The Taxi Driver

“You know how much money I make driving this cab?” the thickly accented New York cabbie asked me as we careened down Lexington Avenue. 

I was just trying to make conversation, as I usually do (often in my Canadian French), and after a trite observation about the weather, I asked him about the new taxi / car service surcharge recently applied to Manhattan rides:  $2.50 for taxis and $2.75 for Uber and Lyft.  He exploded.

It was proposed as a fund raising effort to fix the subways.  But the taxi drivers, call it the “suicide surcharge”… making taxi rides so expensive the industry will collapse.  Or maybe they’re referring to the fact that eight taxi and Uber drivers in NYC have killed themselves in the past year, no longer able to bear the financial burden of driving.

The surcharge was held up by the courts for awhile, but now it’s in effect.  Step in a NYC taxi south of 96^th Street in Manhattan and the meter will start at $5.80.  That’s the bad news.  The good news is, you won’t have trouble finding a cab.  Savvy New Yorkers are either walking, or taking the bus or subway.  Taxis are now expensive. Ubers, too.

So, glancing at the meter which was quickly ticking off the dollars, I asked my driver if the surcharge was hurting tips.  When you see an extra $2.50 added to your fare, I’d guess many passengers are reluctant to also tip the driver.

“WHATDAYOUTHINK?”, said my driver.  “I drive this cab 12 hours a day, and you know how much I make,” he asked?  I didn’t even want to guess.  “I lease this car from the (taxi) medallion owner and I gotta pay for the gas.  I even have to pay tax on my tips (when passengers use the credit card instead of paying cash). And for all that I make $100 a day.”

A C-note a day for driving in Manhattan traffic?  That’s about $8 an hour. Guys slinging burgers make $15, the new minimum wage, and have much better working conditions… like access to bathrooms and people seldom pulling a gun on them from the back seat. So why does he drive?

My driver said he’d been behind the wheel for 12 years, a veteran for an industry that is often a first job for immigrants.  He told me he was ready to retire.  Doubtless when he hangs up his keys, someone new will take his place.

Taxis and Ubers are a service. They take you door to door, in your own little steel cocoon, usually heated and cooled appropriately.  You can get there fast without the noise and accompaniment of the “interesting” people who ride the subway.  Taxis are usually clean and the drivers competent.

And those drivers are doing this job to make a living, just like the gal who is a waitress or the guy at Grand Central who shines my shoes.  It’s less a professional ambition and career track than a way to get by for another week, paying the bills and putting food on the table for the family.

So I don’t resent the new surcharge.  I’m okay with paying to fix mass transit.  But for my taxi driver on this ride, I gave him my empathy and a 25% tip.  He seemed grateful and I felt less guilty.

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media

CT's Hometown Railroad

You might not realize it, but Connecticut is home to the world headquarters of a $5 billion international railroad company on whose trains you’ll never be able to ride.

In a small office building across from the Darien railroad station sits the offices of Genesee and Wyoming Inc, a “short line” railroad conglomerate.  The original railroad, founded in 1899, hauled salt on a 14-mile track in upstate NY.  Today, G&W owns 122 different railroads on three continents, serving 3000 customers with over 16,000 miles of track.

A “short line” railroad, as its name implies, only operates over short distances, sometimes thought of as rail freight’s first and last mile.  They pick up boxcars and tankers at factories and plants and carry them to junction points where they hand them off to the major railroads which carry them to their ultimate destination, a journey often completed by another short line railroad.

In the US G&W’s railroads are as short as a single mile in length and as long as 739 miles.  They operate 1300 locomotives and 30,000 railcars.  But they only carry freight, not passengers.

And because they only travel short distances, they’re not looking for speed as much as customer service.  Moving along at 15 mph saves a lot on track maintenance.

How does G&W’s sales team sell companies on shipping by rail instead of truck?  Fuel costs.  Trains are four times more energy efficient, a crucial consideration when you’re hauling tons of stone, coal, or wheat instead of Amazon boxes filled with packing peanuts.

The G&W’s most local affiliate, The Providence & Worcester, runs a train on Metro-North tracks each night, hauling crushed rock from Connecticut quarries to Queens NY.  I can hear the train from my home, usually just before midnight, as its locomotives strain under the load and rumble through town.

That’s about the only freight train left on the New Haven line.  But that’s another story for another time.

Overseas the G&W owns some much larger railroads, but still dedicated only to freight.  They run trains, container terminals and freight yards in the UK, Germany, Poland, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Down under in Australia the G&W runs a huge freight operation running north-south through the heart of the continent serving the iron ore and manganese mines hauling intermodal containers through the desert-like interior.

How does a tiny, 20-person office in Darien oversee such a massive railroad network around the planet?  It doesn’t.  Each of G&W’s nine operating regions is locally managed with capital allocated from headquarters.  Keeping the decision-making close to the customers, not being second-guessed from thousands of miles away, has been the key to G&W’s success.

But one thing that all of G&W’s railroads do share in common is the color scheme of their logos, originally designed by Milton Glaser (famous for the I  Love NY logo).  Every G&W railroad’s logo is orange and black.  Not just any orange, but Princeton orange, harkening back to its former chairman’s alma mater.

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media

Commuting by Ferry

Why can’t we run commuter ferries on Long Island Sound? 

I can’t tell you how often I’ve been asked that question.  But as with so many “simple solutions” to our transportation woes, there are logical reasons why ferry boats won’t work.

First off, they are too slow.  Even “fast ferries” can only make about 30 knots (35 mph) in open waters, half the (potential) speed of a train.  And to dock at downtown areas in major cities like New Haven, Bridgeport, Norwalk and Stamford, they’d have to sail up rivers and inlets with 5 knot speed limits.  That really slows down the ride.

If we put ferry terminals closer to the Sound we’d be eating into the most expensive water-view real estate we have.  And how would you get there?  By car, parking where?  By shuttle bus, taking how long?

We’d need dozens of ferries to compete with Metro-North’s fleet.  At rush hour on the railroad there’s a train every 20 minutes to Grand Central.  There isn’t a ferry service in the US that can offer that frequency.  Would you be willing to wait an hour if you miss the boat?

On a beautiful day a ferry ride to work sounds like fun.  But how about in a winter storm?  You’d be back on the dependable ol’ train in a heartbeat.

Even the few operators who’ve considered launching ferry service in Connecticut say it would come with fares at least twice those of Metro-North.  Aren’t people complaining already about the trains being too expensive?

Fast ferry boats are gas guzzlers, the aquatic equivalent to the Concorde.  Even when the Pequots built high-speed catamarans to ferry gamblers to their casino to lose money, it cost them a fortune.  Those ferries are still dry-docked, too expensive to operate.

When a private ferry operator offered service from Glen Cove, Long Island to midtown, it lasted only a few months.  Same thing when ferry service was offered on the Hudson River from Yonkers.  Why?  Because both routes paralleled existing train service and the ferries couldn’t compete.  Neither would it work here in Connecticut where Metro-North operates.

Mind you, there are places that ferries do work, especially where they go from point A to point B when you can’t do that on land.  Like the Bridgeport – Port Jefferson or New London to Orient Point (LI) cross-Sound ferries.  Or consider Seattle, where ferries connect downtown with island suburbs.

A ferry from Connecticut to LaGuardia Airport might make sense. But in the late 80’s when Pan Am tried to compete with Eastern Airlines in the lucrative air-shuttle market, they introduced the Pan Am Water Shuttle connecting LaGuardia to midtown.  I rode it once, on a bright summer’s day, and it was sweet.  But even funneling passengers to its own planes, Pan Am couldn’t afford the aquatic connection.  And since Amtrak’s Acela came along, who flies the shuttles anyway?

One final reason why I don’t think ferries would work:  nobody else does so either. 

I’m sure that ferry operators in NYC have looked at Connecticut’s gold coast, crunched the numbers and backed away.  It’s a free market, folks.  If ferries made sense (and dollars), they’d be running here by now.  But they aren’t, and probably won’t be, for the common sense reasons I have cited.

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media

Why 30-30-30 Doesn't Add Up

How would you like a faster ride on Metro-North?  Who wouldn’t!  How about a 30 min ride from Hartford to New Haven, from New Haven to Stamford or from Stamford to Grand Central?

That’s the vision announced by Governor Lamont in his inaugural address.  It’s known as the 30-30-30 plan and sounds good compared to current running times (52 minutes, 55 minutes and 48 minutes respectively).  But how can such vast improvements be done?  Ask Joe McGee, VP of the Fairfield Business Council who’s been pitching this idea for years.

So confident was McGee of this concept that his Council recently paid $400,000 to Ty Lin Consulting of San Francisco to study it.  And which railroad expert did Ty Lin hire to spearhead the study?  Joseph Giulietti, former President of Metro-North… recently named as Connecticut’s new Commissioner of Transportation.

Though the Ty Lin study has yet to be released, McGee admits that the 30-30-30 idea is more of a goal than a possibility.  Yet, for as little as $75 - $95 million, Ty Lin thinks significant improvements can be made in speeding up service by accelerating Metro-North’s return to a “state of good repair”.

When he was President of Metro-North, Giulietti said it would take five years to get the railroad back in shape after years of neglect.  Today, Metro-North says a more realistic time frame is ten years.

By fixing rail ties and overhead power lines to improve speeds on curves, by restoring the fourth track east of Milford and by adding express trains (at a premium fare), McGee claims service will improve quickly, maybe shaving 24 minutes off of the current 103 minute running time from New Haven to Grand Central. That would make it a 79 minute run, but not 60.

But wait.  If this was Giulietti’s idea as a consultant, why didn’t he make that happen when he was running Metro-North?  Or how will he now, as Commissioner of the CDOT, get his old railroad to adopt Ty Lin’s (his) ideas?  I asked, but he isn’t saying.

What seasoned professionals at CDOT have told me is that the Ty Lin ideas will cost billions of dollars and take a decade. In other words… there’s no quick, cheap fix.

Meantime, Metro-North is planning to add six to ten minutes of running time to all New Haven line trains for the spring timetable to better reflect the reality of current delays due to work.  For 2018 the railroad had only 88% on time performance (OTP).  By extending the train schedule on paper, OTP will go up and riders will have a more dependable, albeit slower, ride.

Lengthening running times, even on paper, “is not acceptable,” says McGee who hopes to release his Ty Lin study in about two weeks, fully expecting huge pushback from the railroad and east-coast consultants beholden to the MTA.

But it’s really the FRA (the Federal Railroad Administration) that’s the biggest block to faster trains.  The slower speeds they required after the 2013 Bridgeport and Spuyten Duyvil derailments won’t be raised until they’re convinced the railroad is safe. 

So let the debate begin:  is 30-30-30 possible or just a fantasy?   Did Giulietti create himself a nightmare in proposing as a consultant what he may not be able to deliver as CDOT Commissioner? 

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media

Confessions of a Road Warrior

What idiot said that “getting there is half the fun”?

That’s the thought that went through my mind awhile back when I did a “day trip” to LA:  two door-to-door 10-hour trips just for a three-hour face-to-face meeting with my most important consulting client.

I knew my trip was doomed when I went to pick up my rental car at LAX and there were no cars.  Pleading with the dispatcher that I’d been up since 1 am local time and had a crucial meeting I could not be late for, she said “I can give you a mini-van.”  Fabulous!  If it has an engine and wheels, I’ll take it.  Even in LA where people drive their egos, I abandoned my Ferrari persona for a Chevy minivan.

I should have known there was a problem as it was the only vehicle left on the lot, but a road warrior never gives up.  Throwing open the door to the van I was met with the unmistakable odor of vomit.  The vehicle was clean, mind you.  It just reeked.

So, off I drove, windows down and made my meeting on time!  When I returned the van five hours later it still reeked of vomit, but now with a nice overtone of cigar.

Another time a few years back I’d booked the last evening flight from JFK to LAX.  I helicoptered to the airport, arriving just in time to find that the 6 pm flight was delayed due to incoming equipment.  A promised 8 pm departure never happened, and the delays kept coming in 30 minute intervals until it was clear we were going to be on a red-eye.  Worse yet, after all other flights had left, every bar and restaurant in the terminal closed up.

In its generosity, the airline wheeled out some MRE’s (meals ready to eat) from a back closet and we feasted on stale crackers and government surplus cheese, until one passenger took the initiative and picked up the phone.

A half-hour later (and still hours before departure), a pizza delivery-man arrived with ten pies.  “We’re not paying for those,” screamed the airline supervisor.  “We’re not asking you too,” smiled the passenger, who then sold every slice at about $5 apiece.  PS:  We did eventually take off, arriving at LAX about 3 am.

Then there was the time I arrived late one night at Newark airport from a sad trip to see my dying mother.  I had a crucial meeting in central NJ the next morning, so I’d booked the last hotel room within 30 miles at a run-down Howard Johnson’s.

In the dark airport parking lot, I got off the bus at the wrong stop and in a pouring rain (with no coat or umbrella) was soaked by the time I found my car.  God was telling me something.

Digging thru my suitcase, I found the only dry clothing I could safely use to dry off … a pair of underwear.  I drove to Route 287 and an hour later I found my Ho Jo’s motel, tired and hungry, ready for a meal of those famous fried clams and at little ice cream.  No such luck.  The restaurant was closed as were all other eateries within ten miles.  That night dinner consisted of Pop Tarts with a side order of humble pie.

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media

Global Warming vs The Northeast's Transit Future

What follows is a public apology.  Not to you, dear reader, but to future generations.

“To my grand children:  I’m sorry we left you with this mess.  We should have done more, when we still had time.”

What am I referring to?  Not the national debt.  Not even global terrorism.  No, this apology is about coastal flooding that threatens the Northeast Corridor’s rail lines.

I won’t even get into the debate about what’s causing sea-level rise.  Whether it’s man-made or natural, it is happening and we have not been planning for its inevitable effects.  Sure, when the tides are high and the winds are from the east, we already see a little flooding along the Connecticut coastline.  “Look Dad!  The beach parking lot is under water,” the kids would say.  But the tides and winds then subsided and we’d forget about it.

Aside from pretty beaches and expensive homes, what else is along Connecticut’s coast?  Our railroads:  Metro-North, Shore Line East and Amtrak.  And according to a long hidden report, those tracks, and the trains that run on them, are being threatened by sea level rise.

Just before Christmas, Bloomberg wrote about a three year study, “Amtrak NEC Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment,” that was finished in 2017 but never released to the public.  Using an FOI request, they got hold of a redacted (censored) portion of the study, and its findings are frightening.

The Northeast Corridor of Amtrak runs 457 miles from Washington to Boston and carries 12 million passengers a year on 2200 daily trains.  Those tracks not only serve Amtrak’s inter-city trains but also many commuter rail lines, like Metro-North and Shore Line East.  And the rising sea level is already lapping at its edge, where in some areas those tracks are just feet from the ocean. By 2050 the water may be two feet higher.

When it was originally built in the 19^th century, the coastline made perfect sense as a location for the railroad tracks:  the coast is where the major cities were and the terrain was flat, perfect for trains.  Sure, there were storms (even hurricanes) that caused short-term flooding, but nothing that was persistent.  Until now.

So what’s to be done?

Amtrak and the Federal Railroad Administration have no plans to raise the tracks.  They’re already facing $40 billion in unfunded projects just to keep the darn trains running.  As for building a “wall” to keep out the sea water, even a temporary version erected before a storm would take 12 to 30 days to assemble and cost $24 million a mile.

Keeping this all in perspective, Amtrak reminds us that the cities they serve along the coast are also in danger of flooding, so what are a few damp railroad tracks when your city-center looks like Venice?

What’s most concerning is that this study was suppressed by Amtrak and the FRA because, as Bloomberg wrote, “The disclosure of that information “could possibly cause public confusion.” 

I’m not confused, are you?  Maybe enraged, but not confused.  I may not be around to see these predictions come to pass, but I do feel some sense of obligation (guilt) to future generations to whom I can offer little more than an apology.

Sorry kids.  We left you with a mess.  We should have done more.

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media

Transportation's Benevolent Despot: Robert Moses

What baseball fan doesn’t know who Babe Ruth was?  Or “Shoeless Joe Jackson”?  Every part of American history has its heroes and villains.

Yet, it’s frightening how much we forget about the past mistakes we have made in planning for transportation… lessons we should have learned from.  This became clear recently when I was asked to be a guest lecturer to a group of urban planning graduate students at UCONN.

I made reference in the class to Robert Moses and these planners of our future just gave me a blank stare.  “You do know who Robert Moses was, don’t you?” I asked.  They did not.  I was shocked.

No single individual was more powerful or made more decisions affecting the New York City area’s transportation network than the “master builder” Moses.  His grip on power came from holding 12 different job titles though he was never elected to public office.

From the 1930’s to the 1960’s he directed the building of 416 miles of parkways (Long Island’s Northern & Southern State and Westchester’s Taconic, to name a few), many bridges (the Tri-Borough, Throgs Neck, Henry Hudson, Verrazano-Narrows as well as the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel) and designed Jones Beach and the NY State Parks system.  He presided over two Worlds Fairs (1939 and 1964) and helped bring the UN’s headquarters to NYC.

But he did nothing for mass transit.  He loved cars and didn’t really care for people who did not own them.

Where others had envisioned expanding the city’s subway lines, he built roads, displacing thousands of residents.  Robert Caro, author of the Pulitzer prize winning biography of Moses, “The Power Broker” even called Moses a racist, because he built motorways for the middle class while discouraging the car-less (blacks) from visiting Jones Beach.

He opposed blacks moving into Stuyvesant Town, a Manhattan development on the lower east side for veterans.  City swimming pools in black neighborhoods were kept cold to discourage blacks from using them.

Moses’ dénouement came when he tried to build the elevated, ten-lane Lower Manhattan Expressway which would have connected the Holland Tunnel to the Manhattan Bridge straight through Greenwich Village and Little Italy, evicting 2000 families and 800+ businesses.  “The Master Builder” called it “slum clearance”, but residents like Jane Jacobs (author of the “Death and Life of Great American Cities”) fought back and the city’s artistic heart was saved.

Robert Moses was not an evil man.  Today, many hail his accomplishments and think we need a benevolent despot to get things done in transportation and urban planning, even if a few people get hurt along the way.  It’s all for the greater good, Moses once said:

"I raise my stein to the builder who can remove ghettos without moving people as I hail the chef who can make omelets without breaking eggs."

History will judge Moses… those he helped and those he hurt.  But I think of him, more than the people he displaced, when I drive on the Cross Bronx or any of the city’s bridges.  Love the omelet, forget about the eggs.

But for graduate students at UCONN to be unaware of this man, what he built and how, worries me greatly.  To paraphrase George Santayana:  those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. 

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media