HOT & BOTHERED – Summer’s Transportation Meltdown

Last week’s heat wave was neither the worst nor the last we’ll see this summer. But its effects on our trains, planes and automobiles are worth remembering, and planning for, because this kind of weather will return.  Heat can take a serious toll on our travels.  Just consider…

WILDFIRE SMOKE:          Fueled by hot and tinder-dry conditions in Canada, last week’s smoky skies contributed to flight delays and travel disruptions.  Drivers were warned to keep their windows closed, switch the ventilation system to recirculate, and make sure the cabin air filter was clean.

TRAINS:       Heat can make railroad tracks lengthen by an inch (in an 1800-foot piece of track) for every ten degrees of temperature.  Because much of the track in the Northeast is welded rail (without many expansion joints) that can lead to buckling, known in the biz as “sun kinks”, where tracks get seriously out of alignment.  That can force the railroads to slow their trains down, in Amtrak’s case to just 80 mph in extreme cases, to avoid derailments. 

Sun Kinks caused by heat

Heat can also cause older fixed-tension catenary wires to expand and sag.  Much of Metro-North’s original overhead power system was more than 100 years old before Connecticut replaced it with modern constant-tension equipment.  But when the old wires sagged, a passing train’s pantograph could snag them, bringing down the power system and halting service.

You may remember just such an incident in 2011 on the then-hottest day of the summer with Manhattan pavement heating to 147 degrees.  A train near Westport got its pantograph tangled in the sagging power lines, stranding over 200 passengers onboard with no AC and no windows that could open.  The passengers, understandably,  panicked and called 911 seeking rescue by local first responders.  One positive outcome was improved emergency planning, including provisions for supplying water to passengers on stranded trains.

PLANES:      Aviation also has trouble with the heat, in some cases because it’s just too hot to fly.

Hot air is lighter than cold air, right?  Add higher elevation to the mix (think Denver, where the air is already thinner) and the physics of flying just doesn’t work.

In 2017 Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport had to cancel dozens of flights when the air temps hit 120 degrees.  Where runways are shorter some aircraft, particularly smaller regional jets, may not be able to operate safely without reducing their weight or waiting for cooler conditions.

AUTOMOBILES:    Your car is not immune to heat, either, especially its tires. Sustained high temperatures can accelerate tire deterioration, while an underinflated tire flexes and builds up even more heat as it rolls, increasing the risk of tread separation or a blowout.  Check tire pressures when they are cold and use the recommended pressure printed on the driver’s-door.

But it’s your car’s cooling system that’s strained the most, working overtime to keep the engine temperature stable.  If the temperature gauge starts climbing, turning off the AC can reduce the load on the engine.  But if the car is actually overheating, pull over safely and shut it down.

And the road itself is also under attack:  concrete can buckle (from expansion) and asphalt can soften and start rutting.  As with the trains, the safest solution is to slow down and watch for trouble ahead.

We like to think of Connecticut summers as reliably hot.  What we’re not prepared for is heat this intense… or wildfire smoke this frequent.  Our trains, planes and roads weren’t designed for heat this extreme and this persistent.  Neither were we. The heat is coming again. The only question is whether we’ll be ready.

AIRLINES’ WINDOWLESS WINDOW SEATS

 

Let’s be honest.  Flying is no fun anymore.  Traveling, yes.  Flying, no.  Again this summer the airports are crowded, the TSA lines are long, the flights delayed (and sometimes cancelled) due to weather and the fares have soared because of the Iran War.

But the airlines seem finally to be raking it in.  Estimates are this summer may be one of their best in many years as demand far exceeds supply.  People want that long-wished-for summer vacation, the price be damned.

One of the ways the airlines are draining our pocketbooks is through “unbundling”… charging for a basic seat and them upselling us for perks like checking our luggage, those sumptuous in-flight meals, a tiny bit more legroom and, yes, the choice of our favorite seat.

Mine has always been the window seat.

I’m somewhat of a white knuckles flyer and looking out the window gives me some peace of mind.  So I’ll pay that (2023 industry average) of $31 extra charge to get my ‘view’.  But imagine paying that surcharge for a window seat, boarding the plane and finding there’s no window at my seat, just a blank wall.

A "window" seat with no window

Depending on the type of aircraft, as many as five window seats per plane can lack windows.  It’s just the way the plane is built and the seats placed.  But why would the airlines sell you a “window” seat with no window?  Because they could.  Until now.

As I wrote last November, United Airlines alone pulled in $1.3 billion last year for selling assigned seats.  But now a pair of class action suits is pursuing millions of United and Delta airlines passengers’ claims that, having paid for window seats and ending up with no window, they were duped.

Last week one of those lawsuits was allowed to proceed when the judge rejected United’s claim that they never promises a window at a window seat… that the description referred more to the location of the seat, not the amenity.  As United’s lawyers tried to argue… “the use of the word ‘window’ in reference to a particular seat cannot reasonably be interpreted as a promise that the seat will have an exterior window view.”   Don’t you just love lawyers?

Can you imagine an aisle seat that’s not on the aisle?  I can’t.  And they’re as pricey as the window seats.  Some people get nauseous when flying or claustrophobic and seeing out that window helps them chill.  I get that.

But whatever the reason, simple logic says if I pay for a window seat I should get a window.  Other airlines, like American and Alaskan, have added a warning to online bookers that some window seats don’t offer a real window.  That’s at least honest.

If you go to a Broadway show you’re warned when choosing seats that there may be “an obstructed view”.  Fair enough, and probably priced accordingly.  So why can’t airlines do the same sort of disclosure.

If they lose these suits it may cost them tens of millions in refunds and possible penalties.  And the cost to their reputation?  That’s already left the gate.

 

 

 

250 YEARS OF INDEPENDENCE. 350 YEARS OF CONNECTICUT TRAFFIC

 

People complain about Connecticut's roads. I get it. The potholes. The detours. The construction that begins in April and somehow ends in April of the following year.  But before you curse your GPS, consider this: getting anywhere in colonial Connecticut could be genuinely life-threatening.

We're talking about a time when "road conditions" meant snakes, waist-deep mud, fording unbridged rivers, and a footpath barely wide enough for a horse. And yet, Connecticut built America's first great transportation network.  It started with the King's Highway.

In 1672, New York Governor Francis Lovelace had a problem: getting a letter from New York to Boston took forever and often arrived mangled, late, or not at all.  Sound familiar?  His solution was a monthly postal route, and in January of 1673 the first rider began to blaze what would eventually become the Boston Post Road, US Route 1.

Here in Connecticut, that route followed an ancient Pequot trail, a path Native Americans had kept clear for centuries, it’s said, by burning back the brush each November.  So we didn't build the road.  We inherited it.  And then we paved over the history with good intentions and, for a while, added toll booths.

In 1792, Connecticut solved the pesky problem of "who pays for roads" the way it still does: user fees. The Mohegan Turnpike was the state's first, and the country’s second, turnpike: proof that Connecticut has always been eager to be an early adopter of charging people money to get somewhere. Over the next four decades, roughly 100 private turnpike companies laid some 1,400 miles of toll roads across the state.  Most of those concerns eventually went bankrupt.

By the early 1700s, Connecticut had three branches of the Post Road threading through the colony: the Upper route through Hartford and Springfield, the Lower route hugging the Sound through Stratford and Saybrook, and a Middle route cutting diagonally through Bolton and Woodstock. The road system was, for its time, impressive. Travel was still agonizing… a trip from Hartford to Boston could eat up several days.

In 1753, it’s said that Benjamin Franklin himself drove the Lower Post Road in a carriage fitted with an odometer, standardizing postal rates by distance and ordering stone mile markers placed along the route. Connecticut's General Assembly then required every town to erect them.  Imagine that: State Government mandating infrastructure improvements while arguing about who pays for it.  Some things never change.

But the real transportation superhighway of colonial Connecticut wasn't a road at all.  It was the water.

Long Island Sound was our I-95, only it actually worked.  New London, blessed with deep water and a protected harbor, was one of the colony's busiest ports.  In a single year, 1748 to 1749, 62 vessels departed for foreign ports.  Norwich and Middletown, reached by river, funneled the colony's farms and forests down to waiting ships.  New Haven moved goods both north and south.

And what were they shipping?  Horses, cattle, lumber, salted beef, and barrel staves, all headed to sugar plantations in the West Indies.  What came back in exchange?  Molasses, rum, coffee and, shamefully, enslaved human beings. The slave trade made Connecticut both prosperous and complicit in equal measure.

Much of this water commerce ended, suddenly and violently, in September 1781, when Benedict Arnold sailed into New London harbor and burned it to the ground.  The King's Highway survived.  The waterfront never fully recovered.

So, next time you're stuck on I-95 wondering why our state can't seem to get transportation right, remember: we've only been at this for 350 years.  And we've always moved but never moved quite fast enough.

TWO RAILROAD GIANTS AT WAR – AND RIDERS PAY THE PRICE

 

There’s a feud brewing between Metro-North and Amtrak and it’s getting nasty.  Worse yet, this tiff is already hurting our train service in Connecticut.

Since 2021 construction has been underway to bring some Metro-North trains into New York’s Penn Station, rather than Grand Central.  At New Rochelle, select Metro-North trains headed to NYC will “hang a left” and go over the Hell’s Gate Bridge, just as Amtrak trains now do, with new station stops in the Bronx.

This is significant not only for getting Connecticut and Westchester commuters to Manhattan’s west side, but more importantly, to harvest the labor of Bronx residents for jobs in Connecticut via a speedy, reverse-commuter train ride.

But now Amtrak is dragging its feet, slowing construction.  Why?  Because Amtrak is angry with Metro-North for not allowing high-speed tests of its new Acela NextGen train while running in Connecticut.  And that’s because Metro-North says the new Acelas have been losing their pantographs on Metro-North’s overhead power lines.  Not once, but five times.

Amtrak's NextGen Acela

Amtrak sued MTA (parent of Metro-North) to regain access to our tracks to test their flagship train and they lost.  Now they’re appealing their claim.  Perhaps in revenge, Amtrak is slowing MTA contractors’ access to the new Bronx stations, pushing back their opening from 2027 to 2030.  That means lost employment (and taxes) in Connecticut.

Meanwhile, Amtrak has also throttled the already diminished Shore Line East rail service as CDOT has decided to replace the electric M8 cars running there since 2022.  Why?  Because CDOT says that Amtrak (which owns those tracks and wires east of New Haven) is charging too much money to use its overhead catenary electrical lines to power those electric trains.  So, forget about speed and clean-running electric trains and it’s back to the slower diesels.  Still, CDOT claims this will save them $8.8 million.  I guess that’s the price of clean air?

On top of all this CDOT’s next fare hike (5%) kicks in July 1^st on all Connecticut commuter lines.  Fares are going up because CDOT says its costs are increasing and the only alternative would be service cuts.  That’s not altogether true.

The better alternative would have been for the legislature to adequately fund CDOT operations in the first place by giving them the $11 million needed (and requested by CDOT) this year to run trains at current fares and schedules.  But lawmakers didn’t, so we really have those pols to thank for the fare hike.  Remember that in November.

And forget about the highly-touted revival of trains on the Waterbury branch where ridership is up almost 150% in recent years.  Commuters there are looking not only at that same fare hike but bus substitutes for ten months due to construction. But when the work is done CDOT will open four station upgrades on the branch, so that’s something.

So here's the scorecard: Amtrak and Metro-North are feuding, Shore Line East is going backwards, Waterbury riders will be riding buses, fares are going up, and your legislators didn't lift a finger to stop any of it.  Connecticut commuters aren't just being taken for a ride… they're being taken for granted.

 

 

SHAPIRO’S FOLLY – PART DEUX: THE BRIDGE THAT WON’T DIE

 

Connecticut: the land of steady habits where bad ideas don’t go away, they just get bigger.

Easton housing developer Stephen Shapiro is back again, expanding on his idea of a bridge across Long Island Sound from Bridgeport to Suffolk County NY.  Now he’s even added the idea of a tunnel for parts of the bridge, as shown in a fresh set of AI renderings, gobbled up by the media without asking many questions.

AI Rendering by Shapiro

Go big or go home, seems the theme, though the Shapiro ‘plan’ is just an amateur’s vision as Shapiro is neither a bridge engineer nor transportation planner.  He still thinks the 14 mile bridge / tunnel (or is it 18 miles, as he said this week?) can be built for about $50 billion.  But what do the experts think?

“Fifty billion dollars is a fantasy number,” says Pete Harrison of the widely respected tri-state Regional Plan Association which has been working in this field for over a century.  “The era of big bridge highways has passed.  But just imagine if that much money was spent on our trains and buses (in Connecticut),” he added.

What does CDOT think of Shapiro’s idea?  Not much.  “This proposal has never been vetted by CDOT or any transportation planning organization,” says CDOT’s Josh Morgan echoing Governor Lamont’s comments earlier this year. 

And the MTA (parent of Metro-North) is similarly uninspired.  “The cross-sound tunnel was not part of the agency’s 20 year plan,” Aaron Donovan told me.

One might guess that Shapiro thought he could win those agencies’ favor with his new design which adds a rail line down the middle of the bridge / tunnel.  Shapiro’s beautiful AI renderings show what looks like an Amtrak Acela hurtling across the bridge.  But elsewhere in his descriptions the train line is described as for “light rail”, which Amtrak and Metro-North certainly are not.

None of this bodes well for Shapiro or his political allies who promise to try again to find funding for a study.  The bill introduced this past session (HB-5320, which rightfully died in committee) called for a one year study of indeterminate cost.

That’s not realistic, one transportation insider-turned-consultant tells me: “A market / feasibility study would probably take about three years and cost $5-10 million.  An EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) would cost $25-50 million more.”

Is there even demand for such a crossing?  Shapiro guesstimates as many as 100,000 cars a day, each paying a one-way toll of $39.  For perspective, Fred Hall, the VP-GM of the cross-sound ferry from Bridgeport, carried only 525,000 vehicles in all of last year (at a toll for cars starting at $78 one way).  That means an average daily ferry load of 1400 vehicles. Would a bridge / tunnel toll of half that amount really mean more than 70 times as much traffic?

Most of the speakers at last week’s media event at the capitol spoke about how much Bridgeport would benefit from this new structure.  That city’s former mayor and State Senator Bill Finch (now a lobbyist for the electricians union) compared the project to putting a man on the moon.

Among the other speakers, a college student from Long Island who’d like a quicker ride home from school… a local disc jockey… and a state rep from West Haven hoping the crossing would bring Long Islanders to his town’s beaches. Not one of the speakers was a transportation expert.

Noticeably absent from the Shapiro cheering squad… anyone from Bridgeport city hall, the city most affected by such a scheme.

Why should we spend a single taxpayer dollar on a study that’s D.O.A. when we can’t even fund our existing transportation network properly?

This idea has been proposed and studied before… and never built, for good reasons.  Let’s keep that track record intact.

CONFESSIONS OF A KID WHO PLAYED WITH REAL TRAINS

I have a confession to make.

First, let me caution my readers that you should never, ever try this.  It’s dangerous and probably illegal.  But what did I know, a kid of maybe age ten, so fascinated with trains, that I did something this stupid?

I uncoupled a parked freight train on a siding. 

Yes, I crawled under a fence and went up to a stopped freight train maybe a half mile long, that I knew from experience would be parked there for a while.  I climbed up on the box car, turned wheels and pulled levers. I was having so much fun!

Then the train started up. 

I could hear the engine, far out of sight, blast its horn and slowly start tightening the slack between the railcars.  Jumping well off to the side I was amazed to see so much mass starting to move.  And then it happened.

As the cars tightened at their couplers I saw that one of those levers I had pulled had uncoupled the front of the train from the rear.  The last thing I remembered was a huge hose between the cars tightening and disconnecting with a loud “pop”.  More of a bang than a pop, but by that time I was running toward home.

The train seemed okay but as the front of the consist pulled, away the rear just sat there.  I assume that eventually, somewhere down the track they realized what had happened, maybe when the crew in the caboose (they still had them in those days) noticed they’d been left behind.

Pretty stupid thing to do, I’ll admit.  And dangerous too.  It took me weeks before I could even confess to my Mother what I’d done, and even then she thought it was just my imagination.  But it wasn’t.

But my ‘crime’ had given me a lesson about air brakes.  That hose, connecting each car to the next, was how the train’s brakes worked.

Brakemen at work

In the early days of railroading the brakemen literally were stationed atop the boxcars and, on signal from the locomotive crew blowing its whistle, they’d run across the cars tightening brake handles, hopefully stopping the entire train in time.

Then, in 1872 George Westinghouse (yes, the same guy who later brought us so many innovations in electricity) invented the automatic air brake.

All train cars’ brakes were connected to a hose-fed air pressure system controlled at the locomotive.  When the lines were pressurized, the brakes on all the cars would be released and the train could move along.  When it came time to stop, the pressure was slowly released and the brakes were automatically applied.

The system was also fail safe.  If the train started to derail (or was uncoupled by a naïve young rail fan), the pressure was cut and the brakes applied automatically just as I had witnessed. (I still wonder how the front of ‘my train’ kept moving after I’d popped the hose).

Westinghouse’s system worked so well that by 1900 air brakes were required on all trains.  And they’re still in use today.  That invention became WABTEC, the Westinghouse Air Brake Technologies Company, merging in 2019 with GE Transportation which makes locomotives.  Today WABTEC is a $45 billion company.  A spinoff, WABCO, put the same technology into trucks.

Stopping a huge train or a truck with just the power of air.  Quite an invention.

But a final word of caution from a once-stupid kid who should have known better: never, ever play with trains. Not stopped ones. Not parked ones.  Not “just for a minute.” They can move without warning, and one wrong step can be fatal.  So please…stay off the tracks.

CT TRANSPORTATION FIRSTS

I’m tired of people bad-mouthing Connecticut.

Yes, our taxes are high.  Yes, I-95 often feels like a rolling Town Meeting with brake lights.  And yes, Metro-North can still turn a simple trip into a test of faith.

But let’s give Connecticut some credit.  For almost 400 years, our small state has punched above its weight.  

Sure, we love our firsts. New Haven will always claim the hamburger at Louis’ Lunch.  Bridgeport gave Buckminster Fuller room to build his futuristic, three-wheeled Dymaxion Car, which looked like tomorrow until tomorrow changed its mind. 

Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion

But let’s also consider Connecticut’s transportation history: a story of roads, wheels, rails, engines, submarines and aircraft.  It is also the story of a state that always wants to move faster.  Just look at our roads.

Before I-95, before the Merritt Parkway, before the toll debate that refuses to die, Connecticut had turnpikes.  In the 1790s, private companies built toll roads to connect towns, farms and ports. The idea was simple: better roads helped commerce. The second idea was more important: somebody had to pay for them, proving that some things never change.

Then came better road-building technology.  New Haven’s Eli Whitney Blake patented a stone-crushing machine in 1858, making crushed stone more practical for road construction.  Long before orange traffic barrels became our unofficial state flower, Connecticut was already trying to build better roads.

Then came bicycles.  Hartford became a national bicycle center in the late 1870s, when Albert Pope contracted with the Weed Sewing Machine Company to build Columbia high-wheel bicycles.  The bicycle was more than a toy.  It was personal mobility, freedom and an early argument for better roads.  Long before motorists demanded smooth pavement, cyclists were already lobbying for it.

The "Pope" Bicycle

Connecticut’s bicycle story didn’t end in Hartford.  In 1971, now-famous Cannondale was founded in Wilton.  It began by building camping gear and bike-towed trailers, not bicycles, later applying aluminum to sturdy but light-weight bike frames.

Or consider our trolleys.

Electric streetcars once linked cities, mill towns and neighborhoods across the state.  They let people live farther from work, shop beyond their own neighborhoods and travel without owning a car.  They stitched Connecticut together… before the automobile helped pull it apart.

Connecticut also got into cars early.  Hartford, Bridgeport and New Britain all had their moment in the auto industry.  But we also got into regulation early, because this is Connecticut and we do enjoy a good rule.  In 1901, Connecticut passed the nation’s first statewide motor-vehicle speed-limit law: 12 miles per hour in cities and 15 on country roads.

But transportation here was never just about roads.

David Bushnell of Saybrook developed the Revolutionary War submarine “Turtle”. That future eventually became Groton’s Electric Boat and the nuclear submarine age. Then look skyward: Pratt & Whitney made East Hartford synonymous with aircraft engines, while Igor Sikorsky made Stratford a helicopter capital.

So yes, we complain about traffic, late trains, fares, parking and the CDOT.  But Connecticut has never just watched transportation happen. We shaped it.

So be proud of our state the next time you’re stuck in the traffic our forefathers helped make possible.