Commentary—

Sorry, The Train Doesn’t Go There

By William A. Collins

Transit now,

Will surely grow;

Let’s put it where

Folks want to go.

This year’s state transportation budget has finally switched Connecticut onto the right track. The emphasis has now moved from expanding highways to expanding mass transit. That’s a wonderful change.

Sure, there’s still plenty of road construction left to do, like clearing specific bottlenecks and three-laning some remaining parts of I-95 and I-84. But you don’t hear much talk anymore about four-laning those big roads, or double-decking the turnpike. Common sense has blessedly prevailed. Except, of course, for the highway lobby.

But swearing allegiance to mass transit, while commendable, is not enough. Other ancient mindsets also need attention. For example, there is a certain obvious imbalance among the categories where all this new transit money will be spent. We’ll be buying 342 horrendously expensive new railcars (if we can ever find a suitable bidder), but only 25 new buses.

This is not so surprising. The rail cars will mostly go to New York, carrying prosperous people with good PR skills and excellent political connections. Bus riders travel far below that radar. Worse, many of their low-income colleagues, lacking useful transit routes, nurse old jalopies to work. Unfortunately, a nondescript ancient Pontiac takes up just as much space on the highway as a spiffy late-model BMW. Maybe more.

And this transit dilemma reveals a further bureaucratic problem. Whereas trains and highways are run by the state, bus districts are mostly local. Remarkably dedicated and hardy citizens make them work. The state is known to be helpful too, and actually runs the Hartford and Stamford districts itself, but the idea of some sort of coordinated statewide bus network is simply not in the mix.

Neither is light rail. Connecticut’s experience with trains goes back nearly to DeWitt Clinton, and it’s all been heavy-duty stuff. Well, that’s fine if you’re zooming from New York to Boston, or lugging 500 commuters to the Big Apple. But other applications can be much lighter and cheaper. St Louis, Atlanta, Portland, and others have built light rail much more economically than full-scale track. The cars are more like a subway. For example, such a route from Hartford and Springfield to Bradley Airport with big parking lots along the way would make that trip substantially more appealing.

But the legislature’s new plans instead utilize antique routes. These were laid out 150 years ago, as often as not for freight. Well, that’s an OK start, since the rights-of-way are already there. But it’s not necessarily where people live or work anymore. Is upgrading the Waterbury-Milford rail line likely to serve enough folks to make it worthwhile? Or the New Britain-Hartford busway? Let alone the New London-Worcester commuter route?

Though it may soon be coming, what we haven’t seen so far is any sort of comprehensive survey of where people are now and where they want to go. Would buses be best to get them there in one case and light rail in another? How about upgraded van pooling? If we’re really done with road building we’d better get hot on a whole variety of mass transit, maybe, at last, in its own separate department. Remember, it’s still cheaper to subsidize a bunch of buses than to have rush hour traffic reduced to 10 miles an hour.

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