Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos
Unfortunately, I'd estimate that half or more of state level legislators are mentally unqualified for the task. The numbers are only slightly better at the Federal level.
What do you expect...it's a 424-seat state House, largest in the country, for only 1.3 million people with extreme district-to-district population skews. It's absurdly easy in some districts to get elected, often very inexpensive, and the turnover rate for seats is bipolar election year to election year. So a lot of people with a lot of time on their hands can through sheer persistence outlast the field and find themselves in a seat. And who's best equipped to outlast their way into political leverage but That Ranting Off-Topic Person who draws eyerolls at every town board meeting. Catch a year like 2010 where the voters are fidgety and irritable and the insanity can come in floods.
The "Citizen's Legislature", as it were. In many ways refreshing juxtaposed against big moneyed interests, but has the drawback of being this bipolar. New Hampshire's got a lot of problems, but the feces-throwing from this particular Legislative term is merely a leading indicator of some deep-running denial about the state's sustainability. Commuter rail's been sucked into that vortex, but it's still a footnote in comparison to the cognitive dissonance over I-93 and what
that is doing to the state's budget, plus the notion that they can bottomless tax-break their way into limitless business growth. They have much more serious structural problems than the rest of New England does in this economy.
Unfortunately gonna get way worse before it gets better, and MA/ME/VT are probably gonna have to take steps to firewall themselves to keep the damage from spreading across the border. I still think CR
to the border is going to happen by or before 2020 and Nashua has a decent chance of making it happen by going rogue if it stays on this course of seeking public-private partnerships and cooperation with the other side of the border. But that extension's not all that controversial...North Chelmsford/Tyngsboro need it, it eases the crunch at Lowell, the ROI is just about the largest of any CR extension proposal, and the associated freight upgrades (286,000 lb. car weight limits to Nashua interchange, dovetailing with the Patriot Corridor improvements that flush a lot heavier and more lucrative freight traffic on the Ayer-Lawrence stretch of the Pan Am main) are very high-return. Yeah, no brainer. Richard Davey's on-record saying this is one he's bullish about pursuing soon even with the T's debt issues. And also if you also consider how far below true capacity the Lowell Line is operating because of constraints imposed by far obsolete signals and speed, any reasonable justification to fund improvements on the whole line to get it just up to the spec of some of the fresher-modernized southside lines can raise the ridership 15, 20, 25% in span of a few years. For a line that hits the 3rd largest terminal city on the system, has a huge 128-oriented transit center, hosts Amtrak, and hits some very dense inner suburbs it's got an anemic daily schedule that really depresses the ridership. It's like a less-publicized Worcester Line in terms of hand-wringing about schedule being insufficient for demand. In terms of ridership the CR system should be Providence, Worcester, Lowell(/Nashua)...and everything else small-potatoes by comparison. It's not...only Providence is even close to firing on all cylinders service level-vs.-demand wise.
So, yes,
in spite of New Hampshire there's some reason to be optimistic about this one's prospects in an era where there's not a whole lot of optimism about this one hot mess of a transit system. But emphasis on the
in spite of as far as MA and the semi-autonomous breakaway Republic of Nashua are concerned.
