New England Scene

By Charles J. Stokes

The plight of the New Haven calls for a drastic solution. But what solution? And, quite frankly, who pays for it?

Just how bad the plight is can be judged from the fact that probably no major fare change for passenger service will make any real difference. Some experts have estimated that even if fares were lowered to zero and some form of general tax were substituted for ticket sales, there would still not be enough net benefit to make it worthwhile.

As it stands, the New Haven is really three railroads. First of all, it is a freight carrier between Boston and New York and along the shore route for cities in between—and for Springfield, Worcester and Hartford off the main line. Trucks take most of this traffic.

Secondly, it is a commuter railroad for Westchester County in New York and Fairfield County in Connecticut.

And thirdly, it is inter-city passenger carrier between New York and Boston. Not to mention, the remaining commuter service in the Boston area.

The commuter services with their morning and evening rushes and long idle periods in between produce great losses. And though the Boston & Maine experiments showed that better service at the right times along with reduced fares could bring the passenger back to the railroad, not enough money was made to cover the out-of-the-pocket costs of the line.

Commuter services have stiff competition from highways and even from subsidized rapid transit in Boston and New York. Some form of coordination between the private automobile—better parking facilities at low cost plus more frequent service on the in-town transit system and the railroad may be the final answer.

In that light, a Tri-State Transportation Authority for the New York Region makes sense. It could operate all rail services including subway-elevated in coordinated form.

In Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has authority to work with the Boston and Maine in some form of coordination but no specific provision was made for the New Haven or the old Boston and Albany.

Coordination means that transport is treated as a unit. And it also means that funds can be more equitably spread around among the various kinds of transport.

The fact of the matter is that the rail crisis can be traced directly to our discovery that the gasoline tax was an efficient way of financing highway construction. And to the success of the automobile associations in keeping this goldmine working only for one form of transport.

Highways cost much more per mile than similar rail facilities with much heavier passenger capacity. Since except for an occasional toll road, the services are furnished “free” while that of the railroad and rail rapid transit appear to be expensive in contrast, the public has come to prefer what is in reality the most expensive solution to the problem of getting from home to work and back, as well as around the nation.

But no real solution which favors one mode of transport as against any other can ultimately be successful. Good economics calls for regarding the problem as one. And building the final answer around the effective use of each means of transport. Thus the New Haven’s problem is not really its own. But part of a much larger but in some ways much easier one to solve, if we can only see it that way.