Public transportation in the Westerly area could be described in a word as underwhelming.
The commuter rail from Boston doesn’t go south of North Kingstown. Amtrak’s regional line does stop at the Westerly train station, but the service is infrequent and expensive. High speed Acela trains whizz past Westerly without stopping.
RIPTA runs a weekday bus service that goes from Westerly to Providence in the morning, and back in evening. RIPTA has a couple other narrowly-focused bus services that offer a handful of Friday rides, on-demand pickups, and trips to a few South County towns. But nothing too ambitious.
“Amtrak makes this not a desert [for public transit], and there is bus service – it’s limited,” said Westerly resident and rail advocate Penny Parsekian. “But it’s very hard to use. It’s not user friendly.”
Parsekian and her husband have two cars right now, but Parsekian, who’s retired, says she’d love to reduce to one vehicle. She wants to get around more with public transportation that’s reliable and safer than driving.
“We don’t go to New Haven, to New London – anything that takes you on I-95. It’s totally unpredictable,” she said. “We’re older now, and we don’t like to get on the highway. It’s dangerous. It’s beyond its capacity.”
Parsekian is more hopeful now, because the state of Connecticut is looking into the possibility of extending its Shoreline East commuter rail service into southern Rhode Island at the Westerly Amtrak station.
In 2021, state lawmakers in Hartford set aside about $2.3 million dollars and instructed their Department of Transportation to look into the feasibility of options for extending Shoreline East from New London to Westerly, and from New London up to Norwich, Connecticut.
Right now, Shoreline East runs from New London to New Haven, where riders can switch to Metro North commuter trains into New York City. The preliminary results of the study are out now in draft form and are encouraging for people who want commuter rail service extended to southern Rhode Island.
“There could be market demand to expand the passenger rail service,” said Josh Morgan, a spokesperson for Connecticut DOT.
“There’s no projects currently planned. Really, just the very infancy, the very beginning stages here,” Morgan said. “And that’s important to do these preliminary assessments, to do these studies, before we dig a little bit deeper.”
The study found one option for expanding into Westerly has the potential to add 159,300 annual riders. That could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 9,853 tons per year.
Expansion into Westerly would also reduce congestion and storage needs at the New London station. The Connecticut DOT found an extended line into Westerly could support one train in each direction every hour.
“It’s just part of a larger strategy here in Connecticut,” Morgan said. “When we talk about how to improve mobility through the region – that’s into Rhode Island, that’s up into Massachusetts, that’s over to Boston. So there [are] certainly a lot of possibilities, exciting possibilities in the future.”
If it were pursued, an expanded commuter rail service to Westerly would utilize existing Amtrak train tracks. That would make the transition more seamless, but it would also come with significant challenges.
The price tag for infrastructure upgrades to expand service to Westerly, with stops in Groton, Mystic, and Stonington Borough, is estimated at $243 million.
Among other engineering challenges, the boarding platform in Westerly would need to be elevated to be compatible with accessibility requirements. That would be challenging and require creative thinking because of the curves in the track.
“I think a next step could be an engineering design for the Westerly train station,” said Victoria Gu, state Senator for Westerly. “And then you’d have to look at commitments from both the federal government and probably the state government to actually move forward on the construction part of it.”
Gu says she believes there probably are federal dollars to support this kind of rail expansion, like there was for the new transit center in Pawtucket.
The town hall-style information session on the commuter rail expansion study is Wednesday night at the Westerly Education Center from 6 to 7:30.
Alex Nunes can be reached at anunes@thepublicsradio.org