"Getting There" - Anti-Toll Forces Get Organized

Was anyone really surprised when Ned 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.  Sure, let’s blame them for our traffic and bad roads.   We’re not responsible, it’s “them”.  Everybody hates trucks, unless they’re delivering my Amazon package.  But just tolling trucks won’t get the money needed, so the Governor gave lawmakers a second option.

Yes, lawmakers.   It’s the legislature that must pass a tolling bill before the Governor can sign it, so that’s where the debate has quickly shifted, bringing out… the Zombies!

Usually when you lose an election you slink off in a corner to sulk and regroup.  But not the Republicans.   Their standard bearers have risen again from the dead to lead a new fight, this time against tolls.

Bob Stefanowski, the guy who didn’t vote for 16 years and then couldn’t decide if he was a Republican or Democrat, is now leading his “party of NO” in a crusade to stop the “tolls tax”.

Scott Frantz who lost his Greenwich Senate seat to, gasp, a Democrat...( and a woman !)... is said to be behind his town’s pushback on tolling.  And fellow GOP loser, Toni Boucher of Wilton is still on social media fanning the flames of discontent.  It’s a trifecta of Zombie losers who refuse to admit they were rejected by the voters.

Elsewhere, the GOP is organizing local “informational meetings” with constituents to attack the Lamont budget.   But if you look at who’s providing the “information” you’ll see it’s just the GOP.   There are no voices in support of tolling, just the trolls who oppose it.

The Zombies and Trolls are hoping to find new political life on an issue they campaigned and lost on, big time.

When 88% of the voters said “yes” to a Lockbox on the Special Transportation Fund last November, we witnessed a sea-change in voters’ attitudes toward raising revenue for our roads and rails.   People understand that tolls are not a “tax” as the Zombies would have us believe, but a user fee.

If you don’t want to pay tolls, don’t.   Take mass transit.  And when the anti-toll trolls now complain about how unfair it is to charge tolls to working men and women just trying to get to their jobs, where is their sympathy for the hours they now waste in traffic each day?  

Even Stefanowksi mentor Arthur Laffler understands the issue of supply and demand:  we have a limited supply of highway and insatiable demand.  Tolling will moderate our greed.

Mind you, with the Zombies and Trolls now running lose across the state I’m seriously underwhelmed at our new Governor’s inability to sell his vision on tolling.   His budget speech was fine, but there’s been no follow through.  Let’s get cranking Ned!

It’s time for Governor Lamont to sell the reality and necessity of tolling and finally put a silver stake through the heart of the Zombies and Trolls.

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media

"Getting There" - Mr. Haskell Goes to Hartford

Will Haskell is 22 years old.  And he’s about two months into his first full-time paying job:  Connecticut State Senator, representing the 26^th District covering much of the interior of Fairfield County.  His election victory in November over Senator Toni Boucher, who’d been in office since he was born, was astonishing.

And he has certainly hit the ground running as he is sponsor or co-sponsor of 68 different bills that are “in the hopper” in the State Senate.  Of course, submitting a bill is the easy part.  A Senator can submit a bill ordering anything, but it may never see the light of day… making it out of Committee for a vote.

Senator Haskell’s “progressive” proposals cover everything from voting rights to ghost guns, from a plastic bag ban to fracking.  But the proposed bill that first caught my eye concerned Metro-North whose Danbury and New Canaan branches run through his district.  I’m thrilled that the Senator appreciates the value of the railroad to his constituents, but his bill (SB 163) says nothing about the speed or safety of the trains.  It doesn’t talk about fares, lack of seats, insufficient station parking or electrification of the diesel line to Danbury.

No, the Senator’s two sentence bill would address only one issue:  requiring Metro-North to provide free Wi-Fi on all its trains.  Wow.  That is a hugely misplaced priority.

There are so many more pressing needs for rail commuters in Connecticut:  the aging catenary, the signal system, grade-crossing safety, unreliable locomotives, etc.  But Senator Haskell wants us to have free Wi-Fi.

Why?  Because the cell service along much of the line is so poor.  But does the Senator understand that “free Wi-Fi” on trains relies on local cell service?  If there’s no local cell signal, the Wi-Fi won’t work.  And anybody who’s ridden Amtrak lately can testify about the slow speeds and unreliability of their technology.  So imagine a packed Metro-North train with 50% more passengers than an Amtrak coach and you’ll be lucky to get any bandwidth at all.  Don’t commuters have enough to complain about already?

There are legitimate reasons that Metro-North doesn’t offer Wi-Fi (as I’ve written about before).  The railroad considered Wi-Fi and even issued an RFP for vendors, including Cablevision.  But they balked at once again adopting a technology that would be leapfrogged.

Does anybody remember the 1990’s when Metro-North use to offer pay-phones on trains?  They were made obsolete in months when cellphone prices dropped and everyone could afford one.  Once burned, twice shy.

Today’s “state of the art” 4G cellphones will be toast in another year or two when 5G technology starts getting built-out.  That 5G will give you connection speeds making today’s fast connection look like the early days of dial-up modems.  And, of course, we will all need new phones.

So, isn’t Metro-North busy enough with getting Positive Train Control’s sophisticated radio tech working right that we don’t need to burden them with a millennial’s dream of free Wi-Fi?   If you really want to have hi-speed internet on your daily commute, get yourself a wireless card from your cell provider and an unlimited data plan.

But please, Senator Haskell, let’s get our priorities right when it comes to telling Metro-North how to run a railroad.

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media.

"Getting There" - The Taxi Driver

“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.  Or maybe they’re referring to the fact that eight taxi and Uber drivers in NYC have killed themselves in the past year, no longer able to bear the financial burden of driving.

The surcharge was held up by the courts for awhile, but now it’s in effect.  Step in a NYC taxi south of 96^th Street in Manhattan and the meter will start at $5.80.  That’s the bad news.  The good news is, you won’t have trouble finding a cab.  Savvy New Yorkers are either walking, or taking the bus or subway.  Taxis are now expensive. Ubers, too.

So, glancing at the meter which was quickly ticking off the dollars, I asked my driver if the surcharge was hurting tips.  When you see an extra $2.50 added to your fare, I’d guess many passengers are reluctant to also tip the driver.

“WHATDAYOUTHINK?”, said my driver.  “I drive this cab 12 hours a day, and you know how much I make,” he asked?  I didn’t even want to guess.  “I lease this car from the (taxi) medallion owner and I gotta pay for the gas.  I even have to pay tax on my tips (when passengers use the credit card instead of paying cash). And for all that I make $100 a day.”

A C-note a day for driving in Manhattan traffic?  That’s about $8 an hour. Guys slinging burgers make $15, the new minimum wage, and have much better working conditions… like access to bathrooms and people seldom pulling a gun on them from the back seat. So why does he drive?

My driver said he’d been behind the wheel for 12 years, a veteran for an industry that is often a first job for immigrants.  He told me he was ready to retire.  Doubtless when he hangs up his keys, someone new will take his place.

Taxis and Ubers are a service. They take you door to door, in your own little steel cocoon, usually heated and cooled appropriately.  You can get there fast without the noise and accompaniment of the “interesting” people who ride the subway.  Taxis are usually clean and the drivers competent.

And those drivers are doing this job to make a living, just like the gal who is a waitress or the guy at Grand Central who shines my shoes.  It’s less a professional ambition and career track than a way to get by for another week, paying the bills and putting food on the table for the family.

So I don’t resent the new surcharge.  I’m okay with paying to fix mass transit.  But for my taxi driver on this ride, I gave him my empathy and a 25% tip.  He seemed grateful and I felt less guilty.

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media

"Getting There" - CT's Hometown Railroad

You might not realize it, but Connecticut is home to the world headquarters of a $5 billion international railroad company on whose trains you’ll never be able to ride.

In a small office building across from the Darien railroad station sits the offices of Genesee and Wyoming Inc, a “short line” railroad conglomerate.  The original railroad, founded in 1899, hauled salt on a 14-mile track in upstate NY.  Today, G&W owns 122 different railroads on three continents, serving 3000 customers with over 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.  They pick up boxcars and tankers at factories and plants and carry them to junction points where they hand them off to the major railroads which carry them to their ultimate destination, a journey often completed by another short line railroad.

In the US G&W’s railroads are as short as a single mile in length and as long as 739 miles.  They operate 1300 locomotives and 30,000 railcars.  But they only carry freight, not passengers.

And because they only travel short distances, they’re not looking for speed as much as customer service.  Moving along at 15 mph saves a lot on track maintenance.

How does G&W’s sales team sell companies on shipping by rail instead of truck?  Fuel costs.  Trains are four times more energy efficient, a crucial consideration when you’re hauling tons of stone, coal, or wheat instead of Amazon boxes filled with packing peanuts.

The G&W’s most local affiliate, The Providence & Worcester, runs a train on Metro-North tracks each night, hauling crushed rock from Connecticut quarries to Queens NY.  I can hear the train from my home, usually just before midnight, as its locomotives strain under the load and rumble through town.

That’s about the only freight train left on the New Haven line.  But that’s another story for another time.

Overseas the G&W owns some much larger railroads, but still dedicated only to freight.  They run trains, container terminals and freight yards in the UK, Germany, Poland, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Down under in Australia the G&W runs a huge freight operation running north-south through the heart of the continent serving the iron ore and manganese mines hauling intermodal containers through the desert-like interior.

How does a tiny, 20-person office in Darien oversee such a massive railroad network around the planet?  It doesn’t.  Each of G&W’s nine operating regions is locally managed with capital allocated from headquarters.  Keeping the decision-making close to the customers, not being second-guessed from thousands of miles away, has been the key to G&W’s success.

But one thing that all of G&W’s railroads do share in common is the color scheme of their logos, originally designed by Milton Glaser (famous for the I  Love NY logo).  Every G&W railroad’s logo is orange and black.  Not just any orange, but Princeton orange, harkening back to its former chairman’s alma mater.

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media

"Getting There" - Commuting by Ferry

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.

First off, 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.  And to dock at downtown areas in major cities like New Haven, Bridgeport, Norwalk and Stamford, they’d have to sail up rivers and inlets with 5 knot speed limits.  That really slows down the ride.

If we put ferry terminals closer to the Sound we’d be eating into the most expensive water-view real estate we have.  And how would you get there?  By car, parking where?  By shuttle bus, taking how long?

We’d need dozens of ferries to compete with Metro-North’s fleet.  At rush hour on the railroad there’s a train every 20 minutes to Grand Central.  There isn’t a ferry service in the US that can offer that frequency.  Would you be willing to wait an hour if you miss the boat?

On a beautiful day a ferry ride to work sounds like fun.  But how about in a winter storm?  You’d be back on the dependable ol’ train in a heartbeat.

Even the few operators who’ve considered launching ferry service in Connecticut say it would come with fares at least twice those of Metro-North.  Aren’t people complaining already about the trains being too expensive?

Fast ferry boats are gas guzzlers, the aquatic equivalent to the Concorde.  Even when the Pequots built high-speed catamarans to ferry gamblers to their casino to lose money, it cost them a fortune.  Those ferries are still dry-docked, too expensive to operate.

When a private ferry operator offered service from Glen Cove, Long Island to midtown, it lasted only a few months.  Same thing when ferry service was offered on the Hudson River from Yonkers.  Why?  Because both routes paralleled existing train service and the ferries couldn’t compete.  Neither would it work here in Connecticut where Metro-North operates.

Mind you, there are places that ferries do work, especially where they go from point A to point B when you can’t do that on land.  Like the Bridgeport – Port Jefferson or New London to Orient Point (LI) cross-Sound ferries.  Or consider Seattle, where ferries connect downtown with island suburbs.

A ferry from Connecticut to LaGuardia Airport might make sense. But in the late 80’s when Pan Am tried to compete with Eastern Airlines in the lucrative air-shuttle market, they introduced the Pan Am Water Shuttle connecting LaGuardia to midtown.  I rode it once, on a bright summer’s day, and it was sweet.  But even funneling passengers to its own planes, Pan Am couldn’t afford the aquatic connection.  And since Amtrak’s Acela came along, who flies the shuttles anyway?

One final reason why I don’t think ferries would work:  nobody else does so either. 

I’m sure that ferry operators in NYC have looked at Connecticut’s gold coast, crunched the numbers and backed away.  It’s a free market, folks.  If ferries made sense (and dollars), they’d be running here by now.  But they aren’t, and probably won’t be, for the common sense reasons I have cited.

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media

"Getting There" - Why 30-30-30 Doesn't Add Up

How would you like a faster ride on Metro-North?  Who wouldn’t!  How about a 30 min ride from Hartford to New Haven, from New Haven to Stamford or from Stamford to Grand Central?

That’s the vision announced by Governor 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).  But how can such vast improvements be done?  Ask Joe McGee, VP of the Fairfield Business Council who’s been pitching this idea for years.

So confident was McGee of this concept that his Council recently paid $400,000 to Ty Lin Consulting of San Francisco to study it.  And which railroad expert did Ty Lin hire to spearhead the study?  Joseph Giulietti, former President of Metro-North… recently named as Connecticut’s new Commissioner of Transportation.

Though the Ty Lin study has yet to be released, McGee admits that the 30-30-30 idea is more of a goal than a possibility.  Yet, for as little as $75 - $95 million, Ty Lin thinks significant improvements can be made in speeding up service by accelerating Metro-North’s return to a “state of good repair”.

When he was President of Metro-North, Giulietti said it would take five years to get the railroad back in shape after years of neglect.  Today, Metro-North says a more realistic time frame is ten years.

By fixing rail ties and overhead power lines to improve speeds on curves, by restoring the fourth track east of Milford and by adding express trains (at a premium fare), McGee claims service will improve quickly, maybe shaving 24 minutes off of the current 103 minute running time from New Haven to Grand Central. That would make it a 79 minute run, but not 60.

But wait.  If this was Giulietti’s idea as a consultant, why didn’t he make that happen when he was running Metro-North?  Or how will he now, as Commissioner of the CDOT, get his old railroad to adopt Ty Lin’s (his) ideas?  I asked, but he isn’t saying.

What seasoned professionals at CDOT have told me is that the Ty Lin ideas will cost billions of dollars and take a decade. In other words… there’s no quick, cheap fix.

Meantime, Metro-North is planning to add six to ten minutes of running time to all New Haven line trains for the spring timetable to better reflect the reality of current delays due to work.  For 2018 the railroad had only 88% on time performance (OTP).  By extending the train schedule on paper, OTP will go up and riders will have a more dependable, albeit slower, ride.

Lengthening running times, even on paper, “is not acceptable,” says McGee who hopes to release his Ty Lin study in about two weeks, fully expecting huge pushback from the railroad and east-coast consultants beholden to the MTA.

But it’s really the FRA (the Federal Railroad Administration) that’s the biggest block to faster trains.  The slower speeds they required after the 2013 Bridgeport and Spuyten Duyvil derailments won’t be raised until they’re convinced the railroad is safe. 

So let the debate begin:  is 30-30-30 possible or just a fantasy?   Did Giulietti create himself a nightmare in proposing as a consultant what he may not be able to deliver as CDOT Commissioner? 

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media

"Getting There" - Confessions of a Road Warrior

What idiot said that “getting there is half the fun”?

That’s the thought that went through my mind awhile back when I did a “day trip” to LA:  two door-to-door 10-hour trips just for a three-hour face-to-face meeting with my most important consulting client.

I knew my trip was doomed when I went to pick up my rental car at LAX and there were no cars.  Pleading with the dispatcher that I’d been up since 1 am local time and had a crucial meeting I could not be late for, she said “I can give you a mini-van.”  Fabulous!  If it has an engine and wheels, I’ll take it.  Even in LA where people drive their egos, I abandoned my Ferrari persona for a Chevy minivan.

I should have known there was a problem as it was the only vehicle left on the lot, but a road warrior never gives up.  Throwing open the door to the van I was met with the unmistakable odor of vomit.  The vehicle was clean, mind you.  It just reeked.

So, off I drove, windows down and made my meeting on time!  When I returned the van five hours later it still reeked of vomit, but now with a nice overtone of cigar.

Another time a few years back I’d booked the last evening flight from JFK to LAX.  I helicoptered to the airport, arriving just in time to find that the 6 pm flight was delayed due to incoming equipment.  A promised 8 pm departure never happened, and the delays kept coming in 30 minute intervals until it was clear we were going to be on a red-eye.  Worse yet, after all other flights had left, every bar and restaurant in the terminal closed up.

In its generosity, the airline wheeled out some MRE’s (meals ready to eat) from a back closet and we feasted on stale crackers and government surplus cheese, until one passenger took the initiative and picked up the phone.

A half-hour later (and still hours before departure), a pizza delivery-man arrived with ten pies.  “We’re not paying for those,” screamed the airline supervisor.  “We’re not asking you too,” smiled the passenger, who then sold every slice at about $5 apiece.  PS:  We did eventually take off, arriving at LAX about 3 am.

Then there was the time I arrived late one night at Newark airport from a sad trip to see my dying mother.  I had a crucial meeting in central NJ the next morning, so I’d booked the last hotel room within 30 miles at a run-down Howard Johnson’s.

In the dark airport parking lot, I got off the bus at the wrong stop and in a pouring rain (with no coat or umbrella) was soaked by the time I found my car.  God was telling me something.

Digging thru my suitcase, I found the only dry clothing I could safely use to dry off … a pair of underwear.  I drove to Route 287 and an hour later I found my Ho Jo’s motel, tired and hungry, ready for a meal of those famous fried clams and at little ice cream.  No such luck.  The restaurant was closed as were all other eateries within ten miles.  That night dinner consisted of Pop Tarts with a side order of humble pie.

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media