Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail (South Coast Rail)

riptide said:
Makes sense to begin as a Newport Flyer summer service. The 2002 study projected 576 daily visitor trips through the corridor on weekends, which would probably push a little higher if you removed the cross-platform transfer penalty and ran a train straight from Boston.
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The last thing anyone who actually lives in or visits Newport regularly wants is more day trippers waddling up and down the sidewalks debating between the t-shirt or the refrigerator magnet to commemorate their visit.
 
kmp1284 said:
The last thing anyone who actually lives in or visits Newport regularly wants is more day trippers waddling up and down the sidewalks debating between the t-shirt or the refrigerator magnet to commemorate their visit.
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On peak weekends, Newport's daytime population can climb as high as 100,000, at least according to this article. Would 576 more day-trippers really be so noticeable in comparison? If anything, you'd be more likely notice parking spaces aren't quite as hard to come by. The more Boston-area travelers that choose to take the train and avoid the hassle and expense of parking, the better Newport will be able to handle the usual crowds.
 
riptide said:
On peak weekends, Newport's daytime population can climb as high as 100,000, at least according to this article. Would 576 more day-trippers really be so noticeable in comparison? If anything, you'd be more likely notice parking spaces aren't quite as hard to come by. The more Boston-area travelers that choose to take the train and avoid the hassle and expense of parking, the better Newport will be able to handle the usual crowds.
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Probably not but what they suffer with now is far more than the place can handle and it makes it both a less attractive place to live and to spend time for anyone acquainted with how much better it used to be. It’s one of those places that could be so much nicer if it was a lot harder to get to.
 
kmp1284 said:
Probably not but what they suffer with now is far more than the place can handle and it makes it both a less attractive place to live and to spend time for anyone acquainted with how much better it used to be. It’s one of those places that could be so much nicer if it was a lot harder to get to.
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This is the type of stuff I would often hear when I worked in southeast CT and what it always seems to really be about is parking and traffic, not people.
 
KCasiglio said:
This is the type of stuff I would often hear when I worked in southeast CT and what it always seems to really be about is parking and traffic, not people.
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I haven’t driven into Newport in season in probably five years and I haven’t parked in a commercial lot or on the street for at least ten. It’s about the overcrowding and the rapidly diminishing character of the town.
 
kmp1284 said:
I haven’t driven into Newport in season in probably five years and I haven’t parked in a commercial lot or on the street for at least ten. It’s about the overcrowding and the rapidly diminishing character of the town.
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But WHY does it feel overcrowded and changed in character? Is it actually the number of people? Its population is about 50% of its peak. It's not like Newport wasn't a tourist destination in the 1960s. What's changed is how much of the surface area has been given over to parking and wide roads. Take a look at the urban fabric of Newport in 1963 versus today. The same amount of people are being crammed into smaller spaces.

It's the exact same complaint in Mystic, Groton City, and Niantic.
 
KCasiglio said:
But WHY does it feel overcrowded and changed in character? Is it actually the number of people? Its population is about 50% of its peak. It's not like Newport wasn't a tourist destination in the 1960s. What's changed is how much of the surface area has been given over to parking and wide roads. Take a look at the urban fabric of Newport in 1963 versus today. The same amount of people are being crammed into smaller spaces.

It's the exact same complaint in Mystic, Groton City, and Niantic.
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Have you ever actually been there? You come across as living under a rock and just having an agenda.
 
kmp1284 said:
I haven’t driven into Newport in season in probably five years and I haven’t parked in a commercial lot or on the street for at least ten. It’s about the overcrowding and the rapidly diminishing character of the town.
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Downtown Boston also gets an absurd number of visitors every day. Downtown has far more visitors than it does permanent residents. People visit awesome places, it's a fact of life--the only way to stop them is to make the place less awesome. It's better to capitalize on the tourism and buiId infra to manage it than to kneecap yourself in order to drive it away.

Boston would probably hate tourists too if they didn't mostly navigate the city by train and by foot.
 
For Newport, I dont think people drive around once they get there, the shuttle service is pretty nice, and free during summer.
 
kmp1284 said:
Have you ever actually been there? You come across as living under a rock and just having an agenda.
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Several times, yes. If you're done with the ad-hominin I'd be interested in why you think I'm incorrect. The population of Newport has dramatically shrunk. The percentage of surface area taken away from the use of people dedicated to the movement and storage of vehicles has dramatically increased. In as much as I "have an agenda" it's Newport being a lovely place to live and visit in 2024. It's certainly not declaring an arbitrary point in time to be the town's character that needs to be locked in amber. You bemoan how Newport has changed in the past 30 years as if the change is any less than that over the 30 years prior.
 
kmp1284 said:
Have you ever actually been there? You come across as living under a rock and just having an agenda.
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I have been there many many times. In terms of its "character"--pick your poison. You know what Newport's "character" was for many years after Nixon relocated the North Atlantic Fleet from there in 1973?

Stagnation. Decay. Despair. Desolation. Emptiness. As the NYT reported:

Rhode Island will also suffer the loss of 21,000 jobs, including 17,300 military personnel, as the Navy closes down the naval station at Newport and the Naval air station at Quonset.

In 1977, the unemployment rate in the area was still as high as 30% as a result, per the Washington Post.

30%!! That's Great Depression-level misery.

Regional economic development planners and business/political leaders saw tourism as the only way out, so that's what they pursued.

Anyway, obviously some of the tourism experience there is tacky, obnoxious, etc.--but that's overwhelmingly clustered along the Thames St. corridor. The Bellevue Ave. mansions, the vineyards, Fort Adams, Audrain Auto Museum, all the non-Thames St. restaurants, etc.--all quite lovely still from my experience... it's really misleading to portray Newport's overall tourism scene as monolithically overwhelming/awful/depressing...
 
thepixelnation said:
It would be more apt to conflate the word "plantation" with colonialism than slavery. English first started using plantations with the colonization of Ireland and worked as a means to de-gaelicize the Irish living there. Plantations were a major tool of English colonialism by allowing a community of English men & women to live and reproduce, rather than the French model of trading posts or the Spanish model of Spanish men marrying Native women.

Sorry for this whole diversion! Should have said titled nobility. I'm just happy there wasn't an Earl of Dorchester like there was a Baron of Baltimore. and I forgot the house of burgesses was an elected office.

Maybe we should have a MBTA Baron though...
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I think the degree of unaccountability that the MBTA seems to have is pretty close to that of a monarchical system. Baron might be better than GM at this point
 
DBM said:
Anyway, obviously some of the tourism experience there is tacky, obnoxious, etc.--but that's overwhelmingly clustered along the Thames St. corridor. The Bellevue Ave. mansions, the vineyards, Fort Adams, Audrain Auto Museum, all the non-Thames St. restaurants, etc.--all quite lovely still from my experience... it's really misleading to portray Newport's overall tourism scene as monolithically overwhelming/awful/depressing...
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The point is there was actually a time not that long ago when Thames Street wasn’t the soul-sucking tourist trap it is now. There were a lot of great little galleries and a stretch of fun bars and restaurants geared toward locals, sailors and people who worked around there. The entirety of the tacky tourist zone was more or less confined to the America’s Cup Ave area. What are Broadway and Bellevue going to look like in 20 years if this trend continues? Fortunately locals seem to have had enough and there would be massive pushback to anything that promises to bring in even more crowds and detract further from their experience. And let’s face it, RI is never going to foot the bill for a rail bridge over the Sakonnet.
 
kmp1284 said:
The point is there was actually a time not that long ago when Thames Street wasn’t the soul-sucking tourist trap it is now. There were a lot of great little galleries and a stretch of fun bars and restaurants geared toward locals, sailors and people who worked around there. The entirety of the tacky tourist zone was more or less confined to the America’s Cup Ave area. What are Broadway and Bellevue going to look like in 20 years if this trend continues? Fortunately locals seem to have had enough and there would be massive pushback to anything that promises to bring in even more crowds and detract further from their experience. And let’s face it, RI is never going to foot the bill for a rail bridge over the Sakonnet.
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I’m on the island at least one weekend a month as I have family there. If you are serious about that being the problem to solve, then why aren’t you advocating for the closure of the Pell Bridge? That carries many, many, many times magnitude more people into Newport than any rail connection would.

You’ll have my ear if you want to restrict people traveling by automobile and rail (not that I’d agree with you), but if you only advocate for restricting those traveling by mass transit, then it’s you whose agenda needs to be questioned.

I’m very open to hearing your proposal to curb automobile access!
 
For starters triple the tolls on the Pell and add them on Mount Hope and 24. Not sure if it’s legal to do so but charge out of state registrations a higher rate while exempting Aquidneck residents. Newport itself should add meters everywhere possible. I parked on Kay Street in 2018 or 19 for the boat show and couldn’t believe there weren’t meters. Just because Newport has become a tourist town it doesn’t mean that it needs to be everything to everyone.
 
kmp1284 said:
For starters triple the tolls on the Pell and add them on Mount Hope and 24. Not sure if it’s legal to do so but charge out of state registrations a higher rate while exempting Aquidneck residents. Newport itself should add meters everywhere possible. I parked on Kay Street in 2018 or 19 for the boat show and couldn’t believe there weren’t meters. Just because Newport has become a tourist town it doesn’t mean that it needs to be everything to everyone.
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All great policy suggestions, and as far as I'm aware it is legal to charge a different for out-of-state registrations as long as you're not ONLY charging out-of-state registrations. Importantly this also helps generate some revenue, since all that auto infrastructure comes with a heavy bill that the users aren't really paying.

Unfortunately Newport's Transportation Master Plan does not call for expanding metering or raising rates and in fact says "The City provides a sufficient supply of affordable public vehicle parking. The demand for affordable and easily accessible parking is growing though, particularly downtown." which I really hope doesn't mean "we should be providing more."

There are some things to like in there though. Cutting America's Cup to one lane in each direction, narrowing streets, pedestrianizing streets in-season. There's your downtown elbow room.


Sidebar, but perhaps a mod could move the Newport related discussion to a more Newport centric thread? As much as I think this is worth continuing to talk about we're really losing any connection to South Coast Rail.
 
Speaking of tolls in RI, anyone have an update on whatever happened to their truck tolls? I know they got turned off a couple of years ago as part of some lawsuit from trucking interests, but the physical plant is still there and the last update was literally a year ago in September 2023 when the appeals court heard the case, but I don't think I've heard any news of a ruling. Surely even the US judicial system can't be that dysfunctional.
 
And on the issues of character and congestion in Newport, these buckets don’t help either. Cruise ships have been coming here as long as I can remember but they’ve grown significantly in size in recent years.


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