[PRCo] Re: Routes that Could Have Been Retained

[Fred Schneider]

Would it offend if I pondered this for a while?

  You cannot make a tourist destination.   Tourists make it  
themselves.   They want to go or they don't want to go.   There was  
some magic in the absolute noise of Bourbon Street in the French  
Quarter that was a magnet to tourists (and hearing aid salesmen) just  
as there is in the red coated guards outside Buckingham Palace, the  
filth of Pigalle and Mont Martre in Paris, and that crab dinner on  
Fisherman's Wharf.   You cannot make the destination.    But you can  
be there to take advantage of it.  New Orleans was very much a  
tourist destination.    But we don't have job which are called  
tourist and non tourist.   We have hotels.  Travelers and tourists  
both stay there.   We have restaurants.  Travelers, tourists, locals  
eat there.   Its very hard to grasp what it all means.

     Unfortunately it is not possible to easily come up with numbers  
of tourists that visit any area.   Our local tourist bureau used to  
come up with such concocted numbers, which he released to the  
newspapers.  You might call them "feel good numbers."   One day back  
in the 1970s I went to pay a business call on their manager, to ask  
him how he got those numbers.   I wasn't getting any answer.  So I  
suggested to him that he reached up in the air, grabbed a number he  
liked, pulled it down, and then adjusted it every year upward (or  
downward), in accordance with the visitors that walked into the  
Tourist Bureau Visitors Center.  The man turned red as a beet.  He  
knew he had been had.    And I knew he didn't have the money to come  
up with any meaningful surveys.    And because of my position, even  
though I couldn't stop him, he stopped releasing the bull shit.

   What I did know, Matt, was that our county in the early 1970s had  
about 5,000 more jobs in tourism than might be normal for a county of  
its population (320,000).   What I was doing was simply comparing  
hotel, restaurant, gas station, specialty retail and certain other  
industries per capita to what the state average was per capita.

   Our Strasburg Rail Road (yes, it's two words), doesn't really have  
to work to make a living.  They just casually sit there and rakes in  
the bucks, hauling, depending on the year, somewhere between 350 and  
425 thousand passengers.  I guess I should go to the state PUC and  
look up one of the annual reports ... I think they must be grossing  
around $4 million a year these days.  And it has nothing to do with  
them being a steam railroad and it has everything to do with being a  
steam railroad in a county full of tourists.   How many?   If I  
answered that question I would be falling in the same trap as the  
Lancaster County Tourist Bureau.   But based on motel rooms, well  
over four million a year would not be out of the question.   The  
railroad simply diverts a few dollars that would otherwise go to the  
outlet malls.

    I'm sure that if I were to look at New Orleans in the same manner  
up through August 2005, I would have found the same phenomena.    
People came to rid the boats, some came in on boats, a lot came for  
the lure of the French Quarter, huge numbers came for Mardi Gras,  a  
constant stream came to gamble at the casinos ... and NORTA syphoned  
off some of those dollars into their fare boxes in the same manner  
that the city took in sales taxes and property taxes.  But they  
didn't have the same sense that San Francisco has to charge twice as  
much as the normal fare to ride the cable cars (because of the  
expense of running them).

    But you can't make it happen.   The lure of New Orleans was Mardi  
Gras, the music, the graves above ground ... the trolleys were there  
and people rode them as part of the whole.   Here in Lancaster its  
outlets, the Amish and Mennonite farmers riding and farming using  
horses instead of tractors.   We go to Manhattan to look at tall  
buildings and to take in a show.   (Well, I'd rather go to London for  
the show.)   We go to San Francisco because of the Victorian homes,  
the bridges, the vistas off every hill stop, the crab dinners,  
Chinatown and maybe the cable cars (but not for the cable cars).   We  
visit London for the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace,  
speaker's corner, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Houses of  
Parliament, Big Ben, .... the whole enchilada including some good  
Indian meals but not just because of the tube.

   I was looking at a piece on the Travel Channel last night about  
Disney's attempts to educate people at Epcot in Disneyworld and how  
they simply gave up, finding that people didn't want to be  
educated.   It was easier to put in a car test track and take their  
money.

    So much for historic trolleys in the east end and north side.    
Do you want your daughter, girl friend, wife riding in Perrysville  
Avenue or through East LIberty on a trolley today?

    I invite rubuttals.....


On Oct 7, 2005, at 2:21 PM, Matt Barry wrote:

> Looking at this photograph,
> http://www.davesrailpix.com/pitts/htm/pitt245.htm  I recalled what a
> pleasant ride it was heading out to the Highland Park Zoo from East
> Liberty, after a transfer from an outbound 88 car.
>
> I realize that the Oakland portions of the line, Fifth and Forbes are
> now mostly one-way from Downtown to Oakland, but a solution would have
> been using 88 Frankstown trackage to East Liberty, then to Negley Ave,
> and on to the Highland Park terminus.   Penn Avenue is still  
> relatively
> Penn Avenue, as it was before the conversions in 1967.  OK, for awhile
> there was a huge building parked on top of Penn in East Liberty,  
> but it
> had an underpass for buses, then ultimately all transportation once  
> the
> idea of a pedestrian mall failed.  And Negley and the Highland Park  
> area
> still has the same two-way streets and one-way streets the trolleys  
> used.
>
> Why am I thinking about this at all?     Tourists.     While I was in
> New Orleans this past May, I realized that a lot of the folks  
> riding the
> St. Charles (in particular) and the newer Canal Street lines, were  
> tourists.
>
> Another line I thought would have made a decent tourist one was 39
> Brookline.   And, of course, the grand tourist line of all, the  
> Fineview.
>
>
>
>