MultiModal Mondays: Airport Stop Providential, Just Not For the Atmosphere

"Our father never did anything half so well as to cut off your mother's head," Queen Mary Tudor (Kathy Burke) tells her half-sister, the future Queen Elizabeth (Cate Blanchett), in Shekhar Kapur's 1998 film, "Elizabeth." The same could be said for how we view Amtrak as part of an integrated multi-modal transportation system. Headless wives, or half-funded transportation systems...which is more dead?

Case in point: last Monday was the sixth-month birthday of the T.F. Green Airport rail stop, just outside Providence, RI. The idea was to offer the busy, heavily used northeast corridor the same convenience and carbon-footprint-lowering effort there, as farther south at Newark Liberty Airport and Baltimore-Washington International Airport--Amtrak stops to convey travelers en masse, rather than en car(bon). No such luck in Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (the state's official name, BTW). There, funding fell short of making the proper track to Amtrak's specs, and so Boston's MBTA commuter rail Providence line is serving the station alone...for now.

The problem with cutting off one's nose--or one's wife's head--to spite one's face, or one's enemies, is that, once the deed is done, there's no one around for companionship, no one to raise the kids, and things run very inefficiently, while everyone jockeys for power. By the way, after six wives, and innumerable military actions, the treasury was bare, by the time Elizabeth got to the throne. It took her decades to fix things; let's hope it doesn't take decades to create a transportation system that provides a real alternative to individual-servings combustion-engine locomotion.