There’s a bill working its way through the New Hampshire legislature that prohibits funding commuter rail in any form with taxes on GraniteState residents. Pass or fail, there’s another Boogey-they-them thing (see, I didn’t say man) that might derail it. Something they insisted on for months.
It is this thing the Left wanted to make more permanent.
No, it’s not the virus socialism itself, though that did put a kink in public transportation revenues. Mandating remote work and learning was that thing they made you do, which could be another nail in the commuter rail coffin.
The work from home lockdown, quarantine, zoom-meeting culture fostered by the COVID Cult – primarily center Left control freaks, and their army of Karens-has made the idea of commuting at all an archaic construct. And between investments in broadband infrastructure and green wolves crying planetary doom, the home office has become more desirable than ever.
Why put on pants when you can teleconference from the comfort of your own wherever?
Related: Amtrak Wish-List Includes Rail into NH No One Will Use
All of these things are well-advertised objectives of the Left, and each of them undermines the idea that New Hampshire should sell its soul to run commuter rail from the state line as far as our State Capitol.
The Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy crunched some numbers, and it’s not good news for the choo-choo fetishists.
- [T] he DOT expects lower Capitol Corridor ridership after COVID than it had projected in 2014.
- Nationally, commuter rail operators expect emptier trains.
- “The nation’s biggest commuter railroads are preparing for potentially permanent shifts in daily ridership, declines that in some cases could threaten their long-term viability,”
- “The changes are based on expectations that many office workers will continue to work from home at least part-time for years after the Covid-19 pandemic subsides.”
- The American Public Transportation Association reports that weekday ridership counts for commuter rail are down to between 25%-55% of pre-pandemic levels.
- “The MBTA commuter rail system is averaging about 45,000-weekday passenger trips versus roughly 120,000 before Covid-19, and officials don’t expect a full rebound even after companies bring most workers back to offices,” the Journal reported.
A party obsessed with consensus, perceived, manufactured, or otherwise, out to be able to see this forest for the trees. What was already a very shaky proposition – and in our estimation, nothing more than a trophy for them to put on their progressive awards shelf – has a whole new hurdle.
There was no good reason to put 1.3 million people on the hook for something almost none of them would have used before the pandemic™.
With the workspace-culture shifting and people leaving urban for rural to take advantage of remote offices, a commuter rail corridor run by a money pit doing business as the Massachusetts Transit Authority makes less sense.
Unless the goal is, as I noted, to give Democrats something to put on their resume. Digging a big hole in which they can burn even more of the taxpayer’s money.
That’s all Commuter rail would ever be, but I’m not saying we should bail on rail. Rail is a great way to move freight, which adds revenue where commuter rail wastes it. If New Hampshire incentivized private investment or invested in repairs and upgrades to existing rail routes, it could lead to money coming in instead of burning it in the pit of commuter rail.
