Yeah, but if you look at the schedule, I think the service is intended for day trips to NYC. Definitely does not seem commuter-friendly to me, nor particularly friendly to tourists looking to visit Northampton.
All this is the re-branding and extension of the
Springfield Shuttles to give it a new placeholder role now that the Hartford Line is running. It's still needed because expansion of Hartford Line schedules north of Hartford to Springfield to full-blast is contingent on additional staggered-out construction work and MassDOT getting off its ass to help build a new layover yard in Springfield (one of their few HFD Line monetary commitments, which they are ducking). As these are still the
Shuttles, they're subject to the same ConnDOT-subsidized quasi- commuter fares carried over to the new stops. Those will be very useful to people who go from Holyoke and Northampton to Central CT on an otherwise hellish I-91 commute (Greenfield a tad out-of-range for Greater Hartford commutes), especially as more office park shuttle buses scale-up. From Day 1 it may end up being the most reliable way to fly, since Windsor Locks has a Bradley Airport shuttle and will get substantially upgraded facilities for airport transferees when the relocated Windsor Locks station gets constructed up the street.
Ultimately this is
supposed to be a temporary assignment, only designed to keep their "use it or lose it" rights on the
Shuttles as the Hartford Line fills out. One, if we would just get on with it as a state and greenlight the sure-as-sure-can-be Inland Route plan, the
Springfield Shuttle/
Valley Flyer gets recast once more as the Boston-New Haven shuttle with substantially increased schedule. Second, this Greenfield experiment makes for a low-risk test for commuter rail demand on the Conn River Line, since it's able to leverage ConnDOT's existing fare agreement with Amtrak without modification. This can inform whether and how soon to go for it on Conn River commuter rail. Surveying the hell out of riders on this route can establish pecking order for infill stops--Chicopee, Hatfield, Deerfield, etc.--and most-demanded bus service expansions. And, if the prevailing travel pattern is more
through Springfield than
to Springfield (likely...HFD-SPG is a unified job market, but there's more density in that market on the CT side of the border) it can inform whether MassDOT tries to go it alone as a Springfield-terminating service or opts to pool operations with ConnDOT to run a Greenfield-Hartford thru run flavor of Hartford Line schedule. The
Valley Flyer placeholder arrangement for the
Shuttles can be extremely useful for planning if they use the live trial to mine the right data and don't shy away from making big commitments if the signs point to big commitments needing to be made (already there on the Inlands...TBD but promising on commuter rail if they apportion it right).
