8/1/08: Ticket out of Connecticut can be way to save it

Confession: I don’t plan on living in Connecticut forever.

But I might stay if I felt I could get to Boston or New York with no hassle, and without having to drive.

Forbes magazine calls Boston and New York the second- and fourth-best cities for young professionals, respectively. Both draw international attention for their residents’ accomplishments in science, education and the arts.

It’s easy to see why someone, particularly someone my age, would want to live in cities such as Boston or New York. But increasing opportunities to telecommute also mean that young professionals willing to work from home can live almost anywhere. In theory, we could settle down here, equidistant from two major metropolitan areas, and have the best of both worlds: the small-town, know-your-neighbor sensibilities of much of central Connecticut and the hubbub and high life of the city.

So make it easy for us, Connecticut.

Start with buses.

Farmington has Greyhound bus pickup and ticketing in a Park and Ride lot. Hartford, of course, has a regular bus terminal right off the highway. And New Britain has Jimmy’s Smoke Shop.

Jimmy’s is half Smoke Shop, half bus station, with a walk-through connecting the two. The Greyhound waiting room has a few seats, a ticket counter that doubles as a cashier’s station for the Smoke Shop side and a window that looks out onto the bus depot — a curve in the curb just large enough to let a bus pull in and out without getting in the way of local traffic.

There’s only room for one bus at a time in front of Jimmy’s, and no room for unmetered parking for people who drive into New Britain to catch the bus.

It’s hardly the glittering gateway to the city I might prefer — but worse is that it’s not even practical.

Jimmy’s is an independently contracted agency for Greyhound rather than a Greyhound-run bus terminal, and so falls under the jurisdiction of the Smoke Shop owner and city rather than the bus company.

The bad news is that this means Greyhound won’t do any development work for the bus stop.
The good news is that we can. The city of New Britain, for instance, could designate free parking for bus riders — and there’s no better time to begin thinking about and planning for this than now, with the New Britain-Hartford busway in development.

On a regional level, the busway, the extension of Route 72 into Bristol, the current Metro-North plans to extend commuter rail from New Haven through Hartford to Springfield and plans to increase rail passenger service along Route 7, Norwalk to Danbury, will all contribute to the creation of a workable public transit system, especially if they are able to work together.

Ken Shooshan-Stoller, deputy director of the Central Connecticut Regional Planning Agency, which handles central Connecticut transportation planning and concerns, says many of these major projects should help with connecting central Connecticut residents to New York and Boston, eventually. "We’re looking for ways to improve transportation by transit within the region, and if we improve it, those should help improve those interstate options, too," Shooshan-Stoller says.

But the agency only has jurisdiction over a portion of central Connecticut.

So here’s my big idea, the punchline to the past three weeks of columns: Let’s designate a special committee or board or form a citizen’s group advocating for a comprehensive, efficient system of public transit reaching from Faneuil Hall to Times Square — with a stop in our neighborhood.

Let me know what you think.