NH2060 wrote:Scalziand wrote:It definitely could play a roll. The busway doesn't help buses traveling between Waterbury and New Britain though, where buses have to use 84 instead.
Not to mention that it would take any number of busses to provide the same capacity that a 4-5 car train would provide. Though in the event of a complete shutdown of I-84 through Hartford I would imagine 6 cars+ being warranted depending on frequencies.
Yep. The Boondoggleway doesn't do anything special for 84mageddon. Besides its primary goal as a giant monument to political corruption and cronyism it's primarily a New Britain-centric project. West Hartford is getting its own NHHS stop conjoined to the busway, and if their interzone fares are cheap enough the rush hour crowding pretty much has to tilt heavier to the train once the highway gets torn up simply because the buses won't be able to individually handle the rush hour capacity of that total a number of highway diversions. It's admittedly great for Central CT State U. students who gain a campus stop in 'tweener land between downtown NB and West Hartford, but so much of their commuter enrollment comes from Bristol and points outside of NB that it's not that big an on-campus benefit. Its main utility is future partnerships in Hartford for student internships, which is admittedly a Very Good Thing™ that will boost the school's stature considerably. Still a very hard thing to hang a hat on for the build, since if the New Britain Secondary were built as a rail line they probably would've had a campus stop all the same. One where 'loop' service diverging at Berlin through downtown NB could've put them on an alternate NHHS service pattern in addition to Hartford-Waterbury.
And even in large swaths of NB-proper, Berlin is more the de facto New Britain stop because it's flat-out more accessible to a large western/southwestern/southern areas of the city ringing downtown than the downtown busway station itself. This is all thanks to the unnamed highway stub that forks off Route 9 Exit 24 pointing just in the Berlin direction with no back-track access to downtown or the 9/72 interchange. These neighborhoods are 1-2 family with yards and don't match the density of downtown, but unlike bombed-out downtown these areas didn't de-populate very much when the city collapsed and generally have near-100% occupancy and stable/rising land values. The mid-density residential ring around downtown slugs proportionally higher than cities of similar makeup because of that, and because the road network is slightly less convenient to downtown (no 9 northbound or 9/72 interchange access from the stub, requirements of going around the block to get from a 9 exit to the busway terminal) these are folks who will ALWAYS be tied to Berlin as their home station. CTtransit has a bus up/down 71 that hits Berlin station. Remarkably, 372 doesn't and has a pronounced 1-1/2 mile transit gap on Farmington Ave. between Chamberlin Hwy. and 71 that I have to think is a non-optional infill before 84mageddon starts stressing the commute patterns. Correct that baffling omission and ALL of those outer-ring neighborhoods end up with car-free access to Berlin that makes equal-time with park-and-ride access. Which will be important during 84mageddon because that Berlin lot is going to be overfull at the crack of dawn every day. Even when everyone from the west locks Route 9 solid on the 9<-->91 detour around Hartford to avoid 84, these folks will still have that completely empty expressway stub. If you're operating on the assumption that NHHS will be at its full-blast 32 trains per day schedule as an ironclad prerequisite for tearing up downtown Hartford, all 84mageddon serves for these non-downtown 'ring' neighborhoods of stable middle class is to pour cement on Berlin as the only commute option that matters. They will never ever ride the busway.
And of course the bus access to Plainville, Southington, Farmington, and Bristol is scary deficient and takes such a painfully long schedule to even reach the busway in the first place that the swells of traffic volumes on their state highways when 84 gets rendered useless makes NB a near-impossibility to reach for a car-free commute. Instead of just a high pain threshold commute. Even the NW corner of New Britain is screwed because their (lousy) CTtransit routes don't even point in the direction of downtown and the busway. With 9 absorbing all that traffic 72-to-9 gets sealed off as a reasonable busway commute and everyone who isn't on the southern end of Southington with non-painful access to I-691 and Meriden station get crushed. I can't say this enough, speaking as a Bristol native: this is potentially
lethal to the economies of that relatively dense population cluster arranged around Routes 6, 4, and 10. It's the kind of thing that gets ESPN--which pretty much IS Bristol's and Southington's tax base--to start moving jobs offsite and freezing their growth. Growth that's been one nonstop explosion since 1979. I know the Nicastro brothers in the Legislature and local Chamber are a little insane...they're over-the-top with every advocacy, not just their anti-busway/pro-Highland zealotry. But there's good reason why all the pols Waterbury to western New Britain are a locktight bloc wearing the war paint: their careers are over with what 84mageddon will do to ravage their towns. Everybody in CT remembers the '83 Mianus River Bridge disaster and how long I-95 was shut down, then capacity-reduced for years afterwards. A whole generation of elected officials got wiped out by the carnage it wreaked on the Greenwich and Stamford economies. 84mageddon is Bristol's/Plainville's/Southington's (and Plymouth's and slice of NB and Farmington, with collateral damage to Waterbury) Mianus: a mortal existential threat. And it's planned, not spontaneous. When the most powerful political figures and business leaders are threatened on
their own personal turf with loss of all their accumulated power, @#$% hits the fan and warchests of political capital get busted open. Now, this is not a very powerful bloc of politicians...too many Legislators statewide had their hands in the busway cash drawer for the Nicastro Bros. local army to stop the project. But that gets very very different when ESPN CEO John Skipper announces his list of grievances from a perch on Olympus. And gets joined by Stanley Works threatening to close its Slater Rd. corporate HQ in the transit-screwed NW corner of New Britain, and GE making a move for real this time to shutter its Plainville plant. And co-signees 2 dozen deep from smaller biz (Otis Elevator, Yarde Metals; Firestone; Lake Compounce; etc., etc.).
Trust me...this is only starting to heat up. If this shutdown or near-shutdown plan is the only plausible way of taking care of 84, the big bats like ESPN are going to be the ones wagging the dog. It may not be enough to get the thing built, but once you start joining together titans of the 1% with a politician bloc having night terrors of Mianus II...all with warchests of political capital directly threatened
on their own turf...this thing starts getting a whole lot realer than just railfan wonkery. Because the way U.S. politics circa 2015 is hyper-concentrated at the top, these are the only voices that truly matter on go/no-go. Not a citizen advocacy. So this study, which before now was not much more interesting than another typically-CDOT study about studies, suddenly becomes
weaponized in the hands of titans who see a direct existential threat in I-84 being rendered non-functional for a decade.
The debate over the Highland will, at minimum, start getting very very interesting very soon as the 84 picture comes into focus. This thread's going to have a very long and active shelf life.
