While I love driving, I prefer driving on roads without other cars, thus I’m a huge fan of mass transportation, especially in the form of trains, planes and zeppelins. Then there’s the old fashiony trolley. The venerable Boston T, and the San Diego Trolley system work great. I think Connecticut could use a more subway/metro underground system. Montreal has turned metro and retail into an art form.
The efficiency of running on rails instead of on roads is that the frequency and speed of people moving is better to accommodate the fluctuations of work schedules and mobility. From an aesthetic point of view, the monorail system installed in Las Vegas and soon Austin provide a forward looking take on mass transportation. While there’s a history of extensive trolleys in Connecticut, we should also be open to other rail systems.
The Hartford Courant has this to say:
Nearly two decades ago, the architect and planner Jack Dollard sketched an idea for a Farmington Avenue corridor, which he suggested could include a trolley that ran from Farmington through Hartford and on to the University of Connecticut.
In 1990 such an idea was visionary, if not fanciful. Today, cities around the country are building — or rebuilding — trolley or light rail systems on that scale. From Charlotte and Memphis to Portland, Ore., and San Diego, from big Boston to small Kenosha, Wis., cities are rediscovering trolleys.
This month, a transportation consultant will begin studying the feasibility of reviving New Haven’s defunct streetcar system. The study is being paid for with a $150,000 federal grant administered by the South Central Connecticut Regional Council of Governments, The New Haven Independent website reports. Hartford and the state’s other large cities ought to be engaged in similar studies.
The state once had more than 1,000 miles of trolley tracks on its streets and other rights of way. They were removed, mostly in the 1940s, to make way for the age of the automobile. But with soaring gas prices, global warming, serious air pollution in highway corridors and time lost due to traffic congestion, it appears we may have had it right the first time.
Streetcars are clean, inexpensive, efficient and usually more popular than buses. A light rail system can carry vastly more people than a congested swath of single-occupant cars, and lessen the seemingly inexorable need for parking. Continuing to widen the highways is futile, as is evident from the Q Bridge project in New Haven. The state plans to spend $1.5 billion to rebuild and expand the elevated bridge that carries I-95 across New Haven Harbor, even though the new bridge will have the same level of congestion the old one does in just three years. We need to do something differently.
Mr. Dollard’s idea — a light rail line running from Farmington to Mansfield — begins to look very smart.
The problem I have with this editorial support for a Trolley system, is that they are encouraging the infrastructure investment in precisely the area that Fairfield County tax dollars have been subsidizing. The economic engine of Connecticut is Fairfield County, not the Farmington/Mansfield corridor. Let’s see some smart economic/transportation policy instead of the same old tactic of pouring millions into upstate suburbs.
source: The Courant, Cities Redisover Tolleys, December 7, 2007
