|
|
|
An Earful About an I-Full
Business leaders share woes, solutions to I-95 gridlock
|
Business New Haven
2/17/2003
By: Michael C. Bingham
|
The following are possible solutions to growing automobile congestion in southwestern Connecticut:
Compel - somehow - affluent suburbs like Greenwich and Darien to host affordable housing, and plenty of it, so workers don't have to drive as far to get to jobs in Stamford and White Plains.
Make companies charge their employees a market-rate dollar amount for on-site workplace parking, creating financial incentives for workers to take trains or buses instead.
Eliminate the income-tax deductibility of mortgage payments to "dis-incent" the creation of more single-family housing and suburban sprawl. Eventually families will be forced to return to cities like Bridgeport and New Haven, where from their multi-unit homes they can walk or take public transit to work.
Sound radical? Perhaps. But radical action may be what is required to break the logjam that is Interstate-95 in the southwestern part of the state. The problem - and potential solutions - were the topic of a January 30 Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies panel discussion, "Corridor Congestion: How I-95 Impacts Business & Environment."
The event was part of a lecture series, "The Business of Sustainable Transportation," sponsored by the Yale Industrial Environmental Management (IEM) program. U.S. Assistance Secretary of Transportation Emil Frankel - who, as former commissioner of Connecticut's Department of Transportation, ought to know something about the topic - moderated the session.
Panelist Michael Critelli, chairman and CEO of Pitney Bowes, explained that the traffic problem wasn't attributable to population growth: Between 1990 and 2000, he said, the state's population grew by 3.5 percent - while the number of vehicle miles traveled swelled by 16 percent. "People are traveling longer distances," he said, "and staying on the road longer."
The impact of highway congestion on a business like Pitney Bowes, said Critelli, is twofold: "We lose [employees] to other parts of the state," as the company's "catchment area" becomes narrower and narrower and commuting times lengthen.
Also, "We have to pay [employees] more," Critelli said. "If they're going to be living within a reasonable commuting distance [of Pitney Bowes' Stamford headquarters], they're going to be buying some very expensive real estate."
Of course, in a global economy Pitney Bowes customers are unlikely to pay more as a result of this so-called Fairfield County cost factor, Critelli said. "Over time, we will be incented to move jobs out of Fairfield County," including relatively lower-wage call-center and back-office jobs, he said.
One company that has fought the I-95 monster to a standstill is privately held Purdue Pharma, which in 2000 relocated from Norwalk to the 500,000-square-foot former GTE headquarters in Stamford. Purdue Vice President Diana Lenkowsky explained how, although the company's Norwalk home had clearly outlived its utility ("We had M.D.s working in the mailroom," she said), the company's 1,200 workers greeted news of the move with hostility. For employees living in Norwalk or points east, she says, "It wasn't the extra seven miles" of commuting distance; "it was the extra 30 to 60 minutes a day on the highway."
To address employee fears, Lenkowsky says that Purdue management decided to assemble a menu of commuter options, including flex time, allowing employees to purchase mass-transit trips with pre-tax dollars, making parking available near train stations where workers lived (such as Fairfield), more onsite amenities such as a fitness center and enhanced cafeteria hours, and shuttle service from the Stamford rail station to Purdue offices.
The result? Over two-plus years, more than 400 of 1,100 eligible Purdue employees now use mass transit to commute, according to Lenkowsky. Measured against the five who resigned when the company relocated, that seems a resounding success.
Increasingly, the geographic area from which a company can recruit workers is defined not by miles, but by commutation times, said Christopher Bruhl, president and CEO of the Southwest Area Commerce & Industry Association (SACIA) and head of the Coastal Corridor Coalition, which includes business and environmental representatives united in seeking alternatives to motor vehicle congestion along the Greenwich-to-New Haven corridor.
The group was formed after a proposal to build a gambling casino in Bridgeport was defeated in the mid-1990s. Today its goal, Bruhl, said, is to reduce motor-vehicle congestion by five percent over the coming five years.
Accomplishing that, he said, can only be accomplished within a political context. "Connecticut has largely chosen to let market forces choose its [land-use] policy for it" over the years, said Bruhl, a policy that ultimately has failed.
"We need to link land-use planning to what people really want to buy," said Bruhl. While mortgage deductibility has fueled the growth of single-family housing over the past half-century, "treating the commuter as a customer" would lead to the creation or redevelopment of mass-transportation hubs - also known as cities - that people actually want to live in, beuase they offer entertainment options, desirable housing and decent public schools.
"Absent that," Bruhl said, "development will continue to go farther and farther out into the wild blue yonder.
"Just as wars are too important to be left to the generals," Bruhl said, "transportation is too important to be left to engineers."
|
Go FirstGo PreviousGo
NextGo LastGo
to Index
|
|
