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Saw this article the other day. I'm posting mostly for the comments made by the NYS&W representative towards the end. That was one of OnTrack's biggest problems in a nutshell. Indifferent management uninterested in actually making the service convenient or useful, let alone promoting it after the initiation of service. This also ignores the fairly well known fact that the only reason NYS&W started the service in the first place was so that Robert Rich, a major political benefactor, owned the company and offered it in exchange for subsidies from the state and county for track and signal improvements throughout the system. He was also a big train enthusiast so it was an added bonus.
Yep. And expecting mass transit of any kind to truly be useful *and* profitable is almost always a foolish proposition; we subsidize the hell out of roads, why not subsidize transit that's actually efficient?
OnTrack had many problems. It didn't go anywhere useful for many people, and more importantly, with the exception of the SU area station, it didn't go anywhere anybody lived near. If you have to drive halfway to your destination in order to hit the mass transit, and there's no real traffic to speak of for the other half, it's a waste of energy to bother.
In order for a system like OnTrack to be useful, there will be unprofitable parts of the line - because they lie between places it has to be able to go to be useful as a whole. And in order for it to pick up steam in the first place, it has to be at least comparable in cost to the commute it replaces, which rules out making it work without subsidies.
The NY Susquehana and Western was given free property taxes in Onondaga County in exchange for running the Rail Diesel Cars to the Carousel Mall. The service was always spotty and then they dropped it altogether. And they still don't pay any taxes. It was a scam from the start.
I actually rode that thing a couple of times when I had long layovers between classes. It's too bad that model for establishing rail transit on the cheap isn't used in other locations where tracks exist and there's some need for it. We could use a couple of those in rush hour traffic in Harrisburg, where buses get stuck in the same traffic.
Pardon my inexperience with the Syracuse area, but I've noticed that there are some tracks becoming re-exposed on certain streets... Was this ever part of OnTrack or something like a trolley service? I think I've seen them on E Genesse St. but could be wrong.
Pardon my inexperience with the Syracuse area, but I've noticed that there are some tracks becoming re-exposed on certain streets... Was this ever part of OnTrack or something like a trolley service? I think I've seen them on E Genesse St. but could be wrong.
Those are old trolley tracks, jmrun1126. OnTrack ran on the old RR tracks from W. Jefferson St. to the Carousel Mall--mostly elevated and never in a City street.
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