Commentary

Car-obsessed Americans use railroads

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:24:58 -0500

Providence Journal, Sunday, December 20, 2009
James T. Brett: Car-obsessed Americans will use railroads
By JAMES T. BRETT

President Obama and Congress demonstrated foresight and strong leadership when including $8 billion in grants for high-speed and intercity passenger rail projects in this year’s economic stimulus package. The United States lags far behind the rest of the world in using this efficient transit infrastructure, and the decision to embrace rail will not only jumpstart a new economic period for the nation, but will help reduce road congestion, carbon emissions and dependence on foreign oil.

High-speed rail has proven itself in Japan, where it was first launched in 1964, and in France, where service continues to expand with routes inside and outside the country. The trains have replaced air travel between many cities because of easier check-in, boarding and security procedures, shorter travel times and downtown station locations. America’s only high-speed line — the Acela Express between Boston and Washington, D.C. — has boosted Amtrak’s share of air and rail travel along the Northeast Corridor line to 60 percent, up from less than 20 percent before its introduction in 2000.

Some may doubt that car-obsessed Americans will trade their keys for a ticket. But once trains become a speedy and attractive option for medium-distance trips, as the high-speed rail initiative aims to set in motion, it will become an obvious choice.

Investment in rail will create jobs in numerous fields, including planning, design and construction — both for tracks and stations — as well as daily management, operation and maintenance positions. According to the Midwest Regional Rail Initiative, each billion invested in high speed rail could create 7,500 new permanent jobs.

Transit-oriented development around new or renovated stations will also encourage business growth.

Indirectly, boosting train ridership will contribute to the entire economy’s productivity by cutting time-wasting congestion on roads. A decrease in car travel will also reduce the number of automobile accidents, saving lives and reducing health-care expenditures.

The New England Council wholeheartedly commends the rail initiative, but is cognizant that funding is limited. More than 250 project applications have been submitted nationwide requesting $57 billion. This winter, the Federal Railroad Administration will decide which proposed projects will get the go-ahead. We strongly urge it to consider incremental improvements to the New England region’s railroads. With only $8 billion available, ambitious, multi-billion-dollar projects should be postponed. Funding should be distributed among those states that can immediately maximize the impact of rail on the economy.

New England is the most densely populated region in the country, contains some of the most highly used rail systems, and is already home to the nation’s only existing high-speed line. Strengthening the already vibrant train infrastructure in New England will serve as a successful model for the rest of the country and will not require exorbitant start-up costs or the difficult process of securing rights-of-way for new tracks.

Just as rail lines cross borders, our governors have prepared a joint vision for the region’s train network and have requested funding for a number of “shovel-ready” projects, including improvements to the New Haven-Hartford-Springfield commuter line to reduce rail congestion and improve the link between New York City, Bradley International Airport and Boston; rehabilitation of the Connecticut River line in western Massachusetts to restore the Vermonter service; upgrading the route between Springfield, Worcester and Boston to accommodate high-speed rail; and upgrading the tracks between St. Albans and Brattleboro in Vermont.

While we have rail resources in place, and have identified a range of near-term projects to stimulate our regional economy, there is much to do. Our region’s leaders must continue working together and pushing projects forward to ensure we do not lose the opportunities high-speed rail presents.

In addition, Congress must continue to fund high-speed rail in the future and act on the president’s proposal to budget $1 billion for trains each of the next five years. It’s a commitment to a more robust economy, a cleaner environment and the future.

James T. Brett is president & CEO of The New England Council, America’s oldest regional business organization.

RAIL V. BUSWAY

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:23:18 -0500

New Britain Herald / The Bristol Press, Wednesday, November 25, 2009
OPINION

Rail v. busway and the political realities of both

By RICHARD STOWE
SPECIAL TO THE HERALD/PRESS

Stowe: Have you been following the New Britain Busway proposal?
Transportation professional: Only somewhat. I know the basics.
Stowe: Is the proposal as designed a good idea?
Transportation professional: From what I've heard it's good, but not great.
Stowe: Proponents cite estimates of 15,000 daily riders, but that’s only achieved by shifting 10,000 riders from existing buses to the busway!
Do you think New Britain, the 4th most densely populated city in Connecticut behind Bridgeport, Hartford, New Haven, should have a station stop on New Haven-Hartford-Springfield (NHHS) rail service?
Transportation professional: There was some talk of that, but I think the bus project has been in the pipe line so long that everyone just wants it done.
Stowe: No doubt about that. To carry 300 to 400 passengers you need ten buses, or four trains and buses produce twice as many pollutants as commuter rail per passenger-mile.
Transportation professional: I see your point. In theory, I think it would be better if New Britain had a rail station. In practice, I think this bus line has to move forward, if only because it's so behind schedule already. Also, if there bus line were a success, it would be easier to lobby for a rail stop.
Stowe: The New Britain Busway utilizes the New Britain Secondary in its entirety and the the western half of the Amtrak corridor up to Hartford Union Station. That’s the corridor needed to make a NHHS stop in New Britain possible. Otherwise, rail service is limited to the Hartford-Waterbury corridor via Berlin. The Berlin route is 202 percent longer (4.02 miles) than the New Britain Secondary.
By using the most direct railroad right of way to New Britain for NHHS and Hartford-Waterbury commuter rail service and replacing the busway with Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) on a corridor utilizing streets parallel to the New Britain-Hartford railroad right of way, boardings at both New Britain and Hartford train stations would increase and so would BRT ridership!
That’s what Greater Cleveland RTA did with its Euclid Avenue BRT; it runs BRT between two rail stations!
Valley Metro Light Rail in Phoenix doesn’t use any railroad right-of-way; it uses city streets such as Central Avenue.
Transportation professional: What I was thinking was that there's a lot of political pressure to get the bus line done since, and while it would probably be better to have a rail connection, there are a lot of people who fear that if they ditch the bus line for rail, there's always a chance the rail line could get delayed or canceled later on. So I think the debate is between going for a less ideal bus line that's virtually a sure thing in the near future versus going all in for a train line that could take longer and runs the risk of not happening at all. In other words the bus line is lower-risk/lower reward and the rail line would be higher risk/higher reward.
When I spoke about the bus line making it easier for rail, I was thinking that long term, assuming the bus line was successful, they could replace it with rail using the argument that its higher capacity,
Stowe: That's a costly, indirect way to achieve a goal. Wouldn't including New Britain, the largest city (4th largest on NHHS corridor) in tri-state area without rail service, as an NHHS station strengthen the case for the NHHS corridor?
Fewer riders fall within the walkshed (one-third of a mile) of busway stations than at surface street BRT stops. The busway compensates for that shortfall by providing parking lots at each station!
Transportation professional: I'm thinking about what's politically feasible here as opposed to what makes the most sense. I agree with your take on this issue, I just don't see a clear way through the political obstacles, given the history of the bus line.
Stowe: The busway is projected to cost $61 million per mile, Phoenix Light Rail cost $70 million per mile. Euclid Avenue BRT cost $30 million per mile. The busway is too costly.
Transportation professional: You have a lot of good points on this issue. If you can figure out a way to really sell it, then it might be possible to push for a rail line. I just wouldn't know how to do that.
Stowe: A 2008 Maricopa Association of Government commuter rail plan concludes that multi-corridor full commuter rail buildout yields the greatest number of passengers per dollar and the lowest operating subsidy.
The opportunity cost of siting the New Britain busway on a strategic rail corridor is clearly unacceptable.

Mr. Stowe, who has never owned a car, was recently appointed to the Connecticut Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Board. He is founder and director of Rail*Trains*Ecology*Cycling, a non-profit advocacy group promoting sustainable modes of transportation. He may be reached at bike.rail.politics@gmail.com
His essays have appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Francisco Examiner, Hartford Courant, Danbury NewsTimes, Greenwich TIme, Stamford Advocate and New Haven Register.

Parking paradise

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 01:58:42 -0500

HARTFORD COURANT, Sunday, November 22, 2009
Home > News > Opinion
Hartford: It's A Parking Place
Tripling Space For Cars Hasn't Helped City Prosper — It's Only Devalued Downtown
By NORMAN W. GARRICK and CHRISTOPHER T. MCCAHILL

For the past half-century, city leaders in Hartford have worked hard to satisfy what they deemed to be a critical need — the need for more parking, so that downtown Hartford could compete with suburban office parks and shopping centers.

This summer the Center for Transportation and Urban Planning at the University of Connecticut conducted a detailed study of the cumulative effect on the city of 50 years of providing parking. What we found was startling: Since 1960, the number of parking spaces in downtown Hartford increased by more that 300 percent — from 15,000 to 46,000 spaces. This change has had a profound and devastating effect on the structure and function of the city (see accompanying maps) as one historic building after another was demolished.

And what did the city gain from this assiduous drive to provide sufficient parking? Was it able to grow more prosperous by providing more jobs and housing for more people? If this was the desired outcome, we can consider the past 50 years to have been an abysmal failure. Over the period that parking was being increased by more than 300 percent, downtown was losing more than 60 percent of its residential population, and the city as a whole lost 40,000 people and 7,000 jobs.

Yet the perception of Hartford as a city perennially short of parking and in need of more parking has never slackened. How could this be?

Well, the simple answer is that parking and transportation policy in Hartford has had the perverse effect of inducing an unending cycle of more demand for parking. Like a dog chasing its tail, the city is constantly playing catch-up — the more parking provided, the more parking is needed.

Over the years, some have sensed the problem, have questioned the wisdom of dismantling so much of the city to provide more parking. For example, in 1962, a city planning commission stated that:

"The extremely limited land-area of the 'The City of Hartford' requires careful, intensive study of the impact of highway takings and parking facilities if these takings are not to result in strangulation of the City."

They were right: the city has been effectively strangled by highways and parking.

In 1973 the city council went on record saying that:

"Grade level parking lots and multi-storied parking garages in the CBD (central business district) encourage the use of motor vehicles by employees which conflicts with the City's mass transit and clean air goals."

Once again they were right; in 1960 only 50 percent of Hartford residents drove to work; by 2000 that number had increased to 72 percent.

In 1978 the city council went further in expressing its strong support for a moratorium on construction of parking garages in the central business district. But we were able to find no evidence that any such forward-looking idea was ever actually implemented in Hartford. Fortunately, there are some clear lessons from a handful of cities nationwide that did understand the price of destroying value to accommodate parking. These cities embraced ideas to curb the voracious appetite of the automobile for space. Cities including Cambridge, Mass., Portland, Ore., Washington, D.C., and Seattle developed policies to limit the amount of parking, to re-convert parking land to productive use, and to increase walking, biking and transit use for people going to work.

The contrast between, Say, Portland and Hartford is stark in terms of economic vibrancy and social vitality. Hartford looks more like the hundreds of other American cities that have hollowed out their core to accommodate automobiles.

With more that 700 parking spaces for every 1,000 employees, Hartford has the dubious distinction of being near the top of the list for parking — up there with cities such as Detroit and Buffalo.

In contrast, more vibrant cities like Washington get by with much less parking (250 parking spaces for every 1,000 employees). The need for so much more parking for each job in Hartford compared with more competitive cities is a significant physical and financial drag, limiting the potential for growth in the city.

In fact, the financial penalty is so great that over the past decade a number of companies in Hartford have take steps on their own to reduce their use of parking in downtown Hartford.

The most successful of these is Travelers and, to a lesser extent, Aetna. Travelers provides parking for only about 50 percent of its workers and subsidizes transit use. The result is that 30 percent of Travelers' employees get to work by transit, walking or biking. This might not seem like much, but it is twice the percentage for city employees and three times that for state employees.

In contrast to Travelers, state government provides parking for more than 90 percent of its employees in Hartford. The result is that less than 10 percent of state employees in the city travel to work by transit, walking or biking.

Thus, the state ties up some of what is potentially the most valuable land in the city in parking, costing the city and the state millions of dollars in tax revenue.

Worse, the wasteland of parking that it own on the edge of the downtown degrades both downtown and the surrounding residential neighborhoods. Around the country, such close-in residential neighborhoods, with their rich architecture — places like The Ghent in Norfolk, Va., and Cheeseman Park in Denver — are increasingly the most sought-after places to live.

If Travelers adopted the same approach to parking as did the state, it would cost the company almost $10 million more each year to own and operate the additional parking that would be needed. The good news for Hartford is that the business community is way ahead of the public sector in recognizing that we cannot continue to perpetuate the failed parking and transportation policies of the past 50 years. The cost to the bottom line, and more important, to the health of the city is too devastating and can no longer be ignored.

Both Travelers and Aetna point the way forward with modest programs that have helped to reduce both parking demand and highway congestion. There is simply no longer any excuse for state and city governments to perpetuate policies that have had such a devastating effect on the city — while wasting so much of the taxpayers' money.

• Norman W. Garrick, an engineering professor, is director of the Center for Transportation and Urban Planning at UConn. •Christopher T. McCahill is a doctoral student at the center.

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Copyright © 2009, The Hartford Courant

Rail link would create city

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 02:36:29 -0500

HARTFORD COURANT
RAIL LINK WOULD CREATE ONE GREAT CITY
By NICHOLAS CARUSO
November 15, 2009
By quirk of history, the central part of Connecticut has two major small cities instead of one large urban center. As the major 17th-century colonies of Hartford and New Haven evolved, they sometimes competed.

In 1718, New Haven nailed down the Collegiate School, which had been in three other communities and would soon be named after benefactor Elihu Yale. Hartford and New Haven were co-state capitals until Hartford became the sole capital in 1875.

Both steps continue to define the cities. New Haven, blessed with Yale and a location on the Northeast Corridor/I-95, has become Connecticut's central academic, transportation and cultural hub. Hartford, though hardly bereft of top cultural and academic institutions, is known both for politics and as a prominent insurance and aerospace center.

By themselves, each city has major strengths and weaknesses. But what if they were one city? That is the promise of the New Haven-Hartford-Springfield commuter rail line. If there is efficient rail service that ties the two cites together within 30 minutes, Connecticut will have its first complete city in its modern history.

New Haven and Hartford are far apart on the spectrum of urban culture. After years of hand-in-hand development between Yale and city hall, New Haven has become a 24/7 urban community. The city and university have formed a complete system of amenities and attractions for people to live, work and play in a rich urban environment, all within walking distance of commuter rail to points east and west.

Despite these major pluses, the city has only a nominal business culture that cannot keep graduates of Yale and other local universities in New Haven. So, despite the city's rich culture and other resources, students and young professionals are forced to leave New Haven for better job opportunities elsewhere.

In contrast, Hartford has become a prestigious job center that draws bright young graduates from all over the country to companies such as United Technologies, Aetna, Travelers and The Hartford.

But Hartford's core has become fragmented and disconnected, as much an office park as a downtown. Despite the city's best efforts — and some progress — to make downtown an attractive residential setting, it lacks the basic 24/7 resources to generate a strong urban culture. The idea of living in an office park encourages many students and young professionals to look at urban centers outside Connecticut.

So, what Hartford struggles with are New Haven's greatest attractions, and vice versa. That's the perfect reason to partner up. Their competition is not each other — it is Raleigh, Nashville, Portland and other strong metropolitan areas.

Instead of defaulting to these places as our young people move there, New Haven and Hartford can become the strong, attractive urban center Connecticut needs. The downtowns are about 35 miles apart. If both cities were within 30 minutes of one another by affordable rail service, Hartford could attract young professionals to its financial district with New Haven as an attractive place to live.

The rail line can create a "linear city," a complete urban community of 270,000 in Connecticut, making it by far the largest urban environment between Boston and New York. Plus, it would create a combined Hartford-New Haven metro area of 2 million people, as large as the metro areas of Kansas City, Portland, San Antonio, Las Vegas or Pittsburgh.

Finally, a linear city along the rail corridor that is not dependent on auto use would be the greatest "green" initiative the state could achieve, trumping any solar, wind, hydro or geothermal project that might be on the drawing board.

That's what commuter rail service, scheduled to open in 2015, makes possible.

• Nicholas Caruso is studying for a master's degree at the Yale School of Architecture.

DeFronzo on Transportation

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:40:06 -0400

TRANSPORTATION
Going Forward
Reliable, Affordable, Interconnected System Needed

By DONALD J. DEFRONZO
June 28, 2009
Connecticut has undergone a sea change from its past highway-centered transportation policy. The General Assembly and Gov. M. Jodi Rell have made mass transit a state priority, and the Obama Administration has focused interest and resources on the development of transit systems, bringing renewed emphasis to investment in mass transit in our state.

Last summer, as gas prices topped $4 a gallon, ridership on virtually every transit system rose — triggering requests for added bus service, additional routes on fixed rail lines and expanded express commuter bus service. Moving forward, Connecticut needs to carefully assess its transportation investments. Our priorities need to represent a commitment to a reliable, affordable, interconnected and customer-friendly system that is geographically balanced.

There are five key components to the future of mass transit in Connecticut.

• Our commitment to making Metro-North a top-flight commuter system is well underway and involves an investment of about $2 billion for the acquisition of new equipment, reconstruction of the New Haven Rail Maintenance Facility, expanded parking accommodations and renovations to stations along the line. These improvements include long overdue upgrades to stations and communication and signal systems on the branch lines in Danbury, Redding, Bethel and Norwalk.

• Eastern Connecticut has effectively asserted an interest in the expansion of rail service on Shore Line East from New London to New Haven and has justified its worth with double-digit ridership growth. Additional service is planned through 2010 and beyond with an initial $100 million slated for station improvements, and expanded parking facilities in Branford, Clinton, Guilford, Madison and Westbrook. Expanded service to New London is critical to allow this service to connect to tourist destinations in eastern Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Continued development of this rail line will mean less traffic on I-95 and greater economic development in towns along the route.

• Thought to be just a concept only two years ago, the proposal to upgrade the New Haven-to-Springfield rail line has gained momentum. Amtrak now appears amenable to the plan, and federal funds might become available to expedite the project as part of a northeast rail corridor. The project — which calls for double tracking of a major portion of the route, station renovations, signal enhancements and additional parking — could put all of central Connecticut within reasonable commuting time of New York City. This has spurred interest in a modern rail link to New Britain and Bristol and development of a multimodal transportation center in Waterbury.

• As we look at the future of rail in Connecticut, we need also look at our several underused rail freight lines and the potential each has to take trucks off the highways and efficiently move materials and products throughout the state. In some cases, these systems might also be adopted for local commuter services, as is being studied in the New Britain-to-Waterbury rail corridor. These are existing assets with great potential, some of which are already under stimulus funding consideration.

• Finally, an essential but often overlooked component of the state's public transportation system is our transit bus network. This provides affordable transportation for low-income wage earners, shoppers and the socially isolated. Business leaders have clearly identified access to mass transit as critical to growth and prosperity in Connecticut. Transit buses already account for millions of rides annually, and hundreds of thousands of new rides are a real possibility. Providing reliable and affordable bus transportation needs to be an important state mass transit goal. The proposed New Britain-Hartford busway might be one part of such a system.

While $70 million in federal stimulus funding has been allocated for the purchase of 106 new hybrid buses to replace the existing transit fleet, we need to make services more convenient for commuters, extend service hours and ensure services are better coordinated with rail and other transportation schedules.

The development of each of these five components is fundamentally important to Connecticut's transit system. With the federal government now promoting mass transit, Connecticut must move aggressively to secure support and funding for these important projects. Connecticut has a once-in-a-generation opportunity of which we must take advantage. We have laid the foundation for transformative change in transportation policy. Now we must act.

• Donald J. DeFronzo, D-New Britain, is co-chairman of the General Assembly's transportation committee and assistant president pro tempore of the Senate.
Copyright © 2009, The Hartford Courant