Cameron on Transportation 2019

ConnDOT’s New Commish Should’ve Been Talking to More Commuters by Now: Cameron on Transportation

One of the Few Profitable Transit Companies in the U.S. — the Bridgeport Ferry: Cameron on Transportation

Metro-North Timetable Showing It’s Age: You’d Be Slower Too If You Dated Back to the Woodrow Wilson Presidency

Colorful Comments from Curmudgeonly Commuters : Cameron on Transportation

Trouble for Tolls: Cameron in Transportation

Finding Parking for Your Train Commute — Now There’s an App for That: Cameron on Transportation

CT’s Great at Producing Transportation Master Plans, But Lawmakers Won’t Fund Them: Cameron on Transportation

My Lead Foot, My Hybrid Car — and Your Gas Saving: Cameron on Transportation

Elon Musk’s Idea of ‘Hyperloop’ Trains a Bit Too Loopy: Cameron on Transportation

Wi-Fi on Trains Should Wait — Coming 5G Will Make Current Wi-Fi Obsolete: Cameron on Transportation

Tolling and Trolling — Ned, Sell Your Case or Succumb to GOP ‘Zombies’ — Cameron on Transportation

New York City Taxis and the ‘Suicide Surcharge’: Cameron on Transportation

Genesee & Wyoming Inc. — A $5B Railroad Conglomerate with HQ in Darien: Cameron on Transportation

Could Commuter Ferry Service Work from Here to NYC? Nope: Cameron on Transportation

There Is No Cheap, Quick Fix for Speeding Up Metro-North Trains Cameron on Transportation

Opinion

By JIM CAMERON | May 16, 2019

Opinion

By JIM CAMERON | May 12, 2019

Transportation

By JIM CAMERON | April 27, 2019

Opinion

By JIM CAMERON | April 21, 2019

Opinion

By JIM CAMERON | April 14, 2019

Opinion

By JIM CAMERON | April 8, 2019

Opinion

By JIM CAMERON | April 1, 2019

Opinion

By JIM CAMERON | March 28, 2019

Opinion

By JIM CAMERON | March 21, 2019

Opinion

By JIM CAMERON | March 14, 2019

Government & Politics

By JIM CAMERON | March 11, 2019

Opinion

By JIM CAMERON | February 28, 2019

Business

By JIM CAMERON | February 21, 2019

Transportation

By JIM CAMERON | February 14, 2019

Opinion

By JIM CAMERON | February 7, 2019

A good boss cares about his customers. He wants to keep them happy and actively seeks out their feedback. Such is not the case at the Connecticut Department of Transportation. The CDOT’s new Commissioner, Joseph Giulietti, has missed several important opportunities to interface with riders in his first 100 days in office. Not that he hasn’t been working. He just hasn’t been meeting with customers. Remember that Giulietti came to his new job after a stint as President of Metro-North and in that role he held a number of “meet-the-commuter” events, handling himself quite well in answering questions and defusing angry riders. A year ago, after leaving the railroad, he became a consultant to T Y Lin’s study of how to improve running times on the railroad to achieve the “30-30-30” dream espoused by the Fairfield Business Council’s Joe McGee. That $400,000 study, using Giulietti’s input, said it could be done.

Public transportation is a money-losing proposition. But Connecticut is home to one of the few profitable transit companies in the U.S. It’s not CT Transit or Metro-North, both of which are heavily subsidized. No, the operation that’s squarely in the black is the Bridgeport–Port Jefferson Steamboat Company, a.k.a. “the ferry.”

“If you tried to start this ferry company today, you couldn’t do it,” says the ferry company’s chief operating officer, Fred Hall. Today’s ferry is a legacy of the 1883 cross-Sound service run by PT Barnum. Hall has been on the boats since 1976 when he worked weekends as a bartender as a “side-hustle” to his advertising job in New York City. In those days they used to run a Friday and Saturday night “Rock the Sound” cruise leaving Port Jefferson at 10 pm. Complete with a live rock band and a lot of drinking (the legal age then was 18), the three hour cruise drew 600 passengers a night. From there Hall was promoted to general manager of the Bridgeport terminal, assistant general manager and finally to vice president in charge of the entire operation. And he thoroughly enjoys his work, commuting from his home on Long Island to inspect the three-vessel fleet several times a week. He’s not alone: the ferry carries almost 100 daily walk-on commuters, crossing in both directions, who are an important indicator of the economy’s strength to Hall.

Metro-North rail commuters received a recent spring surprise: a new timetable with slower running times. Rush-hour trains now leave earlier and arrive later, adding anywhere from 1 to 10 minutes to published running times, depending on the length of the trip. But what happened to that 30-30-30 plan for faster trains? Why are the trains running slower, not faster? In one word: repairs.

As I hope you can tell, I love writing this column. As New York Times columnist Tom Friedman once said, a commentator should be in the heating business and the lighting business — getting people fired up while providing factual support for his arguments. The comments I receive from readers each week reminds me that heat runs both ways. Here are some of the recent highlights:

When I wrote about the power failures on Metro-North, user cantchangestupid commented on the column: “I sure hope a thorough investigation gets done on why those transformers failed. I see sabotage as the democratic conclusion.” Gee, and I thought I was cynical.

Gov. Ned Lamont’s tolling plan is in trouble. I knew it when I recently got a call from Dan Malloy. The former governor and I know each other going back to his days as mayor of Stamford, but he’s only called me once before (many years ago when he sought my endorsement in his run for a second term as governor). This time he was calling about my recent column on the Transportation Strategy Board, the panel tasked 18 years ago with prioritizing our state’s transportation needs and how to pay for them. It wasn’t my fawning over then-TSB Chairman Oz Griebel that prompted Malloy’s recent call.

How can you get people to commute by train if they can’t get to the train station? Those two-wheeled, buff millennials would have us believe we should all bike our way from home to the train. But not all of us are that athletic or inclined to take our lives in our hands wheeling through traffic and bad weather. No, the real solution (at least for now) is car-parking. But with a parking permit wait list of up to seven years in many communities, shouldn’t towns be thinking of building new expensive, decked parking lots?

When are we finally going to do something about our transportation crisis? That question has been asked for decades, but never answered, or more importantly, acted upon. I remember in 2001 when Moira Lyons, who at the time was the Connecticut Speaker of the House, held a news conference about our state’s transportation mess. The six-term Stamford Democrat, who was long on power but short in stature, stood next to a stack of consultant studies and reports almost as tall as she was. Enough with the studies, she said.

I like to go fast. Really fast. Nothing makes me happier than hurtling along to Boston on Acela at 145 mph, even if those sprints are brief, or catching the jet-stream on a flight and hitting 600 mph. And nothing frustrates me more, like you, than being in slow-moving, bumper-to-bumper traffic on Interstate 95, that highway’s normative state. But I’m also thrifty, some might even say “cheap,” especially when it comes to buying gasoline.

Is Elon Musk a brilliant innovator, or is he just smoking dope? Well, we know the answer to the second question as a viral video has shown him puffing (legal) weed on a talk show. The man is under a lot of stress, right? There’s no doubt that Musk’s privately funded ventures in space travel and electric cars are prescient, maybe even profitable someday. But his transportation vision for the Hyperloop has yet to be proven viable.

Will Haskell is 22 years old, and he’s about two months into his first full-time paying job as a state senator representing the 26th District that covers most of interior Fairfield County. His election victory was astonishing in November over Sen. Toni Boucher, who’d been in office since he was born. He has certainly hit the ground running as the sponsor or co-sponsor of 68 proposed bills. Of course, submitting a bill is the easy part. A senator can submit a bill ordering anything, but it may never make it out of the committee stage for a vote.

Was anyone really surprised when Ned Lamont did a flip-flop on tolls? Not me. If you’ll remember when he first announced his candidacy for governor, he said he’d sign a toll bill his first day in office. Then he saw the polling data and backtracked, saying he’d only toll trucks. Trucks seem like such a convenient scapegoat.

“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.

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You might not realize it, but Connecticut is home to the world headquarters of a $5 billion international railroad company and you’ll never be able to ride on its trains. In a small office building across from the Darien railroad station sits the offices of Genesee & Wyoming Inc., a “short line” and regional freight railroad conglomerate. The railroad, founded in 1899, still hauls salt on its original 14-mile track in upstate New York. G&W owns 120 railroads on three continents, serving 3,000 customers with more than 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.

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. For starters, 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.

« August 2022 »

Would you like a faster ride on Metro-North? Who wouldn’t? How about a 30-minute ride from Hartford to New Haven, from New Haven to Stamford or from Stamford to Grand Central? That’s the vision announced by Gov. Ned 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).