"Getting There" - The Merritt Parkway Monorail

What is this fascination that people have with monorails?  I can’t tell you how often people suggest them as “the answer” to our state’s clogged roads and rails.

“Why don’t we build a monorail down the middle of The Merritt Parkway?,” asked an architect at a recent meeting.  To my astonishment, such an idea was once studied!

As lore has it, back in the mid-1980’s local tech giant Sikorsky was asked by CDOT if a monorail could be built and a plan was submitted.  Sure, such a system could be built, they concluded, but where would you put the stations and the necessary parking? 

The Merritt Parkway

Since hearing of this white-whale of a tale, shared by Merritt Parkway Conservancy Executive Director Wes Haynes, I have been on a relentless search for details of the proposal, but I’ve come up empty.  Sikorsky has no record of the plan.  CDOT said “Huh?”

Digging through the archives of the Stamford Advocate I found articles from 1985 discussing the idea:  a $700 million monorail down the median of the Merritt Parkway from Greenwich to Trumbull as an alternative to Bridgeport developer Francis D’Addario’s idea of widening the parkway to eight lanes… or double-decking I-95.

Motorists were surveyed and CDOT apparently spent $250,000 for a study.

The amazing research librarians at the State Library dug through their dusty files and came up with a CDOT report from 1987 pooh-poohing the idea, not only on grounds of impracticality but because it would compete with existing rail service.  Heavens no!

But again… why this obsession with monorails?  I think people have been spending too much time at Disneyworld.

In 1998 a monorail was once proposed for Hartford, connecting downtown to Rentschler Field in East Hartford.  It was to cost only $33 million and the cost was supposedly to be paid by the Feds.  It never happened.  The idea was revived again in 2006 when the Adriaen’s Landing convention complex was opened, but again, nothing.

A pseudo-monorail “People Mover” system was built at Hartford’s Bradley Airport in 1976 connecting the remote parking to the main terminal, all of seven-tenths of a mile away.  The fixed-guideway system, with cars designed by Ford Motor Company, cost $4 million but 

Bradley Airport People Mover

never operated because the $250,000 annual operating was cost was deemed impractical.  In 1984 it was dismantled, though you can still see one of the original cars at the Connecticut Trolley Museum in East Windsor.

Whatever your fantasies are about space-age travel by monorail, let me dispel your dreams with some facts.

Monorails are not fast.  The Disneyworld monorail, built by a Japanese company, has a top speed of 55 mph but usually just averages 40 mph.  Even on a bad day Metro-North can better that.  The 3.9 mile long Las Vegas monorail does about 50 mph shuttling losers from casino to casino.

Monorails are expensive.  The Vegas system, opened in 2004, cost $654 million.  That’s why existing monorails like Disney’s have never been extended.

Monorails are not Maglevs.  Don’t confuse the single-track, rubber-tired monorails with the magnetic-levitation technology in use in Shanghai and being tested for passenger trains in Japan.  The Shanghai maglev can travel over 250 mph, the Japanese test trains have hit 374 mph.

No, monorails are not in Connecticut’s future and are not the answer to our woes.​

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media

"Getting There" - Uber for Kids

Hey, all you Soccer Moms out there!  Tired of feeling like an Uber driver for your kids, shuttling them from school to practice, from playdate to home?  Well, I have an answer and an app for you:  VANgo

Launched last year by Connecticut native Marta Jamrozik, a newly minted Stanford MBA named as one of Forbes Magazine’s “30 Under 30” and herself the daughter of a working Mom, the concept is simple:  a rides app for pre-teens and teens with drivers who know about child-care.

“All of our drivers are thoroughly vetted,” says Jamrozik.  “They need to have at least three years of child-care experience, a clean DMV record, undergo a background check, fingerprinting, reference checks and even an inspection of their vehicle.” All drivers have company-provided insurance, too.

Right now VANgo is operating in Fairfield County and Phoenix AZ, but they hope to add two more cities this summer.  Here in Connecticut they have 60 drivers who work part-time, averaging three to five rides a day.  The service is available 6 to 8:30 am and from 2 to 10:30 pm, shuttling kids aged ten to eighteen from place to place.

Rides can be booked up to two weeks in advance or on as little as four hours notice.  When the booking is accepted both parents and the kids receive a text with confirmation including the name of the driver, a photo, description of the car and ratings info on the driver.

Local trips start at $17 with a $2 discount for recurring trips.  Pricing, says Jamrozik, is based on distance and time with the “vast majority” of the fee going to the driver.

“Our pricing is about 15% higher than Uber and Lyft,” she says but emphasizes that VANgo drivers are experienced with child care:  85% of them are Moms.  But so far all the drivers are women… teachers, babysitters, nannies etc.

Unlike Uber, there is no “surge pricing”, raising rates when demand is unusually high.  Tipping is allowed, via the app, and all charges are direct to the parents’ credit card so the young riders don’t have to carry cash.

One Mom from Pound Ridge NY who uses VANgo to get her kids to school in New Canaan every day says she loves the service.  She has three kids on varying schedules and has to commute to Fairfield herself, so she tried to find a nanny who’d drop and pick-up her kids for five hours a week, but nobody wanted the split-shift gig.

She says the drivers are great and she’s reassured in knowing they’ve all been checked out.  Booking in advance fits in with everyone’s routine and while she’s at work she gets peace of mind when she receives a text alerting her that her son’s been picked up and is heading home.

The drivers also like the gig.  Fifty-six year old Christina, a grandmother herself, has been driving for nine months and loves the kids… especially their conversations.  She wasn’t interested in driving for Uber doing airport runs and ferrying drunk folks home at 3 am, so VANgo was a perfect fit.

Founder Jamrozik says she may expand the service to include parents and the elderly, but for now she’s happy with the kids as her clients and their parents as customers.

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media

"Getting There" - Where's Joe ?

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.

But if it was going to be so easy to cut running time from Stamford to Grand Central (now 51 minutes at best) to just a half-hour, you’d think he’d have done so as President of the railroad. But he didn’t.

Instead, as of the new timetable, running times were increased by as much as 16 minutes, angering and confusing commuters.  But the Commissioner has been silent.

He did accept an invitation to attend the April 17^th meeting of the official Connecticut Commuter Rail Council, only to cancel on short notice.  Council Chairman Jim Gildea says a staffer promised to reschedule but has never called back.

Days later the new timetable came out, including a nasty surprise for Waterbury branch riders.  Their usual 4:42 train from GCT arriving in Bridgeport at 5:58 used to connect to their Waterbury train.  But under the new timetable the Waterbury shuttle leaves four minutes before the NY train arrives.  The next train wouldn’t be for three more hours.

Alternatively, would-be Waterbury riders could make the 6:03 pm Bridgeport connection if they left GCT at 4:11 pm.  Try explaining that to your boss.

How could such a mistake in scheduling be made?  Where was Giulietti?

When the Commuter Council asked for answers, they got excuses.  Not until US Senator Chris Murphy wrote a letter to MNRR was the mistake corrected.

Then, on Thursday April 26^th Commissioner Giulietti and Metro-North President Catherine Rinaldi took a train ride.  Last December Hearst reporter Jacqueline Smith had challenged them to ride the Danbury line to see the current conditions.

Accepting the “invitation”, the Giulietti and Rinaldi boarded the post rush-hour 9:05 am train from Danbury, but only after a meet-and-great with that city’s mayor Mark Boughton who must have known they were coming.  At Bethel, First Selectman Matt Knickerbocker came aboard to lobby for transit-oriented-development.

Smith interviewed the pair all the way to South Norwalk and wrote of the trip. But when I asked Smith what had happened when the railroaders talked with commuters, she said they didn’t.  They were too busy being interviewed and lobbied, I guess.

That’s sad.

When they finally had a chance to ride the rails and talk to their customers, Giulietti and Rinaldi turn fact-finding into a PR photo op.

Giulietti’s predecessor as Commissioner, Jim Redeker, was a constant presence in public (and to his employees).  He attended numerous Commuter Council, business group and community meetings.

But where’s Joe?

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media.

"Getting There" For Profit Mass Transit

Public transportation is a money-losing proposition.  But Connecticut is home to one of the few profitable transit companies in the US.  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.  “When the numbers of monthly commuter (at $240 per month) are high, that’s a sign of a weakening jobs market because people have to commute long distances to find work,” he observes.

But for cars carried on the ferry the opposite is true.  “In 2005 we carried 460,000 cars.  In 2018, only 450,000.”  Why?  Because Hall says so many of his repeat customers are using the ferry to get to second homes… beach homes on Long Island or winter ski cabins in New England.

“You can probably fly out West in the winter and get more reliable snow conditions and still save money compared to driving to Vermont,” Hall says of his northbound Long Island customers.

Big changes are coming for the Bridgeport ferry, starting with an annual May fare increase. Tickets which used to be sold onboard “using carnival tickets on a broom handle” are now e-tickets sold and scanned before boarding.  If you’re bringing a car, reservations are a must, especially on weekends.  If you show up without a ticket expect to pay a surcharge, just like on Metro-North.

The ferry company is still working on moving to a new, larger terminal farther east in the harbor, a 19-acre site that will also support a deep-water shipping pier… if the US Army Corps of Engineers dredges the harbor.  But that work is a Catch 22, he says.  “They dredge where there’s shipping traffic.  But that traffic depends on dredging.”

The new, $35 million ferry terminal will save up to eight minutes unloading and loading the ship and allow foot passengers to board using Jetways.  Depending on permits, this new terminal might open in 2020 – 2021.  The ferry company also hopes to add a fourth ferry to its fleet, built in the US and probably costing $30 – 40 million.

But long rumored plans to run additional ferry service from New Haven to Port Jefferson LI probably won’t happen, says Hall.  “We just couldn’t find the land (for a terminal)” in New Haven.

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media

"Getting There" - New Timetable, Slower Trains

Rail commuters on Metro-North got a Spring Surprise recently:  a new timetable with slower running times.  Rush hour trains now leave earlier and arrive later than before, adding anywhere from one to ten minutes to published running times, depending on the length of the trip.

But hey!  What happened to that 30-30-30 plan for faster trains?  Why are the trains running slower, not faster?  In a word:  repairs.

There is so much track work to be done this summer there’s no way that Metro-North can maintain its old schedule. In fact, the on-time performance stats from last summer’s construction hit a record low, sometimes hitting just 82%.  Put another way… the new Spring timetable more accurately reflects the speed of service the railroad can actually deliver, not the service it would like to deliver.

So instead of trains running late, they’ll be on time and the schedule will be more reliable, if slower.

All of this timetable adjusting has been in the works since last fall, though the railroad clearly could have done a better job explaining the whys and hows of the changes.  Big projects like the Atlantic Street bridge replacement in Stamford and the Walk Bridge project in Norwalk are taking one, and in some cases, two tracks out of service.

Necessary “undercutting”, removing years of accumulated rock ballast under rail ties, can take out a track for weeks at a time.  And all four running tracks will eventually need that undercutting work.

That leaves the railroad trying to run a four-track service with a 25 – 50% reduction in resources.  And that, as their computer simulations have shown, means slower service. And all of this assumes nothing else goes wrong.

If there’s an unexpected broken rail, a signal problem or power issue, the railroad will jump on repairs immediately -  causing other delays on top of the planned work.  In other words, it’s going to be a long summer, folks.

And this is just the beginning.  One industry insider tells me these mega-repair projects will continue for about five years, meaning these slower running times will be the new normal.

And the farther east you live on the New Haven line, the greater the impact of the slower trains.  Take Bridgeport, for example.

The current best running time from Bridgeport to Grand Central is one hour and 22 minutes.  Under the new timetable it will be one hour and 29 minutes.  But in 1963 the old New Haven RR could make the run in one hour and 14 minutes.

Why?  Because the original New Haven RR was well maintained.  Today the railroad is 56 years older and not aging well.  The signal system is well past its life expectancy (and can handle speeds no faster than 70 mph).  The overhead power lines (catenary) still dates from the times of Woodrow Wilson in some areas.  And the tracks, as we know are prone to cracking and expansion in the summer heat.

Safety should always be the top priority.  Remember the Bridgeport derailment and Spuyten Duyvil crash?  So if your trains take a few more minutes to get you to work, be grateful:  at least you got there safely.  I’d always prefer to arrive alive, wouldn’t you?

Things will get better.  Maybe not 30-30-30, but better… eventually.

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media

"Getting There" - Your Turn to Share The Heat

 As I hope you can tell, I love writing this column.  As New York Times columnist Thom Friedman once said, a commentator should be both in the heating business and the lighting business… getting people fired up while providing factual support for his arguments.

Well, the “heat” runs both ways, as the comments I receive each week constantly remind me. For reasons best known to my bosses at Hearst, anonymous comments are allowed to be posted on the website version of my column.    Here are a few recent love notes from your fellow readers:

When I wrote recently about the power failures on Metro-North, cantchangestupid  wrote  “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.

Or how about this gem from StaggerLee:  “Am I the only one who thinks Jim Cameron is a Useful Id-yot put out there to enable the spendthrift DemocRATs doing their best to drive the state's economy into the ground?”  You’re not alone StaggerLee.  Your colorfully named (yet anonymous) friends say that a lot, though it is not true.

On the recently approved “lock box” on the Special Transportation Fund, NotMyProblem opined:  “The current Gov already figured out how to get around the lockbox by simply diverting funds before they made it into the lockbox.”  That’s true, as I pointed out in a recent column.

On Twitter rpm4Liberty noted that Metro-North fares, though the highest of any commuter railroad in the US, don’t cover the operating costs but require a state subsidy.  He noted: “my truck starts every morning when I want it to, and I don’t need roads.”  Wow… a flying truck?

And Grizzly Beer Bear adds: “So is it wrong (to ask) the people who use this 18th century form of transportation to pay for it?  For that money you could BUY A CAR and not steal money from people who will NEVER use the rail service.”  Obviously Mr Bear enjoys driving in bumper to bumper traffic and wants to add to it by pricing rail riders off trains and back into their cars. 

For April Fools’ Day I tweeted a picture of a railroad dome car, soon to be added to Metro-North service, noting that the ride may not be fast but it sure would be scenic.  A few followers thought the news was true, but one guy who got the joke commented “When the train derails from lack of PTC you're already halfway outside!”

Much of the email I get is commuters just asking for help:  where to complain about late trains, how to report uncollected tickets on a crowded train or asking about the lack of station parking.  I’m always glad to direct people where to get answers.

Having been at this commuter advocacy mission for awhile, I occasionally even get a note of thanks.  Christian N recently emailed me that his commute never seems to improve, adding “I am losing all hope. But thanks for your advocacy.  You deserve to go to heaven.”

That final train ride, I answered, would probably be on a local train, running late, but oh so scenic.

Keep your letters and Tweets coming my way:  CommuterActionGroup@gmail.com and @CTRailcommuters.

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media

"Getting There" - Tolls Are In Trouble

Governor Lamont’s tolling plan is in trouble.  I knew it lwhen I 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 about the Transportation Strategy Board, the panel that 18 years ago was tasked 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, but instead my characterization of the “lock box” on the Special Transportation Fund as having, to quote one wag, “more back doors than a hot-sheets motel on the Berlin Turnpike”.  The Wag’s words, not mine.

“That comment was not helpful, Jim” said Malloy.  “We’re just trying to get this tolls idea across the finish line and your comments aren’t helping.”

That’s when I knew that the tolls plan is in real trouble. (Why is he calling me, of all people?)  Not that there weren’t earlier warning signs that trouble was brewing.

The first was Governor Lamont’s somersaults on tolling from being in favor, then promising trucks-only tolling and finally settling (again) on tolling all vehicles.  Voters felt betrayed.

Then Lamont pulled millions in car sales taxes from the STF, potentially bankrupting the transportation fund by 2022.

Those moves gave grassroots No-Tolls groups new-found fertile soil, picketing and tapping into the media’s love of controversy by offering up great photo ops.

Sure, the Republicans helped fan the flames with their so-called “information sessions” in local communities, providing a forum to attack Lamont and tolls while resurrecting their “Prioritize Progress” bonding plan, asking our grandkids to pay for the roads and rails we use today.

Then there were the “no tolls votes” in local communities, non-binding of course, but a clear indication of local sentiment.  Even Stamford’s Board of Reps voted against tolls.  Polling by Sacred Heart University, though perhaps poorly worded, showed 59% of respondents were against tolling.

But wait.  Where are the pro-toll voices?

Well a coalition of Hartford lobbyists did try to organize an expensive campaign to support Lamont’s tolling vision, seeking money from construction companies and consultants who’d make a lot of money if tolls were approved.  But a reporter somehow got hold of their pitch book, detailing the campaign, and it now seems dead in the water.  Talk about “not helpful”.

Now, Governor Lamont is on a Magical Misery Tour, holding press events at every crumbling bridge, viaduct and train platform in the state.  Against those backdrops he pitches the need for billions in funding achievable only, he says, through tolling.

In the last couple of months Metro-North has had two major power meltdowns as circuit breakers, transformers and sub-stations have failed, slowing trains and disrupting service.  Commuters take such crises in stride knowing full well they’re riding in shiny new railcars on a century-old railroad crumbling beneath them.

But people upstate could care less.  It’s not their problem, so why should they pay tolls or support mass transit?

Cynicism abounds that toll revenues would really be spent on transportation and not get diverted.  Nobody trusts Hartford.

Tolls, my friends, are in trouble.

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media