Dyster’s Train Station Ten Times Larger Than Needed, According To Amtrak

by Mike Hudson

Niagara Falls Mayor Paul Dyster hasn’t said a word about the $44 million train station he built on Whirlpool Street in weeks, leaving public pronouncements about the project to his associate, City Planner Thomas DeSantis.

The station, set to open in less than 60 days, currently has no tenants and no railroad committed to use it. And DeSantis’s estimates of what it will cost the taxpayers of Niagara Falls have been nothing short of ridiculous.

Last week, he estimated the cost to be just $86,250 a year. In reality, the figure will likely be more than four times that amount.

Security, for example is required. Larger stations like the one Niagara Falls is building generally require 24 hour security.

Janitorial and cleaning services are required.

Then there is window cleaning, escalator maintenance, HVAC, plumbing and electrical, maintenance and repair for buildings and grounds, utilities – heat, water, electric, supplies, and planning, supervision, and other operational costs.

In study after study, all available online, operational costs are reduced to annual cost per square foot. The newly renovated Union Depot Intermodal Transportation Center in St. Paul was estimated to cost $40 per square foot per year. The Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center was estimated to cost $53.71 per square foot per year.

Based on $40 per square foot cost, the Niagara Falls Intermodal will cost $885,721 per year.

Since 1978, Amtrak officials have been content with the 800 square feet they operate on Willard Avenue near Lockport Road. Peak traffic at the Niagara Falls station averages 30 passengers an hour, an event that occurs no more than four times each day. The smallish waiting room, about the size of a dentist’s office, never lacks for seating, even with the hustle and bustle of 15 people getting on a train as another 15 disembark.

There is no likelihood whatsoever that Amtrak will be renting the entire 22,000 square foot new train station. The heavily subsidized and money losing passenger rail line’s policy is to rent just enough square footage needed to service the passengers using the station, currently well under 100 a day.

The new station is about 10 times larger than what Amtrak would require based on ridership figures.

The Rensselaer Rail station – the second busiest station in New York and the ninth busiest in America is an example of to what extent Niagara Falls may have been overbuilt. Last year Rensselaer had 781,597 passengers – 20 times the number Niagara Falls had.

Amtrak generated more than $38 million in sales there to Niagara Falls $1.9 million or 20 times as much money.

While the Rensselaer Rail Station building has a total of 67,000 square feet on four floors, including offices for rent, and a post office, the public space for the train station is 27,000 square feet.

Amtrak leases 17,000 square feet of that.

The ninth busiest train station in the nation is only slightly larger than the Niagara Falls International Railway and Intermodal Transportation Center.

For a top 10 station, Amtrak doesn’t need a train station as large as Niagara Falls.

When Amtrak first leased Rensselaer from the Capital District Transit Authority in 2002, the rent was $50,000 a year.

The CDTA estimated operations and maintenance costs for their new station at $900,000 a year. 

At $50,000 per year, Amtrak offered to pay in rent what was expected to be six percent of overhead cost of running the station.

Niagara Falls should expect the same.

Amtrak only pays based on the space it needs – and the space it needs is by the book. Then it pays a proportionate share based on what it thinks is a reasonable overhead.

Niagara Falls will be lucky to get $1,000 a month from Amtrak for the 800 square feet it needs.

There is no lease now. And readers will no doubt castigate the Niagara Falls Reporter just like they did when predicted the Hamister deal was a phony.

But mark our words, Amtrak will pay only  tiny fraction of the cost of operating a wildly oversized train station; the taxpayer will foot the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars per year – far more than the disingenuous figures DeSantis and Dyster are throwing out today.

The new train station will be an expensive boondoggle  which will be utterly empty almost of all of the time.