Why do many species of birds fly in flocks? Why do so many of the lobbyists at the state Capitol stand around in herds, outside the hearing rooms at the state Legislative Office Building? Why do the internal auditors at major corporations spend so much time meeting together, in little clumps?
The instinct is the same for all of them. They are harder to kill if they stick together. Biologists say the big, bully, ferocious carnivores have an easier time picking out one target, rather than selecting the entrée from a confusing flock.
And so it is with the state Department of Transportation employees. In particular, the “highway guys” at DOT take comfort from being in the same herd with the harbor guys and the mass transit guys and the railroad guys and the airport guys. If the highway guys were ever culled from the herd, Gov. M. Jodi Rell and carnivorous mass-transit freaks would eat them and spit out their innards all over some protected wetlands.
This explains why Gov. Rell has proposed carving up DOT, creating either two agencies or one agency with two very separate divisions. Either way, the highway guys would be isolated and prodded to move out into open fields, where they could be picked off, one by one.
The mass-transit freaks sneaked into Gov. Rell’s bedroom late one night and implanted a computer chip in her brain and downloaded more than a decade of propaganda indicating that the DOT is dominated by big, green, ugly dinosaurs who love highways and hate cool, progressive, forward-thinking mass transit.
Highway Guys Right
And thus, Gov. Rell awoke one morning and announced that the highway guys at DOT should be captured, chopped into small pieces and used to fill potholes on their big, stupid, gridlocked highways.
The odd thing is that while the DOT highway guys might not win many prizes for contract compliance and related contractor oversight, on the matter of mass transit, the highway guys have been absolutely right.
The highway guys’ lack of enthusiasm for much of the grandiose mass-transit talk is based on the reality that tiny Connecticut is an overgrown suburban office park, with much of the commuting between and among suburbs.
With the exception of the daily parade of the New York-bound investment bankers up on I-95 and Rt. 15 during rush hour, and the relatively brief daily mess in and around New Haven and the shoreline towns, the so-called “gridlock” in Connecticut is almost comically ordinary by metro standards in larger regions.
If the highway guys seem a bit petulant on occasion, perhaps it is because they know that environmental hysteria and obstructionism, political gutlessness, and hovering mass-transit vultures have a lot more to do with traffic delays in Connecticut than does the reluctance of DOT to build a few rail lines to nowhere.
The highway guys at DOT know only too well that there are a ridiculous number of exit and entrance ramps on I-95. And they also know that we will all be commuting to work in spaceships before politicians dare to remake I-95 as a real interstate highway.
Grandiose Failures
The highway guys have seen grandiose mass-transit projects fail in regions far more appropriate for such stuff than Connecticut, due to inflated utilization projections.
How did the Boston Globe recently describe the new $513 million commuter train line between Scituate and Boston? “Lie down on a row of three (seats) if you want. There is plenty of room.” The same thing goes on across the country. The Connecticut highway guys know that.
And that’s why Gov. Rell and the mass-transit fanatics want to isolate the highway guys.
And so it may well be at the new DOT. The mass-transit guys will build underused and overpriced projects, while the highway guys pretend that they are still working in an agency that cares about “transportation.”
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
