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Discussion relating to the operations of MTA MetroNorth Railroad including west of Hudson operations and discussion of CtDOT sponsored rail operations such as Shore Line East and the Springfield to New Haven Hartford Line

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 #1347798  by F-line to Dudley via Park
 
Manchester Secondary most definitely takes a backseat to Hartford-Waterbury because I-84 commuters from the east do have some options for bypassing downtown Hartford to the northwest with I-291 and southwest on CT 15/I-91/CT 9 (though that one's going to make 91 an absolute terrorscape Wethersfield-Cromwell). There's also already a fairly robust park-and-ride presence east of the city with not-bad bus travel times due to the HOV lanes contiguous from Exit 65 in Vernon to the Founders Bridge exit in East Hartford. If they surged bus frequencies they can do an alright job taking care of those commuters; the HOV's mean they aren't going to slam to a screeching halt until they're on the Founders. Which in a sea of bad options is the least-worst. Definitely a future rail candidate. Even if you don't tackle Willimantic right away the P&R patronage gives an eastern poke Day 1 ridership from East Hartford center, Buckland Hills, Manchester Center, and maybe a 2.5 mile reactivation to Exit 65 in Vernon. It's just never going to be in the same universe urgency-wise as the Highland. Definitely not now.


Gotta admit...I never foresaw this being the impetus that finally gets the thing built. But if that's really how they want to play 84mageddon, I don't see any choice. It's non-optional if they care about not tanking the west-of-Hartford economy and scaring Stanley Works, ESPN, and the downtown insurance giants to start moving more operations out-of-state. Politically those are not hits any Governor or any of the sitting Legislative leaders can afford to take. And they know it. If you ever dreamed of seeing a zero-BS, zero-fat fast-tracking of a major transit project from the Connecticut Dept. of Transportation Studies About Studies...this might end up being the one with all the political hides directly threatened on their own turf by not having a really big answer for this.
 #1347818  by Ridgefielder
 
YamaOfParadise wrote:
Ridgefielder wrote:Isn't there a precedent for a passenger/commuter rail operation being started up as relief for a highway closure? And in the not-too-distant past?
There certainly is, and one that turned out to be popular so it stayed around... :wink:

But anyways, it's a little more complicated than with SLE; the State is already getting ready to launch another new commuter service in the same timeframe, so launching another one would be a big step up on the car and engine requirements. I don't know how much the Governor will try and minimize harm to himself on the busway, either. It's already going to blow up in his face just by the fact that it has to operate over the selfsame stretch of I-84 as we're talking about, but it's a way higher level of harm to him when the costs involved to convert the busway back into something rail-usable start coming around.
Haha that wasn't a leading question: I honestly completely forgot the service was the SLE! :-D

Malloy was re-elected in 2014. He'll be long gone by the time they undo the first bolt on the I-84 viaduct.
 #1348002  by Scalziand
 
The pending reconstruction of the 691-91-15 interchange should be helpful for traffic bypassing Hartford, but does nothing for commuters in the western side of metro Hartford.

http://www.ct.gov/dot/cwp/view.asp?A=1373&Q=569386" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
YamaOfParadise wrote:I don't know how much the Governor will try and minimize harm to himself on the busway, either. It's already going to blow up in his face just by the fact that it has to operate over the selfsame stretch of I-84 as we're talking about, but it's a way higher level of harm to him when the costs involved to convert the busway back into something rail-usable start coming around.
The busway is separate from 84 along the viaduct which needs to be replaced, so it's not exactly directly affected. Since the two-lane bottleneck on 84 in Waterbury should be fixed by 2019, the DOT might as well restripe one of the travel lanes as a buslane between Waterbury and Hartford. Oh wait, the screwy interchange with left exits with 72 complicates that idea.
 #1348200  by NH2060
 
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.
 #1348258  by F-line to Dudley via Park
 
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.
 #1348498  by NH2060
 
(Not sure if this belongs here, but I digress) CDOT now says I-84 de-congestion not a crucial part of the busway:
But so far, Redeker said, it isn't a question he or anyone in the department has asked. He said determining conclusively whether the estimated $567 million busway is actually reducing highway congestion will require sophisticated and expensive surveys that the state plans to conduct — but not in the near future. In the meantime, Redeker said he feels no urgency to delve into data on busway use during the hours of peak highway congestion.

http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut ... story.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

So.. this thing officially WAS a waste of money after all..? ;-)
F-line to Dudley via Park wrote: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.
I sure hope you're right (including amongst those @ the DOT and the Gov's office). My gut's telling me that it'll get overlooked and nothing will come of it and a slam dunk opportunity to get it up and running will have come and gone. The idea of using the busway to run bus shuttles every 5 minutes or so all day long -from my point of view- sounds like a more likely scenario seeing that it's there and well why not make the most of it.


However I would also hope that they realize that having multiple busses going back and forth however many times could result in a "busway traffic jam". Especially at intersections/busway crossings that are literally RIGHT NEXT to the Hartford Line when a train comes by AND perpendicular vehicular traffic is heavy.
 #1348566  by Ridgefielder
 
NH2060 wrote:(Not sure if this belongs here, but I digress) CDOT now says I-84 de-congestion not a crucial part of the busway:
But so far, Redeker said, it isn't a question he or anyone in the department has asked. He said determining conclusively whether the estimated $567 million busway is actually reducing highway congestion will require sophisticated and expensive surveys that the state plans to conduct — but not in the near future. In the meantime, Redeker said he feels no urgency to delve into data on busway use during the hours of peak highway congestion.

http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut ... story.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

So.. this thing officially WAS a waste of money after all..? ;-)
"Sophisticated and expensive" studies?

Count the number of cars-per-rush-hour passing a given point on I-84. Put that number in cell A1 of an Excel spreadsheet. Find the number of cars that passed that same point before the B.s.way was built. Put that number in cell A2 of the same spreadsheet. Go to cell A3. Write "=A1-A2". If the resulting number is negative you reduced congestion. Do this for a month so you eliminate noise like bad weather or moving holidays.

There I designed the study. How do I submit my bid to CDOT?
 #1373858  by The EGE
 
They're beginning planning for an expansion east of the river. Looks like they learned their lesson about the costs of trying to build bus infrastructure on rail lines - they'll just be using the I-84 and I-384 HOT lanes with spot improvements, rather than taking the old NY&NE to use.
 #1373866  by NH2060
 
Would they be able to actually use any of it at all? The line is still active to just beyond the feed mill east of the Oakland St. crossing and a short distance from there it becomes the rail trail. And with both sections being part of a possible Hartford-New London commuter rail in the long term perhaps the DOT never even bothered to look into using the ROW as it was already "dibbed" for studying the train.


On a different note here's an interesting bit from the Courant on the latest I-84 proposal:
Engineers also said they've concluded it will be essential to keep CTfastrak operating during construction because droves of commuters will want to use buses to get to and from the city.

http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut ... story.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Good luck with that ;-)
 #1374388  by F-line to Dudley via Park
 
NH2060 wrote:Would they be able to actually use any of it at all? The line is still active to just beyond the feed mill east of the Oakland St. crossing and a short distance from there it becomes the rail trail. And with both sections being part of a possible Hartford-New London commuter rail in the long term perhaps the DOT never even bothered to look into using the ROW as it was already "dibbed" for studying the train.


On a different note here's an interesting bit from the Courant on the latest I-84 proposal:
Engineers also said they've concluded it will be essential to keep CTfastrak operating during construction because droves of commuters will want to use buses to get to and from the city.

http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut ... story.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Good luck with that ;-)
Federal Inmate Rowland was the one who proposed BUSWAYING ALL THE THINGS, including the Manchester Secondary, Armory Branch, and Griffins Secondary (after he killed the light rail proposal there). The studies for all those atrocities are archived somewhere on Web Archive. Except for the Griffins, which was mostly inactive at the time, the studies were done without consulting the railroads or so much as checking to see that, no, you can't evict an operating railroad and, no, the ICC/STB would never allow that. So some consultant made good money on studies that could never be applied in real life.

I'm surprised it took them so long to get it in their skulls to use the 84 HOV lanes that have been so depressingly underutilized since Day 1 in 1986. They actually do quite a bit of good at keeping Greyhound, Peter Pan, Bolt, etc. on-time out through Vernon for the Hartford-Boston slots that depart Union Station at rush hour, and CTransit is well-utilized on its 84-hugging route east of the city. Eventually there'll be commuter rail on the Manchester Sec. as a tertiary priority project (maybe first as a +3 stop extension of Waterbury-Hartford runs on the existing track...long-term Willimantic + New London, long-long-term the likeliest-odds NEC FUTURE bypass that actually gets built). But not for a long time, so as quickie jobs go grabbing the HOV's for BRT is a (shocking for CDOT!) positive and sensible transit use since it has matching dedicated exit ramps everywhere out to Vernon Center for local stops.
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