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TRANSPORTATION: Can We Get There From Here?
Making sense about planes, trains and automobiles (and even ferries)
Jeffrey T. Wack is principal of J.T. Wack & Co. in New Haven, a director of the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce and a member of the Tweed-New Haven Airport Authority.
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Business New Haven
11/15/1999
By: Michael C. Bingham
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What concerns you most about the region's transportation system moving ahead?
The major concern is that we might become the backwater of the country. Almost every mode of transportation in southern Connecticut is not up to snuff with the rest of the country. My hope is that during the next ten years we will identify and begin to fix some of those.
Where to begin?
We're a region that because of our education and income levels, will be providing high value-added kinds of services. We're also, due to our relative wealth, going to be purchasing a lot of things that are manufactured in other areas of the country. So I see a couple of issues: Focusing first on the inbound, the kinds of things that we're going to be bringing in will include large manufactured goods. Our ability to do that, either by air or rail, is not very good. Ten years from now I hope there has been serious discussion and planning has begun on how to, for example, offload truck traffic onto rail. And similarly that we will have airport capacity, probably at Bradley, that can handle a lot more air cargo.
How about passengers?
The other piece of transportation is people. The people that I bring in are my clients who come in to avail themselves of my services, medical services, education, people who come here to visit. Those of us who live in this area who need to access markets and who need to visit clients, are going to find our traditional ways of getting places are much more difficult. One thing we're going to be focusing on is how to create more road capacity. We're already getting a balkanization of the East Shore as a result of the Quinnipiac Bridge being inefficient. In much the same way, New Haven has largely been cut off from a very traditional market - namely the Valley and Waterbury &emdash by virtue of our having only a two-lane, windy road, Route 34, that goes up that direction. So increasing road capacity is going to be first on people's minds, and hopefully that can happen.How about high-speed rail, starting next year?
The faster rail will be helpful in moving people. A high-speed train will be an important piece of it. Being able to get in and out of New York City, Boston and Washington will be important. Another market that we're cut off from that we have natural affinities with is Long Island. I'm hopeful that there will be upgraded and faster ferry service. I have clients over there and it's more difficult for me to see clients in Long Island and northern New Jersey than it was [when United Airlines served Tweed-New Haven Airport] to see clients in Chicago.
Which brings us to your favorite subject…
Which is air service. In this region, we are highly underserved. I see that Bradley will have evolved - as all of the regional airports in New England have evolved - to off-load capacity that airports like J.F.K. and LaGuardia can't handle. Bradley is going to get very, very busy. Tweed-New Haven is going to be a key part of this in getting people off of the roads and being able to get people in and out.
Is high-speed rail going to make this region more or less of a New York suburb?
It's going to depend a lot on what the pricing is. Certainly speed is a factor that you would say will make us a suburb of New York. But if it's priced at something extraordinarily [higher] than Metro North, it's almost going to be like plane service, and you'll be addressing only a small segment of the market. And if it gets to that then I would say it's more likely to be seen as an alternative to flying to a place like Philadelphia or Washington. Hopefully it will benefit some of the high-end traffic, lawyers and professionals who need to serve markets in New York City. But if [fares are] extraordinarily high, I think Metro North is going to be the way to go.
Are we playing a losing hand by constantly trying to force more Shore Line East ridership in the face of commuter antipathy?
Well, people are first of all creatures of habit. All marketers know that. So you need to have incentives and disincentives to make it work. Certainly the difficulty of going back and forth over a bridge has the affect of having many businesses relocating services out there [east of the Q Bridge]. For example, a lot of health care is now being delivered on the East Shore. People don't come into New Haven anymore. But as long as there are people living and working in New Haven, I think rail is going to have to be an alternative as long as there is construction on the bridge. Also, what about northbound and westbound rail for southern Connecticut, access to Hartford, access to Bradley, light-rail options? I live in North Haven, and I-91 is getting more congested by the [I-95] exchange. One way we're different from Europe is that you still need a car to get to the point where you will take the train. Therefore, the mental calculation that goes on is, well, is it really going to save me money? I think we should be imagining how this corridor is going to evolve and should be concerned about our dependency on a three-lane highway.
A local economics professor just wrote a paper arguing that we should forget about small regional airports like Tweed and focus on improving ground links to larger airports.
To an extent, that flies in the face of what's happening. Look at Manchester [N.H.] and how it has blossomed. Look at Providence [R.I.] and how it has blossomed. Worcester Airport is now offering Delta service to Atlanta. Stewart [Airport in Newburgh, N.Y.], there was absolutely no service in there in 1989; now it's hundred of thousands of passengers. Westchester, same thing. The federal studies say there will be a 30-percent increase in airline passenger traffic by the year 2010. You can't put that additional 30 percent into LaGuardia or JFK or Logan.
On the other hand, there may be more specialization of the airports. The big jets, the 747s, are probably going to be going out of the larger airports. But I still think there will be people who continue to value time. Policy-wise, I think it would be more inexpensive to fly regional jets into the smaller airports than it would be to try to interconnect the several major airports.
Most people here don't know much about Stewart.
The state of New York was behind the opening of Stewart [airport]. They recognized that the capacity of Newark, LaGuardia and JFK was insufficient, and that Westchester was getting busy and not a place where they wanted to create a major airport. So they put a lot of effort into a regional airport and air-service strategy, including incentivizing American [Airlines] to start service at Stewart. They've got a lot of service in and out of there now, and a market that doesn't compare [favorably] to southern Connecticut.
Anything else?
You know what else I'd like to see in ten years? I'd like to see better road signs. Our communities' roads and highways are not laid out in a grid. It's very difficult for East Haveners to negotiate their way through North Haven, much less visitors find their way back to I-95 or the Wilbur Cross. I'd hope that we'd be a little bit less parochial and a little bit more welcoming of people who do travel in the area by finding ways to put small highway signs on secondary arteries directing people back to major arteries. Another example would be [New Haven's Veterans Memorial] Coliseum. It's been there for 30 years and because we're so parochial, we assume that everyone who goes there is from New Haven and knows where it is. We can't assume that - it's not true. We need to be more thoughtful of the fact that we're not all natives.
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