Commentary—

Transportation — Nobody Wants To Pay

By William A. Collins

Trains and highways,

Stir a fuss;

And no one wants,

To ride the bus.

Many rail commuters in Connecticut are all fired up and not going to take it any more. Though of course they will. What else can they do? Move to Queens?

The railroad — pricey, ill maintained, and sometimes smelly — is the only thing that allows their daily escape to our verdant hills. Otherwise its Yonkers and higher taxes.

Thus, it would seem to make sense for someone to pony up a few hundred million to buy new equipment, replace those Paleolithic overhead wires, and build more parking. But who? Plainly not Washington. The center of political power has shifted West, where interest in railroads ends with the closing credits of The Great Train Robbery. Further, with the White House now joined at the hip with the oil industry, mass transit is an ever-doubtful starter for funding.

Of course, state government could pay the bill, but that would be a poor investment. Factories no longer spring up along Nutmeg rail lines, and while good transit does raise residential property values, it’s the towns, not the state, that siphon off all that tax growth. So the only statewide political profit to arise from trains are from those happy wealthy folks in Fairfield County who contribute to election campaigns. Were it not for them we’d have no new railcars at all.

Curiously, then, it turns out to be the lowly mayors who have the most to gain financially from rail, but they have no resources to contribute. Mostly their role is to rally the troops, and to their credit, build an occasional parking garage. But failing a catastrophe in petroleum supply, enhanced mass transit lacks the muscle to leave the station in Connecticut any time soon.

Highway upgrades, by contrast, have a little better chance since they have more constituents. But highways remain essentially a dead end too. Long ago there was indeed a moment when restoring the Poughkeepsie rail bridge would have kept mountains of freight off I-84 and I-95. But worse luck the bridge lay in New York while the chief beneficiary would have been New England. Thus, we couldn’t fix it and they wouldn’t. Now it’s too late. Rail dependent industries have long since moved away, and more flexible businesses, for want of options, have shifted to trucks. Little chance of that genie going back in the bottle.

Then there’s the touted barge terminal in Bridgeport for ferrying big trucks in and out of the state. Unfortunately, it won’t help much either. While certainly a pleasant token, it’s only worth about five trucks an hour on I-95.

And the revenue picture for expanding highways is as murky as for improving transit. The White House and its oily friends might like to help out, but as we said, the center of transportation gravity has motored westward. Nor did Connecticut’s voting record last November build us any credits on Capitol Hill.

But for the state, highways would at least be a decent financial investment. They generate more gas tax revenue by generating more traffic. To many though, that sounds like a Faustian bargain. More traffic is what is killing us now.

So too is our patented suburban sprawl, famously near and dear to our hearts. The places where we live, work, shop, and recreate are now so scattered that no mass transit, even a bus, can any longer respond.

A more predictable, and painful, endgame will most likely come about all on its own. Volatile oil politics are one day bound to reprise the shortages of the 70s. Suddenly we will once again be car-pooling, van-pooling, and telepooling. The highways will at last be clear and we’ll wonder why we didn’t do all this before.

But we’ll remember soon enough as our sylvan property values sag and downtown property values spike. At last enough bucks will somehow be found for trains, buses, and vans, though not for roads. It will be a glorious public transportation rebirth, but lamentably we will first have to “die” to achieve it.

(Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)