The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Malloy’s high-cost victory ride on the rails
It’s a long ride on public transit from central Massachusetts to Manhattan for Colin Schimmelfing, a recent college graduate from Northampton, now living in the city. He appreciates the new upgrades along the stretch down the Connecticut Valley to New Haven.
Before that commuter line opened in June, he said, “My parents would pick me up in New Haven.”
His friend Jessye Herrell, from Northampton, now Brooklyn, nodded in agreement as she rode the Springfield-to-New Haven rail Thursday afternoon. Up the aisle, Andre Shepley, a tech employee and grad student heading from his hometown of Springfield back to, yeah, Brooklyn, was in the same boat, er, train.
Okay, great. The CTRail line — with 17 round trips a day between New Haven and Hartford, and a dozen round trips from the state capital to Springfield — makes traveling to, from and through central Connecticut cheaper and easier — compared with the old, limited Amtrak service.
But what do we make of it? At a cost of $769 million to build, and an estimated $44 million to run in its first year, was it worth it?
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy says yes, emphatically. He rode the line from Hartford to Springfield in that same car Thursday along with the U.S. Representatives from both cities, celebrating the service as part of his victory tour, or shall we say, legacy tour.
More on how the money breaks down in a bit. Suffice to say, it’s a hefty perride subsidy. Malloy and the congressmen — both senior members of the committee that controls spending — talked effusively about the need to connect cities, transitoriented development and the economic future.
Schimmelfing said it best, assessing the commuter line as he passed through a state that’s been pretty much a blur for him, as a college student in Pennsylvania and now a resident of the Upper East Side.
“I always thought of Connecticut as a bedroom community for New York. This feels a little bit more like it’s got something going on,” he said, passing the historic Windsor Locks Canal. “That would make me more likely to want to live there. That’s why people are moving to cities.”
Ah, cities. In Schimmelfing’s view, it’s about the ability to live in a place where he and his partner can both commute to good jobs, not necessarily in the same place.
What’s the price of that if these young, highly educated people start to want to live in Connecticut rather than pass through, or, worse, exit never to return?
“It’s really important for people who come from where I come from,” said Shepley, who’s in a grad program at Columbia University in New York, and said some of his friends from Springfield have jobs in Connecticut.