Analysis: Garage Subverts State, City Goals

The Independent’s transit guru studies the data and weighs in.

Advocates have become accustomed to arguing — not wrongly, in this writer’s opinion — that the garage would have a negative effect on the city in numerous ways, from built environment to air quality, street safety, and even tax base. And it seems that the new Lamont administration may be listening.

And listen they should. While the garage issue has long been framed as a city vs. state conflict, the truth is that building a second garage not only aggravates existing issues in New Haven and negatively impacts the city, but is undergirded by poor analysis and a simplistic understanding of travel patterns, not to mention the way it represents a large investment that contradicts and undermines the state​’s own goals and alternative investments.

They Come From … Where?

Anti-garage advocates have long made the argument (most recently on p. 24 of the Urban Design League’s report) that the new garage contradicts the state’s expressed goals on climate, resiliency, smart growth, and transit-oriented development. That’s true, but it’s also — unfortunately — pretty much standard operating procedure for state governments, even in liberal states, to make no more than token gestures toward aligning investments with idealistic goals.

Perhaps more striking is the extent to which, in both analysis and the very idea of building, the garage project not only fails to coordinate with but actively sidelines alternative options that the state controls: local transit, the Hartford Line, and Shore Line East.

As captured in the 2016 Environmental Impact Evaluation (EIE), the planner’s basic tool for advancing a capital project, the state’s case for building the new garage consists of two basic points that the state maintains follow logically one after another:

1. The current Union Station garage is at capacity.
2. Therefore demand exists for more parking at Union Station.

However, this analysis is too simplistic on both the demand and supply sides. First, the EIE fallaciously treats demand for parking at Union Station as a single, fixed quantity. As anyone who uses the garage knows, it is occupied by the cars of people making numerous different types of trips, from numerous different geographic areas.

There are everyday commuters, the type who would use a monthly pass; occasional commuters; day-trippers headed for New York City on Metro-North; and people using the garage for long-term parking for intercity trips on Amtrak.

Some, presumably, begin their trips in New Haven proper. But aside from the commuter category, most probably originate elsewhere.

I say ​“probably” because the EIE doesn’t break down or analyze where people parking at the Union Station garage are coming from. The basic tool to evaluate the necessity of the project fails to include one of the most fundamental analyses of actual demand.

Since CTDOT didn’t attempt this analysis, we can try it ourselves.

Even without documentation in the EIE, we are not totally bereft of data on this topic. SCRCOG’s excellent 2015 Regional Transit-Oriented Development Study provides a basic analysis of mobility patterns around New Haven’s rail stations (warning: gory math ahead. Skip ahead for a summary).

They estimate from Census American Community Survey data that around 3 percent of workers who live within three miles of Union Station (which covers virtually all of New Haven and a large part of West Haven) access rail as their primary mode of travel.

According to Census LEHD data from 2015 (the most recent year available) the number of people living in that radius and commuting to work elsewhere — the demographic most likely to use rail — is 37,684.

If we accept the Census estimate that 3 percent of those people use rail as their primary travel mode, we arrive at a figure of 942 ​“locals” who use trains. Even if all of them were to use Union Station (one of three stops within the radius, the other two being State Street and West Haven), and all were to arrive by driving alone, the demand for parking from locals would amount to 202 spaces less than what exists in the current Union Station garage and neighboring surface lot.

And it is likely that the percentage of commuters who drive to access the train in New Haven is actually lower. A 2014 presentation on a Metro-North ridership survey suggests that only 51 percent of Manhattan-bound commuters, and only 29 percent of those traveling to an intermediate station, drive alone to their station of origin.

That survey covered all New Haven Line stations, including those in much more suburban areas, so presumably the percentages at Union Station are even lower.

In summary, it is unlikely that ​“locals” driving to Union Station account for a dominant percentage of the parking demand in the existing garage and lot. 

The SLE/Hartford Line Alternative

And yet, those 1144 spaces do fill up every day — which means the Union Station parking is attracting significant numbers of trips from beyond the immediate New Haven area, most likely both for commute and non-commute trips (the latter of which planners have notoriously poor data on).

We can get a sense of where some of the commute-related demand is from a graphic included in the 2007 MTA/Metro-North Origin-Destination Survey:

Metro-North sees significant demand (or saw; this data is now 12 years old, but I haven’t been able to find anything more recent that is public) from riders beyond its easternmost station in New Haven. But, significantly, much of it is from areas that are served either by Shore Line East or by the new-and-improved Hartford Line.

The key understanding, then, on the demand side is that the demand is not for parking at Union Station. It’s for ways to get on trains toward New York City and beyond.

Riders from beyond New Haven do have rail options for the first, beyond-New-Haven leg of their trip, but they’re ignoring those options in favor of driving to Union Station to park and take the more frequent rail service from there. That is to say, the poor state of service on SLE and the Hartford Line — with bad frequency presumably being the main determining factor — is actually suppressing existing latent demand for rail service, not to mention the possibility of capturing more in the future.

But that doesn’t have to be the case. In fact, that observation points to the second analytical failing of CTDOT’s approach: the EIE does not include in its alternative analysis options to improve transit connections instead of building a new garage. (In plannerese, we’d say it doesn’t include a Transportation Systems Management — road improvements — or Transportation Demand Management component).

As I noted at the beginning of this article, this is particularly surprising because the state of Connecticut runs, and has invested significant money into, two rail operations that could serve the purpose of ​“feeding” riders into connections toward New York at New Haven Union Station: Shore Line East and the Hartford Line.

Notoriously — as I have written here — these railroads are very much not without their challenges. But that’s precisely the point: building a massive new garage in New Haven without considering the possibility of leveraging their existence instead not only is bad analysis, but actively undercuts their own potential (and the state’s rather large investments in them) to shift Connecticut toward more sustainable mobility options.

Unlike building a garage on prime urban land in New Haven, making Shore Line East and the Hartford Line more useful does not come with a major opportunity cost to the host municipality.

How To Get There

CTDOT claims a noble purpose in building the second garage at Union Station: getting more people on trains heading toward New York or beyond.

The problem is that the garage isn’t the only, or even the best, way to do that.

Rather than pursuing the garage at all costs, the state should reexamine its approach to rail access, choosing an approach that utilizes and improves the existing Shore Line East and Hartford Line infrastructure so that potential riders from the very wide area that currently funnels into Union Station — all along the Shore Line and up and down the Connecticut River as far as the Pioneer Valley — can park closer to home, rather than on prime urban land, and ride trains to connect instead.

Indeed, such an approach would likely prove cheaper for riders as well if the state implements highway tolls.

Independent commenters have pointed out that current Hartford Line/SLE service is insufficiently frequent or reliable to use as a feeder into New Haven. Luckily, there is a laundry list of smaller, but already planned and relatively achievable, projects that CTDOT can carry out to make this plan of action plausible, the point being to add additional rail and parking capacity along both SLE and the Hartford Line so as to intercept Union Station park-and-riders further out.

Taken together, these projects may add up to more than the immediate costs of the $60 million garage, but they have significant benefits on their own. The goal, should be to see trains to both New London and Springfield every half-hour all day long, including on weekends, matching Metro-North’s off-peak frequency.

These specific alternatives include:

• Finish whatever work is necessary to allow electric trains on Shore Line East. Originally, SLE was supposed to receive surplus M8 railcars from the ​“main” New Haven Line; instead, various bureaucratic snafus, many of them involving Amtrak, have held up that project, and Metro-North has put all of the existing M8s to work handling booming traffic on the mainline.

But a supplementary order will start arriving soon, and it’s time for CTDOT and Amtrak to put their differences aside and finish the variety of small capital projects necessary to allow M8s to run east of New Haven, including power improvements, additional platforms at stations where there is only one, and the like. Not only will shiny new cars relieve the enormous reliability problems that SLE has suffered from recently, but they will speed trains up considerably and allow more diesel locomotives and cars to be shifted to the Hartford Line.

• Complete the additional planned stations and track improvements on the Hartford Line, particularly North Haven. The single largest remaining project on the Hartford Line, fixing the bottleneck through Hartford Union Station, will be undertaken as part of the I‑84 reconstruction project and is a number of years off. In the meantime, though, the state should pursue funding for the other planned ​“infill” stations — North Haven, Newington, West Hartford, and Enfield — with a particular eye toward implementing them in order of their potential to relieve parking pressure at New Haven Union Station.

The state has budgeted money for designing these stations but not for building them; redirecting the $60 million designated for the garage would represent a nice down payment on getting them finished. (In the interim, the state should also take a swing at bringing costs down; these five stations are budgeted at an average of $49.2 million apiece, while here in Boston the MBTA built four barebones, but accessible, infill stations on the Fairmount Line for a total of $79.2 million.)

The state should develop a scheduling and marketing strategy that emphasizes the possibility of people from the I‑91 corridor, the Hartford region, and beyond parking ​“closer to home” and making an easy transfer from a Hartford Line train to Metro-North or Amtrak at New Haven.

• Modernize various aspects of rail and other transit operations. CTDOT’s transit operations have fallen behind the curve of modern practice in a number of ways, as Roger Senserrich has documented. Modernizing and streamlining their practices makes all types of coordination, including the relatively complicated agreements necessary to connect local, regional, and intercity rail, easier.

• Improve local bus service. Intercepting demand for parking isn’t only for trips originating in distant areas (although that’s most important in terms of reducing overall car travel). New Haven’s bus system continues to serve the city poorly, although the MOVE New Haven study is a strong first step toward fixing it. Any such fixes should be carried forward with the intention of enabling easy bus-rail connections for regional travel.

The Big Picture

The general lesson is to remember to think about transportation systems holistically.

Demand for driving and parking is neither simple nor fixed. It has to be understood as nuanced and dynamic, and can be influenced by policy.

The relatively cheap improvements to rail service proposed here should be understood not as stand-alone ​“rail” projects, but as an alternative to things like the second garage and spending billions on widening I‑95. The failure to think holistically is what has allowed the garage project to hang around through many failed attempts; it’s time to know why, in addition to the impacts on New Haven, it’s important to put it away for good now.

Indeed, now is an opportune time to discuss this type of category shift. The prolonged failure of analysis, creativity, and commitment to green goals that has marked the state’s attempt to build a new Union Station garage illustrates a particular type of error that has long plagued American transportation policy and that today, in the face of aggressive climate change, represents an existential threat.

As Steven Higashide of the Transit Center think tank wrote recently in analyzing the proposed Green New Deal, ​“an ​“all-of-the-above” approach to surface transportation doesn’t cut it. It’s not enough to build more transit, as long as federal policy continues to subsidize the highway-and-sprawl machine.”

The garage project represents the continuation of a paradigm in which policymakers try to generate mode shift to cleaner modes by providing new options, while also continuing to add road capacity and facilities for more driving. That’s progress from the approach Connecticut took during the 1950s and ​‘60s, when the state abandoned much of its rail network and leveled entire swaths of its cities for freeways; but in the face of an unprecedented threat like global warming, it’s not good enough. It’s time for a clean (pun intended) break. And it’s just as important to put that into action at the local level, though reconsideration of projects like this, as it is at the grand level of federal policy. It’s time to focus Connecticut’s transportation ambitions where they can best fulfill the needs of the future, not of some poorly analyzed present.

Thanks to Roger Senserrich for providing comments on this article. 

Sandy Johnston is a transportation planner in Boston, where he lives in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood with his partner and two cats. He grew up in New Haven and is still a regular visitor. Sandy holds a Master’s in Regional Planning and a Certificate in Urban Policy from SUNY Albany and B.A.s from Columbia and the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. Sandy blogs at Itinerant Urbanist and can be found opining on Twitter @sandypsj.