Largely absent from that post — as with many of Alon’s others, honestly — is a meaningful reflection on whether political realities, which are shaped by people who are not always going to make the same decisions that your ridership model or cost-screening tool tells you they should be expected to make, will render the Optimized Recommendation moot in practice.
The post concludes that New England’s rail priorities should be high-speed rail and basically regional rail transformation of the existing commuter rail systems. In a perfect world, yes, those would be the most transformative and generate the most ridership. But HSR ran into a buzzsaw in 2017 when a rather numerically-small, but highly-motivated, pocket of NIMBYs raised hell over it and got their elected officials to back them in opposition. That situation made the topic of HSR untouchable for a decade. And when it comes to electrification of the commuter rail system — one of the core planks of TransitMatters’ concept for Regional Rail transformation — the T is *less* supportive today than it was 5 years ago! So for all TM’s knowledge of best practices and capacity to put together compelling reports with very high-quality visuals to match the research, it apparently doesn’t have enough sway over the ultimate decision-makers to prevent the T from backsliding on such a fundamental aspect of what they’ve ostensibly built up all this organizational infrastructure to be able to push for.
I think this quote from near the end of the post both encapsulates Alon’s perspective here, and shows the point where you see the disinterest in engaging with the political dimension imposes a ceiling on the argument’s real-world usefulness:
“To the person who’d ride the train even if driving were faster, the most important priorities are where train service does not exist, such as across the gap between New London and Wickford Junction. But to the civil servant deciding how to prioritize infrastructure money, it’s more important to invest in trains that can get more riders than just the railfans.”
Of all people, Alon knows civil servants are not steering the ship at that level of decision-making in the United States. Once you clear the basic hurdle of whether a project is worth doing sooner or later, political will plays a much more meaningful role in determining what actually gets prioritized and when it happens.
We didn’t get SCR before a project like the Red-Blue Connector because it was cheaper to build, served more riders, or even was just proposed earlier in time. We didn’t even get the optimal routing of SCR! What we got was, basically, a Promise Kept
. The “railfans” of the South Coast were promised 35 years ago by Gov. Weld that the state would give them commuter rail, and they maintained the expectation over all these years that the promise would eventually be kept. Politicians knew the expectation was out there and that it was a good thing to pay lip service to if they wanted South Coast votes. More importantly, they understood that a high-visibility, big-dollar project like SCR has a political/symbolic value that goes beyond the intrinsic transit value. Even though the number of “railfans” projected to regularly ride SCR may only have amounted to a small mode share (of the degree Alon says isn’t worth focusing on), politicians calculated that a far larger number of voters in the South Coast region probably held “irrational” views that ridership models don’t account for — such as supporting the idea of having an alternative to driving, even if they probably won’t take advantage of that alternative very often — and combined, it meant the constituency for SCR was large enough to warrant pandering and prioritization. That’s how a worthwhile project like SCR can leapfrog a “more deserving” project like Red-Blue Connector.
Compare that situation to the opposite case, with examples like the Reading turnback track and the Blue Hill Ave busway — projects that would add tons of value as transit improvements and seem like great things to prioritize, but which locals have strongly opposed for largely irrational reasons. Most people, politicians and civil servants included, don’t like spinning their wheels and fighting uphill in the face of an “unappreciative” public. You rarely see agencies dig in and fight public opposition unless the project in question is really urgently needed.
We do a lot of things wrong, or at least sub-optimally, in this country when it comes to transit, but if you don’t have the patience to understand/accept/navigate the political context in all its messy and irrational glory, you only have so much room to complain and condemn when seemingly “unworthy” projects cut yours in line.
www.newhavenindependent.org
pedestrianobservations.com
