HARTFORD, Conn. — The CTrail Hartford Line commuter service has carried more than 1 million riders since its debut in June 2018, well ahead of original ridership projections.
Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont announced in a Thursday press release that the line carried its millionth rider during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Year-over-year ridership is up 25 percent, with 750,000 passenger trips projected for its second year, surpassing the projected 667,000. November was the line’s biggest single month for ridership, with 70,551 passengers.
Connecticut Department of Transportation Commissioner Jospeh Giulietti attributed the success in part to the coordinated operations on the line by CTrail and Amtrak, which allows passengers to use either carrier at the same ticket price. Weekday service on the route seeks 14 trains in each direction — eight CTrail and six Amtrak trains northbound, and six CTrail trains and eight Amtrak trains southbound.
Just like when most interstate highways were built the traffic starts off slowly but will build as reliability increases. 70,551 riders in one day means at least 40,000 fewer cars driving the same route.
I agree that McGuire’s method of calculating ridership is suspect. But even if the numbers given are true, the overall impact is small. Is there significant reduction of congestion on parallel roads? Huge bumps to the regional economy in this area? Significantly higher air quality? How close does revenue come to covering costs?
Two points:
1) For some reason people on the ground always imagine they are seeing empty trains zooming by. They are not empty.
2) The economic/environmental gains are long term. What would traffic be if it had not been built. New housing and commercial development will come after the 10th year of operation. Not the first year.
Wish the signal maintainer would flip his gate over so it’s correctly oriented.
I seem to recall that this service is provided by a private operator. It would be interesting to see what the farebox recovery figures are. If they are good, this might be the kind of public private partnership that could garner broad bipartisan support.
GERALD – Oh, c’mon! Your comment about ROBERT went a bit too far. ROBERT’s post on this thread (below) may not have been his best. I disagree with you that most of his statements as you say are not good. Even if they are politically motivated, USA is a free country and people are free to have political opinions and to express them.
On the whole I see ROBERT as a good contributor to these pages.
Jacob,
Your math would be correct if those 14 combined trains ran 7 days a week, I suspect that there are less than 14 on Saturday and Sunday…which changes the numbers. Also, just ignore Robert, most of his statements are politically motivated and not based on facts or research(just like this one).
I see you rode the train one time and that provides all the evidence you need to say that the whole thing is such a failure that the CT government has to make up data to keep their failure hidden. Wow, you’re really proven something here….
This has to be a government lie. I rode the train once and it had only 3 passengers (including me) out of Springfield. Several more got on in Hartford but only one coach was open. Other times I have watched the trains from the platform at Berlin and there appeared to be no more than a dozen in each open car. This is simply the government exaggerating the ridership to try and show their stupid idea was a success.
Glenn and Robert,
Actually both of you could be right. A quick rough breakdown of the November ridership numbers suggests an average of 81.3 passengers per train [Monthly total /(28 trains per day X 31 days)]– about 2 bus loads, or 2275 persons per day. The first does not seem good at all but the latter seems okay, though not very impressive. Both seem to be good numbers as a base for initial service on which to grow. . . . It would be nice however to see a comparison to what the ridership was for the each of the two years before the upgrades started.