Re: Fairmont Line Upgrade
Buying 30 DMUs for a line that has been primed and proven to be of high ridership (which the Fairmount has not...yet) would be a great test before committing to DMUs anywhere else. The corridor looks great....the density is there, it's a transit-oriented population, etc, but it is still in the process of having ridership grow to the point where rapid-transit levels of service are the next step.
If you increase frequency, and the ridership still doesn't show up (I'd be surprised), then you don't commit to using the Fairmount Line as your test bed....but rather Boston-Waltham, or Boston-Lynn, or whatever corridor outperforms Fairmount and has already proven higher ridership.
Either way, the DMU step comes after the ridership increase that coincides with a much cheaper increase in frequency.
And if you buy them, don't expand the service or pull back the service instead, and run DMU's at rush hour on a 495 line instead...you get the worst of all worlds. Vehicles ill-suited to the task, that cost more to operate for that task, and $200M pissed down the drain.
Fear of transit loss or fear of broken promises as sales pitch for making an expensive, non- state-of-repair related vehicle purchase is a guaranteed loser of an argument for a new vehicle purchase. If they want to make sure the purchase never happens...parrot that line over and over again. Because nothing will be more effective at killing this dead. The purchase, the service...all of it.
Fear does not appeal to riders. It most certainly does not appeal to risk-averse politicians.
What's missing here...what's missing for every aspect of this...is an implementation plan.
How?
-- How is the fare collection going to work "rapid transit-like". Not by paying by smartphone or paying a premium for onboard fare; that biases against people who don't have or can't afford smartphones, primarily poor and elderly. How does the service achieve fare collection equitability with rapid transit fare collection?
-- How is the fare portability going to work with transfers? How do you transfer without double-dipping rapid transit fares? How does this attract ridership if a bus-to-subway transfer prices out less, unless there's a specific transfer structure? Is there going to be a transfer structure? If so, what is it?
-- How are the zones going to break out? Is everything staying 1A? Because this won't work if there's intra-city Zone 1's unless you redirect some buses to stop at the nearest 1A. How do you make the rest of the 2024 map square when the zones escalate at different rates on every single line? How is this route system scalable beyond 1 line only without figuring that out for this first line?
When?
-- When can we see meaningful service increases start? When does this start stepping up from today's service to full-blown clock-facing service? When does each successive step in the service increases get triggered? Do we have to wait until the DMU's are on the property before we see anything? Based on all recent vehicle purchases, that's like 6 years after a bid that's now been postponed. What would you be able to do and when with current equipment during that long a wait? Plot this for us on a calendar.
-- When do we get an answer on the fare strategy? We have no idea if these service frequencies are going to be useful without knowing this. Plot that for us on a calendar.
What?
-- What can tell us about the odds of this actually happening after so many broken promises? What are you specifically doing to make sure you meet the steps in the service plan you're going to specifically tell us the how's and when's of? What happens to the service plan if there's another budget shock? What guarantees can you make that we won't be the first cuts?
-- What is Keolis's statement about operating this service when they--and their predecessors--have had so much trouble operating bread-and-butter commuter rail on-time with good customer service? What stresses does this put on operations, and what is the impact on this service on a day when commuter rail operations across the board are stressed? Will we be the first to have canceled trains and vultured equipment to prop up the suburbs? Can they commit to a clock-facing turnaround time? What's the recourse if they can't? What are the implications for the next operator contract renewal?
-- What are the performance metrics that trigger the next rung of service increases? Is that set in stone what the escalating rungs are going to be, or are you going to play it by ear? We're suspicious of less-than-firm commitments, so what's your answer to us to relieve those suspicions?
-- What's the worst-case scenario if this doesn't work out? If it belly-flops like Greenbush? Do we have a service guarantee that the rollout will continue? What ridership does this have to show to proceed to each successive step?
Where?
-- Where are you getting the money to do this? We've just come off years of service cuts and deferred service increases. The repair bills for regular commuter rail are more than you can afford. You need more replacement commuter rail equipment. And you're asking to spend over $200 million for starters. Where are the funding sources for the service going to come from to ensure a service rollout in this budget environment? What ensures that your implementation timeframe that you told us the how's, what's, and when's on happens? And happens on-time?
-- Where's your backup plan if you fall short? Do the DMU's get further deferred? Can Keolis run this with regular commuter rail trainsets? What's their answer on the service levels they can run it with on push-pull equipment? Or do we deal with service cuts? Where does service get cut first?
-- Where do we go for updates on answering these questions in the implementation plan? Are you going to update us with specifics: how's, what's, when's, and where's?
Why?
-- Why should we trust you to live up to your word, when that hasn't happened to-date? Show us why this implementation plan is worth the paper it's printed on with specifics. Show us why we should believe Keolis is capable of providing reliable service by them giving us specifics, and a customer service chain of command.
-- Why is this commitment to the inner city going to be honored...this time...and not see resources diverted to the suburbs. We heard about that Foxboro DMU proposal. Why aren't we going to be subject to another bait-and-switch? What are your guarantees.
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ALL
OF
THIS
MUST
BE
ANSWERED. . .
. . .up-front, or we do not have an implementation plan. It does not cost anything to state for the record what your plan is, what the steps are, what the conditions for the steps are, what is guaranteed and what is not guaranteed. And for damn sure what's the alternative in the event of a failure.
There is no Indigo Line without answering these questions in specific detail, with dates and commitments and all the itemized caveats. That is all people are asking for. No bullshit, no sales pitches. And definitely no inflammatory F.U.D. not even the Governor would take like, "Well, if you don't let us spend $200M it'll be easier for us to just not follow-through at all. Even though it wouldn't be hard to not follow-through if you did."
Just a matter-of-fact detailing of what, where, when, how...and why what/where/when/how means they're serious and can't back out this time. Somehow...for all their faults and all they had to get held to the fire...they were able to answer these questions for GLX. Let's see some growth and "reform before revenue" with some similar transparency here.
That's it. No blind trust, no blank checks. Show 'em how it'll be done.
That is why I made the point. Greenbush is a mistake. It was forced before there was any proven ridership base, and at such a high cost, we can't just cut and run. CapeFlyer was another unproven test, which has faltered a bit, but nobody is dismayed over having attempted (and still attempting) a low-cost trial.
I could have been dishonest and said Downeaster > Greenbush, but in reality, for every Downeaster there is a CapeFlyer, and that's the point of gradual increases of service. Some new services look a lot better on paper and aren't a hit. You don't want to over-commit.
Well, I don't think the risk of failure is all that high with Fairmount. The demand for high-frequency rail service on this corridor has been picked apart under an electron microscope for 40 years now. We've got a pretty solid handle on the fundamentals. Greenbush has had entire reports written about it on how many
mistakes its scoping studies made and how much it relied on assumptions about cost and squishy degrees of wishful thinking on the projections. It literally is whitepaper fodder on how not to blow through a bunch of caution flags. We're not dealing with that risk here.
The risk is: do the powers that be truly understand the difference between an instant-impact project like GLX and a far-reaching, slow-growth project like Fairmount stimulating a route corridor that wasn't pre-existing. Because GLX's corridor was pre-existing; look at all the bus routes flanking it on both sides screaming to be consolidated. This is new as a corridor. The fundamentals are solid as a corridor because the corridor matches up perfectly with square-to-square travel that Boston is built around, and hits a lot more squares en route than the bus network does because of the street grid orientation. The grid kinda sucks in Dot and HP. Except for Blue Hill and HP Ave. it's too much E-W, not enough N-S even though the squares line up N-S. This punches through the N-S barrier that the bus routes can't.
But it's still a new corridor. And the ridership is going to stink for the first 5-8 years regardless of service levels. That's not a bug, it's a feature. Everybody knew that during the study. It's why it's a risk-managed build; it can get stepped up in notches and not have to slip 8 years behind schedule like GLX before Day 1 ever happens. What we don't know is whether the powers that be
remember that this is what they signed off on. And that's why they have to detail out the implementation plan to the nines. It'll show that they remember and have full commitment to seeing it through its first decade. If instant gratification rules...yeah, of course everyone's going to be worried about the rug getting pulled out--or never laid in the first place--and be reluctant to try it out. There's nothing 'fixed route' about a route whose service could go away or turn back into a pumpkin. That's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So is the F.U.D. that it takes a $200M vehicle purchase and 7 years to get on the property to *maybe* have some nice things that won't be taken away (except not guarantee either of those DMU's or no). That's every bit as much a self-fulfilling prophecy.
