Connecticut: Love It Or Leave It

The recent debate over tolling our highways should remind us of just how divided our state has become.  Not red vs. blue and not even just upstate vs. downstate.  The real divide is between those who commute by car vs. those who take mass transit.

I’ve written for years about the fact that riders on Metro-North pay the highest commuter rail fares in the US, and those fares will only keep going up.  Most rail riders have little choice, especially if headed to New York City.  What are they going to do… drive?

Yet every time the fares go up… and they have increased 55% since 2002… ridership goes up as well.  Why?  Because conditions on the highways keep getting worse and worse.

But those who chose to drive, or must because there’s no viable mass transit option, seem to literally hate rail commuters.  I think its jealousy.  During the tolls debate, the venom was dripping and one Tweet in particular hit home.

“Just because your commute (by train) is so expensive doesn’t mean mine (by car) should be too (because of tolling),” read the post.

The driver had clearly missed the point.  We aren’t looking for tolls to subsidize rail fares, just to get motorists to pay for the upkeep of their roads and bridges before we have another Mianus River Bridge collapse, which we will.

But it gets worse.

The anti-toll forces now sound like Howard Beale, the deranged newsman from the movie “Network” who was “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.”   Doubtless, much of this is directed at Governor Malloy who enjoys (suffers from?) the lowest popularity rating in the history of polling.  Sure, the economy of our state is in bad shape.   But Malloy didn’t create this economic mess.  He just inherited it and mishandled it.   

And it will get far worse, whoever succeeds Malloy in the fall.  The solutions will be few and all will be painful.  Forestalling tolls and gasoline taxes today won’t stop the bridges from rotting.

But this opposition to tolls or modest gasoline tax increases to pay for roads has now been taken to a maniacal pitch predicting that “everyone is leaving the state”, conditions are so bad.   That’s fine with me.

I was recently at our town dump and saw a young man unloading a bunch of items.  “My parents are moving,” he told me.  “Everyone is leaving Connecticut!” he exclaimed.  

“Really?”, I asked.

“It’s all Malloy’s fault,” he said, sounding like a Pied Piper leading a caravan down I-95 to some promised land.

I asked him one question:  “Did your parents sell their house?”   “Sure,” he said.  “And at a profit over what they paid for it.”

“Well,” I said, “I guess not everyone is leaving.  Your folks are moving out and someone else is moving in.”  Someone who wants to live here.

To those who hate it so much living in Connecticut, I extend an invitation:  please leave.  Enjoy your low-tax destination.  And don’t forget to pay those highway tolls as you drive down I-95 through NY, NJ etc.

But enough already with the “I hate Connecticut” mantra.  Some of us actually like living here.  And losing ‘the haters” will only mean fewer cars on our roadways.

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media.

America's First Subway - Powered By Air

A secret project, defying the government, helped build America’s first subway.  It only ran for three years but carried hundreds of thousands of  passengers, even though it ran only 312 feet. And it was powered by air.

In the 1860’s New York City was in a transportation crisis.  The streets were jammed with horse-pulled trolleys and wagons, as many as 1000 an hour passing a single point on lower Broadway.  Pedestrians dodged the vehicles and mounds of horse manure.

By 1863 London had solved a similar road chaos by opening the world’s first subway, The Underground.  But New York’s Tammany Hall wasn’t interested as Boss Tweed was making massive amounts of money from investments and kickbacks from New York’s street railroads.

But Tweed did show interest another London innovation:  mail transported underground in pneumatic tubes. Seizing the moment, American inventor and Scientific American editor Alfred Beach got a city permit to construct a postal tube system on lower Broadway.  Using $350,000 of his own money ($6.4 million in 2018 dollars), Beach’s plan was far grander and his “tube” would be far larger.

Working secretly at night in the sub-basement  of Devlin’s Clothing Store near City Hall, Beach started digging his tunnel.  In 58 days it was complete, running one city block.  All he need now was a “car” and a means of propulsion.

Given that his tube was only eight feet in diameter, Beach opted for a small, round passenger car that could carry 22 people.  The interior was posh and upholstered.  And to lure riders fearful of subterranean lairs, he built a $70,000 station complete with chandeliers, plush chairs, a goldfish pond and a piano player.

To power the train he acquired a 50 ton ventilation fan used in mining, nicknamed the Western Tornado.  Sucking air from the streets above, the huge fan would blow the car down the track at 6 mph.  When the car reached the end of the tunnel, the fan was reversed, sucking it back into the station.

On March 1, 1870 the subway was opened to the public.  For 25 cents a ride ($4.50 in today’s money) thousands came to see transportation’s future. (Beach donated all of the fare revenue to charity).

Boss Tweed was enraged, especially when Beach predicted he could transport up to 20,000 passengers a day five miles north to Central Park at speeds up to “a mile a minute”.  The Boss had other plans.

He wanted to solve the street congestion by building up, not under.  Of course, his plan for elevated railroads would make him a fortune.  Coupled with the financial collapse in the Panic of 1873, Beach’s Pneumatic Transit system was doomed, The fans were shut off and

the project was shuttered.

Beach’s tunnel was later used as a shooting gallery and wine vault before being sealed up for good in 1874.  In 1912, workers digging the BMT’s Broadway line dug into the old tunnel and found the car and the old piano.  Beach’s pneumatic mail system did survive serving customers until 1953. 

Beach died in 1896 and eight years later New York City’s first true subway opened for business, running from City Hall to Harlem.

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media.

The Tale of Two Trains

As the clock ticks down on the legislature’s efforts to avert service cuts and fare hikes on our trains and buses, people are confused and angry.

That was certainly the tone at last Monday’s ‘listening session” in New Canaan held by US Senator Chris Murphy, who’d come to talk about transportation.  Most of those who turned out cared little for his vision of national infrastructure.  They were more worried about losing their mid-day and weekend branch line service on Metro-North under proposed CDOT budget cuts starting July 1^st.

“We’re really fed up,” said one.  “This kind of crisis has now been socialized,” said another, predicting we’d be back dealing with such ideas again in another few years. “Was this a political ploy or a real crisis?” asked a skeptic.

Senator Murphy clearly understood he was walking into a hornet’s nest.  But the audience seemed surprised when he admitted he didn’t understand the extent of the proposed service cuts.  Really?

“We need to refill the Special Transportation Fund,” said Murphy.  “But I’ll stay out of the details of how to do it.  I’m not plugged in at the state level.”

While state Senator Toni Boucher (R-Wilton) tried to reassure attendees that the looming crisis has been averted… that there will be no service cuts or fare hikes July 1^st… the details are fuzzy.

Both the Democrats’ and Republicans’ proposed budgets seem to find money to staunch the hemorrhaging of the STF. But my sources tell me it’s the same old shell game.  Take a little money from the rainy-day fund, divert the new car sales tax, maybe a booze bottle deposit tax and yes, a four to seven cent increase in the gasoline tax.  Even Boucher said a gas tax hike “would be fair”. 

But no tolls?  No, in an election year that can has been kicked down the road once again. 

By the time you read this column, the proposed solutions may be different.  But they all seem like band-aids, not systemic changes in funding.  Crisis postponed, not averted.

Meanwhile, Senator Murphy was talking big picture:  infrastructure investment on a national, bi-partisan level measuring billions of dollars.  He reminded attendees that while the US spends 2% of GDP on infrastructure, Europe spends 6% and China 12%.

He said that Amtrak’s high-speed Acela turns a profit of $300 million a year which is used to subsidize slower, traditional Northeast Corridor trains.  Acela could be privatized.

He praised the European model where the government owns and maintains the tracks while private companies pay to offer competitive service with their trains.  Imagine having a choice of carriers to whisk you by rail to Washington.

What about Elon Musk’s Hyperloop?  We can’t wait that long, said Murphy.  “It’s far from being proven as a technology.”

Murphy admitted that US roads and rails are too expensive and take far too long to build under current regulations.  “The Republicans are going to have to accept new taxes and the Democrats some changes in labor and environmental rules,” he said.

It was the tale of two railroads.

Murphy was dreaming of 200+ mph high speed rail and most people in the room were just trying to save their one-track, “dink train” from New Canaan to NYC. 

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media

Transportation Cuts Will Hurt Us All

For weeks I’ve been writing about the CDOT’s impending bus and rail service cuts and fare hikes and their profound impact on commuters, local businesses and real estate values.  But with just weeks to go, the folks who can prevent this pain… our legislature… seem to be doing nothing.

 The deadline is July 1^st this year when proposed CDOT cuts will go into effect:   A 10% fare hike on Metro-North will be matched with elimination of off-peak trains on the New Canaan, Danbury and Waterbury branch lines as well as Shore Line East.

How are local officials responding?  By complaining that the proposed cuts on them aren’t fair.  “Don’t cut my mass transit, cut someone else’s!”, seems the plaintiff cry.  “Why is my bus service being cut but Hartford and Stamford’s isn’t?,” one official asked me.

I told him he was asking the wrong question.  Instead he should be asking why any bus or train service was being cut.

It’s as if a crowd was trapped in a burning building with one narrow fire escape and everyone’s screaming “I deserve to survive. Let the others get burned” while nobody is working to douse the flames.

The answer isn’t to push away the pain onto others but to turn off the pain at its source.

 Legislators can easily stop CDOT’s plans by just raising the gasoline tax four cents a gallon and diverting the car sales tax into the Special Transportation Fund.  Instead, they’re blaming everyone but themselves for the mess they got us into.

Remember:  it was the legislature that pandered to voters by lowering the gasoline tax 14 cents a gallon in 1997, a move that cost the STF $3.4 billion in lost transportation spending that could have repaired roads and fixed bridges.

Now the Republicans are so focused on the fall campaign they’re deceiving voters in a “big lie” PR move only Sean Spicer could enjoy: trying to argue that proposed highway tolls are “taxes”.  

They are not.  Tolls would be a user fee, paid only by those who drive on those roads.  Train fares aren’t taxes, are they?  You only pay those fares if you take the train.

Do Republicans really think voters are that stupid?  Apparently so.

The pols are also piling on the CDOT for being late in opening the new Hartford Line, the commuter rail line between New Haven, Hartford and Springfield.  Our legislature can’t even deliver a budget on time, let alone understand the complexity of a $769 million railroad construction project that’s taken over a decade.

It’s not by chance the Republicans are known as the “party of no”.  For all their complaining they have offered no new ideas or embraced the ones that thoughtful observers think are obvious:  asking motorists to pay their fair share with gasoline taxes and tolls.

Metro-North riders already pay the highest commuter rail fares in the US, fares that have risen 53% since the year 2000…  while motorists haven’t seen a gas tax increase in 20 years. How is that fair?

If the July 1^st service cuts and fare hikes go into effect, commuters should know it’s their legislature that’s to blame.

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media