The Network Effect: A Conversation with Jim Mathews of the Rail Passengers Association
Oct 14, 2020
This conversation with Jim Mathews, CEO of the national Rail Passengers Association, began when he and host Karen Christensen met at the 40th Annual NYS Passenger Rail Advocates Meeting & Lunch in Albany on 7 March 2020, just days before the US lockdowns began. Mathews frequently talks about the important of measuring the value passenger rail brings to our country and to our communities. Christensen was especially interested in the ways in which a well-conceived network amplifies the value of any individual rail line.
Mathews explains in the podcast that he was alert from an early age to the fact that trains make things happen, that all kinds of activity and commerce develops around around train stations. As he became professionally involved in the train world, he saw more and more evidence that this was so. But he wanted to move from anecdote to data about rail as an economic engine. In this podcast he explains some of the things he is doing at the Rail Passengers Association to produce data and tools for analyzing network scenarios.
Train Time podcasts are available on or iTunes and Google Podcasts, and you can subscribe via RSS.
Jim Mathews is President & CEO of the Rail Passengers Association in Washington, DC, a nationwide 501c3 nonprofit transportation advocacy group. Mathews has been leading a reinvigorated advocacy and legislative effort which has notched several wins in since 2015. A lifelong train traveler with a deep-rooted vision for a robust national passenger train network within the US, Mathews believes rail can be an economic engine in the communities it serves, a potentially transformative mode in an ever-changing transportation landscape and the most environmentally responsible way to meet the transportation challenges of the 21st century.
Train Time is hosted by Karen Christensen, founder of the Train Campaign and Chief Executive Officer of Berkshire Publishing Group and a writer specializing in sustainability and community with a focus on China. She was senior editor of the Encyclopedia of Community (SAGE), and is a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania Press and an associate in research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. She founded the Train Campaign in 2011 as a project of Barrington Institute, sister nonprofit to Berkshire Publishing Group.
Transcript TO COME
This text has been lightly edited. Recorded on .
Welcome to Train Time, a podcast from the Train Campaign, working to connect cities and rural areas because we’re convinced that passenger rail as the essential framework for efficient, sustainable transportation in the 21st century.
T for All of MA: A Conversation with Chris Dempsey of Transportation for Massachusetts
Oct 07, 2020
We’re speaking with Chris Dempsey, director of Transportation for Massachusetts (T4MA), about the “us or them” mentality that often pervades transport funding, and the efforts is making to build connections across the entire state, including out to western Mass and even to Berkshire County, which we sometimes call western western Mass.
In this podcast, Dempsey highlights legislation that can help communities across the state support one another. The conversation ranged from federal funding, state funding for regional transit authorities including the Chapter 90 Program, which provides money to every single city in town on an annual basis, and the need for a higher gas tax in Massachusetts, recognizing that this needs to be implemented with equity issues in mind. And of course we discussed the importance of connecting rural communities to one another and to larger metropolitan areas. Transportation for Massachusetts (T4MA) is a diverse coalition of more than 90 member and partner organizations with a stake in improving transportation across the Commonwealth. The Train Campaign is a member, as is the Western Mass Rail Coalition we helped to found.
Train Time podcasts are available on or iTunes and Google Podcasts, and you can subscribe via RSS.
The coalition’s Director, Chris was formerly Assistant Secretary of Transportation for the Commonwealth. In that role, he co-founded the MBTA’s open-data program, which was named Innovation of the Year by WTS-Massachusetts in 2010. Chris has also worked as a consultant at Bain & Co., on a number of local and statewide political campaigns including that of Congressman Joe Kennedy III, and at a transportation technology startup that provides mobile ticketing for transit systems in New York, Boston, and Los Angeles. Chris is a graduate of Pomona College (B.A , 2005) and Harvard Business School (M.B.A, 2012). Chris has taught transportation policy at the graduate level at Northeastern University. In 2015, Chris was named Bostonian of the Year by the Boston Globe Magazine for his volunteer work leading No Boston Olympics.
Visit https://www.t4ma.org/ to learn more.
Train Time is hosted by Karen Christensen, founder of the Train Campaign and Chief Executive Officer of Berkshire Publishing Group and a writer specializing in sustainability and community with a focus on China. She was senior editor of the Encyclopedia of Community (SAGE), and is a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania Press and an associate in research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. She founded the Train Campaign in 2011 as a project of Barrington Institute, sister nonprofit to Berkshire Publishing Group.
Transcript
This text has been lightly edited. Recorded on Wed, 9/30/2020 • 22:19 minutes.
Karen Christensen 00:01
Chris, it’s great to be with you today.
Chris Dempsey 00:04
Karen, wonderful to be with you. Thanks so much for the invitation.
Karen Christensen 00:07
Now, where exactly are you right now.
Chris Dempsey 00:10
So I am sitting in Hull, Massachusetts, right at the border with Cohasset. About as far away from Great Barrington as you can be, but still being in Massachusetts. So I’m lucky to be looking at the Atlantic Ocean right now. But normally, I would be talking to you either from our offices in Boston, or from my home in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Karen Christensen 00:35
Well, as you know, we have often talked about some of the challenges that face rural Massachusetts, and really the sense that people in rural areas–not just here, but across the United States–they feel cut off, they feel ignored.
And so often when either politicians, or even organizations like yours, Transportation for Massachusetts, talk about policy solutions for transportation, it seems very much focused on cities and on urban commuters. But I know that you keep a much broader perspective on this. And so what I want to focus on today is your ideas about how we connect Massachusetts, and connect the people of a state like ours that has urban areas and rural areas.
Chris Dempsey 01:35
That’s great, and I’m looking forward to that conversation. And I should start by just being clear with folks that Transportation for Massachusetts is a coalition made up of other organizations around the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that have a stake in making transportation work better. And we’re really proud that we have members like the Western Mass Rail Coalition, and that’s how we’ve gotten to know you, Karen, as well as groups like the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission, or the Berkshire Community Action Council, which represent Western Massachusetts and rural parts of the state.
We are very attuned to the fact that folks in Western Massachusetts often feel left out of the conversation. And I will admit that we do not always get it right. And we rely on folks like you to help keep us honest, and keep us focused. So thank you for always pushing us, and my commitment to you and your team is that we’re always going to be there to listen.
Karen Christensen 02:33
That’s terrific. So let’s talk about some of the specific challenges and some of the solutions that you’re proposing because one of the things I’ve so enjoyed about watching the work of T4MA is that you always have this long list of solutions that you want people to adopt. And obviously, these are things that then you and the coalition push. Some of them are successful, some aren’t, and there’s a long-term view.
But tell us about the certain things that have come up that have to do with the challenges that we face out here–and I do want to make sure we leave time to talk about how the East-West train service that is being proposed and discussed right now will make the people of the east, of Boston, and people in other parts of the state actually more interdependent.
So we’ll get to that later. But we’ve specifically talked about the challenge of roads and bridges and funding repairs for those.
Chris Dempsey 03:43
Yeah, so let’s start with some basic context. I like to start here, and I think this is especially relevant because your audience is not just in Massachusetts, but really around the country. So a few years ago, US News and World Report, the magazine, started ranking states. You know they’ve always ranked universities and hospitals, and they’ve finally started ranking states. And they named Massachusetts the number one state in the entire country. And that was largely due to the fact that we were number one in the entire country in education, and number two in the entire country in healthcare, representing our great public school system and our universities and our excellent hospitals and healthcare institutions. But we were number 45 in the country when it came to transportation.
We have old bridges and potholed roads and transit systems that are not serving people, whether they’re in Berkshire County or whether they’re in Boston. We’ve got sidewalks that are falling apart or don’t even exist in many parts of the state. And so we’ve got this wonderfully talented and diverse workforce that can go solve all sorts of problems that the world might have, but we make it so difficult for that workforce to actually get to work or get to the grocery store or to the hospital or wherever it is that they’re trying to go.
And there’s a silver lining there, of course, which is that there’s a lot of low hanging fruit in Massachusetts transportation. There’s a lot that has not been focused on properly, that has not been given the right care and attention over the last 20 or 30 years. And so there are a number of ideas that states have already adopted elsewhere in the country that we think Massachusetts should be adopting, as well as places where Massachusetts should be a leader and should break new ground as it has so often done over the course of its history.
So let’s talk about the challenges in rural communities. And of course, again, you know this better than I do from a personal perspective, but what I hear, when I visit communities across the state, is that for most people that are in rural communities, the main way they can get around is by getting a single occupancy vehicle because we just have not provided them with very good options to do otherwise. They live in communities that don’t have sidewalks, and so they’re not necessarily comfortable walking. They don’t have bike lanes, or they’re on windy, rural roads, and they don’t want to risk their health and their safety on a bicycle. And their transit service is probably totally non-existent. Or if it does exist, it’s built around maybe a nine to five, Monday through Friday schedule, which doesn’t allow you to get to a friend’s house on the weekend, or to church or to the grocery store. And so it’s not really a reliable option for you, and it’s sort of only something you use if you don’t have access to a vehicle.
And so we’re forcing people to only have that option of getting in a car. And that’s of course, the right choice for people given the incentives and the infrastructure that we built for them, but we could really do so much more. Even when you have communities that are not that dense and are pretty rural, many of them still have a town center, or a village, or a green, where there’s a center of activity–civic activity, commercial activity, artistic activity–and taking those areas and saying “Let’s make them more walkable and bikeable”, so that people can stop and do one trip, or they can spend half a day there because they they feel like it’s it’s worth it to come down and bike around and then head back out later in the day. So much more we could be doing in communities like that. And we have a number of tools that we haven’t really used or deployed to appropriately, I think, fund those programs and support the needs of those neighborhoods in those communities.
Karen Christensen 07:30
Mhm. And now, of course, there’s a great deal of attention on transportation as one of the building blocks of really restoring our economy after the crisis of this year. And there are a lot of different things on the table. So what would you propose? What do you think will be the key drivers for rural communities in terms of both recovering from this crisis, but also really preparing for a more vibrant and sustainable future?
Chris Dempsey 08:09
Yeah, I hope that we can build back stronger than we’ve been in the past, and I think this could provide an opportunity to do that. You know, one thing at a very simple level that we do is we advocate for more resources from the federal government. You’ve got a strong representative in Chairman Neal with the House Ways and Means Committee, who is able to bring back resources to Western Massachusetts. And I think you’ve seen that in things like the CARES Act, which passed in March in response to the pandemic, which really provided a financial shot in the arm to the Berkshire Regional Transit Authority and the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority to serve their residents and their riders in the places that they serve.
But then it’s not just the federal piece, of course, it’s also the state piece. We are advocating for more robust funding at the state level for regional transit authorities. We are always advocating for what’s called the Chapter 90 Program, which is a program that provides money to every single city in town on an annual basis in Massachusetts. Every single city and town receives some funding from that program every year. And so we want that to be robust, and those dollars can be spent in a pretty broad way by those cities and towns, but they have to be spent on transportation. So they’re typically used for repair and maintenance of local roads and bridges.
And then I also think there’s a really interesting conversation around how do we connect rural communities together and how do we connect them to larger metropolitan areas? And that’s something that the Western Mass Rail Coalition has been such a great leader on. And I know you’ve had Senator Lesser–Eric lesser–from the Springfield area on your podcast before, he’s been a terrific leader on this. We have places where the corridor already exists, often because it historically provided rail service between communities. And with relatively small investments, you’re not doing any new tunneling here, you’re not necessarily even building bridges, in some cases, you’re just restoring the rail, and maybe rehabbing or refurbishing stations. For relatively small dollars, you can provide a transformational service where, all of a sudden, getting to New York City can be done without having to get in your car first, or having to head to Springfield or Hartford first. So those, I think, are really interesting opportunities. And we love the conversations that are happening there and want to find more ways to make sure they feel real to people, and not just like a vision and a dream, but actually something that’s happening.
Karen Christensen 10:52
Now, Chris, you’ve talked to me about some funding proposals that would keep the money in the communities that the money comes from. One of the issues out here has long been–this is raised by some of the Berkshire delegation now and again–is that we send sales tax to fund the MBTA.
Chris Dempsey 11:18
Yep. And, you know what, Karen? I think that’s a really fair criticism. And I represent a coalition that advocates strongly for more funding for the MBTA. But I think it is totally reasonable for people who do not use the MBTA on a daily basis–and especially people who live in communities where they’re still 100 miles away from the closest MBTA station–to say, “Wait a minute, why are we paying a sales tax every time we go to the corner store that’s funding folks in Boston to take transit?” I don’t have a short-term answer on that, but I think the longer-term answer is to allow local regions to have more flexibility and tools to raise money that they can reinvest back in their transportation system.
One example of that would be that we’re strong supporters of the idea of doing more tolling on the congested roads in Boston as a way to reduce congestion in Boston, but also then to generate revenue that can be invested in the T and to maybe over a 10- or 20-year period start to wean the MBTA off of that sales tax and find more local sources of revenue for it. But in a place like Berkshire County, where you don’t have the same traffic issues that they might have in Boston, there’s another really important tool here, and that’s called regional ballot initiatives.
There are over 30 states around the country that allow local communities to put a question on a local ballot to say: “Do you want to raise revenue from a particular source?” Maybe it’s the property tax, maybe it’s a local sales tax, maybe it’s the auto excise tax, and have the dollars dedicated to a particular project in that community. And what that means is those dollars don’t flow into Beacon Hill and get filtered around and then you feel like you’re putting $1 in and you’re getting 80 cents back. Every single dollar that you raise from that tax goes to the project that those voters voted for. And you can really see the benefits of those dollars in your community rather than, kind of, scratching your head and wondering where the money went.
Karen Christensen 13:24
And is that used very much for transportation?
Chris Dempsey 13:28
Well, all around the country it is, and we just don’t have that tool in Massachusetts. So it’s used in, most recently for example, Cincinnati, Ohio, passed a ballot initiative to better fund their bus service. You see it lots of times for more rural communities that want to do either Rails-to-Trails or they want to restore rail service in their community. Where, again, you’re talking about projects that are in the tens of millions of dollars, not the hundreds of millions of dollars, but where they can say, “We now have the ability to fund that project ourselves, and we don’t have to wait for Beacon Hill to agree to it for it to happen.” And so what we fight for at T4Mass is we fight for the legislature to pass the concept of regional ballot initiatives to provide local communities with that ability, and then it would be up to the local communities to decide if they wanted to pursue a particular transportation initiative in their area.
Karen Christensen 14:24
Well, that could be extremely meaningful here. I can see that, for sure. Let’s talk about the bridges. You and I have talked about it. We started by talking about it, I think it was when the Division Street Bridge closed and Taft Farms, which is a much loved local institution–a farm store–lost business, something like 70% of their business because it became so inconvenient to get there. But obviously there’s all sorts of other effects, and now that’s the second of the bridges in Great Barrington that’s closed now, with no clear date for reopening. So what can we do about that? What policy changes would make a difference?
Chris Dempsey 15:15
Yeah, so this is obviously something you see around the state. But I think it’s particularly true in rural communities, especially places that grew up in and around their rivers. I mean, the river was the lifeblood of the community. And so because you got a lot of water, you’ve got a lot of bridges that have to go over that water. And people have really constructed their lives and their businesses around that.
So there’s a couple of different answers to that question. At the end of the day, bridges can be pretty expensive projects. And so we need to be properly funding our transportation system to get those projects done. Most of the bridges in Massachusetts are owned and controlled by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, itself. And they have a bridge program that they undertake every year. It’s traditionally been underfunded. And I think it’s still underfunded, and we’d like to see more resources go to what’s called the Statewide Road and Bridge Program. But there are also smaller bridges, they tend to be, not major highway bridges, but more local road bridges that are owned and controlled by municipalities. And oftentimes, you’ll have a 20-, or 50-, or hundred million dollar repair on a bridge, which is a lot for the taxpayers of any particular community to bear. And so, more recently, the Baker administration has been pushing something they call the Small Bridge Program that provides direct funding to municipalities to fix and repair some of these bridges. Again, those problems come back to “Do we have enough revenue coming into the system to actually make these repairs?” And this is where we get to some tough conversations around things like the Gas Tax.
Karen Christensen 16:57
I wanted to talk about the Gas Tax, which can be especially controversial in a rural area because people are dependent on cars.
Chris Dempsey 17:05
Totally understood. And it gets back to that earlier conversation where that’s really people’s only option is to get in a car. So we have to be thoughtful about that, and I don’t think we can push the Gas Tax on anybody. But what we can do is try to have a fact-based conversation about the reality of our Gas Tax in Massachusetts.
So the Massachusetts Gas Tax is currently 33rd in the entire country. We just got passed by Alabama and Tennessee, which now have higher Gas Taxes than we do in Massachusetts. We’re the lowest in all of New England and New York, except for New Hampshire, which is just two cents lower than ours. But most of our peer states, the states that you think of that are kind of larger, “dynamic economy”, coastal states, not all of which are just cities, mind you, places that have significant rural populations, like in a New York, or a Pennsylvania, or a Washington state or a California; those states typically have Gas Taxes that are roughly double the Massachusetts Gas Tax. And because of that, they have far more resources to put into fixing their roads and bridges. In Massachusetts, since 1991, we have raised the Gas Tax a total of three cents, since 1991. So that’s a 14% increase over basically a 30 year period. It’s set us behind. It means that we cannot do the same amount of road and bridge repair now that we could do in 1991 before the effects of inflation eroded the value of those dollars coming in.
Karen Christensen 18:45
How much could a Gas Tax bring in, Chris?
Chris Dempsey 18:47
Well, so every penny on the Gas Tax raises roughly $30 million per year to be spent on roads and bridges. And the Gas Tax is down over the last year about 40 or 50 cents from where it was a year ago. So let’s say you just got halfway back to where it was a year ago. Let’s say you did 20 cents. That’s $600 million dollars a year that you would put into programs like Chapter 90, which goes directly to cities and towns; like the Small Bridge Program that funds bridges, like the ones you have in Great Barrington that are municipally owned; and like the Statewide Road and Bridge Program, which funds the larger bridges that you might use on the Turnpike or on other major highways. All of those could be supplemented if we had the political willingness to say we’re just going to bump up the Gas Tax five or ten cents.
Karen Christensen 19:41
Yeah, and I think once people see the context, see the reward, that’s going to make a difference. It’s not just a tax. And I know that in the meetings I’ve attended in Boston, with T4MA, that there’s always conversation about ways to make sure that any kind of new policy or fundraising method doesn’t unfairly impact people who are most economically vulnerable. And I think that that that’s a really interesting, complicated one to deal with.
Chris Dempsey 20:17
Yeah, you know, I should really credit some of your representatives out there, whether it’s Rep. Pignatelli or Rep. Farley-Bouvier. And then, of course, Senator Hinds, and as I mentioned, Senator Lesser earlier. With the regional ballot initiative idea where the local communities vote on these issues that I mentioned earlier, Senator Downing, your former senator in the Berkshires was the lead sponsor of that. And when he retired, or stepped down, he handed that bill to Senator Lesser who’s been a champion, and we’re grateful to him for leading that.
So I think you have folks in your legislature representing you, our legislature representing you, who understand that there needs to be balance. And they don’t approach this with ideology, they approach it with common sense. And at the end of the day, I think we’ll make the right decisions on these things that reflect really the wants and desires of the people they represent in Western Mass.
Karen Christensen 21:14
It’s really great to see this kind of cooperation at a time when, obviously, there’s so many challenges that face us as a state and nation. I really appreciate your work. I appreciate the chance to learn from you and your colleagues there in Boston. And appreciate your joining us today, Chris.
Chris Dempsey 21:35
Well, Karen, thanks so much. And I really thank you for all of your engagement with our coalition, and the grassroots energy and spirit that you bring to the work that you do to restore rail service in your community and, really, up and down the corridor in Western Massachusetts. It’s inspiring work. And you’ve done a lot with a little out there, in terms of the volunteer resources that you put into it. So bravo to you, and thanks so much for your partnership.
Karen Christensen 22:07
Thanks very much. All right, take care then.
Welcome to Train Time, a podcast from the Train Campaign, working to connect cities and rural areas because we’re convinced that passenger rail as the essential framework for efficient, sustainable transportation in the 21st century.
Fast, Low-cost Ways to Improve Passenger Rail Service Now: A Conversation with Jay Flynn of TransitMatters
Sep 27, 2020
We spoke to Jay Flynn, officially “Bus Lead” but generally known as one of the TransitMatters gadflies. Jay worked in government for years before becoming a transportation advocate with TransitMatters. We’ve observed that TransitMatters seems to be good at holding feet to the fire. Flynn laughed and said, “Speaking truth to power.”
TransitMatters looks at big government projects in a way that a reasonable taxpayer might if they had more information and background on infrastructure planning and budgeting.
We asked Flynn to explain how the team looks at train scheduling to find ways to make improvements to service quickly and cheaply, with a focus on their work related to the East-West Rail Study in Massachusetts.
Train Time podcasts are available on or iTunes and Google Podcasts, and you can subscribe via RSS.
Train Time is hosted by Karen Christensen, founder of the Train Campaign and Chief Executive Officer of Berkshire Publishing Group and a writer specializing in sustainability and community with a focus on China. She was senior editor of the Encyclopedia of Community (SAGE), and is a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania Press and an associate in research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. She founded the Train Campaign in 2011 as a project of Barrington Institute, sister nonprofit to Berkshire Publishing Group.
Welcome to Train Time, a podcast from the Train Campaign, working to connect cities and rural areas because we’re convinced that passenger rail as the essential framework for efficient, sustainable transportation in the 21st century.
A Conversation with State Senator Eric Lesser: Can We Build Back Better?
Sep 05, 2020
Just over a year ago we interviewed Massachusetts Senator Eric Lesser about his efforts to bring frequent, fast passenger rail service from Boston to western Massachusetts. This week, we caught up with him again, talking about the COVID-19 pandemic and what it means for his constituents and our nation. We asked if the crisis has changed his position on passenger rail and connectivity, and about how Springfield and western Mass are perceived in the national press. Naturally, we wanted to know if he thinks we can build back better, and about the efforts underway in Washington DC to make passenger rail a part of economic recovery plans and a Green New Deal.
Train Time podcasts are available on or iTunes and Google Podcasts, and you can subscribe via RSS.
Train Time is hosted by Karen Christensen, founder of the Train Campaign and Chief Executive Officer of Berkshire Publishing Group and a writer specializing in sustainability and community with a focus on China. She was senior editor of the Encyclopedia of Community (SAGE), and is a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania Press and an associate in research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. She founded the Train Campaign in 2011 as a project of Barrington Institute, sister nonprofit to Berkshire Publishing Group.
Welcome to Train Time, a podcast from the Train Campaign, working to connect cities and rural areas because we’re convinced that passenger rail as the essential framework for efficient, sustainable transportation in the 21st century.
Transcript
This transcript includes timestamps, and has been lightly edited for easy reading.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Western Mass, rail, people, communities, crisis, state, green new deal, country, Boston, economic, investments, Springfield, working, western Massachusetts, Massachusetts
SPEAKERS
Karen Christensen, Eric Lesser
Karen Christensen 00:01
Senator Lesser. What a pleasure to talk to you again and thank you for taking time.
Eric Lesser 00:08
Well, thanks for having me, Karen. Good to be back. Yes, we recorded a podcast for the Train Campaign just over a year ago in July of 2019. It seems like forever, though, doesn’t it? So much has happened. Although, it depends, it feels it feels like a long time ago, for sure. But sometimes it feels like it was yesterday, I can go back and forth.
Eric Lesser 00:33
That’s so true.
Karen Christensen 00:36
You know, our focus, of course, is on trains, and transportation and Western Massachusetts, but I really would like to hear about what you’ve been doing the COVID-19 crisis, because it seems like all these things really do fit together. So give us a little rundown on what you’ve been up to please.
Eric Lesser 01:00
Yeah, well, well, so first, and I think it’s a truism at this point to say that our lives were completely different before March than they were after March of this year when COVID-19 struck. Really for me, there were a few things I was laser focused on from the beginning- first was getting our handle around the appropriate State response. And, you know, certainly, maybe, we don’t want to get into a bigger political discussion here. But the lack of coordinated Federal response really meant that the states were left to make the really urgent decisions at the start of this crisis. And as this crisis has continued, in terms of school openings and closures, working with the governor’s team, on the Department of Public Health guidelines, working on the essential business and non-essential business closures and opening protocols, we face a raft of severe economic consequences. Quickly. Around unemployment insurance, around health for needy families, around food pantries and food access. We face a crisis on our hospitals as elective procedures were canceled. Our hospitals and our health care systems were facing, you know, really, it is not an exaggeration to say the threat of economic and fiscal collapse when their revenues suddenly stopped. And of course, on top of all of this, we were facing an urgent health crisis and mounting cases every day. So really, in the early phases, it was working with various organs of State government, making sure that information is being provided to our communities. That was just clear; that was factual. And then it was really, you know, day to day emergencies that were coming up in our community food banks that needed more food, hospitals that needed financial help from the state, essential workers that needed PPE protection and needed our assurance and support. workplaces [where] we’re going to be safe coordinating and working with the National Guard to make sure that resources were mobilized at nursing home[s]. We had the horrific issues at the Soldiers Home. [We] have many constituents. Their families we were working with… navigating that so the early phase of the of the crisis was really about getting our handle around what was coming at us, making sure that we were being a resource to our community that are [at a] very urgent moment and then really doing our best to share and disseminate the fact-base[d] information people needed to know. And I can tell you, I care. I mean, we saw the feedback from that, you know, for example, track traffic to my Facebook page. My Facebook page went up by more than 100% and then at one point nearly 10x. Is it normal? It’s because people needed information. They needed information about Mass health coverage. They needed information about business, the essential and non-essential business closures. And I was committed in a moment like that- not to play politics with the information, to just share with people. The information that was being distributed by our state government, that’s what we did. As the virus numbers began to come under control, and as the spread began to slow down, we really had to begin to have these longer-term conversations about the structural issues in our society – in our communities – that coronavirus revealed. They really didn’t create them, they revealed them. And at the top of this are the issues you and I have talked about many times: income inequality, racial inequality, environmental degradation. That has meant that communities that I represent, for example, Springfield, have the highest asthma rates in the country. We know asthma is an underlying condition that exacerbates coronavirus. So these issues are built on top of each other and I’m committed. And I think a group of younger public servants, newer public servants that are coming through, or are committed to rebuild and better than where we were at before coronavirus. On the Senate floor, after comparing our economic rescue package, what we found from coronavirus, was that we actually had to have to crush two curves. When we started, we thought that our goal was to get the virus curve down. But what we’ve discovered is that we also need to fly in the second curve, which is a curve of skyrocketing economic and racial inequality in our in our system. In our state and certainly in western Massachusetts, just to bring it back. Yeah. To the topic here at hand, rail is one of the key solutions to those multi-layer intersectional crises that we face.
Karen Christensen 06:18
And tell us why you know, before the COVID-19, before the 10th or 12th 10th of March, there was so much going on. I was in Boston at the state house that day talking about rail revival. There was so much happening, a lot of contention, a lot of debate, but a lot of movement and interest. And then, there was the lockdown and people said, is rail going to matter? Are people going to travel at all anymore? How is this even part of the future? But in fact, there’s been a lot going on, hasn’t there? Can you explain why?
07:03
Just [so] you know, there is a school of thought, a group of skeptics. I point out that many of these people were skeptics of rail before coronavirus and are now using coronavirus to say the state can’t afford it, that the state has more urgent priorities, this isn’t the time to be talking about infrastructure, talking about rail. And I just want to respond to that right now, unequivocally. And say the moment has actually never been more urgent for these types of investments. And here’s why. We are facing, as you and I just talked about, a set of interrelated, simultaneous crises. We have a severe public health crisis. We are doing what we need to and we need to stay focused on doing what we need to do, to get that crisis under control. We need dramatically more testing in Western Mass. We need dramatically better investments in PPE. We are working, at the Mass Life Sciences Center, for example, on new therapeutics that effectively treat COVID-19. And then of course, we hope down the line, eventually we’re going to have a safe and broadly available vaccine. So fighting the virus is, of course, number one in the short term. We have multiple other issues and very severe issue that need to be dealt with the second crisis. The second curve that needs to be faced, is an economic crisis, the most severe economic and jobs crisis since the Great Depression. This rail project is a New Deal project. If you think about it, back in the 1930s, our country built 78,000 bridges at the height of the Great Depression. We built 800 airports back when air travel is just beginning. The height of the Great Depression most Americans had never even seen an airport, let alone been on an airplane when our country decided to build a hundred airports. The empire state building was built at the height of the Great Depression…. the Hoover Dam. And we look back on those investments as inevitable, but at the time, they were controversial. And they were presented as a way to put the country back to work and to solve the jobs crisis. Rail investments would put thousands of people to work immediately, building it. And we put 10s of thousands of people to work in the secondary effects once the rail is here, and we have all the development that comes with it.
09:36
The second crisis we face, that we’ve face in our country for a long time, has come back to the forefront. Of course after the murder of George Floyd and the issues coronavirus, has revealed, is we have a racial inequality crisis in our country. Springfield is a minority city with one of the largest Hispanic and African American populations in the northeast, outside of the big cities, of course, like Boston and New York, and it would be transformed by this. It would create thousands of new jobs and would create immense new opportunities for small business and economic growth in regions of the state and in communities of the state that have been left out of that growth. And then, you know, the other crisis that needs to be discussed is the climate crisis. And coronavirus, has again revealed this because again, you see the effect of dirty air, of asthma, of underlying conditions exacerbating the COVID-19 pandemic. And this project would be our green new deal for Massachusetts. This would be the single largest reduction in greenhouse gases in our Commonwealth issue. 40% of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions come from Transportation, almost all from cars. This would take 10s of thousands of cars off the road. It would create 10s of thousands of good high paying jobs. And it would and it will, reduce air pollution and save our climate in the process. So when you look at the big challenges we face, whether it’s fighting racial inequality, fighting the scourge of income inequality, and especially the lack of economic growth industry map, taking on the climate crisis, this project is at the center of all of those. I think for those of us you meet, so many others who have been so passionate about this for so long. It’s really incumbent on all of us to make the case for why rail and in particular East West Rail connecting Pittsfield, Springfield and Boston is one of the key solutions to the really defining issues of our time.
Karen Christensen 12:01
Senator Lesser, can you, for those who listen to this podcast, and who don’t know our region – I mean, one of the wonderful things about doing a podcast is it does reach a larger audience and people far away who are interested in what we’re doing – can you tell people about what western Mass is like? What Springfield is like? Can you characterize it for those who are not familiar with it? We’ve got some press lately, haven’t we?
Senator Lesser
I appreciate that opportunity. Because, you know, I was frankly a little bit frustrated with some of the national coverage of, you know, recent news in western Mass, for a variety of reasons. I think principally, many national reporters who either don’t live here or haven’t otherwise created ties here or traveled here, really misunderstand what our region is like. You know, first off, I think that a lot of people assume, who don’t live in Massachusetts, that Massachusetts is Boston, right? We’ve all faced this, when you know, you meet someone from outside of the region, and they say, Oh, where are you from? And I say, you know, I say I’m from Massachusetts, and they just assume. Right. So, I think that there is a national perception that the whole state is Kendall Square; like the whole state is English. And of course, we know even in Boston, there’s immense diversity, and there are many communities in Boston that have been left out of that tech boom. But I think it’s safe to say that the general kind of national or even global perception of Massachusetts, for better or worse is that it’s a tech center, highly educated. You mentioned Harvard, you know, that’s what people tend to think of when they think of Massachusetts. And then I think, in western Mass, you know, sometimes there’s a sense that the sort of cultural institutions of the Berkshires or the academic centers of Amherst in Northhampton, are western Mass also. And I think what’s important for people to understand is, I actually think our region is a microcosm.
Eric Lesser
Take my State Senate district, for example. You know, I have about 170,000 people I represent in nine communities. My communities are incredibly diverse, really, in every way. Really a microcosm of the country. I have one of the largest Air Force Reserve faces. I also have multiple elite colleges. I have a tier one Medical Research Center and I have the headquarters of Smith and Wesson, I have some of the most rural community in the state, and I have some of the most densely populated urban and suburban communities, everything in between. I have some of the wealthiest communities in the state and I have some of the poorest. So really across the board, there needs to be, I think, an acknowledgment that western Mass is a much more diverse place really, in every sense, than I think a lot of people understand. One thing though, that unites all of those communities. I just pointed out that I represent rural urban suburban, you know, densely populated, wealthier or less wealthy, industrial, academic…. the region has not kept pace with the growth that we’ve seen in the metro Boston area, And many families, no matter where they may have started, don’t feel like your kids or grandkids are going to get the same offers that they did or that their parents did. And so a lot of families feel like they need to leave, and especially young people. And so smart policy can reverse that. And you know, just to connect it again back to the current crisis. If we do the investments that happen to create universal high speed internet, if we make the investments we need to make to get that East West and North South Rail done. If you combine that with the trend towards remote, walking, we could see immense opportunity for Western Mass because we are a place that can be a real center for this new era that we’re entering. So for example, someone in a lot of fields, the nine to five workday is really a thing of the past. People are working all the time. They’re working off hours. They’re working at home, [not] the conventional commute to work at 9am commute home at 5pm. Really something that’s changing. Somebody could live in Great Barrington, or live in Pittsfield, or live in Longmeadow and work, by June, you know, four days a week. Maybe one day a week goes into Boston, one day a week goes into New York or once a month or whatever, but as otherwise, working remotely, that is completely doable from Western Mass. And now all of a sudden, all of these opportunities that had once required leaving the community will allow people to stay in the community. So someone who’s graduating from UMass Amherst with an engineering degree, they can work for an engineering firm in Silicon Valley, you know, or a tech developer in Kendall Square, and they can stay in Amherst while they do it. And that is a huge change. And it’s something that we ignore at our own [peril?].
Karen Christensen 17:54
So we need connectivity. We need internet connectivity. And what do people say to you about rail and why trains will make their lives better?
Eric Lesser 18:22
Because of what it represents, for all the things that we’ve just discussed. And I think you’re right here and you really hit the nail on the head, it’s about connectivity. Western Mass is a great place to grow up. It’s where I grew up. It’s where I’m raising my daughters. We know it’s a great place. Those of us who live here know it’s really a best kept secret. And it’s a beautiful place. We have incredible cultural assets. We have really great talented people. But let’s be honest, our region has been left out of the economic boom that has happened all around us, and the results have really been devastating for our communities and our families. You know, taking up 50 years ago we were a manufacturing center and all of our different communities around western Mass that specialize in different things and Ludlow a town I represent, they made twine. And they made they made twine and textile and oil in the paper. You know, in Pittsfield, you had a General Electric. In Springfield, you had automobiles and automotive parts and aircraft engines, in Chicopee. You went around Western Mass and you saw paper mills, automotive company, manufacturing that employs thousands and thousands of people in each place, with good high paying, often movement, jobs. And we know what happened in the 1970s in the 1980s. In the 1990s. When I was growing up, those jobs left. They moved out, sold and moved overseas, they became automated. And while other parts of our state were able to backfill that change with new jobs in, in high tech in life sciences. We made some progress in those areas that we weren’t able to keep up. And the result has been really decades of an economy that has left too many people out, and people heard it. And the way to reverse that is to reconnect us to the world that is growing. And whether that’s, you know, whether that’s life sciences, whether that’s tech policy, whether that’s, you know, things like advanced manufacturing, where somebody without a college degree after a 10 week training program can make $90,000 in a year, in precision machine as well as a tool and die maker. But we can’t do those things if we don’t have the connectivity. And so the connectivity is across the board. It’s Rail. It’s high speed, internet. Um, it’s mindset. That’s a that’s a big part of it. So that’s what’s ahead.
Karen Christensen 21:07
I noticed that you tweeted this week about a conversation between Congressman Richard Neal and Senator Elizabeth Warren, about the East West Rail project. So what do we see ahead? What can we expect from Massachusetts and from our legislators in Washington in the months and years ahead?
Eric Lesser 21:30
Yeah, well, I’ll tell you, I’m on pins and needles. Because I do think we’re at a pivotal moment. In many respects, the stars are aligning for East West Rail. We’ve been working on this. Look, I campaigned on this as a 28 year old, in 2014. When I came home, I really to my home community after working for President Obama in Washington, after you’re attending schools in Boston. No, I came home and I saw what was happening. I felt it in my community where I had grown up and we made the case that we this is not an optional project, we need this project, there is no other choice, because the alternative is Western Mass continuing to fall further and further behind. So, you know, the governor vetoed the first try. We try it again. And then it got blocked in the legislature by some special interest, we overcame that. Finally, we went to the people and we organized the public. We did a tour, support for Rail, and the governor, you know, finally agreed and for the study in place. The study then got delayed and we had a global pandemic. That delayed it again, but we haven’t bled off and now we’re at a momentous time when a study will be released. And we have a Congressman Richard Neal, who is in an incredibly powerful position in Washington, who has also made rail a key part of his platform. We have two US senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, both publicly, multiple times at this point, now over many years committed to making East West Rail happen. And we will hopefully very soon have a President who himself you know, rode the Amtrak to get to and from Washington from Wilmington, Delaware for his whole career. So and, and again, most importantly, the homework will have been done on the State level because the study will be completed. So we are really at a key moment. So I’m hopeful if Joe Biden is elected, if we have and I expect we will have, a house majority in Congress. So Congressman Neal wants to remain chairman. We’ll have two advocates for Rail, Senator Warren and Senator Markey, both in great positions of influence. And on a national conversation, you know, if a green New Deal starts to become reality nationally, and I certainly hope it well, we need to also be clear, this is a green New Deal project. Because this is clean investments in clean infrastructure that are going to create good high paying jobs. At the same time, they reduce greenhouse gases and take cars off the road. So I’m very excited. I’m very energized by the prospect here. And I think we have no other choice. Because of the crisis, we face the economic and equality and environmental crisis that coronavirus has shown and exposed in great to great effect and impact. And so that’s the moment we’re in. And so for people who are listening, we really need everybody mobilized at this moment to try to bring it to the finish line.
Karen Christensen 25:08
Yes. And certainly you were there at the beginning and we’ll stay with it to the finish line. Eric, I know. Thank you so much for bringing us up to speed on where we stand now, at this important moment. And we’ll have to touch base again soon.
25:36
Thanks for having me, Karen. And I hope you and your family and everyone are doing well. And I just want to thank you. Because, you know, we really rely on you. We rely on you and, and all of our train advocates all over the country, really, who have been focused on this project. They’ve been our fuel.
Karen Christensen 26:00
I so agree with you that this is a model. It’s important for Massachusetts and Western Massachusetts but it’s also a model for the country. And we can do something here that really will show what’s possible in the future. You know, you’ve been leading the charge for so long. Thank you, do stay well, and get some downtime! Enjoy the weekend.
Train Time Podcast with Massachusetts Senator Eric Lesser: Connecting the Commonwealth
Jul 29, 2019
Welcome to Train Time, a podcast from the Train Campaign, working to connect cities and rural areas because we’re convinced that passenger rail as the essential framework for efficient, sustainable transportation in the 21st century. Train Time is hosted by Karen Christensen, founder and president of the Train Campaign. Our guest this week is Massachusetts Senator Eric Lesser, who worked as a aide during the Obama administration and was elected to the senate in 2014. He represents his hometown Longmeadow and neighboring communities in the Greater-Springfield area, and is known for his advocacy of passenger rail service to western Massachusetts. In this podcast he explains how the current East-West Rail Study came to be, what its goals are, and what his vision is for connecting the Commonwealth. Click the link below to listen.
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Train Time is hosted by Karen Christensen, founder of the Train Campaign and Chief Executive Officer of Berkshire Publishing Group and a writer specializing in sustainability and community with a focus on China. She was senior editor of the Encyclopedia of Community (SAGE), and is a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania Press and an associate in research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. She founded the Train Campaign in 2011 as a project of Barrington Institute, sister nonprofit to Berkshire Publishing Group.
The coalition’s Director, Chris was formerly Assistant Secretary of Transportation for the Commonwealth. In that role, he co-founded the MBTA’s open-data program, which was named Innovation of the Year by WTS-Massachusetts in 2010. Chris has also worked as a consultant at Bain & Co., on a number of local and statewide political campaigns including that of Congressman Joe Kennedy III, and at a transportation technology startup that provides mobile ticketing for transit systems in New York, Boston, and Los Angeles. Chris is a graduate of Pomona College (B.A , 2005) and Harvard Business School (M.B.A, 2012). Chris has taught transportation policy at the graduate level at Northeastern University. In 2015, Chris was named Bostonian of the Year by the Boston Globe Magazine for his volunteer work leading No Boston Olympics.
