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.
I totally feel the tone of this piece.
Although I prefer to bike around Springfield, I rode the PVTA G5 downtown and back to visit our museums (FREE TO RESIDENTS) this week and celebrate the ridership diversity I see every time I’m on it.
Happen to know what WRTA’s ridership is in Worcester? Their single-hub setup is notably simpler than PVTA’s.
I would argue that Holyoke, Westfield, Northampton, and Amherst stations are more than just ancillary hubs as this is indeed a truly regional system. Although not BRT, I understand the Route 9 corridor from Northampton to Amherst gets sizeable ridership. The big disappointment, however, is that it takes at least one transfer to get from anywhere in Hampshire County down to anywhere in Springfield.
As a follow-up, I’d highly recommend digging into PVTA’s staff and leadership structure. As with many things “keeping Springfield off folks’ radar,” my sense is that there’s a leadership/marketing story there…
Awesome comment! The G-5 is my favorite for two reasons: it’s what’s left of the Dickinson-Tiffany I used to take downtown all the time as a kid AND, now it stops right in front of my house. The stop is at my front door!
According to this Worcester Telegram piece
https://www.telegram.com/news/20180626/wrta-ridership-decline-is-worst-in-us
The PVTA has about 5x the ridership of WRTA. Again, Worcester is at the center of a bunch of quaint little villages, Springfield is just one of at least 5 cities which, I agree, create a much more regional situation. I called them “ancillary” to highlight that while they look similar to the ART’s only station, they are not the primary one in the PVTA.
On the make-up of PVTA leadership I know next to nothing, I get a kick out of the fact that the chief executive not only doesn’t use the PVTA, she lives in one of the few towns in The Valley that doesn’t even have the most minimal pvta service; Clearly a true Urbanist with her finger on the pulse!!
Thank you for commenting. Someone in Springfield reads my blog! Who knew?
Steve,
I’ve been reading the blog for about a year now; I found it somehow, not totally sure, but I am glad I did. I just moved (begrudgingly) to Windsor CT as my girlfriend works in Hartford and I in Springfield still. Previously I was on Mattoon for a year, before that in East Forest Park, and originally in Sixteen Acres when I first moved to Springfield just over 4 years ago for graduate school. Springfield became my home and I loved it, especially my time on Mattoon.
Anyway, I’ve noticed you accurately refer to this part of New England in regional terms. That is, New Haven-Hartford-Springfield make up a densely populated region rather than 3 separate cities and their own suburbs. I’m curious, then, as to your thoughts on annexation, what it would mean to each independent city, and to the region as a whole. It seems to me that if Hartford incorporated West Hartford, East Hartford, and possibly some other bordering towns (Bloomfield, Windsor, Newington, Glastonbury, Wethersfield) it would reach more than 300,000 people within its city lines, with considerably more corporations considered to be headquartered in Hartford (i.e. Cigna, Colt Firearms, Pratt & Whitney) and therefore offering massive tax dollars to the region. It would also now contribute enormous tax dollars of the high earners (who benefit from being next to Hartford proper) in West Hartford, Glastonbury, etc. to Hartford’s base, while also consolidating the amount of town costs (each has their own fire dept & chief, police, etc.).
I mean, for Hartford to annex this handful of towns would probably put its geographic size close to that of Atlanta (134 sq miles, ~500,000 population). To put it further, Hartford County is about 750 sq miles with close to a million people in it. By comparison Allegheny is about the same geographic size and 1.2 million citizens, with Pittsburgh as its county seat. The narratives on Pittsburgh and Atlanta are much different than Hartford-Springfield-New Haven, I think mostly due to the nature of the cities land base. Because they are larger, they have more residential areas and neighborhoods, which stabilizes the perceived “crime” rate, and their city services are condensed coherently with opportunity to create public projects with the regions interests in mind. Perhaps that’s another reason they get more attention from journalists and we don’t. We are completely misrepresented as a region.
My point is this: doesn’t it seem that this region, with cities technically using a small amount of space in comparison to the region, is structured so that the cities are destined to fail? With each suburb competing against the city, pulling tax dollars (both corporate and income) away from the traditional areas of business, the city proper is left with nothing, and is then blamed for its problems. Hartford is tiny, only about 18 sq miles. Springfield is a bit bigger (33 sq miles) with about 30K more residents. New Haven is in the middle, about 20 sq miles and about as dense as Hartford.
Why are we not talking about regional cooperation? It seems your calls for regional prosperity are on point, but how can we ever get there if our cities are not major metro areas that benefit from occupying larger space? Nowhere else in the country does this issues really exist (and I recognize that New England towns have their own identity and would likely resist this process).
It seems, from a macro perspective, that merging our regional cities with its suburbs, is the first step to a rational urbanist agenda.
This is great stuff. Let me pull some thoughts together on it for next week. I’ll say this: I think the perception creates reality and few people in this awesome region take advantage of all it has to offer as though it were their own.
Looking forward to reading about it. To clarify my points, I’d like state that I don’t think annexation makes sense in every city as an overarching concept. But in a densely populated region like ours, I think the suburbs generally take for themselves and don’t contribute much to the region’s well-being. So the cities are suffering. The reality is that the wealthy suburbs in our region only exist because of Springfield, Hartford, and New Haven (and perhaps Waterbury), and I worry that these cities are in need of a bailout (by annexation) that they are currently getting from federal/state aid anyway.
Obviously I didn’t get to it last week…but I will. I’ve got a backlog of ideas!!