InFocus featuring economic impact of the rail trail

From the 22 News Plus Studio, this is 22 News In Focus with Patrick Berry. Hello everyone and welcome to this edition of In Focus. I'm your host Patrick Berry. We are here in the 22 News Plus Studios and sitting across the desk from me today I have two gentlemen who are Craig Della Pena and Dan Hodge. Today we are talking about the rails to trails conversion all over Western Mass from New Haven to Northampton to Leeds to Boston, the whole nine yards, and the economic impact of that because there was a report that came out not too long ago to talk about the economic report or the economics, excuse me, of these rail trails. So gentlemen, thank you both for being here. I really do appreciate it. Dan, let me start with you because your company created this report. Explain to me why. Well, so we are an economic consultancy based in Northampton and I've been working on different kinds of economic impact studies for my entire roughly 30-year career at this point. Started off at a small company in Amherst and now in Northampton. I've worked in Boston and long story short is that we work for clients and collaborators who are interested in advancing different kinds of projects and working with Craig Della Pena and a number of his different colleagues and stakeholders, there was interest in taking a deeper dive in terms of studying, quantifying the economic value in particular of this New Haven to Northampton shared use path or rail trail or bike and pedestrian trail, however you want to refer to it. And so the why is really that there was interest from Craig and partners in Connecticut and Massachusetts to take a look and help evaluate this corridor. So your company, this was a project you took on. It's not like you guys are focused on rail trail stuff. It's just one of many different projects your company works on all the time. That's right. I mean, we are fortunate to work with Craig also on the mass central rail trail, which is the Boston to Northampton project. And a couple of these around the country, but we do work in all kinds of different areas and infrastructure and economic development all over the Northeast and globally. And we will get into a little bit of the data shortly, but Craig, I want to switch gears to you now to talk about your organization, Northeast Greenway Solutions. You focus on rail trails. You focus, this is your bread and butter as you look at the benefits of these conversion from old rail lines that aren't being used anymore into, I guess they're called linear parks or something like that, right? But why is this so important to you? Well, I used to market rail freight and plan the startup and manage the operations of big railroad owned transloading facilities. And matter of fact, one of those, I was telling Dan out in the parking lot was just a few hundred yards from us here in Chicopee. And over the years, I stood up and managed seven of those. And one of my customers invited me to write a book about it. I have background in railroad history. And he was a publisher of outdoor recreational titles and guidebooks. And he said, if you were to write a manuscript, I'd publish it about the history of these old lines and pointing out the old archeology that's there. And then there were people, the first book came out in 95, it was a hit. There was people, there was a guy giving them away at trailheads, buying them by the case. And I was contacted by someone who said that in his community, they were having the trouble because the people were opposed to the idea and I couldn't believe it. And so I became involved in the politics of how they did or did not get built. So through your travels, you bring up a very important point. And I live in Westfield. It's not news to anybody. And Rail Trail goes through Westfield. I remember when the Westfield project was coming about, there was a lot of opposition to it, specifically the people who lived in the homes and apartments that abutted the trail. Is that unique to Westfield or is that? No. Within 150 mile radius where we're sitting right now is the densest network of dead steam railroad corridor in North America. There is nothing else like it. None of this goes to obscure, forgotten coal mine branch lines in the middle of nowhere. Around here, it went to gateway cities like Hoyo, Chickadee, Springfield, where big mills were producing heavy things needing rail service. And those railroads are now put, gone, because the mills have closed and changing to apartments, condos. And in Westfield, it's very interesting. The High Line in New York City, which was a project of mine, I was involved tangentially in that. But Westfield is the only other dead railroad in the Northeast that has this elevated right-of-way through an urban locale. I was going to ask you that because I had heard that through my life in Westfield that, you know, of course, everybody likes to try and pair themselves with, you know, something else. But a lot of people in Westfield were saying the same thing. But isn't Northampton have one? Isn't that the Rail Trail goes right through the center of Northampton? But it's not elevated. It's mostly at grade in Northampton. Okay. But there was opposition. There was at least a dozen places that voted down the trail. Some of them were national newspapers that were so shocking that there was a lot of opposition. So through your work, both of you, through the research and working with all these communities, I have to imagine fast-forwarding, you know, you go through the opposition when it's being talked about, when it's being built, there's a positive outcome on the other side. Once it's done and people are using it, is that what you guys are finding on your side of it? Yes. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, it's interesting because I live in Northampton and we have direct access to the trails. We take our bikes into Hadley and Amherst. We ride into East Hampton and we see how popular those trails are. And in a lot of cases, those trips are, you know, shorter distance, a few hours at a time. Maybe you stop to get lunch, maybe an ice cream, something like that. So there is some spending and economic activity that comes through that along with the recreation benefits and other kinds of aspects. Part of our study is really showing the power of building a continuous longer distance trail. And so with the continuous longer distance trail, that in particular allows for multi-day trips or people who will drive in to ride, you know, like a full day kind of thing. And in our work, what we show is that there's really three kind of categories of users. There's the local, you know, recreation type users, maybe a commuter for ice cream. Exactly. And that's the lowest spending category. And it's, you know, it's largely local. They're the day visitors who maybe drive an hour. I don't know if you know the Ashwillatuck trail, which is in the Berkshires. That's a nice trail that sometimes people will go travel to from Pittsfield up to Adams. And, you know, you could spend a day easily on that. But then the biggest spending category are overnight trips. And that's because, number one, you know, spending overnight, more time you're staying at a hotel or a campground, you're eating dinner at a restaurant, and you're bringing money in from outside, you know, other places, which then adds new money to your local economy. We are up on our first commercial break. When we come back, we want to dive a little bit more into the data and the benefits that these communities are seeing. So stay with us. We're back in just a moment. This is 22 News In Focus with Patrick Berry. This is 22 News In Focus with Patrick Berry. Welcome back, everyone, to this edition of In Focus. I'm your host, Patrick Berry, sitting across from me at the desk. On your left is Craig and on your right is Dan Hodge. Gentlemen, thank you both so very much for joining me. Craig is with Northeast Greenway Solutions, and Dan is with Cambridge Econometrics. Econometrics. Very good. Yeah. Two different ways of looking at our rail trails. You know, the first segment we talked a little bit about the overarching theme of rail trails and so forth. But I want to dig into now the effect of rail trails here on our lives and communities in Western Mass. As I mentioned, I live in Westfield. It's called the Columbia Greenway Rail Trail over in Westfield. It's got different names throughout. But Westfield is the northernmost terminus from New Haven. So if I jump on it in Westfield, I can get all the way to New Haven, correct? There's a couple of gaps in Connecticut still. You're the current northern terminus, but not the final terminus. It's going to go all the way to Northampton and to points east. But the problem with that is, and I know in Westfield, it stops at the Westfield River because north of that is an active rail line. So there's a, and correct me if I'm wrong, Craig, you're in it much more than I am. There's active discussions to try and figure out how to get around that or go alongside it to connect to Southampton, right? Yes. They got to get across the east-west main line, which is the CSX main line, and then get north to Southampton. And there is, there are high-level works and plans being discussed on how to do that. Several options. The Friends of the Columbia River Greenway is working on it, and high-level people inside the state government as well. So I'm confident it will get done. So Dan, the research that you guys have done focuses on that portion from Westfield South, correct? Well, it focuses on the entire corridor from New Haven to Northampton, which is a roughly 81-mile corridor, recognizing that there are a couple of key gaps that still need to be filled in. And so our study, in a lot of ways, is helping to demonstrate, first of all, that there is existing economic benefits of that corridor. But the power of actually completing the entire corridor is really significant. And in particular, when we look at things like the number of users on the trail, it's about 800,000 now, when you add it all up across the different segments from New Haven to Northampton. A decent number of those are in segments in Connecticut and north of Westfield. But then being able to connect everything brings in not only more local users, but as we were talking about before, allows people to do longer trips along the trail, which then helps spur even greater economic activity. So, Craig, where are we in making that connection between the endpoint in Westfield and the, where is it, Eastampton or Southampton? Where are we in making that connection so that way people can take the full benefit of Northampton to New Haven? I would say just in terms of years, likely it'd be three to five years. That's not too bad. Right. We've been working on these things for 50 years. When MassDEM, now called DC Isle State Parks Agency, first bought the Cape Cod Rail Trail, the corridor there, and the Nowatik Rail Trail, those were back, those conversations started in 1975. 1975. Yes. Took five years of negotiations to buy the Nowatik section. Took another 10 years to get the town of Hadley to buy on to the newfangled idea. I love that newfangled idea. It was. And now it took three years to get it opened. 1993 was its opening. And at that time, no one ever thought it could be a hundred mile cross state trail. And here it is. We're 70 miles of that one open right now. Really? That's right. In different sections. Okay. But it's piecing together. And in the next, I'd say two weeks from us right now, DOT is going to have a costing report done about how much it's going to cost to finish the trail. If you go to finishtherailtrail.org, you'll see there's a lot of information about that east-west trail. Okay. The hard one here, the north-south one, this is an interstate trail. And let's be honest, in Connecticut, or just generically speaking in New England, we don't partner well on cross-border projects with our neighboring state. That's a kind of a newfangled idea. And so you mentioned the few names we have here in Massachusetts. They used to have 16 different names. It was only in the last couple of months that it finally got uniformed to one name in Connecticut. But here in Massachusetts, we still have multiple names, yes. So, Dan, does your company go to these, what is it, DCR meetings to present the findings of how benefit, because obviously it's the cost, the cost-benefit analysis. The state of Massachusetts is looking at the cost of completing these trails. You guys have to come back with the benefit analysis and say, look at how much our communities help. And then anecdotally, we all see, I mean, I see in Westfield, there's so many little pop-up shops, you know, in Westfield, Southwick, and even further south, all these little pop-up coffee shops, ice cream shops, restaurants, inns, whatever it might be. So do you guys present your findings? So sometimes we do in person. Sometimes it's, you know, just drawing results, you know, from the report itself. The example you just gave reminds me, Patrick, if I could, that one of the things that we did in this study is that not only did we try to pull together all kinds of data and try to quantify the economic benefits, but we also did profiles of, I believe it was five different businesses in both Connecticut and Massachusetts that are right along the trail that in some way benefit from the trail to provide real-world examples of how this works. So it's not pie in the sky. Yeah. So like the example, the two that I'll give you, one is a cafe that's actually in Southwick, I believe it's Congamon Cafe. I know it. Okay. And we spoke to the owners there and, you know, they said that as they opened up their cafe, they didn't really realize the power and the benefit of the trail, but they said that in a lot of times, about a third of their customers are bike trail users. They now have extensive bike racks. They've even changed the offerings. Like they have more granola and protein-based things for the people. And I think some of their menu items are like different names. Yeah. You know, Rails Round Burger or whatever. I'm just making it up. Yeah. And similarly in Connecticut, there's a bike seller shop that's a stone's throw from the trail in Connecticut. And they talk about, you know, over 70% of their customers are people who are directly, you know, using and riding. They're expanding the number of rental bikes that they have. And it's those kinds of activities that help then, you know, spur additional kinds of economic impacts. Like you have to hire a new person because of the business, you're buying more kind of ingredients or other sorts of inputs to your business, which then have, you know, what are known as multiplier effects. And that's part of what our study helps capture. Fantastic. We are up on our second commercial break. We've got plenty more to talk about with Dan and Craig. So stay with us. We're back right after this. This is 22 News In Focus with Patrick Berry. Welcome back, everyone, to this edition of In Focus. I'm your host, Patrick Berry, sitting across the desk from me today. I have two gentlemen, Craig Della Pena and Dan Hodge. We are talking about the benefits of rails to trails in all of our communities. Craig is with Northeast Greenway Solutions and Dan is with Cambridge Econometrics. That's a tough one, Dan. I got to get used to saying that. So thank you both for being here. We've talked a lot about really the benefits. I don't see a downside because as we started out earlier in the conversation, there's a lot of pushback when the idea gets floated. But once these are open and people are using them, it's so much more positive. There's a tourism aspect. Dan, you alluded to it earlier, and Craig, you've seen it, witnessed it firsthand. People taking their bikes and they'll go town to town and stay at inns, stay at restaurants. Dan, tell me a little bit more about the tourism aspect of a rail trail. Yeah, happy to. So one of the things that we kind of look at when we do a project like this, again, is the profile of users. And as part of this work, and Craig alluded to the vast number of rail trails that we have in New England, but what we don't really have are longer distance continuous trails. And so one of the things that we did is that we did some research into bike tourism sites that offer multi-day, multi-night trips that people can put together. And they make it easy, right? Like they line up your inns or your B&Bs that you stay with. So it's a little cottage industry. Yeah, and so you can find them in Pennsylvania, in Maryland, in Florida, all kinds of parts of the country. It's huge in parts of Europe. If you search these sites, there's not a single one of those offerings in New England right now. And so one of... Attention Massachusetts entrepreneurs, there's your business right there. So one of the things is that if you look at our study, we show, we do a range. These are projections of economic impacts. And in essence, what we say is that with minimal marketing, we think the total job impact could be around 350. But with a bigger marketing push and more time and getting plugged into some of these kinds of bike tourism sites, which encourages the overnight, that's where you can get the bigger economic impact, which is approaching 600 total jobs. You know, I just pulled up a picture of the... When it's all said and done, this is... Craig explained that this is the main line, right? For lack of a better description, from New Haven to Northampton, interchange heading to east to Boston. And so the Mass Central Rail Trail is the east-west one on here. It goes from Boston at North Station to Union Station, downtown Northampton. And that intersects with 18 other trails. This is it here, 1930... When it was a railway. Right. This is the route where Calvin Coolidge used to take the commuter rail from Northampton to the statehouse. There was no turnpike back then. That's right. And so today we're piecing it together as a rail trail. And it connects in Northampton directly with the North-South Trail from New Haven to Northampton. The longest rail trail in New England, the East-West Trail, connects directly with the North-South Trail, the longest interstate trail in the Northeast. That East-West Trail also intersects with 17 other total 18 trails intersecting. There is nothing like this in North America. Wow. This is very, very... It's going to be impactful for bicycle... Tourism is the third largest industry in Massachusetts behind healthcare and high tech. And we are on the top 10. Logan Airport is the top 10 for inboard people coming from Europe. What do European tourists know is mostly bike tourists. I love this image that you sent me. Mile marker zero. People think of that, you know, Key West, you know, but that's Northampton. On both sides. Exactly, right, right, right. One is for the East-West Trail and one is at the North-South Trail. Right there. Yeah, I can't help but point out that that's literally about 50 yards from our office in downtown Northampton. Oh, that is funny. Gentlemen, I can't thank you enough for joining me today. This has been a fantastic conversation. I love, you know, being in Westfield, rail trail goes right through it. I love spending time on a rail trail and Westfield has expanded a little bit along the rivers and along the Westfield River and so forth. And I love to see the communities, you know, across the country just really embracing this. So again, thanks for the economic impact of it and a little insight as to where we stand and where the future holds. Gentlemen, thank you both. Thank you. Appreciate the opportunity. Yes. Great. Thank you. This is 22 News In Focus with Patrick Berry.