Boise Light Rail: Fantasy or Reality?

"There is an energy to this issue. The time is right. We need to move this nation past the highway and a limited view of transit. This is about making rail a critical part of our strategy and it is about building stronger communities."

When Boise Mayor Brent Coles delivered this pitch for commuter train service in a keynote address to the more than 300 mayors and federal officials at the United States Conference of Mayors Winter Conference in 2001, his passion for rail transit was already a source of both enthusiasm and debate in Boise. Pushing both light rail (such as trolleys or streetcars) and commuter rail (passenger trains running on railroads) had been one of his administration's fundamental themes for years. This culminated in 1997, when the City of Boise, Ada County and the Idaho Department of Transportation all contributed substantial funds to sponsor a demonstration by a German-manufactured Siemens RegioSprinter commuter train. Over 18,000 Treasure Valley residents took a free ride from the Boise Depot to the Idaho Center during the 10 days that the train ran.

In the ensuing years, the "energy" that Coles told the other mayors about has caught on around the west. Most recently, both Salt Lake City and Portland are expecting to launch commuter train lines in early 2008, following over a decade of planning and the implementation of several hotly contested local taxes.

However, these metropolitan areas differ from Boise in that they've had well-established and profitable light rail systems for years--the MAX line in Portland and the TRAX in Salt Lake City. According to Kelli Fairless, executive director of Valley Regional Transit, Ada and Canyon counties' transit authority, one reason that commuter trains in particular have held such an appeal for Treaure Valley residents and politicians is that our suburban layout and preexisting rail line could hypothetically enable us to skip over the light rail step altogether--at least at first. Albuquerque, New Mexico, took such a leap last month, launching its "Rail Runner" line to the outlying suburbs of Belen and Bernallilo two years before the city's light rail system is scheduled to open.