Teban54
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Strictly for funsies only: I did propose this alignment for an alternative Urban Ring that runs down Everett Ave into more central areas of Chelsea and then Eastern Ave (which I'm sure you know). It's a consideration for a deep bored tunnel across Chelsea Creek that does not depend on the suspension bridge: if we're spending the $$$ for it, might as well bore it in a way that serves Chelsea better. But otherwise, I agree that it doesn't fundamentally change your analysis.Even the most "out there" crazy transit pitch would only add one other potential corridor, along Route 1 (i.e. a heavy rail extension):
View attachment 46153
But for the most part, we're talking about those first four. Whether it's just high-frequency buses or full-out dual LRT lines, Washington and Broadway will both remain the major radial corridors, and the Grand Junction + Eastern Route is always going to be the main corridor running east-west.
On the question of space: looking at the (new) current Chelsea station, as well as the new center-platform Boston Landing station, a 2-track mainline station requires about 45 feet of ROW width. The tracks alone require about 30 feet of width. Rapid transit tracks require about 25 feet of width; the GLX stations require 45 feet of width (the GLX + Lowell total width is about 63 feet, by my measurements).
If a mainline station and rapid transit station are placed side-by-side, the ROW would probably need to be 90 feet wide. I don't really see any place within the circled area above that could accommodate that.
- Mainline 2 tracks: 30 feet
- Mainline 2 tracks + platform: 45 feet
- Rapid transit 2 tracks: 25 feet
- Rapid transit 2 tracks + platform: 45 feet
But, staggered stations might relieve some of the pressure to squeeze full-width stations side by side (75 feet at the rapid transit station, 70 feet at the mainline), something like this:
View attachment 46156
It looks to me that the ROW between Washington and Broadway is just about 70 feet. The ROW to the west widens a bit to 80 feet (actually wider than that if you include the old mainline platform, but its spacing seems like it would be mostly useless for tracks and platforms), though lengthening the current SL3 station to GLX size might be a little more challenging.
I'm not sure if 70-75 ft is enough for a platform and 4 tracks. The four GLX stations alongside Lowell Line all measure almost exactly 80 ft, even in areas tightly constrained on space, like Ball Square:
Having said that, there do seem to be plenty of examples of commuter rail platforms that are 10 ft wide. Your maximum for the CR platform will be 10-15 ft here, which is certainly less than ideal, but may be doable for a single island platform.
A minor correction to your diagram is that the 800 ft CR platform needs to span underneath and east of Broadway, as the distance between Washington Ave and Broadway is only 640 ft. But that should be pretty doable as the crossing under Broadway is quite spacious.
A few factors to keep in mind:Setting aside the silliness of making the brand new Chelsea station obsolete, this raises the larger question about the role of the Regional Rail stations, the Circle Line services, and the necessities of transfers to/from the T111 and T116.
My take is that it makes sense to relocate the mainline station to Washington / Broadway after NSRL is built and mainline trains at Chelsea are through-run to South Station and beyond; at that point, being able to transfer from the T111 and T116 (a la Sullivan Square) becomes more valuable. Until then, mainline passengers who are commuting, e.g., Salem <> Airport can transfer to Circle services at the current Mystic Mall station.
Would frequent non-NSRL Regional Rail services tip the scales in favor of relocation? I still think probably not -- I don't see many T111 or T116 riders transferring to North Station-bound Regional Rail instead of riding to Haymarket or transferring at Maverick.
- The T111 is the second most frequent bus route in the BNRD (only behind the combined SL4/5), and the T116 is also slightly more frequent than other Frequent "T" Bus Routes, mostly due to off-peak frequencies. (In terms of # trips per weekday, the T116 is only behind SL4/5, T111, T32, T57 and T1 in this order, and tied with T28.) So yes, I do think it's very worthwhile to improve connection from the T111/T116 to both CR and Urban Ring.
- If you want to promote both T111 and T116 to true BRT (or even street-running LRT), the Washington Ave bridge only has space for 3 travel lanes. This means a very plausible approach will be to set up one transit lane in each direction along Washington Ave, Broadway and Cary Ave, and reroute both T111 and T116 like below. This is a scenario that further increases the need for connections at Broadway (i.e. not just Washington Ave).
Another note is that there's a need for better connection from Urban Ring to Broadway, which can be achieved by moving Box District station further west.
To be clear, I agree that Broadway from Chelsea to Revere deserves better radial transit, and I even made god-mode proposals for it before. But in reality, I'm not sure if a subway will be built there even with C&C. Broadway is heavily residential, so the drawbacks of C&C - which ironically Jeff just pointed out above - will be especially salient. (Put it another way, the political challenges for a Chelsea-Revere C&C tunnel are almost exactly the same as the 66 corridor from Charles River to Muddy River, and you know my opinions on that.)In my recent fantasy map the option I went with for serving Chelsea was a full C&C subway under Broadway, which generally does a better job of hitting the major locations in Chelsea compared to the SL3 alignment. It can also be extended further into Revere Center, another major location with extremely high bus ridership that would significantly benefit from better transit.
How sure are we about that? I certainly hope so, and IIRC the design guidelines require bus lanes, but I'm not sure if they will necessarily be built in a way that allows (easy) conversion to rail in the future. The grades from I-93 to the river may also be too steep for an intermediate station in Charlestown.In terms of the southern side, the replacement of the Tobin Bridge in the near-ish future means there's a good opportunity to run a rail line across a new bridge
This would be a good fit for F-Line's "Red X" proposal. (Which is surprisingly ambitious by F-Line standards.)which would also then serve Charlestown, another underserved area, before meeting the OL at Community College and then doing... something, there's options.
Any OL branch that cuts the frequencies of Malden, Wellington and Assembly permanently in half is a non-starter, not to mention this proposal even hurts Sullivan. The real-world MBTA Orange Line Transformation aims for 3-min headways, which demonstrates a real need for that coming from Malden, and cutting that to 6 min will make you even worse off than pre-Covid levels. Having 3-min headways on both branches require 1.5-min headways downtown, which only the absolute top tier heavy rail systems worldwide can achieve.Maybe this could be combined with another C&C subway under Broadway (The Everett one) that branches off the OL?
(Edit: Branching OL was discussed here, but I stand by my original opinion. All the OL Transformation work shouldn't result in a downgrade to 6-min frequency with no way of improving further.)
To clarify, are your Bronze Line Everett/Revere branches grade separated in this scenario? If they're not (which itself is reasonable given the Red X), then I don't see the two Silver Line branches being grade separated either, especially the Malden branch.I went far down the crayoning rabbit hole here, well outside the bounds of feasibility, but useful as a point of imagination:
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