What He Meant . . . Maybe

Since yesterday, I have been mulling the mayor's claim that Hudson is the "4th most visited City in America." How could this be? Hudson is not one of the cities on TripAdvisor's list of the 25 most popular destinations in the country--a list that begins with New York City and ends with Austin, Texas. Maybe "small" was the missing qualifier. But Hudson didn't make Smithsonian Magazine's list of "The 25 Best Small Towns to Visit" in 2015, 2014, 2013, or 2012. Where did this statistic come from?  

It occurred to me that this claim might somehow be based on Amtrak passenger statistics. The number of passengers that come and go from the train station in Hudson had been a topic of interest when Saratoga Associates presented the results of their feasibility study on the Dunn building, so maybe this was the basis of the mayor's claim.

The National Association of Railroad Passengers provides the chart below, which gives the number of passengers by station in New York. Predictably, the station with the most passengers is New York City, followed by Albany-Rensselaer. In 2012 and 2013, Rhinecliff was 3rd and Hudson was 4th, but in 2014, Hudson pulled ahead of Rhinecliff, to seize 3rd place, with 185,611 passengers as compared with Rhinecliff's 184,337.

Might this information be the basis for the mayor's claim that Hudson is the "4th most visited City in America"? We have the fourth busiest train station in the state?

Of course, questioning the mayor's statement puts Gossips firmly in the camp of those "local social media propaganda bloggers" who want to "ruin what we have worked so successfully to establish over the past three years." I think, however, that Hudson's vibrant return from the edge in a post-industrial era, which has been happening incrementally and inexorably since 1985, as a result of the vision and the work of many, is enough to celebrate without having to gild the lily with specious claims.
COPYRIGHT 2015 CAROLE OSTERINK