Kristin Hotchkiss started taking the bus when gas prices bulldozed the $3 mark.
She got on in Marlborough and got off near her job at ING in downtown Hartford. In between departure and destination, she made friends, saved gas and mileage and took a comfortable backseat to commuter congestion.
On Oct. 15, ING will host the grand opening of its new facility just off Day Hill Road in Windsor. Following a trend toward business decentralization, the investment giant, together with mega-employers like MetLife, is abandoning the hub of downtown Hartford to propel the growth of suburban corporate sprawl.
It also means the end of Kristin Hotchkiss’s bus riding.
Suburbia offers free, on-site parking and shiny, modern digs, but the new location means more time and more hassle for bus riders like Hotchkiss, because express bus service doesn’t go from her town to ING’s new headquarters. Instead, Hotchkiss and her fellow riders are looking into a van pool.
Mass Transition
“It’s nice not to rack up the miles on the car,” she says.
Losing mileage-minded commuters like Hotchkiss due to decentralization is becoming cause for concern at Connecticut Transit, which has already seen a decline in ridership over the past fiscal year.
From FY 2006 to FY 2007, Connecticut Transit express routes fell from 869,092 passenger trips to 863,546. Although the loss of more than 5,500 trips means express ridership is down by only six-tenths of a percent and Connecticut Transit services as a whole are down by only 1.6 percent, local officials and organizations fear those numbers are likely to get worse.
Part of the ridership decrease could be due to the public’s growing acceptance of fluctuating fuel costs, said Richard Gray, the Connecticut Department of Transportation’s supervising planner. But another part, he said, is the increasing number of businesses that opt away from downtown Hartford in favor of the ’burbs.
When businesses move out of the central city, demand for public transportation becomes non-centralized. People want to get from suburb to suburb instead of from suburb to central city, and “it becomes a Chinese puzzle,” for the bus company, Gray said. The impending move of MetLife out of CityPlace 1 to Bloomfield will mean major transit changes for another 1,300 workers.
Long Day’s Journey
For Kristin Hotchkiss, for example, a commuter express from Marlborough to Windsor doesn’t yet exist. To take the bus to ING’s new location, she would have to take the express route into Hartford and then transfer lines, adding time and toil to every ride.
“Even if [Day Hill Road-area employees] are highly motivated to use transit, they may find it extremely difficult,” admits Sandy Fry, principal transportation planner for the Capitol Region Council of Governments. “The change in development just makes it more and more difficult to serve jobs with [mass] transit.”
The Capitol Region Council of Governments (CRCOG) is currently conducting a study that looks at how to provide improved transit to the Day Hill Road area, which has been flooded with upwards of 25,000 employees as a result of business development since 2000, Fry said. The Northwest Transit Corridor Study began in June of this year and will survey area employers to determine the transit needs of their employees.
The study won’t be completed until the end of 2008, too late to effect any change prior to ING’s move. ING has already moved several hundred employees into its new facility and expects to be at full, 2,000-employee occupancy by January of 2008.
But despite bad timing, the Netherlands-born company will not ignore the plight of its public transportation-reliant employees until the results are tallied.
“The environment is…important to us,” said ING spokesman Phil Margolis. “We’re really into public transportation.”
ING estimates that about 5 percent of its employees rely on some form of public transportation to get to work.
To accommodate that 5 percent, as well as any other employees interested in commute options, ING has been working with Connecticut Transit officials to bring a third bus to the area and to enlist an express bus from downtown Hartford to the Windsor corporate area.
Also, Connecticut Transit has added a bus stop directly in front of the new ING building. The closest bus stop prior to that addition was almost a half mile away.
