Crazy Transit Pitches

[c_combat]

So it sounds like the Essex St. Subway is impossible, or perhaps not worth the time, money, inconvenience.

I mean it only about 7 blocks (small blocks) and I know there must be a lot of utilities that make it tough. But do you think that today in our modern times with all of our wireless technology, that some of these utilities could be a non issue? I know electric and water are important, but aside from those, perhaps it would be possible to work around only those essential utilities??

It would be a pain to dig out that narrow street, that is undeniable. But is it really impossible to turn it into a trench only temporarily, to lay down tow sets of track that can join at the Silver Line busway?

It would be so cool if that could be in the cards but, eh... guess not.

What about Stuart St.?

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

F-Line, I am sure that you have explained your idea before, but how do you connect the Tremont former Green Line tunnel to the surface running Washington Street line through the South End to Dudley? Where do you surface, and where do you cross the Pike canyon/Orange Line?

The current Tremont St. tunnel portal is intact underneath the front walkway of the day care center building, underneath those fenced-in trees. This is what it used to look like before the park was filled in on top of it:

Emerged below street level in a pit with the 4 tracks hugging each side of the block. Block's been reconfigured in the years since with Charles St. Ext. on the left reshaped, turning this block into a wider trapezoid instead of narrow triangle. All buildings except for the condemned church are behind the portal, so all this ex-incline space is there for the taking.

The Tufts station would basically remake this track layout verbatim with slightly wider wedge in the middle. Shallow depth, sort of like Boylston St. station with no buildings on top except for the headhouse coming out of the center. Your triangular wedge platform touches the 2 inner tracks, and there would be side platforms grafted onto the outer tracks. As mentioned, probably will have an underpass connecting them all...and that's also where you would snake the ped tunnel across the Tremont-Washington block to reach the Orange Line (probably pointing NW from under the platforms and traveling under the parking lot next to the Tufts garage to reach the OL).

The wye track would go the length of the south end of the park. From the angle in that historic picture, you would basically be standing on the outer wye platform as you point your camera.


So...the tracks to the right of the picture are the old City Point branch. That's your trajectory for the Seaport and Washington. 1 block of tunneling underneath Shawmut to Marginal St. The Orange Line tunnel basically splits the Quincy School building down the middle at the corner of Shawmut/Marginal and crosses the intersection at an angle. So you would have to have a pretty steep incline (no big deal for a trolley) on this block to dip under the tunnel and structurally underpin it. Higher difficulty, but not infeasible when the area of impact is confined to 100 sq. feet under an urban renewal intersection with the school building's foundation safely set back from the corner. Helluva lot easier to square than what SL Phase III attempted (and ultimately failed) to do underpinning all of Boylston and Chinatown stations with BRT tunnels and stations under impossibly narrow Essex St.

The Seaport tunnel would diverge here and curve under Marginal St. hugging the Pike retaining wall (probably inclining up to a little shallower depth in the process). The Washington St. tunnel would diverge at the same spot and go diagonal underneath the Pike and NEC while inclining up. The portal would go here along the Herald St. retaining wall where those electrical boxes are on the side of the NEC, with the incline to street level grafted onto the Herald wall. This is the space formerly occupied by the Boston Herald's freight siding; you can see from the way the NEC tracks curve around it 2 blocks east and 2 blocks west that this was a siding and not a thru track, so that space will never be needed for RR operations. Hit the street at the Washington/Herald intersection, graft a trolley signal phase onto the traffic light, and hang a right down Washington.


Back at Tufts station the Back Bay-->Huntington tunnel would take the former Egleston Branch tracks on the left side of the historic photo. Then a 1-block tunnel down Tremont to Marginal, then curve onto Marginal westbound. Follow Marginal, Cortes and the Pike retaining wall to Clarendon St. Then cross underneath the BBY garage's circular car ramps and hug Trinity Pl. to the Stuart-Huntington block...always staying to the north side of the covered-over Pike retaining wall. Tight squeeze here, but the only building impacts are those circular garage ramps. If anything has to get underpinned or wrecked/rebuilt, let it be those and not any buildings themselves. BBY station's Green platforms would be well offset from the rest of the station, so your connecting walkway would go somewhere through the ground level of the garage under or behind the Dartmouth St.-facing retail side of the building. The Huntington tunnel joins at the corner of Exeter/Stuart/Huntington under the Shaws front lobby (saving you from having to cross the Pike).

The wye tracks obviously let you go straight through from the Seaport to BBY and Huntington.

The only movement that's impossible with the tunnel configurations out of here is Washington-->Seaport because of the angle and depth at which those 2 tunnels coverge @ Marginal/Shawmut. But that was one of the main criticisms of the conjoined Silver Line: Roxbury-Seaport is too low a demand thru route that nearly all ridership from either end would transfer out downtown and not ride it end-to-end. No big loss. And if you want path-of-least-resistance tunneling you have to accept some non-critical compromises like this. I don't think Dudley Sq. is going to protest when they can wait on the Tufts platform and ping right back out to the Seaport.

 

[Matthew]

Who do I have to pay off to make the 66 go straight on Harvard Ave and turn right on to Cambridge Street and the reverse when coming in the other direction?

They tried, and the neighborhood opposed it. Too many homes in Union Square are dependent on the 66 dogleg (which comes from the old days when the 66 and the 86 both terminated in Union Square, Allston, and you had to transfer to ride thru).

No other LRT system in the land would throw that kind of straightjacket on itself

Yeah, well, the United States of America is the world leader in putting unnecessary straitjackets on railroad operations that are not found anywhere else in the world. And we're talking about local agencies that put a fence up on Comm Ave because of the "big bad scary trolleys," but at the same time force riders to wait on tiny platforms and stand inches away from speeding trucks. Maybe by the time our planning overlords get as tenth as much vision as you, that attitude will have changed.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

So it sounds like the Essex St. Subway is impossible, or perhaps not worth the time, money, inconvenience.

I mean it only about 7 blocks (small blocks) and I know there must be a lot of utilities that make it tough. But do you think that today in our modern times with all of our wireless technology, that some of these utilities could be a non issue? I know electric and water are important, but aside from those, perhaps it would be possible to work around only those essential utilities??

It would be a pain to dig out that narrow street, that is undeniable. But is it really impossible to turn it into a trench only temporarily, to lay down tow sets of track that can join at the Silver Line busway?

It would be so cool if that could be in the cards but, eh... guess not.

What about Stuart St.?

Not when water, sewage, and skyscraper steam heat pipes + electrical lines and underground transformers are part of the package. The problem with the utilities is that they accumulated so piecemeal over 150 years of development that no one has any bloody idea exactly where everything is. And there's no way of finding out until you're actively digging...and have to stop, figure out what to do and tack on another design revision, then restart until you find the next "WTF?" 10 feet further. There are still active telegraph lines under every street of downtown feeding those street-level fire alarm boxes that have been untouched since the late-19th century, and every record of where half of them are perished decades ago. Cut one by accident and BFD gets called into action for an alarm fault. It's death by a thousand cuts to any tunneling project, slows the schedule to a crawl, and is impossible to budget for ahead of time. You don't have short trenches and short street closures. It drags on for years and years and years. NYC is doing this right now with the 2nd Ave. subway and East Side Access digs. And they have a much wider street grid and much more solid bedrock to bore through than the landfill mush under Boston's nonsensical and narrow grid.

We learned this the hard way with the Big Dig. Every worst-case projection of what utilities lurked underneath ended up being too optimistic by a mile. The utility spaghetti was twice as bad as feared and cost twice as much.

This is why the path-of-least-resistance streets are the ones that got wiped for 1960's urban renewal. The "WTF?" mess got cleaned up into orderly, well-documented bundles much like the Big Dig did and you can budget ahead of time what all the impacts are.



Unintended building foundation impacts are also a problem the older a street you try to dig under. The Copley station ADA retrofit ground to a halt for months when the elevator shaft construction caused cracks to appear in Old South Church. Google shows all the tarp covering the building to fix that problem. No one knows why the elevator construction did that; it shouldn't have, and defies logic that it did. But it did. And it drove the project way over-budget and behind schedule as they had to figure out a fix. But that's what happens when you construct next to a stone masonry building from 1874...the "shit happens" impacts start to pile up, and it's wholly unpredictable where they will pop up.

BRT tunnel under narrow Essex would've been a godawful nightmare for "shit happens" stuff. The Silver Line costs had already spiraled out of control, but no one could say with confidence it wouldn't rack up another billion dollars for unpredictable impacts along Essex and under the Common. Stuart doesn't have any buildings that old, but it's got plenty of older wartime masonry skyscrapers like the Hancock building and Back Bay Hotel whose facades could behave unpredictably during construction, and it's not the widest street in the world.

If you have to pick your poison around building impacts, limit it to a few isolated structures instead of a whole street full of 'em. The Marginal St.-->BBY connector on urban renewal land has only these 3 impacts of concern: this building, the BBY garage circular ramps, and Hancock Conference Ctr. @ Trinity Pl. (rear corner of the building by the BBY garage). Make no mistake: that Clarendon-Dartmouth block's going to be a real bitch to tunnel through. But would you rather have 3 structures on 1 block to worry about or 7 blocks worth of structures?

 

[c_combat]

Not when water, sewage, and skyscraper steam heat pipes + electrical lines and underground transformers are part of the package. The problem with the utilities is that they accumulated so piecemeal over 150 years of development that no one has any bloody idea exactly where everything is. And there's no way of finding out until you're actively digging...and have to stop, figure out what to do and tack on another design revision, then restart until you find the next "WTF?" 10 feet further. There are still active telegraph lines under every street of downtown feeding those street-level fire alarm boxes that have been untouched since the late-19th century, and every record of where half of them are perished decades ago. Cut one by accident and BFD gets called into action for an alarm fault. It's death by a thousand cuts to any tunneling project, slows the schedule to a crawl, and is impossible to budget for ahead of time. You don't have short trenches and short street closures. It drags on for years and years and years. NYC is doing this right now with the 2nd Ave. subway and East Side Access digs. And they have a much wider street grid and much more solid bedrock to bore through than the landfill mush under Boston's nonsensical and narrow grid.

We learned this the hard way with the Big Dig. Every worst-case projection of what utilities lurked underneath ended up being too optimistic by a mile. The utility spaghetti was twice as bad as feared and cost twice as much.

This is why the path-of-least-resistance streets are the ones that got wiped for 1960's urban renewal. The "WTF?" mess got cleaned up into orderly, well-documented bundles much like the Big Dig did and you can budget ahead of time what all the impacts are.



Unintended building foundation impacts are also a problem the older a street you try to dig under. The Copley station ADA retrofit ground to a halt for months when the elevator shaft construction caused cracks to appear in Old South Church. Google shows all the tarp covering the building to fix that problem. No one knows why the elevator construction did that; it shouldn't have, and defies logic that it did. But it did. And it drove the project way over-budget and behind schedule as they had to figure out a fix. But that's what happens when you construct next to a stone masonry building from 1874...the "shit happens" impacts start to pile up, and it's wholly unpredictable where they will pop up.

BRT tunnel under narrow Essex would've been a godawful nightmare for "shit happens" stuff. The Silver Line costs had already spiraled out of control, but no one could say with confidence it wouldn't rack up another billion dollars for unpredictable impacts along Essex and under the Common. Stuart doesn't have any buildings that old, but it's got plenty of older wartime masonry skyscrapers like the Hancock building and Back Bay Hotel whose facades could behave unpredictably during construction, and it's not the widest street in the world.

If you have to pick your poison around building impacts, limit it to a few isolated structures instead of a whole street full of 'em. The Marginal St.-->BBY connector on urban renewal land has only these 3 impacts of concern: this building, the BBY garage circular ramps, and Hancock Conference Ctr. @ Trinity Pl. (rear corner of the building by the BBY garage). Make no mistake: that Clarendon-Dartmouth block's going to be a real bitch to tunnel through. But would you rather have 3 structures on 1 block to worry about or 7 blocks worth of structures?

I see your points. Very well illustrated. Thanks for your perspective it very much helps me understand the logistics of an engineering endeavor such as this and it being is such a historical environment. I suppose most any city would be able to do something equal to this without half the headache. In the meantime, I've messed with my system map a little. This idea for a bit further in the future.

Idea for the Blue Line to Chelsea is that in the distant future it could take up where the proposed SL 6 is going on the same ROW, whatever that Martin A. Coughlin Bypass Road is. I suppose there would have to be a tunnel under the river seeing that the parallel bridge raises and I don't think train bridges should have to deal with that kind of thing. So there is the extension to Lynn as well and a new BL designation that splits to Needham.

Orange Line is out to Roslindale, I was thinking that it could go further and eliminate the Needham Commuter Rail all together, as someone mentioned in a post somewhere. Perhaps it could terminate at the Blue Line Terminal?

I haven't gotten around to altering the Essex St. subway yet, but that's next. :/

 

[JeffDowntown]

The current Tremont St. tunnel portal is intact underneath the front walkway of the day care center building, underneath those fenced-in trees. This is what it used to look like before the park was filled in on top of it:

Emerged below street level in a pit with the 4 tracks hugging each side of the block. Block's been reconfigured in the years since with Charles St. Ext. on the left reshaped, turning this block into a wider trapezoid instead of narrow triangle. All buildings except for the condemned church are behind the portal, so all this ex-incline space is there for the taking.

The Tufts station would basically remake this track layout verbatim with slightly wider wedge in the middle. Shallow depth, sort of like Boylston St. station with no buildings on top except for the headhouse coming out of the center. Your triangular wedge platform touches the 2 inner tracks, and there would be side platforms grafted onto the outer tracks. As mentioned, probably will have an underpass connecting them all...and that's also where you would snake the ped tunnel across the Tremont-Washington block to reach the Orange Line (probably pointing NW from under the platforms and traveling under the parking lot next to the Tufts garage to reach the OL).

The wye track would go the length of the south end of the park. From the angle in that historic picture, you would basically be standing on the outer wye platform as you point your camera.


So...the tracks to the right of the picture are the old City Point branch. That's your trajectory for the Seaport and Washington. 1 block of tunneling underneath Shawmut to Marginal St. The Orange Line tunnel basically splits the Quincy School building down the middle at the corner of Shawmut/Marginal and crosses the intersection at an angle. So you would have to have a pretty steep incline (no big deal for a trolley) on this block to dip under the tunnel and structurally underpin it. Higher difficulty, but not infeasible when the area of impact is confined to 100 sq. feet under an urban renewal intersection with the school building's foundation safely set back from the corner. Helluva lot easier to square than what SL Phase III attempted (and ultimately failed) to do underpinning all of Boylston and Chinatown stations with BRT tunnels and stations under impossibly narrow Essex St.

The Seaport tunnel would diverge here and curve under Marginal St. hugging the Pike retaining wall (probably inclining up to a little shallower depth in the process). The Washington St. tunnel would diverge at the same spot and go diagonal underneath the Pike and NEC while inclining up. The portal would go here along the Herald St. retaining wall where those electrical boxes are on the side of the NEC, with the incline to street level grafted onto the Herald wall. This is the space formerly occupied by the Boston Herald's freight siding; you can see from the way the NEC tracks curve around it 2 blocks east and 2 blocks west that this was a siding and not a thru track, so that space will never be needed for RR operations. Hit the street at the Washington/Herald intersection, graft a trolley signal phase onto the traffic light, and hang a right down Washington.


Back at Tufts station the Back Bay-->Huntington tunnel would take the former Egleston Branch tracks on the left side of the historic photo. Then a 1-block tunnel down Tremont to Marginal, then curve onto Marginal westbound. Follow Marginal, Cortes and the Pike retaining wall to Clarendon St. Then cross underneath the BBY garage's circular car ramps and hug Trinity Pl. to the Stuart-Huntington block...always staying to the north side of the covered-over Pike retaining wall. Tight squeeze here, but the only building impacts are those circular garage ramps. If anything has to get underpinned or wrecked/rebuilt, let it be those and not any buildings themselves. BBY station's Green platforms would be well offset from the rest of the station, so your connecting walkway would go somewhere through the ground level of the garage under or behind the Dartmouth St.-facing retail side of the building. The Huntington tunnel joins at the corner of Exeter/Stuart/Huntington under the Shaws front lobby (saving you from having to cross the Pike).

The wye tracks obviously let you go straight through from the Seaport to BBY and Huntington.

The only movement that's impossible with the tunnel configurations out of here is Washington-->Seaport because of the angle and depth at which those 2 tunnels coverge @ Marginal/Shawmut. But that was one of the main criticisms of the conjoined Silver Line: Roxbury-Seaport is too low a demand thru route that nearly all ridership from either end would transfer out downtown and not ride it end-to-end. No big loss. And if you want path-of-least-resistance tunneling you have to accept some non-critical compromises like this. I don't think Dudley Sq. is going to protest when they can wait on the Tufts platform and ping right back out to the Seaport.

F-Line, this all sounds way too doable, and probably at reasonable cost given the minimum of complex tunneling. Why is it not on the table in a serious way?

 

[Nexis4jersey]

I see your points. Very well illustrated. Thanks for your perspective it very much helps me understand the logistics of an engineering endeavor such as this and it being is such a historical environment. I suppose most any city would be able to do something equal to this without half the headache. In the meantime, I've messed with my system map a little. This idea for a bit further in the future.

Idea for the Blue Line to Chelsea is that in the distant future it could take up where the proposed SL 6 is going on the same ROW, whatever that Martin A. Coughlin Bypass Road is. I suppose there would have to be a tunnel under the river seeing that the parallel bridge raises and I don't think train bridges should have to deal with that kind of thing. So there is the extension to Lynn as well and a new BL designation that splits to Needham.

Orange Line is out to Roslindale, I was thinking that it could go further and eliminate the Needham Commuter Rail all together, as someone mentioned in a post somewhere. Perhaps it could terminate at the Blue Line Terminal?

I haven't gotten around to altering the Essex St. subway yet, but that's next. :/

They need start electrifying the Commuter rail , the Needham line would be the first line to get that treatment. I don't think theres a high enough demand for rapid transit to Needham. Your Blue line extension to LYnn is missing a few stations.

 

[George_Apley]

They need start electrifying the Commuter rail , the Needham line would be the first line to get that treatment. I don't think theres a high enough demand for rapid transit to Needham. Your Blue line extension to LYnn is missing a few stations.

The Needham Line will be the first to get the axe due to expanding NEC schedules. It needs rapid transit. It'll likely end up with green to Needham Junction with orange taking over to West Roxbury.

 

[c_combat]

They need start electrifying the Commuter rail , the Needham line would be the first line to get that treatment. I don't think theres a high enough demand for rapid transit to Needham. Your Blue line extension to LYnn is missing a few stations.

I took out Wood Island because a Day Sq. station would be way more convenient. There's really nothing and no one in the immediate area of the present station as where Day Sq. is and would be a focal point for social and economic activity and therefore benefit by having a subway station right there.

Point-o-Pines should probably get a station too? What else would be missing?

I think Needham would be good for the Blue Line to branch to. Consider that this map is for the future, where Metro Boston will have a higher population that it does currently. So, as these ideas would sure enough help us out today if they were implemented tomorrow with our current population, just think how the system as we know it today would be if it is not expanded for higher volumes and for population growth in the future. Needham in the future may be much bigger than it is today in the next 40 years, so I try to keep in mind that the outer suburbs will gain significant population and will want direct access to the city and not at the cost of car ownership in many cases.

..And, in the same way many people will take a Metro North train outside of NYC instead of drive into NYC, many Metro West folks would probably opt out of tolls, parking costs, traffic, crazy designed streets,and overall frustration that comes along with driving in the city of Boston and simply pay a T fare to get from Needham or Riverside, get into downtown for a Celtics game or Fenway for a Sox game, or whatever else. Plus, considering that the Blue Line is a heavy rail line, it could handle a higher volume of passengers. But right now, i agree, there is probably not much of a passenger demand for it.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

They need start electrifying the Commuter rail , the Needham line would be the first line to get that treatment. I don't think theres a high enough demand for rapid transit to Needham. Your Blue line extension to LYnn is missing a few stations.

The problem with Needham is it can't get the slots on the NEC for any service enhancements. Which makes electrification a waste of money. It has to either come off the commuter rail network entirely or it's going to keep getting squeezed for slots. There's not much you can do to mitigate this against projected 2020-2040 growth of NEC traffic, and a dinky that just pings between Needham Heights and Forest Hills will kill the ridership deader than dead.


FWIW, I do think the ridership is there from Newton Highlands to Needham Jct. and FH to West Roxbury if it were separated into separate rapid transit legs. But regardless of where that sits on the priority pile there's only 20-25 years left before Amtrak and Providence Line appetites squeeze the Needham Line out of existence.

The Army Corps did, BTW, study widening the SW Corridor tunnel to 4 tracks as part of the South Coast Rail DEIR: http://www.nae.usace.army.mil/Portals/74/docs/topics/SouthCoastRail/Appendix3.3A.pdf. $2.5 billion price tag. That's a half-billion more than the high estimate for SCR itself, solely inside the City of Boston at net gain of only 1 track's capacity.

Yeah...that got a pretty emphatic not-recommended rating from all parties.

 

[George_Apley]

Point-o-Pines should probably get a station too? What else would be missing?

Oak Island should get a stop around Oak Island Street. The RoW through Point of Pines is compromised in spots by encroaching development, so the BLX would probably have to swing up to the Eastern Route before the Point of Pines peninsula. To make up for no PoP stop, probably drop a West Lynn stop
around the parcels east of the GE facility that are up for redev.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Oak Island should get a stop around Oak Island Street. The RoW through Point of Pines is compromised in spots by encroaching development, so the BLX would probably have to swing up to the Eastern Route before the Point of Pines peninsula. To make up for no PoP stop, probably drop a West Lynn stop
around the parcels east of the GE facility that are up for redev.

Yeah. The encroaching high-rises would put the T in a vice grip up there and probably force some subwaying that would bloat the cost of the project hideously. Best they can do is sandwich PoP with stops at Oak I. (which is a no-brainer) and a TOD-oriented West Lynn stop that spurred new development on that empty parcel opposite the GE Plant on the Lynnway side. Consolidate all those Lynn buses that currently have to express down Lynnway to Wonderland into a nicely frequent local serving PoP and make some badly needed pedestrian improvements to the horribly narrow sidewalks on the 1A movable bridge and PoP is no worse than 1/2 mile walk on either side to the nearest Blue stop.

Rolling back the ROW encroachment is just too hard now, so this is the best to hope for.

 

[JeffDowntown]

The current Tremont St. tunnel portal is intact underneath the front walkway of the day care center building, underneath those fenced-in trees. This is what it used to look like before the park was filled in on top of it:

The Seaport tunnel would diverge here and curve under Marginal St. hugging the Pike retaining wall (probably inclining up to a little shallower depth in the process).

F-Line, I saw the rest of your proposed routing for the Seaport leg in another posting about building over the pike. While I applaud the concept of getting Green Line to the Seaport transitway, I think you are delusional if you think Chinatown will roll over and play dead as you try to bulldoze your way up Hudson street.

Although this may seem like no-mans-land today, there are a lot of development interests aligned along that route (including One Greenway, Tufts, Drucker at the Chinatown Park and The Radian) who would not appreciate having their developments disturbed by the cut and cover. Also the remaining row houses on Hudson Street are starting to turn over at real prices (with the One Greenway development underway across the street. And everyone knows how much foundation damage the tunneling with groundwater extraction causes (all T tunnels leak -- a lot, and the pumpout destroys the water table, essential to the wood piling foundations).

So I think you need to find an alternate route to the transitway, because Hudson is going to be one ugly, long legal nightmare.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

F-Line, I saw the rest of your proposed routing for the Seaport leg in another posting about building over the pike. While I applaud the concept of getting Green Line to the Seaport transitway, I think you are delusional if you think Chinatown will roll over and play dead as you try to bulldoze your way up Hudson street.

Although this may seem like no-mans-land today, there are a lot of development interests aligned along that route (including One Greenway, Tufts, Drucker at the Chinatown Park and The Radian) who would not appreciate having their developments disturbed by the cut and cover. Also the remaining row houses on Hudson Street are starting to turn over at real prices (with the One Greenway development underway across the street. And everyone knows how much foundation damage the tunneling with groundwater extraction causes (all T tunnels leak -- a lot, and the pumpout destroys the water table, essential to the wood piling foundations).

So I think you need to find an alternate route to the transitway, because Hudson is going to be one ugly, long legal nightmare.

There is no other way, except Boylston-Essex on the flunked SL Phase 3 plan. Strike 1.


Between Marginal and Kneeland it doesn't have to go directly under Hudson. It can hug the Pike onramp retaining wall and straddle Surface up to the I-93 retaining wall. That's better...no legacy buildings get impacted.

You have no such attractive choices past Kneeland. Maybe you can slip past the "Welcome to Chinatown" building on the Surface side and get behind it before the Dewey Sq. Tunnel centers itself under Surface. But maybe you can't and have to go square under Hudson, dig carefully around the same building, and have to deal with that whole block's worth of buildings on Hudson up to Beach.


And either way...once you get around there you MUST dig under the park. That empty triangular parcel at Essex & Surface at the tip of the park is where the Transitway's bus loop ends.

Essex or Chinatown Park. Those are your only two entrypoints. Can't get into the tunnel from the north, can't get into the tunnel from due south, can't get into the tunnel from anywhere east. Only due west or SW of the Essex/Surface/Lincoln intersection.

The only saving grace about surface impacts here is that the Transitway is pretty deep below ground so you're either a healthy distance below before you cross Kneeland or well underway inclining from shallow to deep, which helps for mitigating building impacts and getting surface disruption covered up quicker.


But you don't have any other choices. It's either rip the everloving shit out 6 consecutive narrow blocks of Boylston/Essex on the SL Phase III route or take your chances with the Hudson-Surface block past Kneeland and the park. Nobody said this would be cheap, painless, or have no neighborhood impacts. But if you had to choose, which one of those two (and only two) looks like the path of least resistance and the one where the building impacts can be limited to single blocks or invididual structures?

There can only be one. And this is it. How badly do we want a real Seaport-downtown rapid transit connection? It won't happen any other way, and there is no DMU you can tart up or boondoggle up enough with under-NEC tunneling or potentially Amtrak/CR-harming ugly hacks that accomplishes one-third as much service frequency.

So how bad do we ultimately need it? If we need the frequencies, it has to go here or under Boylston/Essex. One or the other. If we don't need the frequencies...well, let's establish that fact once and for all instead of hoping we can buy time to squint hard enough for some "Eureka!" easy solution to appear while still believing in our hearts we need the frequencies. Because that easy solution is never going to appear.

 

[JeffDowntown]

There is no other way, except Boylston-Essex on the flunked SL Phase 3 plan. Strike 1.


Between Marginal and Kneeland it doesn't have to go directly under Hudson. It can hug the Pike onramp retaining wall and straddle Surface up to the I-93 retaining wall. That's better...no legacy buildings get impacted.

You have no such attractive choices past Kneeland. Maybe you can slip past the "Welcome to Chinatown" building on the Surface side and get behind it before the Dewey Sq. Tunnel centers itself under Surface. But maybe you can't and have to go square under Hudson, dig carefully around the same building, and have to deal with that whole block's worth of buildings on Hudson up to Beach.


And either way...once you get around there you MUST dig under the park. That empty triangular parcel at Essex & Surface at the tip of the park is where the Transitway's bus loop ends.

Essex or Chinatown Park. Those are your only two entrypoints. Can't get into the tunnel from the north, can't get into the tunnel from due south, can't get into the tunnel from anywhere east. Only due west or SW of the Essex/Surface/Lincoln intersection.

The only saving grace about surface impacts here is that the Transitway is pretty deep below ground so you're either a healthy distance below before you cross Kneeland or well underway inclining from shallow to deep, which helps for mitigating building impacts and getting surface disruption covered up quicker.


But you don't have any other choices. It's either rip the everloving shit out 6 consecutive narrow blocks of Boylston/Essex on the SL Phase III route or take your chances with the Hudson-Surface block past Kneeland and the park. Nobody said this would be cheap, painless, or have no neighborhood impacts. But if you had to choose, which one of those two (and only two) looks like the path of least resistance and the one where the building impacts can be limited to single blocks or invididual structures?

There can only be one. And this is it. How badly do we want a real Seaport-downtown rapid transit connection? It won't happen any other way, and there is no DMU you can tart up or boondoggle up enough with under-NEC tunneling or potentially Amtrak/CR-harming ugly hacks that accomplishes one-third as much service frequency.

So how bad do we ultimately need it? If we need the frequencies, it has to go here or under Boylston/Essex. One or the other. If we don't need the frequencies...well, let's establish that fact once and for all instead of hoping we can buy time to squint hard enough for some "Eureka!" easy solution to appear while still believing in our hearts we need the frequencies. Because that easy solution is never going to appear.

OK,

So it is ugly either way. Essex Street or Hudson/Chinatown Park.

A couple questions:

1) Has One Greenway messed up the idea of hugging the SE Expressway wall? Is there any room under Albany street before you hit tunnel?

2) If you want local support, what about an intermediate station somewhere -- perhaps at about Kneeland Street or even under Chinatown Park?

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

OK,

So it is ugly either way. Essex Street or Hudson/Chinatown Park.

A couple questions:

1) Has One Greenway messed up the idea of hugging the SE Expressway wall? Is there any room under Albany street before you hit tunnel?

http://goo.gl/maps/8lctW

1) I took a closer look and that inclined portion of Surface that runs on the east side of this parcel has the Pike exit tunnel directly underneath it, so it doesn't look like the Surface side of the block is an option to begin with. You must go on the Hudson side.

That complicates things, but when all's said and done it's pretty much a draw because zigzagging around the Surface side of the block looked like a big longshot anyway for clearing the back side of the "Welcome to Chinatown" building.

One Greenway does fill up the Harvard St.-Kneeland block and has it towering over the sidewalk on the Kneeland and Surface sides. Hudson's the parking egress side so there's a tree-lined promenade in front that widens the Hudson sidewalk considerably. The space immediately between the South Station Access Rd. and Hudson is going to be a mini-park. Then there'll be a narrow Surface wall-hugging building on the Harvard St. - Tai-Tung St. block with another Hudson-facing egress/promenade. The extremely narrow strip from Tai-Tung around the Curve St. curve to Marginal is too narrow to be built on at all, so that remains a grass median and is not up for sale to developers.


Soooo....

Nothing is outright prevented. You can hug the Pike ramp retaining wall around Curve St. to give it a wide berth. You can dig under the promenade to keep it from impacting the pre-existing brick buildings and sidewalks on the other side of Hudson. And then the Kneeland-Beach block into the park is the same mitigation hell as before.


Cons: One Greenway's going to have to put up with getting its promenade dug up for 1-1/2 years then replanted. It's going to take lots of careful community outreach. The other side of Hudson will need a lot of noise/dust mitigation, so the state will be pulling back out their Big Dig playbook for that. And the Kneeland-Beach block sucks because not only is it narrow, it'll take a longer time to construct (and disrupt) because of the descending grade into the Transitway.

Pros (or Neutral): The Marginal-Kneeland stretch is largely safe from building impacts because of the driveways, promenade, and mid-block park. Harvard, Tai-Tung, and back alleys from Tyler St. largely preserve the car/parking access and sidewalks access. It's a very non-critical couple of blocks on the street grid because of Harrison and because of Tyler. It's short enough and shallow enough that they could probably blitz the construction between Tai-Tung and Kneeland in one season and get the street and driveway access fully restored (albeit with a metal plate or two in the road lingering for probably another year. There are no bad utilities impacts here because Hudson got clean-roomed twice in the last 60 years for the Expressway and Big Dig; anything legacy originates from the Harrison/Tyler side of the block with the One Greenway side being fresh landfill devoid of anything.



In the end it's more voices to reckon with, but not an increase in difficulty level. This IS a difficult project, especially on the descent into the Transitway by Beach St. and the park. But it is still considerably less difficult than the Essex alignment which included Boylston Under station, Chinatown Under station, and a wider BRT tunnel in a cavern this uniformly narrow the whole length.

Again, if you had to choose which one had fewer overall impacts and more isolated impacts reduced to just individual structures, Hudson St. hands-down.

2) If you want local support, what about an intermediate station somewhere -- perhaps at about Kneeland Street or even under Chinatown Park?

Not in Chinatown because, of course, Hudson is literally staring across at the entrance of South Station where the trolleys are going anyway. They need to improve the ped access to the station on the SS Connector Rd. side of the block since those parcels along Kneeland are all being filled up and Surface is going to gain a whole row of street-facing buildings. Connector Rd. doesn't have a sidewalk and goes way up in the sky to the top of the bus station, but a ramp from the Lincoln St./SS Connector crosswalk here and walkway behind the block helps a lot for bringing the rear/park side of One Greenway and the Tai-Tung block half the walking distance to SS that they were before. It's 1200 ft. to the rearmost station entrance if they had a semi-direct sidewalk.


You could attempt an intermediate stop for the Ink Block as the more geographically accurate spacer. However, if you are forking a Washington St. tunnel off of your would-be Tufts station you will already have a surface stop at the corner of Washington/Herald right in front of the Ink Block. So it makes little sense to put another one underground directly across the Pike barely 400 ft. away at Harrison/Marginal or something like that on the Seaport route when crossing the Tufts platform gets you pinging right back out there. Plus station space is a little limited at the various intersections around Marginal, and the only way of keeping this thing at $1B or less is not carving out new station caverns that aren't already available (like the filled-in triangle incline where Tufts will go).

I think this entire area and whatever Pike air rights and/or air rights greenway it eventually gets filled in with is going to be extremely well-served by transit with Tufts-Orange entrance on Washington, Tufts-Green entrance on Shawmut/Tremont, the Ink Block surface Green on Washington/Herald, Broadway close to the Albany side of the Ink Block, and SS hopefully getting better ped access from the block behind Kneeland. That pretty much extends the thick net of stations and station access that presently exists north of Kneeland/Stuart an entire half-mile south to E. Berkeley St. with similar walking distance.



No doubt it's all a megaproject, but it's quite a bit less to pay for than the ¼-or-worse Big Dig that Silver Line Phase III had turned into before cancellation.

 

[c_combat]

I gotta say, the pain that an Essex St subway connection would make would pay off considering the massive development there is in the S. Boston waterfront. Lots of residents, lots of employers - they need the connection. 7 painfully frustrating/expensive blocks will be worth it. I mean, if they were willing to go through with the expense and pain to put 93 underground and appease the motorists, why can't we appease the mass transit riders as well and at a lesser scale even?

I would like to see a push for this despite the clusterfuck of inter-tangled wires and electric lines or whatever that is beneath Essex St. Is a dinky, centuries-old street really going to call the shots? Did we not land on the moon? I thought this was America, dammit.

 

[George_Apley]

^ This is transit-OCD thinking. You can do the connection an easier and cheaper way, that doesn't hurt transit riders. Why set yourself up for a world of pain just to make the line look nicer on the map? Yes, residents and employers need a connection, but they don't need the Essex connection. They don't care. They just want a connection that works, and the state ought to make that connection in a way the both works, but also is the path of least resistance.

 

[cozzyd]

How much of it really needs to be tunneled? A surface reservation on Kneeland seems like it would fit (but no clue how to connect that to the Tremont tunnel...)

 

[cbrett]

We only went to the moon for political reasons, and those same political reasons are why an Essex street subway will never work but we can spend billions on the big dig. The "motorists" here make up residents from across the state and account for a huge chunk of the voters in Massachusetts.You can cry that transit is already underserved and that this subway is possible, but you'll never convince taxpayers to shell out millions more for a tunnel which cuts a small district of Boston's commute down by a few minutes when there's an obviously easier and less expensive approach.

The millions saved on avoiding that clusterfuck arent going to be wasted or thrown at motorists, they could be used to bring about much needed changes like more transit vehicles and better frequencies for the new Seaport line.