TESTIMONY

Jim Cameron, Vice Chairman

CT Metro-North Shore Line East Rail Commuter Council

Before the Executive & Legislative Nominations Committee  -  Hartford CT   4/2/02

 

JIM CAMERON: -- I have served on the Metro North Shoreline East Rail Commuter Council for ten years. That group was created, as you know, in 1985 by the Legislature to represent the interests of the 40,000 daily riders on Metro North in Connecticut and more recently, with the addition of riders on Shoreline East.

So we represent railroad passengers all the way from New London to Greenwich, continuing on into New York City. The Branch Lines, New Canaan, Danbury, Waterbury, as well as New Haven.

We meet on a monthly basis with representatives from the Department of Transportation, with Metro North, and with Amtrak which operates the Shoreline East Rail service. I have served as vice chairman of this group for the past seven years.

We work on a budget of zero dollars. We have no money whatsoever. We used to have a small amount that was given to us by the Legislature, but in tight times, that amount was eliminated. So we, members of the committee, are all commuters. We reach into our own pockets to do this job, to communicate with our constituents, many of whom are your constituents. We don't have money to do publications. So we build a web site and I built and operate that and we get 300 new visitors every week who come and learn about mass transit alternatives in the State of Connecticut, use us as the advocates that we hope to be for their complaints, their suggestions, and their concerns regarding rail transportation.

And we meet, as we say, on a regular basis and address anything from the cost of the ride to the schedule of the trains, the parking or lack thereof at the stations, the lack of seats on the trains, the cleanliness of the washrooms, the lack of inter-modality connecting with buses.

We've gone so far as to take on quality of life issues such as the suggestion that we create a quiet car on each train where people can be free from cell phone conversations.

As a result of my work on the Commuter Council, I was also appointed by Senator Eads to the Southwest Corridor Action Council, the group which is monitoring DOT's compliance with your legislation mandating that they come up with a 5% reduction on traffic congestion on I-95 and the Merritt Parkway. And last fall I was elected to serve on the Coastal Corridor Transportation Investment Area which you know is one of the groups advising the Transportation Strategy Board on solutions to the transportation crisis that we have in this state and I work as an alternate to the Transportation Strategy Board's working group on movement of people, which is chaired by Commissioner Spada.

I imagine some of you have questions or issues that you'd like to address, so I'll keep my remarks as brief as I can.

Thank you for your time and consideration and I welcome any questions that I can address.

REP. TONUCCI: Questions? Representative Powers.

REP. POWERS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good morning, Mr. Cameron.

JIM CAMERON: Good morning.

REP. POWERS: I think, actually, we've talked before. I represent Greenwich.

JIM CAMERON: Yes.

REP. POWERS: So I'm very glad to hear you're on the Advisory Board to TSB. That's super. We need a voice.

And changes since 9-11?

JIM CAMERON: Ridership has gone down since 9-11, which is bad news, but also good news. The biggest issue that we're facing now with riders on Metro North and you know, coming from Greenwich, being a little further down the line, we don't have enough seats on the trains. It's standing room only for her constituents to go into their jobs in New York City.

The DOT has been negligent in keeping up with the ridership increases year to year that we have seen. We've seen a 5% increase in ridership because traffic is so bad every year for the past five years.

We haven't ordered a new rail car in ten. We are at a situation now where the average rider on Metro North has a median income of $153,000. Some of them are Greenwich residents. We have millionaires that ride these trains to New York City. They will not stand on a subway-like conditions for an hour to get to their jobs in New York City for the privilege of coming back and paying 4% tax.

If we don't give those people a seat for the privilege of the $200 they're paying a month for their commutation ticket, schools aren't that good in Greenwich that they can't move to Westchester where they have much better rail service. It's so bad now that we're going to start a bus from Ridgefield to take riders on the Danbury branch and put them on a bus and send them over to Katona in Westchester County where they're going to be paying $60 a month less because the fares are more heavily subsidized in New York and they're going to get into New York City twenty minutes faster, which is just going to raise the deficit and raise the vulnerability of those branch lines.

DOT has told us on the Commuter Council that after November there will be another fare increase and there will be cuts in service. And as of 2003, Harry Harris of DOT says he doesn't have enough money to keep the trains running.

So what we're looking at in the long run, is that necessity of ordering 400 new rail cars by the year 2020 which will cost $1.5 - $2 billion.

Now, I know that you have budget problems you're dealing with right now and it's millions of dollars here and tens of millions of dollars there, but I don't think that any of us are - I don't think we're serving the public good by ignoring this longer term huge capital expenditure that we're going to have to make. Forty percent of DOT's budget is still paying debt service from the last time that we neglected public transportation and the Mianus River Bridge collapsed. I don't think we're doing enough and I hope that the TSB, when it comes out with its recommendations, will be taken seriously because they're not going to be politically expeditious. No one's going to want to embrace what I hope the TSB is going to recommend and I'm happy to be part of that process and take the heat. Go ahead, blame me instead of you, but I'm confident that this quality of commutation that people have now is going to get a lot worse before it gets any better.

While I was driving here today - I mean, the fact that I have to drive to get to our State Capitol, and then go down and look at this parking lot, which is 100 yards from a railroad track, which could be offering rail service. DOT had plans five years ago to start commuter rail service from New Haven North to Hartford and beyond and the fact that everybody that works in this building has to drive here or maybe, I hope, take a bus, instead of being able to take a commuter train and get off just down there, I think is sad.

REP. POWERS: Thank you.

JIM CAMERON: You're welcome.

REP. TONUCCI: Senator Harp.

SEN. HARP: Thank you. I notice that you do a lot of media work and I guess in a way it sort of translates into marketing.

What do you think advocates like yourself could do better to raise the level of concern among legislators and the administration as a whole regarding the transportation issue that we have in our state and the importance of rail?

JIM CAMERON: Yeah. Well, I appreciate that question because I think it really gets to one of the things that I hope that the Commuter Council would do much more of and that is getting out there in front of the public and making them aware of some of these issues.

The Coastal Corridor Transportation Investment Area, I helped start a speakers bureau where we're going out and explaining what a TIA and a TSB is and talking about some of the more controversial issues such as value pricing, tolls, etcetera.

You know, the Commuter Council is made up of commuters and most of us work in New York City. We commute into the City every day. We don't get up to Hartford as often as we should or could. So I would welcome the invitation any time that the Transportation Committee, some of you are serving on, is addressing these issues. If you'd like a commuter's point of view, I'd be glad to come up and speak with you. Again, my background is not in engineering or transportation, but over the years I've learned a great deal about how DOT operates and Metro North operates and I have a lot of respect for the people that are running the railroad operation. I think that the larger issue is further up the chain of command where the longer range spending has not been taken into account and that's why we're getting ourselves into the situation much as one of your other speakers spoke about deferred maintenance on the school system. It's going to cost a lot more to fix these problems the longer we wait.

REP. TONUCCI: In the meantime, would an increase of bus shuttle service be of any help?

JIM CAMERON: I'm in favor of anything with wheels and more than one occupant. It doesn't have to have a flanged wheel and a steel rail as far as I'm concerned.

I think some of the things that are being done up in New Britain and Hartford in the construction of busways are exciting. Whether they have application further down in Fairfield County, for example, I'm not sure. I think that the branch lines, in particular, the trains that serve Waterbury and Danbury are the ones that seem to be the most vulnerable to service cuts because of the low mid-day ridership. And I would expect that if those cuts in rail service come about, I would hope I would plead with DOT to at least replace those trains with bus service. We cannot send the wrong message to people if we're trying to solve the transportation crisis by not offering them an alternative.

We have already had one train cut on Shoreline East, a late night train. It didn't have a huge ridership, but it was another reason to give people a choice to say okay, I don't have to drive into work. Even if I stay late at the office, there will be a train I can take.

A few years ago we sent absolutely the wrong message by lowering the gasoline tax. It reduced the amount of money that we had available to subsidize mass transit and it just said to everybody, drive your car, gas is cheaper. When that was proposed, I said the gas tax is unpopular because people don't know how it's being spent. Why not put a sticker at the pump that says, "While you're pumping your gas, you should know you're helping pay for the DMV, the trains, the buses, mass transit."

I think it's the people that are driving SUV's who should be encouraged to seek alternatives and if they really want to drive that SUV, have them help pay for mass transit for those that can't afford a car, let alone an SUV.

REP. TONUCCI: Could more shuttle services to the train, that's what I was mostly referring to.

JIM CAMERON: I apologize. Absolutely. One of the big issues, obviously, is getting people to and from the train. The train service itself is not bad. We did a "meet the commuter" event last week. Most of our Commuter Council meetings are held in the evening. And at the end of a long day of working in the City, probably the last thing a commuter wants to do is go to a nighttime meeting. You know about nighttime meetings.

So I suggested let's go to the commuter. So we got all the Metro North, the DOT people, the Amtrak people. We put them in a bar car on the train and we held a moving meeting and we said, you've got complaints about the railroad service, step forward to the bar car, we're there to answer your questions.

There was a woman who lived in Milford who commuted to Westport. And she could not get a bus in Milford that got her to the train to catch the train she needed to connect with the bus that she needed to in Westport to get to her ultimate destination. Some cities are well served. Greenwich has a shuttle service. Stamford has a shuttle service. But if we don't offer modality, inter-modality, once you get off the train to get to your destination, it's just another reason to have people say I'll take the car.

So yes, we need more - one of the recommendations of the Coastal Corridor Transportation Investment Area is to create a Connecticut transportation authority to get the operation of the buses and the railroads out from under the Department of Highways. DOT.

This is the only state in the country that still operates its trains, the State directly operates the railroad. And it's not because we're leaders and innovative. I think every other state has seen the wisdom of having an independent transportation authority that could say to the bus operators your schedule will mesh with the trains. Instead of having wheels and Connecticut Transit and Greater Bridgeport Regional Transit Authority all operating seemingly on their own.

REP. TONUCCI: Representative Dickman.

REP. DICKMAN: Thank you. Good morning, sir. Welcome.

JIM CAMERON: Thank you.

REP. DICKMAN: I want to just move the other way. Everybody's talking about moving south. And I understand you've solved some of the problems moving south. I live in Fairfield and I have people from Fairfield and Bridgeport, by the way, who go north into -- north or east into New Haven.

And it seems like everybody is neglecting those commuters that are going into New Haven, particularly in the inter-modality thing where once they get into New Haven, they may have an hour, an hour and one-half. It takes them that much longer to get to work in New Haven.

And I hope that you will be looking at two-way traffic and trying to solve the problems that are going the other way too at the same time. It's not as pressing, I admit, as going to the City, but they are there and it would involve getting more people off the roads where needed.

JIM CAMERON: And just following up on Representative Tonucci's question about post 9-11. Yes, ridership into New York City has gone down partly because of the economy, partly because of dislocated jobs, but one of the success stories of Metro North is the reverse commute. More people are coming out to Stamford from the City and the ridership on those trains coming out in the morning up to New Haven has increased. So yes, I think that's as important a service. Even mid-day service. As it is now, if I have to go to a meeting in Bridgeport, there's only one train an hour outside of peak rush hour.

If we could offer greater frequency of service every twenty minutes, every fifteen minutes, almost like subway trains, if you miss one you know there's going to be another, I think that frequency of service would attract riders. The track and the highway are right next to each other and all you have to do is be stuck on I-95 in bumper-to-bumper conditions and see the train come flying through at 85 miles an hour and you've got to go, well, there's the best marketing we could possibly do. But if we offer that frequency of service to the reverse commuter, to the person that lives in Fairfield and maybe working in Meriden. Why not offer that through service so that they can get to their work without getting on the Merritt?

REP. DICKMAN: And one more, sir.

JIM CAMERON: Yes, sir.

REP. DICKMAN: Almost an observation, but maybe a question too. I happen to serve on the Internship Committee, which seem like it has nothing to do with this, but we had two applicants from, I think, one was from Darien and one was from Greenwich, believe it or not, who did not have cars. And --

JIM CAMERON: That's hard to believe.

REP. DICKMAN: It's very hard to believe, but the sad part of it was that they had planned to take the train to come to Hartford every day and I think it became logistically impossible and consequently, we lost what might have been two good interns. I never thought of the problem of people commuting from Fairfield County to Hartford by train until this came up and I know it's a very small thing, but at least it opened my eyes that there are some people who might want to do and we just haven't opened that avenue for people.

So, maybe you will pursue that. I know you expressed a wish to. Maybe you will pursue that too, sir.

JIM CAMERON: I'm in absolute agreement. The only way you can do it now is by Amtrak if the schedule works out that you can actually catch a train along that way.

And the Council is very concerned with what the breakup of Amtrak is going to mean in terms of not only in-state service, but also the capability of getting from Stamford to Washington or Baltimore to do a day meeting or going up to Boston.

Amtrak, as an entity, seems destined for breakup and we have yet to figure out how that's going to effect us.

REP. DICKMAN: And one other question.

JIM CAMERON: Yes, sir.

REP. DICKMAN: I've been advised that the commute between say Greenwich and Hartford is quite expensive, maybe $80, I've heard the figure. Would you please see if you could investigate some way of making it a little less expensive? I know you have to pay for transportation, but it seems that $80 may be a reason for people to say I'd rather take my car for $40, if that's what it is.

JIM CAMERON: I assume that's an Amtrak fare that's being quoted?

REP. DICKMAN: Yes.

JIM CAMERON: Because --

REP. POWERS: (INAUDIBLE-MICROPHONE NOT ON)

JIM CAMERON: Yes. You really have to address that with Amtrak because our enabling legislation really limits us to discussing with DOT and Metro North. Amtrak has its own rail advisory board and they set their own fares the way they wish.

REP. DICKMAN: Alright. Thank you, sir.

JIM CAMERON: You're very welcome.

REP. TONUCCI: Maybe one last question of me, anyway.

You said that monthly you meet with Arthur Spada at DOT and other departments, I guess.

Could you recommend to us what other people should be there, what other departments, possibly legislators, whatever. I mean, just to pull it all together. You said there's a problem with just tying everything -- all the different networks of transportation together.

So what could be done?

JIM CAMERON: Well, two things. Actually, the meetings with Commissioner Spada are the working group of the Transportation Strategy Board on the movement of people, which is separate from the Commuter Council itself.

When the Commuter Council meets on a monthly basis, we do it in various cities that are served by Metro North and Shoreline East, Stamford, New Haven. We've gone up to the Naugatuck Valley, as well too. And when we hold meetings in those communities, we always try to invite the elected officials, the local representatives, state senator, the representatives, as well too, as much to come down and have a chance to meet with these hidden constituents of theirs who are gone into the City or off at work every day to have a chance to hear from them what their day is like and what their commute is like and how it effects the quality of their life.

But I have to say that Metro North, the representatives they send, DOT, and the representatives from Amtrak who attend our monthly meetings are very cooperative, very open and forthcoming in explaining to us so we can explain to commuters the strengths and the weaknesses of their funding issues, their staffing, their equipment and the capital expenses.

REP. TONUCCI: And have you moved in the direction of coordinating the transportation schedules between buses and trains and what have you?

JIM CAMERON: Harry Harris is the Director of Rail Operations from DOT and is also responsible for the buses, as well too and he has been working to re-route many of those buses, which still follow old unused transportation patterns going back to the days of street cars. So yes, I think he is aware of that coordination issues as well, too.

REP. TONUCCI: Thank you.

JIM CAMERON: You're welcome. Thank you very much.