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Talkin’ Transit
Panel: As state transportation needs change, policy must, too
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Business New Haven
7/10/2000
By: BNH
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Three transportation experts lent varied perspectives to a June 28 City Hall panel discussion on “Urban Sprawl, Transit & Parking: How Will New Haven Manage Its Own Revival?”
Moderated by former state transportation commissioner Emil Frankel, the session highlighted several ways of addressing the region's changing transportation needs and infrastructure.
State transportation policy, argued State Sen. William A. Aniskovich (R-12), was radically transformed by the 1983 Mianus River bridge collapse to a mission emphasizing road and bridge construction and safety - arguably at the expense of economic-development needs.
Further, Aniskovich said, public transportation is a “poor stepchild” in an enormous state Department of Transportation (DOT) bureaucracy. “If we want to make mass transit work outside of Fairfield County,” he said, “we need to make it much more convenient.”
Connecticut Fund for the Environment attorney Karyl Lee Hall noted that as pressure on the state's transportation infrastructure continues to grow, policy-makers must take into account the rising costs of making that infrastructure larger - not just dollars, but medical costs from more highway accidents, law-enforcement costs, air-pollution issues.
“The transportation issue is not just cars vs. public transit,” she said. “We need to create a wider array of options” for moving people. “We have to give all our citizens access to a transportation that offers them a better quality of life.”
“We 'mobility managers,'” explained Michael Sanders of the DOT's Office of Transit & Ridesharing. Sanders said New Haven would realize benefits from a number of planned transportation projects, including a new State Street rail station for Shore Line East commuters, Amtrak high-speed rail service between Washington and Boston, and even the possibility of renewed passenger rail service on the New Haven-Hartford-Springfield line. “Now it's up to people like Sen. Aniskovich to figure out how to pay for it,” said Sanders.
Sanders also defended the DOT's emphasis on safety issues. “If we don't make the existing system safe, there won't be any economic development,” he said. “So I don't think we're asleep at the switch.”
The panel discussion was under the auspices of a day-long transit fair centered on the Green in conjunction with the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.
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