Darienite (https://darienite.com/category/news/transportation)
Road, train and other news related to transportation
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?
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.
Planning an early getaway on Friday, May 28 for the long weekend? Metro-North will operate a regular weekday schedule on Friday, but we are increasing capacity by adding train cars — so your weekend starts when you want it to. — an announcement from Metro-North
If you’re returning on Monday, May 31, we are running regular weekend service that day (not that anyone wants to think about the weekend ending yet). Wondering when to go and return? Check the schedule.
Is it safe to get back on the train to New York? Casey (not her real name) thought so when, a couple of weekends back, she wanted to see some millennial friends in Manhattan for brunch. But boarding the Saturday morning train she immediately started to worry and texted me. The train was jammed, she said. Very few empty seats.
How would you like a plan to remove thousands of trucks from Connecticut
highways, clean up the air and create new jobs? Who wouldn’t? It’s a win-win-win plan that you’d expect Governor Lamont to
embrace, especially in this time of TCI (the Transportation Climate Initiative). The solution? Invest in our state’s freight railroads.
Hurrah! It’s finally “infrastructure week” in Washington. In his first 100 days as President, Joe Biden has delivered a plan that his predecessor just kept teasing us with for four years: a complete rehabilitation and expansion of the nation’s infrastructure. Of course, Biden’s “American Jobs Act” goes way beyond just rebuilding roads, bridges and rails. It also covers our water supply, electrical grid, internet, sea and airports, our housing stock and our very jobs.
Effective Monday, April 12, 2021, Metro-North is making schedule adjustments to the weekday schedule on the New Haven Line. We are adding an early morning inbound train from New Haven, and we are adding a stop at Greenwich to two New Haven express trains. Additional service is added to New Rochelle, Larchmont, Mamaroneck, Harrison and Stamford stations. — an announcement from Metro-North
For full details and additional schedule adjustments to the Hudson and Harlem Lines please go to this Web page. Please note: New York and Connecticut State laws require that face masks be worn on all Metro-North trains, stations and at Grand Central Terminal, regardless of vaccination status, and regardless of social distancing. For More Information …
Joe Giulietti loves to talk, especially about trains. And when the commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Transportation calls me and says, “Jim — let’s have a chat,” I’m all ears. In a recent exclusive one-on-one, here’s what he said:
Will rail come back? The commissioner says yes, but maybe not until the fall. “Am I optimistic?
Tokeneke sidewalks will be replaced between Great Hill Road and Cliff Avenue starting Monday, April 5, the Darien Public Works Department announced on Thursday. The replacement project covers about four tenths of a mile (according to Google Maps), starting several hundred feet east of Tokeneke School and ending several hundred feet west of the Darien-Norwalk border at Five Mile River. The project is expected to be done by mid-May, although bad weather could delay completion. A previous sidewalk project installed or replaced sidewalks on Tokeneke Road west of the upcoming project. With completion of this new project, people should be able to walk to downtown Darien all the way from Rowayton, almost entirely over new sidewalks.
How are we going to get riders back on the trains and save Metro-North from ballooning deficits, potential service cuts or fare hikes? That’s the question I crowd-sourced on social media last week and found dozens of great answers! Most respondents said they won’t be commuting as much as before because they will continue working from home. It’s not that they are shunning the rails out of fear, just that commuting won’t be necessary. “Most of us have figured out how to work without riding a train every day,” one rider opined.
The Governor’s proposed biennial budget for transportation just doesn’t add up. Thanks to reduced rail ridership, he’s projecting cost savings in the CDOT budget of $82 million over the next two years but promises no further cuts in service beyond those already taken during the pandemic. But how does that jibe with Metro-North parent MTA’s projected $8 billion operating deficit through 2024? Even pre-pandemic when ridership was at record highs, Metro-North still lost money. And taxpayers made up the difference.
Why is transportation construction so expensive in our area? What kind of honor was it when New York City recently surpassed Zurich (one of the most expensive cities in the world) as No. 1 on the most-expensive-place-to-do-underground-construction dishonor roll? The highly respected Regional Plan Association has studied that question and offers some explanations and frightening examples. Focusing on three recent MTA mega-projects in New York City — the Second Avenue Subway, the No.
Imagine going from New York City to Washington, D.C. in one hour — not by plane, but by maglev. By comparison, today the same trip from the LaGuardia to DC’s Reagan airport takes about 90 minutes by air (not counting getting to and from the airports) and costs $276 one way. On Amtrak’s Acela, the fastest run, downtown to downtown, is three hours and costs $157. Or you could take the bus for $30, assuming you have 4½ hours to waste. A maglev is a train, of sorts, that floats on a cushion of air, suspended and propelled along a special track quite different from conventional railroads.
I have one belated prediction for the new year and you’re not going to like it: After we all get vaccinated and things “return to normal,” regular weekday commuters on Metro-North will not be coming back as hoped. Why should they? Who wants to spend $400-plus a month and waste two-plus hours each day, five days a week riding a train into New York City if you don’t have to? If this pandemic has shown us anything it’s that going to an office isn’t necessary to doing our jobs. Sure, there are some people who have to show up in person to do their work (healthcare staffers, auto mechanics etc.), but that’s never been the bulk of Metro-North’s ridership.
Here’s a possible solution to Connecticut’s transportation and infrastructure problems and the state’s current unemployment woes: a WPA-style building project. You’ve heard of the Works Progress Administration, right? It was FDR’s plan that put millions of unemployed Americans to work building public projects like roads, water mains, firehouses and dams. Look around you and you’ll still see us benefiting from that investment. But fast-forward 80 years …
Any reader of this column is all too familiar with the need for transportation investment in our state: our 7,000 miles of roads and bridges in “poor condition”, the $4.6 billion needed for wastewater treatment not to mention our rusting railroads. And everyone in Connecticut is aware of the unemployment crisis brought on by COVID-19 — 8.2% of the state’s labor force is out of work, translating to 153,000 people without jobs, most of them now drawing benefits from our rapidly depleting Unemployment Trust Fund.
When it comes to COVID’s impact on transportation in our state, we are in the eye of the hurricane. That’s been the theme of my recent virtual talk to various Connecticut’s libraries and civic groups, comparing the calm eye of an intense storm to how we’ve become complacent about our transportation future. We kid ourselves if we think the winds have passed. The worst is yet to come. Commuters who’ve returned to the rails tell me ridership is slowly coming back but many still fear for their safety on mass transit, and with good reason.
