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Two retired men stepped off a morning South Coast Rail train from Boston onto the station platform just north of downtown on a cool Patriot’s Day weekend Saturday. They knew they’d reached their destination, New Bedford, but otherwise things were a little fuzzy.
Parking lot directly in front, parking lot to the left. Houses holding forth ahead on higher ground. To the right, some vaguely industrial scene.
David Marx, of South Boston, and Mark, a Cambridge resident who declined to provide his last name, were headed first for Dillon’s, a breakfast and lunch spot on County Street. Then, a day checking out downtown New Bedford, which would not quite end as planned.
They were among a few dozen folks who arrived shortly after 10 a.m. that day, not quite a month since South Coast Rail launched, part of a leading edge of indicators on an array of questions. How will the rail matter for tourism? Local retail activity? Economic development?
Those with stakes in the answers say it’s very early, and it’s not yet summer. But there are a few signs.
Mixed reports on visitor traffic
“Everyone who comes on the train wants us to know they came on the train,” said Amanda McMullen, president and CEO of the New Bedford Whaling Museum. “They all want to talk about how easy it was.”
The museum’s reception staff commonly ask visitors for their home ZIP code, providing a sign of how the train may be affecting the museum.
Between South Coast Rail’s launch date of March 24 and April 6, there were 125 visitors from Boston, with Jamaica Plain and Brighton best represented, McMullen said. For the same period last year the number of Boston visitors was 53, a boost of 135%.
It’s not clear how many people took the train into town, but McMullen said, “We are seeing a bounce for sure.”
Otherwise, folks who run and work at restaurants and attractions close to the station provide a mixed report about rail-borne visitor traffic.
At the Black Whale restaurant, a short walk from the train station, manager Cynthia Lawrence said a number of customers have said they took the train down from Boston.
“We’ve definitely seen an influx of not the ordinary kind of clientele,” said Lawrence. She noted a particular flurry of activity on the train’s opening day, with seven small groups of people who had taken the train into town.
Rail service went smoothly that day, but the train has run into problems since. Several trains have been canceled and replaced with buses, and folks have been stranded at certain stops.
Officials of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority say Keolis Commuter Services, the contractor that runs the trains, has had trouble staffing trains, especially on weekends. A state Senate committee has opened an investigation of delays and cancellations.
Amid these difficulties, Lawrence said the Black Whale has provided refuge.
“We’ve had people who have gotten stranded in cancellations of trains,” she said. Just the other day, she said, a couple from Boston was just looking for a warm place to wait out a delay.
“They were, like, freezing… ‘Can we please have a cup of coffee?’” she said.
Managers at Cork, Candela Cucina, and Merrill’s restaurant — all a short walk from the station — said they’re not seeing a lot of train-related traffic, as far as they can tell. They’re waiting to see what happens later in spring.
Denise DeLucia, a park ranger at the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park, said in the first few days of train service, a number of visitors said they’d come in on the train.
“And they were excited to share that,” but that sort of chatter has diminished, DeLucia said.
“I wouldn’t say it’s a huge uptick,” DeLucia said, noting that it was a chilly April, and she’s eager to see what develops with warmer weather.
Laura Orleans, executive director of the Fishing Heritage Center, could not provide numbers, but she said “generally speaking, we’re seeing an uptick…On Saturdays we’ve seen people coming in by train.”
She said she thinks the city needs some signs at the station pointing the way to downtown and attractions.
Sniffing the whale oil, making a long ride home
Mark and David Marx would agree.
As they stepped off the train that Saturday, Mark kept his eye on Google Maps on his phone. He’d been to New Bedford before, eight years ago.
“Visually I wouldn’t have guessed which way to go,” said Mark, stepping onto the arched pedestrian bridge over the JFK Memorial Highway. “The bridge is pretty cool. Nice design.”
They made it to Dillon’s, where Marx — who had never been to New Bedford — later said they enjoyed breakfast. They stopped at the New Bedford Free Public Library downtown and checked out the collection of Audubon prints. They saw the short film at the Whaling National Historical Park Visitor Center, including a glimpse of sailors’ living conditions, “and that it smelled really bad,” Marx said.
Curious about the aromas of whaling, they stopped at the lobby of the Whaling Museum for a sniff of whale oil still oozing into a container out of a relatively new blue whale skeleton suspended from the ceiling.
They were too late for Seamen’s Bethel, which closes at 3 on Saturdays, and too early for Acushnet Creamery, which had yet to open for the season. They enjoyed snacks at The Baker, and later a meal at Izzy’s on Spring Street. Marx said he ordered the chicken Mozambique, which he found overcooked. Still, the charm of the proprietor “more than made up for the shortcomings,” he said.
Then they returned to the station for the 6:50 p.m. to South Station, only to find no train, but a bus.
The coach was comfortable, Marx said, but it made every stop the train would have made. The train was scheduled to get in at 8:25. The bus made it at 9:55, Marx said.
Still, a bit more than a week later, Marx said, “I have nothing but good memories.”
Before that weekend, he said, he knew two things about New Bedford: a deep history of whaling, and a more recent history of prevalent drug addiction.
He was pleased to find that the city seemed safer than he expected, the people he met were all very nice, and he enjoyed seeing the architecture. He said he planned to return in a few months, by train, figuring the MBTA and Keolis will have things figured out by then.
“It was wonderful to be somewhere I haven’t been,” he said. “It felt like a micro trip to Europe.”
Transit districts set the stage
The New Bedford Economic Development Council stands on Purchase Street, in one of the city’s two train station districts. From harbor-facing office windows you can see the near-downtown New Bedford station, the adjoining Whale’s Tooth parking lot and just a bit of the proposed site of a new hotel.
What you cannot see is where all this leads, or what if any role the rail link might play in fostering development.
Derek Santos, EDC executive director, won’t make predictions.
“I would feel much more comfortable” speaking to the question, “on the first anniversary of the first day” of the South Coast Rail launch. He was speaking less than three weeks after.
“What I tell everybody is it’s too early to tell what specific impacts would be,” Santos said, “but I’m really encouraged by some of the early signals we’ve seen.”
On the morning he was speaking, the nonprofit got an out-of-town call expressing interest in a property nearby on Purchase Street, within the Clasky Common Transit Oriented Development (TOD) zoning district.
Asked about the timing of the call, so soon after the rail opening on March 24, Santos said, “I don’t think that’s by accident.”
Otherwise, he’s not talking about this inquiry. Not about the specific property, the caller, or what the caller might have in mind.
“They’re looking at several scenarios,” he said.
Whatever they’re considering, he said it helps that the city has already done much of the work on the Clasky Common TOD.
City planners have drafted a 16-page zoning ordinance, plus a map of the district and a summary page, and presented the material to the City Council’s ordinance committee. The committee first took up the draft last month, and is scheduled to continue proceedings on May 28.
The proposed rules encourage multi-family housing and commercial development under a state law supporting more dense housing, train commuting over driving, and walkable neighborhoods with a mix of housing, stores, restaurants, offices and hotels.
Late last year, the council approved the Kings Highway TOD, a similar district surrounding the Church Street station, three miles north of the downtown train stop. The two districts vary in some details. For instance, “big box” stores would not be allowed in the Clasky Common district, but allowed in the Kings Highway district with Board of Appeals permission.
Development in the two districts could represent the rail link’s most significant economic impact. There’s just no way to put the potential change into numbers.
Planners have not quantified the magnitude of possible growth in terms of new housing or businesses, or the dollar value of new construction beyond what already exists, said Jennifer Carloni, director of city planning. Carloni said the vagaries of the market, and other unpredictable factors that would ultimately determine what gets built, resist reliable projections.
What is known is that the Kings Highway district is 272 acres, the Clasky Common district 61 acres. The new zoning doesn’t erase existing rules, but adds requirements for parking, scale of buildings, number of housing units allowed per acre and open space.
New hotel in the works
What can also be said is that shortly before the council committee discussed the Clasky Common draft, a local hospitality company proposed a development in the district.
LaFrance Hospitality — whose New Bedford enterprises include the Fairfield Inn & Suites, Merrill’s on the Waterfront restaurant, and the Eighteen & Union housing development — wants to build a Hilton Garden Inn & Homewood Suites hotel right next to the train platform.
The five-story, 140-room hotel, meant to open in 2027, would stand on what once was a tire recycling business. The nearly three-acre lot on Pearl Street is now home to a brick and concrete building, parked trailers and stacks of tires.
LaFrance representatives declined to speak for this story, so it’s not clear how South Coast Rail figured in the company’s decision to propose the project, estimated at $25 million.
Their architect’s letter to the Planning Board — due to open proceedings on this on May 14 — mentions the site’s proximity to the train station, but also to ferry services and the Port of New Bedford, and its presence in the Hicks-Logan district. That former industrial area is the focus of a city redevelopment plan approved in 2023.
Santos said the train was likely one factor among others. However the South Coast Rail weighed in this decision, he said he’s glad that EDC promotional materials going out this spring or summer include mention of the rail link as a fact, not an aspiration.
“We like having photos, not renderings,” Santos said. “You’d rather have that as a basic infrastructural service than not.”
New Bedford makes the pitch
Boston’s South Station is a sensory feast of food stands, billboards, people-watching, the big board of arriving and departing trains, and, new in May: a bit of New Bedford to entice visitors to ride in on South Coast Rail.
Both the New Bedford Whaling Museum and the city’s office of Tourism & Marketing plan to post video ads in South Station in hopes of building on the Boston crowds that started showing up as soon as the train launched.
The museum ads are expected to start in early May. It’s a $6,000 buy for the museum, 40% of which is covered by the Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism and the South Coast Visitors Bureau, said McMullen, the museum president and CEO.
“We’re pretty frugal with our advertising, so it’s an experiment for us,” she said. “We can pull (visitors’) ZIP codes up in a second and see if it’s making a dent.”
The city’s video ad at South Station — expected to appear late this month — is a 15-second montage of showing, among other things, folks enjoying a day at Fort Taber, costumed parade revelers, a visitor peering at a hummingbird sculpture at the New Bedford Art Museum, cute furry faces at the Buttonwood Park Zoo, and the Massachusetts Design Art & Technology Institute’s giant Plastic Rooster on Union Street.
“Boston has always been a target market,” said New Bedford Director of Tourism & Marketing Ashley Payne, but the effort is stepping up now with the help of a $65,000 grant from the state Office of Travel and Tourism.
In connection with the new rail link, she said, “we’ll be amplifying our pitch in Boston in May.”
She said the city plans digital signs and video ads posted in the Boston area on billboards, public transit stations, taxis, gas station pumps and shopping malls.
They’ve also placed an ad featuring a plate of seared scallops in Orion, a quarterly magazine covering nature, arts and culture, as well as ads on Google.
A social media campaign in a partnership with AHA! will promote weekends in New Bedford, Payne said, linking to a page on the Explore New Bedford site promoting seasonal events.
Payne said the New Bedford advertising will highlight the city’s diverse culture, including events such as the Feast of the Blessed Sacrament, the Cape Verdean Recognition Parade, and the Festival Tipico de Guatemala.
Many of the ads will carry the Massachusetts 250 logo, marking the beginning of a year of celebrations culminating in 2026, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
New Bedford fits the historic theme nicely, said Amy DeRosiers, Tourism & Marketing’s director of marketing.
As does the arrival of South Coast Rail, which didn’t quite take 250 years — perhaps it only seemed so — but is considered a historic achievement nonetheless.
Email reporter Arthur Hirsch at ahirsch@newbedfordlight.org.
Will windfarm tours be offered?
With the prospect of higher density residential development near these stations, it’s critical that the city adopt inclusionary zoning requirements to increase the number of affordable units in the market.
Sounds like some clear signage is in order to direct people to main attractions at least.
Notice to visitors. If you are illegal be very aware we have enormous ICE presence, this is the last place you should want to be. They are removing residents from their cars and homes. Best choice, stay away.