MADISON, Wis. — Residents of Madison started signaling where they would like to see an Amtrak station potentially set up shop, as the city held a kickoff meeting for the passenger rail station study Wednesday.
“I think I can say with confidence that Madison wants passenger rail service,” Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said to a room full of applause at the Madison Municipal Building. “I saw a tweet from Amtrak that had the Connect Us map on it and Madison was on the map! And I was like yes, it’s going to happen.”
The city is expected to apply for the federal Corridor ID program this month.
RELATED: Madison’s try for an Amtrak stop picking up steam
According to city and Amtrak officials, getting a head start at choosing a location puts them at better odds to get federal funding.
“This is really going to help position this corridor, put it in a really good position as the federal process starts,” said Arun Rao, director of network development for Amtrak.
It was clear at Wednesday’s meeting that excitement for high-speed rail is picking up steam.
“With Madison being Wisconsin’s second-largest city, it only makes sense that we have something here,” said west side resident Jack Plasterer. “It’s about darn time.”
Now, the public is able to give feedback on which of the six locations the city identified they’d like to see welcome four daily stops from Chicago and Milwaukee:
- The area near University Avenue and Park Street on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus;
- Downtown near the Monona Terrace;
- The former Oscar Mayer plant along Packers Avenue;
- The area near First Street and East Washington Avenue;
- The Dane County Regional Airport; or
- The area near Milwaukee Street and Fair Oaks Avenue.
“(I) really like the Monona Terrace station idea myself,” Plasterer said, “I know when they were building Union South leading up to 2011 they kind of created rail platform-like structure there out front.”
The audience of residents and community leaders came with plenty of questions about the potential station, including how equity and ridership will be incorporated into the study.
“We won’t actually have ridership estimates until we actually enter the Corridor ID program,” Madison transportation director Tom Lynch said. “We’ve done a lot of analysis with (Bus Rapid Transit) and the like, so we kind of know where our underserved areas of the city are, and so that will be a factor in it.”
Whether the question was about environmental impact, traffic impacts, or whether existing buildings would have to be demolished, the answer was much the same.
“Once the rubber meets the road, we need to deep dive in and look at those considerations in specific detail,” said Philip Gritzmacher, Jr., a transportation planner for the city.
But one thing was clear to the mayor.
“I know people have very strong feelings about this particular issue,” she said, “but at the end of the day we have to pick a station that works for Amtrak, and that works for the Federal Railroad Administration that’s sort of the bottom line… otherwise we’re not going to successfully get into the process and get the funding that we need from the federal government.”
What Amtrak needs is space.
According to hired consultants HNTB, a standard platform is 700 feet for a terminal station, the end of the line. Madison is proposed to be the last stop on the Hiawatha line, but there are discussions of making it a mid-line stop on the way to the Twin Cities.
The station also needs to have interior waiting space, customer service, on-site services, retail, and any other community needs such as multi-modal connections.
That led many Wednesday night to be on the same track as Angela Burgette — “Oscar Mayer’s has the tracks already there.”
“At the airport, it’s already really congested, there’s so much stuff there,” she said, living on the north side near the former plant. “And there’s nothing going on at Oscar’s and it’s a huge place and it can be repurposed so easy.”
Meanwhile, some others, like town of Middleton resident Andy Phelps, blew the whistle to think about the environment.
“For example, a downtown area, is that area going to be harder to keep dry? We do need some sort of projection as to the effects of climate change in the coming decades here if we’re going to build something that’s going to be here for the next half a century,” he said.
There will be at least two more public meetings, one in February and one in April. You can find those dates and more information on the city’s Passenger Rail Study webpage.
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