One of my favorite recent developments in North American travel is that the Tijuana airport is binational. Since 2015, the Cross Border Xpress, a pedestrian bridge, has let passengers walk directly into Tijuana International from the U.S. side. You check in for your flight in San Diego, cross the bridge, clear Mexican customs and airport security, and board. No port of entry, no hours-long vehicle queue. It works because the airport sits flush against the border.

And this isn’t even that exotic. San Diego’s Blue Line runs to within 600 feet of the border at San Ysidro. People cross on foot, hop on the trolley, and go to work, in both directions, every day. My own politics aside, I love how porous and symbiotic San Diego and Tijuana are.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the line, Mexico is building. President Claudia Sheinbaum picked up where AMLO’s Tren Maya left off and has kept the passenger rail program moving: new regional service around Mexico City, plus two long-distance routes radiating out from the capital that terminate in Nuevo Laredo and Nogales, two cities that sit directly on the U.S. border.

Two passenger rail lines with two portals knocking on our country’s door.

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What’s possible

Let’s be clear up front: through-running trains between the U.S. and Mexico is not happening. Amtrak is not going to operate into Mexico the way it does into Canada, for geopolitical reasons that are what they are, warranted or not, I’m not interested in litigating that here.

So the exercise assumes three constraints:

1. Mexican and U.S. passenger trains never cross each other’s borders.

2. Customs happens at the border crossing itself: no pre-clearance.

3. It will take 15 hours to get from Nogales to Mexico City (run times are not posted from Mexican government, this is just a guess)

How do we take advantage of this opportunity?

A few ideas and possibilities as I think of this exercise.

Given there’s two portals, let’s do the first one, Nogales, Mexico and for another post, we will do Nogales, Arizona.

The proposal: a customs facility that straddles the border

Here’s my idea: At Nogales, the track is owned by Ferromex (a private rail consortium) on the Mexican side and Union Pacific on the Arizona side. There’s plenty of room on both sides for a passenger siding.

My proposal: build 700-foot platforms on each side of the border, connected by a single border control facility that physically straddles the line. A timed train arrives on one side; passengers alight, walk through the facility, clear passport control and customs, and board the connecting train waiting on the platform in the other country.

No train crosses the border. The building is the border crossing. The transfer is the port of entry.

Everything below is about what connects to that facility on the U.S. side.

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Nogales: the Options

The options below are color coded and explained by how likely they are to happen (should something happen at all).

Option 1A: Train to Tucson (most likely)

Blue on above map

Pima County officials have already been talking to Mexican rail officials about Tucson–Nogales service in light of Mexico’s rail plan. As one Pima County Supervisor put it: “If they can do 700-plus miles of track, we’ve got to be able to figure out how to do 63 from the border up to the Tucson area.”

Sixty-three miles. That’s the whole ask for the minimum viable version of this.

This would be 115 minutes if you used the historical timetables of this route. (17 hours from Tucson to Mexico City)

Option 1B: Extend to Phoenix

Blue + red on above map

Phoenix–Tucson is currently being studied by the state with federal Corridor ID money (why this service doesn’t already exist is, frankly, insane), with 13 potential stations including Sky Harbor and Mesa Gateway airports.

But this is a politically loaded 158-mile project, it would take considerably longer to build, and in my opinion, the political capital statewide to build either Phoenix to Tucson or Tucson to Nogales are all that exist. Pick one, and the former makes far more sense.

This would be 260 minutes if you used the historical timetables of this route and the current planned time. (19.33 hours from Tucson to Mexico City)

Option 1C: Los Angeles via Phoenix

Blue + red + green on above map

Continue from 1B, reactivate the 64 mile Wellton Branch, and you can run LA–Phoenix–Tucson–Nogales service. In a perfect world, LA–Phoenix would be high-speed rail, and 1B becomes the regional rail feeder connecting Phoenix to Nogales — and, through the straddle facility, to Mexico.

Do I need to explain why this is the hardest option? Not really.

The ideal plan: the FRA Southwest network

Follow the FRA Southwest Plan. Connect Phoenix/Tucson to Nogales, and the border facility plugs into a network with high-speed rail to Los Angeles, high-speed service toward Reno and Las Vegas, and conventional service to Denver, Albuquerque, and Flagstaff.

Does it make perfect sense to build all of this? Yes. Was I born yesterday? No. But the ladder matters: each rung is independently useful, and the bottom rung is 63 miles of track to a facility Mexico is already building toward.

The world just watched an incredible World Cup shared among three countries, two of which are connected by two insanely slow Amtrak trains, and a third with no U.S. rail connection at all, now building two lines to the literal border from the second-largest metro on the continent.

Do I think many people will ride the train from Arizona, Nevada, or California to Mexico City? Very few. Do I think connecting Hermosillo, Ciudad Obregón, Los Mochis, and many others to our national network is a good idea? Absolutely yes.

Sometimes doing the most obvious thing is the hardest. ¡Sí se puede!

Next up: Nuevo Laredo

Nogales is the western portal. The eastern one, Nuevo Laredo, has its own set of options on the Texas side, from a San Antonio connection to leveraging the existing Texas Eagle. That’s a post going soon.

The United States currently has 49 miles of high-speed rail track. On that track, Amtrak trains can run up to 160 miles per hour, as the geometry is straight and the right-of-way is fully grade separated. All of it lies on the Northeast Corridor, split between New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts.

An exercise:

Imagine for a moment that you’re tasked with providing commuter rail service between Providence and Boston. Much of the track supports some of the fastest rail speeds in the country, and it’s fully electrified.

In what reality would the train technology look like this?

Running diesel push-pull trains under wires on mostly straight track? Unserious.

The Providence Line is the busiest commuter rail line on the MBTA’s 12-line network, with nearly 20,000 daily riders, and with Providence ranking as the 13th-busiest Amtrak station in the country, the line clearly deserves better.

At present, the trip from Providence to Boston takes 70 minutes (varies based on trip). The Acela does it in 48 (with far fewer stops). So how can a local line like the Providence Line close the gap if 48 mins is the ceiling? Quite easily, actually.

How to Improve the Line

The basic improvements the Providence Line needs could be made anywhere, but the incredible work of the Momentum Report and the TransitMatters report highlights the changes we all know would make the line far faster (please read and support both organizations).

The current runtime of MBTA #836 is 78 minutes, of which only 36 minutes is actual running. That means 54% of the trip is spent accelerating, decelerating, and stopping at stations.

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High Level Platforms:

Of the 12 stations between Providence and Boston's South Station, 6 are currently low-platform, which means everyone boarding has to climb stairs to get on and off the train, slower than simply walking through a wide door that's flush with the platform.

At the extreme, Amtrak can dwell for more than 5 minutes at a low platform with narrow doors; in places like Providence, the Northeast Regional can take 2 minutes thanks to those narrow doors and passenger luggage. The fastest dwells belong to the LIRR, where wide doors and flush platforms let people board and alight in as little as 30 seconds. Compound that across many stops and the delay adds up fast.

Time savings: Converting every platform on the line to high-level alone would save 9 minutes.

New Vehicles with better Acceleration

It goes without saying that heavy diesel trains take longer to reach cruising speed than a lightweight electric one, same as with cars. Caltrain's electrification is the famous example: what takes a diesel push-pull train (MBTA's technology) nearly 90 seconds to reach cruising speed takes an electric EMU a fraction of that.

And even if the trains stayed diesel but ditched the push-pull setup (a locomotive hauling cars), you’d still see savings, if MBTA’s Providence Line trains looked like the TexRail equipment below.

In a perfect simulation, the acceleration savings could approach 60 seconds at every single stop.

Time savings: Converting the current fleet to electric EMUs would save 16.5 minutes on its own.

More with the Same

I almost always run my own calculations on work like this, but given the great work of the Momentum Report and the TransitMatters modernization report, I’ll use their numbers, I’d rather not promote something outside the bounds of their advocacy. So: high-level platforms at every station, and electric EMU trains.

Per my very rough math, at max peak service there are 5 trains running between Wickford Junction/Providence and Boston, producing 20 one-way trips each way to Providence (8 of which continue to Wickford).

If you assume all five trains can run a 47-minute runtime to Providence and a 73-minute runtime to Wickford, with each train needing 10 minutes to turn around at each terminal, the time savings let you run an additional 12 trips in each direction every day.

Why Don’t We Just Do This?

What is happening on the Providence Line is a microcosm of American transit. We look at METRA, MARC, VRE, and Metrolink, and we accept sluggish, low-platform diesel operations as the natural order of things. But Caltrain’s 57% ridership jump post-electrification proved what happens when an agency stops accepting the status quo. Fixing this isn’t a question of technological limits, it’s a test of political will. We don’t always need to build new multibillion-dollar systems from scratch. Sometimes, we just need to stop choosing to run the systems we already have so poorly.

Sources for this work: Transit Matters Report & Momentum Report

Author’s note: I was formerly contracted with the MBTA. All information in this article comes from fully public sources; none of it was gained from my time at the agency, its employees, or anything not public-facing.

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History

The Staten Island Ferry began in 1817, when the Richmond Turnpike Company launched a steamboat service between Manhattan and Staten Island. Cornelius Vanderbilt, yes, that Vanderbilt, bought the company soon after, merging it with other ferry operations. By 1864, he sold it at a loss. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad later purchased the service before the City of New York finally took control in 1905.

As with so many great public transit systems, the car changed everything. Ridership declined as people chose to drive instead of sail, and by 1967, the Staten Island Ferry stood alone as the city’s only remaining commuter ferry.

Today, it’s the busiest passenger ferry line in the world, a relic of the past that somehow became a backbone of modern New York.

Staten Island Railway Transit

After purchasing the Staten Island Ferry, Cornelius Vanderbilt financed the first rail line from Tottenville to Stapleton, responding to public pressure from island residents who wanted better transportation. The line made a modest profit but, like the ferry, eventually went into receivership. It was sold at foreclosure in 1872 to George Law, an entrepreneur, railroad investor, and one-time presidential candidate.

By the late 1870s, the railroad was barely operational. That’s when Erastus Wiman, a civic-minded Staten Island businessman, stepped in. On March 25, 1880, he organized the Staten Island Rapid Transit Company (SIR) and partnered with the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad to expand the network. Together, they built a new ferry terminal at what’s now St. George, on land donated by Law himself, who asked only that the terminal bear his name.

The North Shore Branch opened in 1886, and with Wiman’s advocacy, Congress funded the Arthur Kill Bridge, then the world’s longest drawbridge, connecting Staten Island to Cranford Junction via the Baltimore and New York Railway.

At the time, you could get from the Staten Island Ferry to Cranford (now on NJ Transit’s Raritan Valley Line) in just 17 minutes, a trip that takes 50 minutes by car or nearly two hours by transit today.

As freight traffic dwindled and ridership declined, the lines were gradually abandoned. In 1971, the Tottenville line was transferred to the MTA, where it continues to operate today as the Staten Island Railway (SIR) and is directly connected to the ferry.

(Note: I’ll cover both the costs of Staten Island secession and the island’s broader transit needs in future posts.)

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Operations

The Staten Island Ferry isn’t owned or operated by the MTA, it’s run by the New York City Department of Transportation (NYCDOT). The fleet consists of nine vessels, though only four operate at a time during peak hours. The service runs 24/7, departing every 30 minutes, with frequencies doubling to every 15 minutes during the morning and evening rush.

On an average day, the ferry moves about 46,000 passengers, more than any other ferry route in the world, and that’s with only one line. For comparison, most major commuter ferry systems operate between 4 and 35 routes to reach similar ridership totals.

(Note: pre-pandemic, the Staten Island Ferry Line itself would’ve been the second busiest commuter ferry system in the world).

The boats themselves are massive. Across four vessel classes, capacity ranges from 4,427 to 6,000 passengers per boat, making them the largest commuter ferries on the planet. That scale comes with a cost: it runs about $8,306.51 per revenue hour per vessel, or $16,613 per hour to operate the line under normal service, doubling to $33,226 per hour at peak.1

If every ferry were full, operating costs would amount to just $0.83 per passenger, compared to the average $2.30 per-trip subsidy across USA transit in 2022, an incredibly efficient way to move people across the harbor.

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