Buffalo, NY (WBEN) - Architecture students at UB presented ideas Friday for ways to extend Buffalo's Metro Rail. Experts say there are two proposals that were focused on during Friday's session.
Jim Gordon of Citizens for Regional Transit says UB students introduced those proposals Friday night. "There used to be light rail on the belt line, which surrounded the inner city, and there is a proposed line going from the central business district through Larkinville, Central Terminal and Galleria out to the airport and to Transit Road," says Gordon. He says four stations were discussed, with their ideas on what future stations at four places would look like.
Gordon says right now, these are just pie in the sky proposals. "There's nothing firm ever going on at the moment, the NFTA has expressed some interest in after they do the Amherst extension, to consider the airport extension. So this is to get the ideas on the books, get people thinking about them, to generate some support for starting a study that says, is this practical? Is this something doable?" notes Gordon.
Gordon says this is realistic in the sense people are interested. "The airport extension has been officially proposed since the 1960s. The NFTA owns the right of way for that particular one," explains Gordon. "The belt line was in services passenger rail in the early 1900s and there are people who remember it and would like to see it come back."
He says the students had to face several challenges for the Beltline. "There's a proposal for a station at the foot of Lafayette Avenue. There is a very narrow excess way to get to the belt line from Lafayette Avenue. You've got an elevation change. In other words, there's like a little embankment that you have to deal with. You'd have a very narrow station platform, and you'd have to have a way to get to it from Niagara Street, which is up a little higher. So that's a challenge for the students to design," adds Gordon. These are students from the School of Architecture, so he says they're trying to design stations that will be attractive and useful. Another station that they're working on is one for an extension to the airport. "You would need to have a station right in front of Sahlen Field, so people could get from Sahlen Field all the way out to the eastern burbs and out to the airport. So they're working on that one, a smaller station on Swan Street, just as a regular stop."
UB's Brad Wales says these are new old ideas. "Because what's magical about Buffalo's opportunity to have additional rail lines, besides just the metro rail, is that the existing railroad right of ways. In fact, the actual beds are already right there. They're intact and ready to go," explains Wales.
Wales says because Buffalo already has existing railroad right of ways, it's very realistic this can be done. "It's a bargain compared to Seattle," adds Wales. "Seattle is now trying to do a three and a half mile extension of one of their northern spurs, and for three and a half miles is going to cost $7 billion and the reason for that is they have to take land by eminent domain and establish new right of ways, new railroad right of ways here in Buffalo," he explains.
Wales says it has the potential to turn Buffalo into a boom town to bring the city back. "We have a daughter who's young, and she just moved away. She lives in Washington, DC now, which has a great Metro Rail system, everybody uses it, upper class, right down, everybody, and she didn't want to live in a city where you can't get around by mass transportation. The other aspect to it is, every time you have a train station stop right around there, what happens is called DOT transit oriented development. And it happens like spontaneously, kind of like when Rochester got rid of its a portion of its inner loop highway, they got $200 million in private investment in a year and a half," explains Wales.
Wales says it will take up to 25 years for this to become reality, so interest has to build now. "There's a whole process that the federal government dictates, everything from preliminary studies to plans and things like that, you have to go through impact statements. It's a long process," says Wales.