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High-speed rail and the challenge of doing big things
Article below featured in The Hour, Stamford Advocate, CT Post, New Haven Register, Greenwich Time, Darien Times, and NewTimes
The instinct is to roll your eyes; to say, as one mayor did, “This is not something that will ever happen.” A hundred-billion-dollar plan to bring a train under Long Island Sound connecting New York City to Boston will do that.
Its supporters, though, are serious. To them, it’s about global competitiveness, meeting the moment for racial equity and taking on the challenge of climate change. It may be that the United States doesn’t do big projects anymore — the days of the Interstate Highway System and the moon landing are far in the past. But whether we can do so again isn’t a matter of preference, they say, but of necessity.
“I don’t think we have a choice,” says Bob Yaro, former president of the Regional Plan Association who is helping lead the push for what’s being called the North Atlantic Rail project.
The centerpiece is a New York to Boston connection in 100 minutes with the goal of a closer economic interdependence within the Northeast. That’s the part that involves a tunnel under the Sound and what would be years of environmental studies before work could begin, and might not even be the hardest part of the journey. That would be east from Hartford to Providence, with a stop at UConn, that would require new rights of way, which is a nice way of saying they’ll need to go through people’s backyards or parks, guaranteeing some level of opposition nearly every step of the way.
But all that is in the future. The North Atlantic Rail plan is proposed in stages, and — key for Connecticut — the first part would be to upgrade existing service in the state, including branches to Danbury and Waterbury. Even if the plan stopped there, it would be a boon for Connecticut.
The Waterbury line, for instance, includes stops at some of the most distressed communities in the state, all of which would benefit from more frequent, more reliable service. Naugatuck Valley officials have spent decades arguing that the key to their communities’ rebirth is better train service, and this could be a way to get there.
The NAR plan would take this idea much further. The decline seen in former factory towns in the Valley can be witnessed around the Northeast in midsize cities that lost their jobs, along with a reason for being, and have never fully recovered. It’s not just Bridgeport and Waterbury, but Springfield, Mass., and Bangor, Maine, and dozens of others.
The Northeast has plenty of wealth, but the growth has been concentrated in Boston and New York and their immediate vicinities. Reconnecting midsize cities that have missed out on generations’ worth of prosperity could have wide-ranging impacts. The implications for equity are potentially huge as many of those downtrodden cities are home to large Black and Hispanic populations.
Just as important is the climate aspect. Unchecked climate change will affect everyone, and reforming transportation — cutting emissions — is only one policy we need to pursue. Connecting people via train rather than car would be a big climate win, though how effective it would be in a country defined by sprawl is a difficult question. To be truly effective, we’d need density, too, but doing that on a large scale might be harder than a hundred-billion-dollar train.
Beyond the money — which, to be fair, is a huge sticking point — the big question is not whether it’d be nice to have such a project as NAR come to fruition. It would have many positive effects, as evidenced by the speed with which the rest of the world is designing and completing projects of this ilk.
The question is whether we’re up to it. Backers like Yaro and Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin cite other projects that seemed insurmountable but ultimately got done, including the Big Dig in Boston, the Tappan Zee replacement in New York and the cleaning of Boston Harbor. Impressive as those were, none presented quite the level of challenges the NAR would face, where a potentially project-ending problem lies around every corner.
Organizers say they’re prepared. They want to avoid lawsuits and stay away from warring bureaucracies, taking on problems before they arise. More important, they want to bury the idea that this country doesn’t do big things anymore.
“Throwing up our hands — that’s just not how we’re going to succeed in this century,” Yaro said.
Hugh Bailey is editorial page editor of the Connecticut Post and New Haven Register. He can be reached at hbailey@hearstmediact.com.