The Future of Commuter Rail in North America (2025)
Chapter: Summary
SUMMARY
The Future of Commuter Rail in North America
As the COVID-19 pandemic upended traditional travel markets, speculation swirled about what work-from-home patterns would mean for commuter rail agencies, their services, and the funding structure that supported them. For decades, commuter rail providers across North America offered a service that was often faster than driving and cheaper than parking for many downtown office commuters. However, in 2020, ridership on all public transportation services hit record lows, followed by slow recovery, with most services still significantly below their 2019 levels. Remote and hybrid work arrangements have reduced the downtown commuter market, which now represents a smaller share of total regional travel. Providers will need to broaden their focus from the downtown commuter market to restore commuter rail’s ridership and relevancy in regional transportation systems.
Evidence indicates that a new travel pattern has emerged in North America’s metropolitan regions. Work-from-home among office workers is entrenched, demand for off-peak and leisure travel has increased, and downtown office buildings are unlikely to attract the same quantity of daily workers that drove their initial investment. Where there remains strong demand for downtown commutes, it is limited to Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, offering a challenging dynamic for capital-intensive transportation services. How commuter rail providers justify their investments remains uncertain and will be dependent on local travel markets that vary by time of day and day of week.
This report explores these issues, examining how commuter railroads might navigate the market, service, and funding challenges they will face in the coming years and decades. The research identifies implementable and practical strategies for commuter rail services in North America to facilitate recovery from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and to transform the role and relevance of commuter rail in regional mobility.
Research Approach
This research relied on several data sources to document proven strategies, emerging practices, and innovations being considered by domestic and international commuter rail service providers. The analysis includes a review of historical and current literature as well as data from public sources to understand the context for commuter rail systems and overall trends. The research also reflects dozens of interviews with experts and practitioners within the field, including discussions with transportation agency staff and board members, labor representatives, elected officials, consultants, planners, and operations teams. The report includes six case studies of U.S. commuter rail agencies focused on specific strategies and emerging practices, as well as a review of regional rail models in Germany. Finally, the report relied on the research team’s experience working in the North American commuter railroad industry.
Key Findings
How commuter rail providers in North America address regional goals for economic mobility, ridership needs, and environmental sustainability will vary from region to region. With a diverse industry of 28 rail systems that vary in age, operating models, land use development, and governance, there will be no single solution to the future of commuter rail. Yet commuter rail providers experiencing the most success in terms of ridership growth and financial sustainability are following similar paths guiding them toward their future. The following is an overall summary of those best practices, showing how commuter rail might reshape itself to improve the utilization of its operating and capital assets. The intended audience for this information is leadership and staff of commuter rail providers. The report can also inform funders, elected officials, other decision-makers, and stakeholders interested in regional mobility.
Assessing and transforming for the future follows a three-part iterative strategic planning process tailored for the unique nature of commuter rail, given its fixed infrastructure, historical agreements, and challenging financial position (see Figure A). The planning process needs to (1) integrate market information with (2) service innovation options in a manner that recognizes and responds to (3) challenges in governance, infrastructure, and funding. These factors need to fit into regional mobility discussions: This process should be part of understanding what broad mobility goals a region has and determining the role of commuter rail in achieving those goals.
Understanding Market Dynamics and Service Adjustments
The commuter rail industry is facing significant challenges responding to radically different travel patterns and market dynamics post-2019. Work-from-home and hybrid work have provided suburban commuters with much greater travel flexibility. Travel data reveal that traditional peak commute times have softened, while off-peak, weekend, and non-downtown travel markets have rebounded faster than peak commutes and, in some cases, have grown
beyond their 2019 size. Including the peaks on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, the traditionally strong downtown commute is less robust than it has been historically. Even within these “peak” days, workers are more frequently commuting outside traditional peak hours.
Commuting trips generally continue to be a sizable market, but a review of outputs from travel data platforms that locally integrate mobile location data with population and economic activity information suggests there may be other market opportunities. These “new” travel markets could be attracted by rail services that employ a different and more comprehensive “regional” service model.
Commuter rail providers responding to the changes in travel behavior since 2020 have not used traditional demand models to evaluate new markets. The high costs and uncertainty related to the models’ underlying assumptions discourage their use. Instead, providers are turning to proprietary extrapolations of regional travel data to quickly identify travel markets that might be receptive to using new services along existing rail corridors. Even a small portion of a new large market can be a significant gain for a commuter railroad.
Developing Innovative Service and Fare Structures
The timetable and fare structure are the product and price for a commuter rail system. High ridership recovery, and ridership growth in general, is generally associated with providers delivering service on a regular, repeating, all-day, bi-directional pattern. Providers like Boston’s Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) Commuter Rail, Southern California’s Metrolink, and the San Francisco Bay Area’s Caltrain are adapting by introducing schedules with regular repeating service throughout the day, accommodating diverse travel needs. This “regional rail” model shows promise, with increased ridership recovery linked to expanded service hours.
The COVID-19 pandemic also introduced opportunities for commuter rail providers to experiment with fare structures and marketing strategies, aided by temporary federal COVID-relief funds. Providers like Chicago’s Metra revised their fare structures, simplifying products and targeting occasional riders with flexible pricing. While reduced fares temporarily boosted ridership, providers acknowledged that such strategies are unsustainable in the long term without additional funding. Simultaneously, investments in passenger information and marketing are vital to attract a growing base of occasional riders unfamiliar with the system. Enhanced integration with local transit networks and transit-oriented development initiatives, such as in Connecticut, are also emerging as strategies to drive ridership and regional growth.
Navigating Infrastructure and Governance Challenges
Writing a new timetable might help better serve a market, but implementing that timetable depends on funding and infrastructure capacity. Challenges can persist in regions balancing high peak demand, like the New York City region, with service diversification. Providers must balance market demands, funding constraints, and operational realities to align services with changing ridership patterns. In some cases, high infrastructure costs and restrictive infrastructure-sharing agreements limit the ability of commuter rail providers to adapt timetables or add services. Strategic capacity management, as practiced in Germany, offers a model for optimizing track usage through disciplined timetabling, which involves comprehensive understanding and detailed management of movements for all trains, maintenance work, and other movements on a rail line throughout a given day, week, or longer time period, and iterative evaluation of market needs.
In the longer term, ownership of rights-of-way provides an advantage for some North American agencies, enabling greater flexibility in capacity management. Governance reforms, such as restructuring agreements or purchasing tracks where possible, could further enhance operational effectiveness. Addressing these systemic issues is critical for agencies to respond to changing market demands and ensure financial and operational sustainability. This, in turn, requires an iterative review of markets and potential services, creating a long and short-term vision of how to deploy service that works within budgets and regional contexts.
The future of commuter rail also depends on the funding to implement some of the innovative strategies and best practices identified in this work. For most providers, the fiscal cliff—when COVID-relief funding runs out and costs continue to rise—will arrive in the coming few years. Common strategies for confronting funding shortfalls like the impending COVID-19-related fiscal cliff include cutting service, increasing revenues where possible, reducing expenses through organizational or operational efficiencies, making cuts to customer experience, deferring debts, selling properties, and more. If these strategies fail to deliver reliable service for customers, the role commuter rail providers play in their regional transportation market will weaken, and the justification for continued expenditure on commuter rail as a travel mode will be undermined. Some providers are positioning themselves in a way that demonstrates their value to the region before the need to increase funding arises. However, few providers have taken concrete steps aimed at reducing their operating costs or addressing the high cost of delivering transit capital projects.
Conclusions
The research indicates that under the right circumstances, a regional rail model can improve equipment and crew utilization, yielding lower costs per mile compared with a service design focused on a high concentration of peak demand. While regional rail operating models are also associated with more train miles and thus equal or greater costs overall, this aim at efficiency (e.g., lower cost per mile or per passenger) could be an important part of setting a sustainable and economically viable path for providers. Regardless, this model reveals gaps and limitations that must be addressed in future work. This report identifies areas for future research informed by the results and limitations of this report, as well as the broader context of existing literature:
- Exploring how staffing levels, better maintenance practices, and equipment can affect commuter rail operational costs.
- Understanding best practices for commuter rail customer information and ease of use.
- Developing better land use coordination for commuter and regional rail networks.
- Evaluating first-mile/last-mile connections for commuter rail users.
- Finding paths forward for future funding and system governance.
Now it is more important than ever to reevaluate the future of commuter rail, and this research shows that many of North America’s passenger railways are already adapting to the new challenges presented by the work-from-home movement.
