Advocates say it’s finally time to connect Alaska’s largest city to bedroom communities to its north using commuter rail service.
Thousands of Matanuska-Susitna Borough residents make the roughly 45-minute drive to Anchorage every day for work. For decades, transportation officials have studied the prospect of a commuter rail service to better connect the communities.
The current proposal from the Alaska Commuter Rail Coalition is fairly straightforward, though it’s still unclear who will pay for it.
Coalition member Andrea Feniger said the pilot project would have two trains running daily from the Mat-Su to Anchorage and back again on existing rail that’s maintained by the Alaska Railroad Corporation.
“The Wasilla depot could encompass the whole Valley and bring them to one stop at the downtown depot, and then one stop at the airport, and then turn around and do it again,” Feniger said.
Feniger, who serves as state director for the environmental nonprofit Sierra Club, said the benefits would be twofold: reducing congestion on the Glenn Highway and lowering greenhouse gas emissions from cars.
The idea of commuter rail has been kicked around for decades, most recently through a task force set up by Gov. Bill Walker in 2017. Current Gov. Mike Dunleavy nixed the task force in 2019.
Advocates and officials have studied the feasibility of commuter rail for long enough,Feniger said.
“Our pitch right now is it's time to just do a pilot project, and that will get us the data that we actually need to see if this is a viable project and see how we can move it forward,” Feniger said.
Typically, the Alaska Railroad sees its highest ridership in the summer, with tourists flocking to the state. The commuter rail pilot would run in the offseason, from October through April.
Another reason winter is a good time for the pilot project is it’s a time when highways are less safe to drive, said Brian Lindemuth, vice president and chief engineer with the Alaska Railroad Corporation.
“People might be a little bit more interested in having somebody else bring them to Anchorage or to the Valley without dealing with the dark and the ice and the moose,” Lindemuth said.
And while commuting via train from the Mat-Su to Anchorage would take nearly double the time of driving, it would include amenities like wifi and restrooms. It also wouldn’t be impacted by vehicle accidents and other hazards that can shut down or limit traffic on the highway, Lindemuth said.
“There is a single road between them,” Lindemuth said. “And as we've seen as recently as 2018, 2019, when a bridge gets taken out, it can cause a major disruption.”
As it has been for decades, the biggest open question on commuter rail is the cost.
Cynthia Wentworth was a member of Gov. Walker’s commuter rail task force and said the project was close to being funded in 2018.
“We almost got commuter rail then,” Wentworth said. “The funds in the Legislature were tight, and they couldn't appropriate the money for the demonstration project, but the railroad was all in favor.”
Railroad officials are still committed to running the pilot project at its current projected operating cost, but the price tag for starting it up has grown in the past few years, Wentworth said.
“Probably $10 million a year in operating cost, and then a one-time cost of $13 million to put in a siding, a capital cost, up in Wasilla,” she said.
Coalition members say they’re hoping to raise enough money to cover 20% of the cost, which is a typical matching cost-share to qualify for federal grants. According to the U.S Government Accountability Office, most of the country’s 31 commuter rail services are heavily subsidized and took a hit during the COVID-19 pandemic. As of 2023, ticket fares and transit agency-generated revenue contribute to less than a quarter of the systems’ total revenue. That’s down about 15% from 2019.
However, Wentworth said, the amount of federal money spent on highways dwarfs rail systems by a large margin.
“I just was looking at these figures again,” Wentworth said. “Today it’s something like 16 times as much highway money as rail money from the feds.”
There’s currently no commitment of funds for an Alaska commuter rail line, and it’s unclear if the Mat-Su Borough, the Municipality of Anchorage or the state would kick in that money.
During his visit to the state in mid-August, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said he’s open to all kinds of rail projects, but he said they’re pricy endeavors.
“I want to look and see, where can we get the biggest bang for our dollar to move the most people and make those investments, and where do I have state or local support?” Duffy said. “How much are they going to put in? Do they have the resources, if the feds put in money on rail, do you have the resources for upkeep?”
Whether there’s enough interest from Mat-Su residents to use commuter rail is another big question. About a third of the Mat-Su’s roughly 117,000 residents commute to Anchorage for work, according to the borough. The pilot project would be able to transport about 460 passengers daily.
And as the population of the region has grown, so too has the availability of local businesses, restaurants and medical facilities, said Mat-Su Borough Manager Mike Brown. That could potentially reduce the number of people who’d need to commute to Anchorage, Brown said.
“You start making those things available, and then with the available land and the housing market, I mean, it does make it an attractive place to potentially locate as a business, which could affect that volume of commuting traffic,” he said.
Getting people to their final destination from the railroad depot is another issue to address, Brown said.
“I think one of the challenges with commuter rail specifically is if it terminates at Ship Creek or someplace in Anchorage, just, how do you then move those people to their actual workplace, and how do you close that gap,” he said.
Those concerns were partially addressed when commuter rail was studied during the Walker administration, said Lindemuth, with the Alaska Railroad. Some local employers offered to pitch in to help ferry passengers for that last leg of the journey to their jobs, he said.
“We had buy-in from the military, we had buy-in from Providence (Alaska Medical Center) at the time, committing to providing transportation to those larger transportation hubs,” he said. “To the extent that, you know, the world's gone around the sun eight or 10 times since then, they would have to be re-engaged.”
Officials with Anchorage Mayor Suzanne LaFrance’s administration did not respond to requests for comment, saying that commuter rail is not currently a priority for the mayor.
At the earliest, Lindemuth said, the railroad would be able to get the pilot project rolling sometime around October 2026, but he said it’s more likely the project would start in 2027, assuming advocates are able to get the money together.
