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Remarks by John Rodman, Director of Marketing and Sales, to the Board of Directors of the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority, on February 25, 2008
Good afternoon I’m John Rodman, Director of Marketing and Sales for the Preservation Society of Newport County. Most people know us better as the Newport Mansions. I am here to speak to the proposals now being considered for replacing the trolleys now in service on several RIPTA lines, and the ferry service between Newport and Providence.
Before touching on those matters let me compliment the board and staff of RIPTA for the outstanding record of service you provide to the citizens of Rhode Island. Day in and day out, your transit system keeps us all moving. You have set the bar for service very high indeed.
My comments here today are by way of cheerleading for that very high standard of service and encouraging you to stick with it.
The Preservation Society averages 750,000 admissions each year, making it the most visited cultural attraction in Rhode Island and the fourth most visited museum in New England. Our visitors come from every part of the US as well as the Pacific Rim and Europe. They have been calculated to create more than 100 million dollars in regional economic impact. As you know, part of that impact is advertising by the Preservation Society on your trolleys. I’ll come back to that in a moment.
What makes people want to visit Newport is its character: Colonial, Victorian and Gilded Age houses and buildings still largely nestled in living neighborhoods.
Mix in its historic institutions –
- Newport Art Museum,
- Redwood Library,
- Touro Synagogue,
- Ft Adams and the historic houses of our sister institution, the Newport Restoration Foundation just to name a few.
Add to that
- beaches,
- the cliff walk,
- sailing,
- dining and shopping.
Newport is an adventure.
And the RIPTA trolleys have been part of that adventure for most of a decade.
In recent years the Preservation Society and other attractions in Newport have partnered with your management to help promote use of the trolleys by offering incentives for ridership; free admissions, for instance, to Green Animals Topiary Garden. It has been very rewarding for all of us to see ridership grow.
Some years ago the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau conducted nationwide research to identify the essential elements of the perfect vacation. They found 6:
- Feeling happy
- Making lifelong memories
- Being with someone I love
- Feeling responsibility free
- Being surrounded by beauty
- Feeling relaxed and refreshed
Create as many of those benefits as possible and you will have a successful vacation destination. Today’s RIPTA trolley helps. The rider is certainly feeling free of responsibility parking downtown and riding the trolleys. The riders are offered a truly different and memorable vehicle to ride.
If you're trying to get vacationers out of their cars to reduce traffic congestion, then you have to make the public transportation option interesting and attractive. The current proposal to put brown paint and a pagoda on a new diesel bus doesn't fit that bill.
Even a cursory look at the proposed replacement GILLIG vehicle shows it is not a trolley in any sense. GILLIG brags that under the paint job and trim it is their standard low floor bus.
GILLIG is at least honest enough to call it a “trolley replica” bus. All the characteristics of the trolleys are gone… the multiple glass panes in the front, the cow catcher, the center entrance doors. Instead you have the vast expanse of bus glass in the front with the overhanging route sign, the flat characterless back.
Admittedly, today’s trolleys are of course only replicas themselves, but that is the point. The novelty is wearing too thin when we start offering the public a replica of a replica. Even with wooden seats inside, a bus is a bus is a bus.
People come to Newport to see things that are really different. Not just a little different. They ride today’s trolleys and view them as part of that combination of really different experiences that make them want to come back. Of course those same attributes also contribute to local quality of life.
We do not believe a shortcut replacement for today’s distinctive trolleys will enjoy anything like the public acceptance today’s trolleys enjoy, locally or among visitors. There is pressure to homogenize everything, to use the same bus for every kind of service everywhere. That begets diminishing returns.
If you buy a cheaper less distinctive trolley replacement but lose ridership, you lose money in the end.
Today’s trolley also represents a meaningful attempt to improve air quality. When purchased these trolleys were solid green options. Pun intended. Technology has come a long way and the challenges of green house gasses are far better understood today than they were a decade ago. So rather than be prescriptive about what fuel choice to make we would only urge you to be as forward looking today as you were then about fuel efficiency and low emissions.
We speak to these issues as an interested party but also as a financial partner. The Preservation Society is one of the largest advertisers on the RIPTA trolley in Newport, a decision entirely driven by the character of the trolley itself. Our ads are designed around the size, shape, color and character of the trolleys. If the current trolleys are replaced by RIPTA with traditional GILLIG buses, regardless of paint and trim, we would almost certainly move our advertising to the other trolleys in town.
And finally I want to add our voice to those asking for continuation of the ferry service from Providence to Newport. It is a shame that smart people cannot come up with a way to make that work.
As a person whose daily commute for 4 years in my previous job was on a harbor shuttle I am willing to attest that these things take time to get their legs under them, but once they do the rider loyalty is considerable. The same is true for excursion services and seasonal services.
The Providence/Newport service is another aspect of that distinctiveness which makes Rhode Island a special place to live as well as visit. It is an important service. I repeat--It is an important service.
We ask you to keep the bar high, and continue the high quality of service for which you are so well and justly known.
Thank you for your interest and attention.
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