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Your Search Yielded No Results

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I ended last week’s post with a snarky comment about Asheville and Grand Forks. Right on cue, as I’m doing some Saturday afternoon light reading in preparation for today’s contribution to my ouevre, I see this:

It’s too perfect: A.R.T.. And it doesn’t mean what you think it means. It’s “Asheville Redefines Transit”. Wow, The oh, so important story at the heart of this article summarized and linked to on this website which caters to city planners all over the world? Asheville is buying seven 30′ long diesel-hybrid buses instead of 50′ long electric buses. And spending some cash to renovate this:

a.r.t.’s sole transit station.

Spectacular. That really is great news for Asheville’s transit patrons who count on “art” for over a million transit rides a year:

What does this have to do with Rational Urbanism?

I started this blog just over 7 years ago because I couldn’t find anything with an urbanist’s perspective written about Springfield or cities like Springfield. There was (and is) always plenty to read about the superstar cities, and trendy cities, and even a fair amount about rapidly declining cities, but almost nothing about the places in the middle; so I decided to do it myself. It hasn’t caught fire, or even gone viral very often which perhaps explains why Planetizen and CityLab continue to ignore Springfield and places like it.

But for anyone who is interested in, let’s say, public transportation, there are some pretty interesting things going on in this northeast provincial backwater. For comparison, here are some numbers:

Yes, Springfield’s PVTA (Yes, that’s Pioneer Valley Transit Authority, think of the “V” as a “U” and remind yourself that 1) most of the PVTA’s riders are Hispanic, 2) “The Pioneer Valley” was just a name given to this region by marketing experts hoping to get vacationers to stop here on their way to the Berkshires, and 3) apparently anything is better than putting “Springfield” in your name!) has ten times the ridership of a.r.t..

And apart from these two ancillary stations in Holyoke and Westfield:

Both somewhat recently opened, the PVTA has only been using this little ol’ place as its primary hub for two years:

And just opened this new facility:

And the Union Station hub has added at 14 daily trains on two new services going north and south, and creating increased east-west service appears to be on the front burner in Boston.

I mean, it’s not 7 whole new buses or anything, but it seems like a tiny little revolution in transit for a region of 3/4 of a million people.

This goes for the MGM development too, by the way. A corporation with a name perhaps second only to Disney in entertainment plops down a billion dollar development in the heart of a struggling formerly industrial city in New England and…I haven’t seen any in depth coverage on it show up anywhere but in local news outlets. Leaving aside that the world’s largest rail car manufacturer decided to place its North American headquarters here as it produces rolling stock for Boston, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, (maybe that belongs in the transit story?), or the redevelopment of one of the oldest hotels in the United States along with an amazing baroque style theater, just the MGM story has about 10 angles to it. Which I’m trying to get to, by the way, but it’s almost like my job as a Spanish teacher gets in the way.

It seems that what’s happening, and what’s not happening here doesn’t hold any interest for the editors at CityLab or even those who mostly link to the content of local media (like Planetizen). 

I’ll take this to the bank, though. There is no better place to be in the month of September in the entire world than Springfield, Massachusetts. It’s not just the Basketball Hall of Fame and its yearly induction of the greatest players and coaches ever in the world’s second most popular sport, it’s the Mattoon Street Arts festival, Glendi, and JamFest, and, of course, the largest fair in the east, New England’s great state fair, The Eastern States Exposition. I can literally look out my back window and see Six Flags New England, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, and MGM Springfield, and I can walk out my front door and be at “The Big E”, on foot, in a few minutes. 

Next month the symphony starts its new season, the Thunderbirds are back in the nest at the Mass Mutual Center, and it will be time to settle in and watch the leaves change along the longest navigable river in New England and up and down the foothills of the Berkshires. Sure, we don’t have more craft breweries per capita than anyplace else in the world, but maybe dulling your senses in the Pioneer Valley in autumn would be a pretty stupid thing to do.

Take a Flyer

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The pilot program Valley Flyer train service began last week bringing something like commuter service to the communities north of Springfield. I say “something like” commuter rail service because, perhaps as a pilot program should, it only expands two way travel options to a very small subset of potential users of the corridor north of the newly reopened Union Station.

In searching for news and opinion on the Valley Flyer I happened upon an incredibly nerdy but rather informative old fashioned message board devoted to the “Amtrak Northeast Corridor, Springfield Shuttle, Regional, and Greenfield Route”; over 100 pages of experts and rail enthusiasts opining on everything imaginable and quite a few perhaps unimaginable things. As often happens, having access to the back and forth of people who are highly focused on a particular topic helped at the very least to expand my awareness of my ignorance on topics like the interplay between freight and passenger service, equipment adaptability and storage, and crew accommodation.

Turns out you can’t just make more trains appear wherever, whenever and have them go any which way at any time! Who knew?

So with a nod to the realities of expanding service on a busy rail corridor I want to lay out what this new service facilitates, what it doesn’t, and what I would love to see it turn into if the rate of use of the new service appears to warrant it.

When CTRail began its New Haven to Hartford, then Springfield, service it became possible to get to New York City reliably on a daily basis in the morning. For people leaving from Union Station in Springfield that also meant that commuting to a job in Hartford or New Haven by rail became a legitimate possibility assuming that said employment was situated either near a handful of train stations or was connected, reasonably, by other transit. Given the number of employers in downtown Hartford and New Haven and the close economic ties which have been shown to exist along the I-91 corridor this wouldn’t be an altogether unusual circumstance. 

I would add that, despite the existence of “Super-commuters”, I can’t imagine someone living in Western Massachusetts commuting every day of the week to a job in New York. For someone who travels to the city say once or twice a week, however, I imagine this service is highly useful.

What this service has never done is allowed people from Connecticut to get to jobs in Springfield before 10 a.m.. Obviously Springfield’s downtown doesn’t have the density of employment of Hartford, but Union Station does offer excellent service on the PVTA’s two primary axes of service to Mass Mutual, Baystate Medical Center, Mercy Medical Center, American International College, and Springfield Technical Community College to name just the most prominent institutions.

Unfortunately, this expansion of service not only does nothing to remediate that, it perpetuates it.

Using the Valley Flyer will give people in Greenfield the chance to go by rail round trip to NYC in a single day. It could also provide transportation to and from a morning meeting anywhere from Northampton south to New Haven provided you were done and ready to return by early afternoon. If, however, you wanted to commute daily anywhere along that same NoHo-NHvn stretch you wouldn’t be able to return until after 9 p.m.; hardly a reasonable option.

So, putting CTRail and the Valley Flyer together: you can commute from Springfield to points south on a daily basis; you can get to Springfield after 10 a.m. from Connecticut and return in the early evening; and you can get to New York City in the early morning from Greenfield, Northampton, and Holyoke and return that same evening. What you can’t do is commute into Springfield, Holyoke, or Northampton from any direction. From the south there is no morning service which extends north of Springfield and what service exists to Springfield arrives after the start of normal business hours. If you leave from anyplace north of Springfield then you cannot commute to Springfield or any points south because the only service after mid-afternoon doesn’t depart New Haven until almost 8 o’clock in the evening, departing even later then from any other location.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is subsidizing the Valley Flyer service, and the stated goal was to provide service for people north of Springfield to get to New York and back in a single day. This does that. Maintaining and expanding the service beyond the two year window the state has funded will require that ridership reach 24,000 trips a year. When you add up the number of trains each way given 4 trains on weekdays and 2 on weekends and holidays that means an average of around 20 passengers per train. That’s certainly not a ridiculously high bar, and while the populations they service might be very different, overall demand for this current service isn’t an unreasonable barometer to use when trying to get a sense of the other.

For me, the end goal of this process is a transformation of land use in the valley. If a convenient, reasonably priced, trustworthy fixed transit corridor becomes available then it is reasonable to assume that businesses, for the convenience of employees and customers, will want to locate along that corridor; there is no dearth of commercial, manufacturing, and retail space from Northampton to Springfield which is a reasonable distance from their respective train stations. If employment begins to aggregate along the corridor not only will demand, and therefore level of service increase, but demand for housing along the corridor will increase and a critical mass of all of the above will transform the region into an even more vibrant and resilient ecosystem. 

I was reading an article about the concept of the mega-region. In it the author mused on the supposed Washington-Boston megaplex, but opined that the Hartford and Springfield links in that chain were dubious because they lacked institutions of higher learning. Sure, apart from the University of Connecticut, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Hampshire, Elms, Westfield State, Springfield College, American International College, Western New England College, the University of Hartford, Saint Joseph’s, Trinity College, Albertus Magnus, Wesleyan, and a few others there aren’t any colleges around here. It is true that unlike Harvard, Brown, and Yale they are not Ivy League and mostly are not within the walkable footprint of the city.

Making Springfield and Hartford more obviously connected to the institutions of higher learning in their corresponding, geographically very small, metropolitan areas could change facile assessments like this. Not all of the colleges and universities associated with Boston are walking distance to city hall, but they feel as though they all form part of a whole. In the Knowledge Corridor they don’t yet seem at all connected to their closest urban center. 

As a final note, I saw on CityLab and at Planetizen articles on the expansion of bus service in Birmingham, Alabama. Birmingham is one of those cities and metros which is theoretically “bigger” than Springfield and so gets more attention. It has a population of 100,000 more people…spread out over literally 10x the area! I checked the numbers, the Birmingham-Jefferson County bus system has 1/3 the ridership of Springfield’s PVTA. In just over a year Springfield has seen the reopening of a spectacular intermodal transportation center with now two expansions of train service and a significant relocation of its local bus maintenance and operations headquarters, and the introduction of a (poorly designed and nearly unused) free downtown “Loop” service and…not a mention in any of the usual online sources. 

Being wedged in between Boston and New York makes being taken seriously as an urban area very difficult. As I’ve mentioned ad nauseam the Springfield to New Haven corridor taken together has a larger population than Denver but in half the area; I’d say that makes this place kind of urban. Massachusetts and Connecticut, together, are making some really intelligent relatively low cost experiments designed to expand transportation options in this area. It seems like the kind of thing that might spark interest in people who publish stuff on walkability in Asheville and Rail Trails in Grand Forks.

Slum Lords

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Most of the discussion I hear regarding affordable housing is so foreign to my personal experience here in inland New England that I realize that I have very little to offer in the way of helpful input. People in this region can spend ridiculous amounts of money on housing if they choose, but many people use the Springfield Strategy or its variants: the Holyoke Strategy, the Chicopee Strategy, or even the Ware/Warren Strategy if they want more of the feel of Appalachia in their life. 

As far as the poor are concerned, the aforementioned cities are nowhere near their peak populations and housing options exist in what appear to be ever growing numbers. One Springfield developer in particular, Gordon Pulsipher, has already created a handful of entire neighborhoods of gorgeous apartment buildings by combining tax credits for both historic preservation and affordable housing. In doing so he has given the city these streetscapes which look for all the world like affluent locations in Manhattan or Brooklyn. As an aside I sometimes wonder if he has a secret plan to corner the market on these places and when the “affordable” restrictions time out he’ll be left with thousands and thousands of units of market rate housing at a time when, in this fantasy of mine, walkable urbanism becomes all the rage in western New England. 

That one example aside, problems regarding housing for the poor in this region strike me as being very similar to the claim that Springfield is a food desert; being poor stinks. Everything is more difficult when you’re poor because it is definitionally having fewer resources to bring to bear to do things. With that firmly understood I would say that this region is one in which being poor makes finding housing less onerous than in many other regions of the country.

With that far too extensive preface out of the way, I was struck this summer by a weirdly inverted situation regarding the passing of housing from one economic and social class to another. Often I have heard in the conversation of affordable housing that one should not build housing for the poor intentionally. The more natural process is to construct housing for the middle and upper classes, who have the resources to create demand, and allow those homes, apartments, and condominiums to slowly work their way down to the poor once their style and condition are less suited to those with more resources.

I live in a townhouse which began its life as a domicile for the upper class; the deed to my home includes an easement (I believe is the term) which allows my servants to access Union Street from the rear of my property by passing through the back of the townhouses at 82 and 84 Maple Street. My house became a rooming house in the early 20th century, a single family home again in the 70’s, and was a law office from 1980-2008. 

What I saw in Cold Spring, New York was altogether different; this was housing for the working classes, the moiling and toiling factory workers of the West Point Foundry. Today these are smallish unassuming houses, some of which are valued at over a half a million dollars. These are homes on small lots which were built out of necessity with minimal artistry or pretense:

The property taxes on these homes are over $7,000 a year with Zillow estimated mortgage payments of $2,000 a month.


I have no idea what this means, if indeed it means anything. I suppose it might teach a little humility; who knows what things in the built environment and beyond future generations might view as of great worth?