Wickford gets 8 round-trips per weekday with 2-3 hour headways, and no weekend service. Of course it isn't generating ridership. RIDOT was supposed to have advanced more of its intrastate CR buildout by now allowing service increases to Wickford. It hasn't acted on any of that. It's a proven axiom that frequencies generate ridership. Wickford on-spec wasn't a bad idea, but if they want the ridership they're going to have to generate more frequencies and pony up with the capital investments that make it so.
The half-assing of Wickford service levels is a beating red warning sign for SCR Phase I. If you don't supply halfway usable frequencies for the build money, the ridership is going to struggle like hell to materialize.
Beyond the frequency issues I'm not going to dispute, the business case for Wickford Junction was always off. Its is legitimately in the middle of nowhere, and thus has zero walk-up potential absent significant TOD. That station is/was entirely reliant on car commuters coming in and parking - there's not even a corporate shuttle to quonset. Same thing with TF Green; the station serves the airport perfectly adequately, but doesn't meaningfully serve Warwick. if you're going to have an isolated station, they all need better local transit connections. I believe at opening exactly zero ripta routes served it, and South County isn't exactly the bit of RI with lots of people and traffic to begin with.
It's worth recalling that RI also split its intrastate rail rollout into two phases, not too dissimilar from SCR. Phase 1 was TF Green and Wickford Junction; Phase 2 was the rest of the extension to Kingston and Westerly, plus infills at East Greenwich, West Davisville, Cranston, etc. Once it became clear how badly Phase 1 ridership was underperforming vs. the initial projections, the state put Phase 2 on ice, and that's where it's stayed for the past 12 years. Only in the last year is RI finally peeking its head out of the foxhole and giving serious thought to a statewide system again, most likely thanks to Pawtucket/Central Falls Station "proving" that rail can work if you get your station siting right and provide enough service.
Both service frequency and station siting matter. Frequency is what matters most from a practical standpoint, and that's what will likely delay SCR Phase 2 by a decade or more. But as long as the SCR stations are modestly designed, they'll at least avoid RI's unforced error with how Wickford Junction was sited and designed.
From a public perception standpoint, I think Wickford Junction Station itself did more to set back RI's intrastate rail plans than anything else. At first glance, even today, it strikes you as a waste. It's an imposing, three-story parking garage that looms over some grass and the side of a Petco, as thoughtfully-designed as it is empty. (For me, the icing on the cake has always been
the historical photo on the station platform sign...what better way to politely say "there's nothing here" than to label the sign as Wickford Junction, but show an image of The Towers in Narragansett, 10 miles away.)
The siting was a mess in the making even before the station was built. The site itself, which falls within a groundwater protection overlay that prohibits sewer infrastructure, was available because the developer of the shopping plaza next door sat on the parcel since the 1980s in the hopes the state would put a station on it. Sure enough, eventually the state bought the site and co-developed the station with him, a sort of P3. Ostensibly the station's high ridership projections were based on the fact that the site had good highway access, which would make it a good park-and-ride. But state and local interests were not aligned...see the
comments on p.43 of this report from both the public and planning board members. The locals didn't want the station to generate traffic, TOD, or economic development! One of the only things they did support was linking the station with more local bus routes. It took three years for the state to try to bring bus routes to the station, and once they did, the developer
sued them because he thought the buses would diminish traffic flow to his shopping plaza, among other things. Here's to hoping SCR Phase 1 doesn't go above and beyond with the antics like Wickford Junction did.
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