Bus Ridership Returns Slowly

Much has been written about Metro-North’s slow return to “normal” service as commuters ponder a return to their New York City offices.  But what matters as much, if not more, is bus ridership within the state.

Pre-COVID busy systems like GBT (Greater Bridgeport Transit) served as many as 15,000 bus riders in communities from Westport to Milford.  Recent statistics show 10,000 riders per day, about a 33% drop from pre-COVID.

“We reached 10,000+ boardings on some weekdays this past July.  I expect to see that gap partially close as the high schools, universities and colleges resume in-person learning,” says Doug Holcomb, Executive Director of GBT.

CT Transit ridership in Stamford, New Haven and Hartford has equally held up, recently down only 40% compared to Metro-North’s 60% drop.

Why the difference in returning ridership between trains and buses?  Because bus riders are much different than train riders.

Most can’t work from home:  nurses and blue-collar workers can’t telecommute.  And many don’t even have access to cars. (GBT says 90% of all passengers are going to or coming from school or their job.)  If the bus doesn’t keep running to get them to work, they can’t get to class or lose their jobs and go on unemployment. 

Bus riders are also less affluent. Even though bus fares are only $1.75 (closer to $1 for those with discount passes), that daily expense represents a bigger chunk of their weekly pay compared to “gold coast” residents taking the train.  While Metro-North riders enjoy a one-seat ride from their home station to Grand Central, many bus riders must take two or more connecting routes.

In other words, bus service in this state is essential.  It keeps service jobs staffed, our hospitals running and cars serviced.

But what will it take to get even more riders back on the bus?

First, they need to feel safe.  And here the bus companies are doing a much better job than the railroad both in cleaning and in enforcing recently extended federal and state mask-wearing rules.

“We have only had one reported incidence of refusal (to wear a mask) that resulted in a driver/rider confrontation. We focused on encouragement and outreach – signage, announcements, newsletters, social media, mask giveaways, persuasion. This seems to have worked as well as anything,” says GBT’s Holcomb. “If there’s a group of people who really know we’re in this together, it’s bus riders.”

To encourage their staff to get their vax, GBT held a lottery with prize money.  Vaccination rates went way up to 70%.  They’re also building service resiliency by keeping the staff healthy and are even hiring new drivers.

As crucial as bus service is, there is a lot of anti-bus prejudice in Connecticut.  I regularly see social media posts complaining about “empty buses” driving our roads, often posted by the same people opposed to highway tolls as being too burdensome for the working class.

When Southington was recently considering restoring bus service for the first time since 1969, a local resident wrote a letter to the local paper declaring “Towns that have bus service are towns that frankly have a lesser quality of people.”

Really?

Forget about community college students who need their U-Pass to bus to class every day.  Or the people who come and clean your home, if you’re so fortunate. Bus riders are what keep the state, literally, moving.

Kudos also to the bus companies’ drivers and technicians who, as Holcomb says “are courageous and dedicated people with a commitment to this community."

Amen.

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media

The Raillway to the Moon

New England is home to many railroad “firsts”, but none is more impressive than the Mount Washington Cog Railway, the world’s first cog rail line.  And it’s still running, at a profit, 152 years late, using some of the original equipment.

Unlike most railroads, “The Cog” doesn’t pull its coaches along a relatively flat line with flanged wheels on two parallel tracks.  A cog railroad’s locomotive directly connects its gears to a center rack of iron teeth, pushing the train up the mountain very slowly, but surely.

On a normal railroad the train can handle a two percent grade (or climb) at best.  On the Mount Washington Cog the grade is as steep as 38% as the train ascends the 6,288-foot peak over three miles of steep track at about 3 mph.

A recent race up the mountain between humans on foot and The Cog saw the train win the climb to the summit by about ten seconds.

Originally proposed as a tourist attraction by Sylvester Marsh in 1858, the entrepreneur was almost laughed out of the New Hampshire legislature when seeking a charter, teasing him that he had as much chance of building a train line to the top of New England’s highest peak as building “a railway to the moon”.

But build it he did and it is still running to this date, now owned by the Presby family who once owned the nearby Mount Washington Hotel and Bretton Woods Resorts.  Since assuming sole ownership of this historic line, Presby has poured over $3 million of dollars into its preservation and enhancement.

While The Cog still operates two century-old steam locomotives, their unique design with slanting boilers (to handle the steep pitch) requires hand-made replacement parts.  These old puffers consume a ton of coal and a thousand gallons of water on every trip while generating a lot of smoke, known to locals as “Cog smog”.

Augmenting the two steam powered trips each day is a fleet of biodiesels that do the journey on 18 gallons of cleaner-burning fuel.  Each locomotive pushes one passenger car carrying 70 passengers.  Like the locos, the passenger cars are all hand-crafted on the property and are adorned with beautiful wood inlays. The newest cars also have a reassuring automatic air brake system.

During the COVID shutdown in 2020 the railway accelerated a rehab process, replacing the rails and racks on the line and building a state-of-the-art repair shop.  The five-year project was finished in eight months.

Since its opening over 150 years ago The Cog has always attracted crowds.  Pre-COVID ridership topped 120,000 annually and with an expanded all-year schedule they hope to surpass those numbers this year.

Unlike some railroads we know, The Cog runs on time thanks to superb maintenance and a dedicated staff of 100.  They’re even hiring new engineers and mechanics, some of them coming from an apprenticeship program with a nearby community college.

Summer and fall are the busy seasons, but a wintertime climb half-way up the peak sounds spectacular, given extreme weather conditions atop the peak where the winter wind chill gets to 50 below.

Tickets aren’t cheap, but well worth it for the experience.  Some of the fall steam trips are already booked up. If you’re any kind of railfan, The Cog is a must for your bucket list.

Road & Rail Scofflaws

What do  Metro-North and the Merritt Parkway have in common, I mean, aside from often crawling at a snail’s pace?  Well, both seem to be hotbeds of unenforced safety rules.

Anybody who has driven the Parkway knows that its 1930’s design cannot accommodate trucks, but they are there all the time.  Tom Lombardo, a fellow Board member on the Merritt Parkway Conservancy, recently conducted an unscientific survey to quantify the problem.

In a single hour one weekday morning he logged 212 trucks, buses and commercial vehicles traveling in both directions on the highway. That’s more than three per minute.  Now compare that number with the fact that State Police issued only 581 tickets to trucks on the Parkway in all of 2020 and you get a sense of how unenforced this rule is.

Mind you, trucks on the Merritt Parkway are only facing a $90 fine, if caught, which they aren’t… often, until they strike a bridge.  The King Street Bridge in Greenwich was struck 24 times in one year.

State Police are understaffed and spread too thin.  Enforcing the “no trucks” rule isn’t high on their priorities list.

But on Metro-North, rules enforcement should not be the problem it has become, given the staffing of conductors on all trains.  Yet, in the midst of the resurgent COVID pandemic, the railroad is not enforcing a simple rule designed to keep conductors and passengers safe:  wear a face mask.

They’re still wasting money and manpower disinfecting car interiors, wiping down surfaces and spraying the seats.  Never mind that the CDC has been telling us for months there’s only a one in 10,000 chance of getting COVID by surface contact.

Oh, the railroad does a great PR job explaining how to wear a mask, but they don’t enforce what is now a Federal TSA regulation:  wear a face mask or face a fine.

A recent Freedom of Information request of the MTA Police by CTExaminer showed that since last September they have not issued a single ticket to mask rule violators in Connecticut.  Not even one!

Yet I see social media complaints every day, often with pictures, of people on trains riding maskless and not being challenged, let alone ticketed, by Metro-North staff.  In some cases passengers say even the conductors aren’t fully masked.

These reports are duly logged by MTA’s social media watchers, complete with date, time and location information and “reported to supervisors”… and then, like with so many complaints to the railroad, nothing changes.

Are these conductors disciplined? Retrained? Does anyone do anything to stop this potentially life-threatening non-enforcement of a Federal public health rule?  Apparently not, given the growing number of reports we see.

The MTA has seen 136 of their own employees die of COVID since the pandemic began.  They’ve even built them a memorial.  And sure, they’ve passed out thousands of masks to subway, bus and train riders.  But what good are free masks if the rules to wear them aren’t enforced?

The TSA and FAA have issued tens of thousands of dollars in fines in 1300 cases of non-mask wearing on airplanes.  But on Metro-North not a single ticket?  Not one.

If trucks aren’t ticketed on the Merritt Parkway and maskless riders aren’t penalized on the train, people notice the laws aren’t being enforced, and scofflaws rule the roads and rails.

The Amazon Logistics Marvel

These days “Getting There” doesn’t just mean moving yourself from point A to B, but the logistics of moving stuff from dozens of locations to your doorstep.  And nobody does that better than Amazon.

Want a new pair of jeans? Click once and they’re delivered the next day.  Need a new printer?  Maybe a couple of days because they’re still scarce, thanks to the home-office explosion.  Your favorite ointment out of stock at CVS?  Save yourself a trip, click here and apply twice daily.

In his 2013 book “The Everything Store” (yes, available on Amazon), business writer Brad Stone chronicle the early days of Jeff Bezos’ dream.  But in the intervening years the Amazon phenomenon has grown far beyond anything that even Stone could have envisioned.

And now that Bezos has stepped down as CEO it’s worth a moment to admire what his team has built.

At the heart of the operation is a logistics network that is a marvel of technology.  So just how does a package go from your click to your doorstep?  Keep in mind that half of all Amazon orders are for third-party sellers just racking their goods on Amazon’s e-shelves.

Most Amazon orders are handled at one of the company’s 110 US “Fulfillment Centers”, massive 800,000 to one million square foot warehouses filled with robotics.  So far there are two such centers in Connecticut, Windsor and North Haven, with more in the works.

Merchandise arrives by the pallet and gets offloaded, scanned and stored by some of the 1500 full time employees at each site.  Other, slightly smaller centers house the really big stuff… furniture, lawn mowers and such.

As sales soared during the pandemic, Amazon went on a hiring binge, bringing an additional quarter million staffers onboard, many of them enticed by $1000 signing bonuses.  Worldwide the company has 1.3 million employees.

Much has been reported on the working conditions in Amazon facilities… the long hours, intense pressure for performance, etc.  While we should keep this in mind when we shop at Amazon, there seems no shortage of folks willing to take these jobs, averaging about $40,000 a year in Connecticut, plus benefits.

These are the folks who, with the help of Kiva robotics, pick your order, pack it up and SLAM it… scan, label, apply and manifest.  Then it rides miles of conveyor belts and is sorted by destination zip code.

It used to be that Amazon relied on FedEx, UPS and the postal service (for the last mile) to deliver your order, supplemented by freelancers earning $20 an hour to make deliveries using their own cars and vans.

But lately Connecticut has seen Amazon roll out its own fleet of dark grey Prime vans to handle many deliveries, with plans to convert to an all-electric delivery fleet by 2040.  The current vans are noticeable by their back-up warning sounding like a quacking duck rather than the usual beep-beep.

Supporting this US network are 20,000 tractor trailer trucks and Amazon’s own cargo airline, Prime Air.  That plane fleet has doubled in size this year to 85 leased jets and Amazon even is building its own $1.5 billion airport hub in Kentucky.

So next time you click to shop, think of the amazing logistics network that helps your package in “Getting There”.

 

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media

 

Is It "Time for CT"?

In 1955 a New Haven Railroad commuter train could run non-stop for the 36-mile distance from Stamford to Grand Central in 48 minutes.  Today that Stamford to NYC run takes 59 minutes at best, despite Governor Lamont’s long-promised dream of a 30 minute trip time. 

But now there’s a new effort to speed up the New Haven line: CDOT’s ambitious “Time for CT” $8-10 billion plan.   It promises 10-minute faster running times from New Haven to NY by next year and a 25-minute quicker run by 2035.

While some dream of a new high speed rail system running from Washington to Boston at 200+ mph speeds, CDOT and Metro-North are taking, in my view, a much more realistic approach to fixing our existing system. “Higher” speeds will be fine.

Reading the consultant-driven 138-page plan, years in the making, one gets a sobering picture of how badly our railroad has deteriorated.

For safety reasons, “slow orders” all along the line have cut speeds to 37 mph, both for commuter trains and Amtrak. 

As one trouble spot gets fixed, another pops up as Metro-North plays whack-a-mole with decaying infrastructure. Layer on top of this permanent slow orders implemented by the FRA in 2013 and you can understand commuters’ frustrations.

There are 57,000 track-ties that must be replaced.  Of the 134 bridges between New Haven and the NY state line, 34 are rated as poor or in serious conditions.  The open deck timber bridges are in most need of attention. 

And of the five movable bridges, only one has been replaced while the others are each more than a century old.  The South Norwalk swing bridge project alone will cost about one billion dollars.

The catenary (overhead power) system is in better shape, but some of its trackside support structures are also in the century-plus club.  There’s a lot of work to be done.  And trying to do it while still running the railroad will be like changing the fan belt on a car running 60 mph.

At the Stratford event unveiling the CDOT plan, the construction unions photo-bombed the press conference unveiling a huge banner reading “Jobs Jobs Jobs”.  And every speaker pandered to them promising “45,000 good paying union jobs” on this project.

But it’s not like CDOT or Metro-North will be hiring 45,000 new plumbers, electricians and carpenters.  That number is a hypothetical projection based on the cost and time involved in the work.

The Metro-North unions  have jurisdiction over all track work and you can’t join that union until you get hired by the railroad.  Then you need training which can only be done on the job.  And you need track equipment, some of which on the New Haven line is 30 years old.

Hopefully we’ll have enough money to make all this happen thanks to Senator Blumenthal and the Congressional compromise on infrastructure achieved recently.  But then we still need leadership.

CDOT has been suffering a brain drain in recent years, losing its best and brightest planners and engineers to retirement, those fat state pensions or lucrative consultant jobs.  With so much Federal money being thrown at transportation, Connecticut will be in serious competition for a limited pool of expertise.

There’s so much to be done. But it’s all achievable given enough money and patience.

 

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media

New Commuter Alternatives

Not with a bang, but a whimper.  That’s how commuters seem to be moving, albeit in small numbers, back to working in-person in their NYC offices.

Leaving the comfort of your home office and Zoom-nasium won’t be easy, as many of us have found ways to be so much more productive without wasting hours commuting.  But when the boss says “jump” you got to ask yourself (and her), “how high?” when you really want to say “but why?”

I hear anecdotes of some employers being persuaded (or forced?) to offer work-from-home alternatives two or three days a week just to keep their key staffers.  And  given the demand for talent, such options may become a deciding factor in where to hold a job.

Many of those who’ve been persuaded (or ordered) back to the office have so far opted for driving to New York City, perhaps because their expensive parking was being subsidized by their employers to entice them back.  But their traffic-and- stress-free drives of months ago have morphed into post-COVID mayhem as I-95 and the scenic Merritt Parkway are back to gridlock.

So, is it time to reconsider the train or are there new alternatives on the horizon?

Much as Metro-North keeps saying it wants commuters to come back, they’re not doing enough to make their service attractive.  Oh, their trains safe enough if you keep masked-up (as required by the TSA).  But with ridership crawling back from 9% (a pandemic low) to more recent weekday loads of 39%, given the reduced service the trains are getting crowded again.  Really crowded.

Every day someone Tweets a picture of a standing-room-only Metro-North train, pleading with the railroad to add more cars if not also increasing the number and speed of trains (currently offering only 53% of pre-COVID service).

Granted, they just added four more daily trains between New Haven and GCT in rush hour.  And I’ll give them thumbs up for adding a new feature to their TrainTime app to show which cars are the least crowded.

But Metro-North is about as nimble as a rock.  They have a surplus of new M8 cars and plenty of OT-hungry conductors and engineers, so why not expand service more quickly?  Why do anything more to discourage people from riding the rails again?

Why?  Because they have no competition… yet.

Sensing a business opportunity, entrepreneur Joe Colangelo (the guy who invented Boxcar, the “Air B&B of commuter parking”), is considering giving Metro-North a run for its money, especially along “the gold coast” of Fairfield County.

Colangelo envisions a luxury motor coach offering a one-seat ride from New Canaan, Darien and Greenwich to midtown and Wall Street.  His cushy fleet would have Wi-Fi (still a non-starter on Metro-North), at-seat power plugs and onboard bathrooms.  So even though you may be stuck in traffic you can still be productive.

Right now he’s conducting a survey to gauge commuter interest and to collect data on destinations and travel times.  But I’d predict he gives his idea a chance over the summer to have it ready for post-Labor Day carmageddon.

Tickets would be bought on their app even use benefit programs like Wageworks and TransitChek.  From New Canaan to GCT would be 65 minutes, then on to Hudson Yards and the Financial District (90 min).

While Metro-North is studying and planning, hemming and hawing, this entrepreneur may launch a new alternative in just a matter of weeks.  And good for him, even if he’ll be skimming the 1% cream off the top of the railroad’s heavily subsidized operation.

Commuters deserve alternatives.

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media.

Summer Road Trips

The summer travel season is starting with a vengeance.  After a year of quarantining, we’re all anxious to get back on the road again.  But where to go?  And what can you expect when you get there?  A recent mid-week mini-vacation to the Berkshires taught our family some important lessons.

WHERE TO GO?    Like many vacationers we opted for a road trip instead of flying.  There are great destinations within two or three-hours drive.  But in deciding where to go, remember you’re not just going to see the sights or visit friends.  You’re relying on local services and the folks who live there and run them.

MASKS OR NO MASKS?:          With vaccination levels well over 50% here in Connecticut and mask rules relaxed, especially for those vaccinated, you’ll want to see how your destination compares.  Do you really want to go someplace where vaccination rates or low or mask compliance is arbitrary?

WHAT’S OPEN?               In many parts of the country restaurants and hotels are still shuttered, so put your spontaneous wanderlust on hold and do your research.  Don’t just rely on apps or websites.  Call ahead and be sure they’re open.

CAR RENTALS:     If you are flying or enjoying Amtrak to travel and need a car at your destination you don’t want to be disappointed.  Many car rental companies downsized dramatically during the pandemic, selling off their fleets.  Now, because of the chip shortage hitting auto makers, they can’t get the new cars they now need.  Reservations will be a must and car rental availability may even  end up determining where to go.

If you can reserve a car, prepare for sticker shock as rates have soared, on average double the old rates. 

GASOLINE:            Unless you’re driving an all-electric car, the availability and price of gasoline may also factor into your plans.  In the Northeast availability was unaffected by the recent Colonial Pipeline shutdown, so the supply is there.  But rising demand will see the highest prices in seven years.  AAA suggests filling your tank before arriving at busy resort destinations where prices will be the highest.

STAFFING SHORTAGES:          The biggest surprise on our recent trip was the number of establishments offering reducing hours because they can’t find staff.  Restaurants, coffee shops, hotels, museums and art galleries were all operating on reduced hours while their windows were plastered with help wanted signs.

Several owners lamented to me that they desperately needed servers, kitchen help and sales staff but nobody was applying.   “I need four people right now,” said one restauranteur, “But nobody wants to work.  They’re all making $600 a week on unemployment!”

This is becoming a serious issue, not just in hospitality but in transportation.

DRIVER SHORTAGE:       Supply chain issues have left some store shelves empty because the trucking industry says they have a driver shortage.  In some areas of the country that’s also affecting gasoline deliveries.

In New York City the MTA needs 400 bus drivers, meaning reduced frequency and longer waits at bus stations just as they’re urging riders to come back to mass transit.  Some school districts are also having trouble filling bus driver jobs as are tourist destinations that run jitneys.

But don’t let all of this frighten you.  We all deserve and can enjoy our summer travels if we just do a little planning ahead.

 

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media.