I Love BosWash
An Appreciation of the Northeast Megalopolis
I Love BosWash.
I lived in Washington, DC from 1992 to 2002 before getting engaged and moving out to Alexandria, Virginia. When I was a District resident, I walked almost everywhere and rode transit everywhere else, primarily on Metrobuses. I didn’t own a car then or even have a driver’s license.
I often wondered back then if I could travel up the Northeast Corridor from Washington to Boston riding only local transit and/or commuter trains. The electrified Northeast Corridor has some of the most extensive and most heavily used commuter rail systems in the country – Maryland’s MARC Train, Philadelphia’s SEPTA Regional Rail, New Jersey’s NJ Transit Rail, New York MTA’s Metro-North Railroad, and Boston’s MBTA Commuter Rail. Connecticut has the less heavily used Shore Line East between New Haven and New London.
I recently watched a handful of YouTube videos of young guys taking:
Commuter rail, local buses, and a short segment on Amtrak to travel from Boston to New York;
Commuter rail and local buses from New York City to Washington, DC; and
Commuter rail and local buses from all the way from DC to Boston.
You can easily get from New York to Philadelphia riding just two commuter rail lines – NJ Transit’s Northeast Corridor Line from New York Penn Station to Trenton and SEPTA’s Trenton Line from Trenton to Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station.
There are two significant gaps in regional rail service along the corridor, between MARC’s northernmost station in Perryville, Maryland and SEPTA’s southernmost station in Newark, Delaware, and between Connecticut’s northernmost station in New London and MBTA’s southernmost stop on the corridor at Wickford Junction (just south of Providence, Rhode Island).
There are a couple of Cecil County buses that connect Perryville to Newark through Elkton, Maryland. The gap between Rhode Island and Connecticut is trickier. One YouTuber “cheated,” taking Amtrak between Wickford Junction and New London. The other made a westward swing, avoiding Rhode Island altogether by taking CT Rail’s Hartford Line from New Haven to Springfield, Massachusetts, and then a series of Pioneer Valley Transit Authority buses to Worcester to pick up MBTA’s Framingham-Worcester Line into Boston’s South Station.
So why the commuter rail gap? Why aren’t the Northeast’s cities more tightly linked? Well, each metro area has a strong local identity – just consider the fierce rivalries among their sports fans (Red Sox-Yankees, Commanders-Eagles-Giants, the Flyers and everyone). There also are eight states and a federal district along the Northeast Corridor. States still have a lot of say in even the most populous, most prosperous metro areas.
But Maryland is in talks with Delaware and Virginia to extend MARC Rail service to Newark and Alexandria. I’ve seen rumblings of proposed commuter rail links to Boston from either Hartford or Springfield. But who knows?
The Northeast and the Rest of America
Despite the transit gaps, cities in the Northeast Corridor are more closely linked than cities in most of the country. While Albuquerque and Santa Fe are linked by the New Mexico Rail Runner Express, there is no regional rail link in the Texas Triangle between Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Houston (or College Station and Waco) or between Phoenix and Tucson in Arizona.
The loosely linked metropolitan areas of the Northeast Corridor dominate the U.S. economy. The region’s also home to many of America’s top national universities as well as some of the country’s best hospitals.
Four of America’s Top 10 most walkable cities and seven of the most transit-friendly are in the Northeast Megalopolis, according to Redfin’s Walk Score site.
Note: French geographer Jean Gottmann coined the term “megalopolis” to describe the Northeast region in his 1961 book, Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States. Strategist Herman Kahn later coined the term “BosWash.”
One of the reasons I love BosWash is that you can get around more easily without a car in the cities of the Northeast Corridor than almost anywhere else in America. [Remember: I didn’t own a car or even have a driver’s license when I lived in DC.]
A few years ago, professor and author Richard Florida and a colleague compiled a Metro Car-Free Index using census data (from the American Community Survey). They looked at households in metropolitan areas that didn’t have access to a vehicle, the share of commuters who take transit to work, those who bike to work, and those who walk to work. The top 10 “car-free” large metros included four in the Northeast: Boston-Cambridge-Newton, New York-Newark-Jersey City, Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, and Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington.
Great Race to New York
Another YouTuber, Miles Taylor of Miles in Transit, recently posted a “Great Race to New York” series where seven teams raced from Boston to New York and back taking a variety of intercity buses (GoBus, Greyhound, Lucky Star, Peter Pan), Amtrak routes, and flights. Surprisingly, (Spoiler Alert!) both legs of the competition were won by a team flying JetBlue (Logan to LaGuardia and JFK to Logan).
Given the commuter rail gaps along the corridor, if I was planning to take a Northeast Corridor trip (to escape the Central Texas heat, for example), I probably would take Peter Pan (assuming I hadn’t booked Amtrak tickets 11 months out). I could easily take Peter Pan from Baltimore to Philadelphia to Manhattan to New Haven to Providence to Boston and probably even make a side trip to Cape Cod.
I’ve lived in the Sunbelt for almost nine years. I moved to Phoenix with my late, ex-wife and our pets in September 2014. I moved by myself to Austin in June 2021. After visiting my Dad and stepmother for the first time since August 2019, I spent five nights in Washington this past April. A lot has changed in nine years, but Washington still feels like home (even if rents and home prices are unwelcoming).
After nearly nine years of punishing summer heat and seemingly endless sprawl, I desperately want to get back to the Northeast Megalopolis/BosWash/Acela corridor.