False...yes they have. 54 total trains, 27 total RT's on both the 2019 and 2024 schedules. The only difference is the peak/off-peak distribution being a little bit different now, and the weekend schedules being slightly expanded.
false statement:No, it's not a "vast majority". There were 12 peak IB's, 9 peak OB's on the 2019 schedule. There are 11 peak IB's, 9 peak OB's on the 2023 schedule. It's a net reduction of 1 unidirectional train. And @Teban54 already provided you with the cite that CR ridership is at >90% pre-COVID ridership (94.8%, in fact, as of October!). It's on you to find the specific citation that the Worcester Line is severely lagging the system in ridership recovery to support this claim.
Direct citation on the union blocking it? Don't think for one second you can fling a claim that provocative out there without backing it up with a hard news cite.
They already have, unless you're holding out on the 12th inbound peak slot as the crux of your entire "vast majority of the ridership" argument.
Show us the numbers, then. Show us where the Worcester Line is severely lagging and show us where the subway-overlap stops are busting out to an extreme skew.
That may have been some issue with the train you were on? The line is predominately rated for 60-70 MPH (per OpenRailwayMap), both before and after the Wildcat Branch. There is no track or equipment reason for those trains to run any slower than the Downeaster does. Since the scheduled effective speed is 35 miles per hour (43 minutes to go 25), I assume there are some significant time penalties for station dwell, acceleration/deceleration for stops, etc. If so, that's an issue of local vs express service, and not an issue of somebody not caring.
Yes, but also, Lowell would be a strong candidate for pre-electrification diesel Frequent Regional Rail (more details at link). 45 minutes sucks, but it's also well within the realm of rapid transit commutes (and the journey from high-ridership Anderson/Woburn is only 25 minutes). Even the 45 minute journey still means that basically all of downtown and some of Back Bay is within a 1 hour commute, and that expands to most of Back Bay and the Seaport if you stretch your commute to 1:05. Several Lowell Line stations have good placement to support walk-ups and bus transfers, exactly the kind of station that would benefit enormously from near-walk-up-and-go 15 minute frequencies.
I know this idea does not originate with you personally, but I remain confused by it. Is this supposed to assume that trains beyond Beverly will be dual-modes/battery trains? Because otherwise you're still going to have 2 trains per hour coming in from Newburyport and Rockport. If our target is 15 min frequencies, then that's 50% of your service already accounted for as diesels.
Generally speaking, rail is competitive with Boston car commutes if you can do 128-to-Terminal in under 30 minutes, and 495-to-Terminal in under an hour. The Lowell Line already meets the competitiveness standard handily, especially at the 495 end where it's 10-15 minutes faster there than any other line not-named-Providence.
Isn't this the Downs-Thomson paradox in action, and so rail travel times will generally be "competitive" with driving? The time to drive a commute tends to match the trip times of equivalent trips taken on public transit. If we speed up the trains, people will switch from driving, and car traffic will speed up until it hits that equilibrium again. If the trains run slower, people will switch to driving until traffic is so bad it is the same time to just take the train.Generally speaking, rail is competitive with Boston car commutes if you can do 128-to-Terminal in under 30 minutes, and 495-to-Terminal in under an hour. The Lowell Line already meets the competitiveness standard handily, especially at the 495 end where it's 10-15 minutes faster there than any other line not-named-Providence.
Boston T-Time: Commuter Rail
The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority's 134 commuter rail stations on 12 lines, spaced by average travel times to or from Boston North or South Station during peak schedules.www.stonebrowndesign.com
I posted in preparation of me taking the Lowell line again last night. This could be me misreading hwo fast we were actually going, but there are significant stretches, especially in the first third of the journey, where the train seemed to be at a crawl (5-10mph). My expectation for a straightish, double tracked rail line is that it should just be flying between stations, but I'm not an expert. It felt exactly like the rapid transit trains do when they run into signal and slow zone issues. We even stopped at one point for a minute or so. I even saw a Downeaster fly by us. I didn't think to time the journey but I think it was closer to an hour. This matches my experience from a couple months ago.
If it took an hour, that's 33% longer than the time table indicates. I guess the question is whether it is consistently slower than scheduled, or whether you encountered some bad luck. As for that Downeaster flying by, it will definitely go faster, because the only stop it is making is at Anderson RTC. I don't know whether the MBTA would have reason to run a Lowell Express, but if they did, it would certainly move at a higher speed than the locals.
Commuter Rail travel times really aren't that variable, though. Unlike the price we're paying with rapid transit's slow zone hell, the CR network's speeds have been stable for decades. With on-time performance that's generally gotten a little better over time as some dregs-of-system lines (Fitchburg, Worcester, Haverhill) have gotten infrastructure improvements for some of their traffic management flaws. That chart I posted was from 2012, and there's been scant change in the dozen years since...and certainly little to none in the negative direction. Loading really doesn't affect it much, because there's built-in schedule padding for things like low-platform dwells on particularly packed runs. So all the movement and instability has been on the roads side. And part of the attraction of public transit is its relative schedule certainty (current crisis-era rapid transit excepted) compared to the crapshoot on the roads. Traffic loading on the roads is such that an accident or construction can freeze traffic even on the off-peaks, with a big part of our current traffic hell being the sheer unpredictability of trips at any hour of the day. With some commutes, like I-93, being so incredibly unpredictable that you have to lean worst-case on planned trip time pretty much all of the time.
You can easily track on-time performance on any CR line with the T's Service Reliability tracker. The Lowell Line has been pretty stable over the last 30 days. 2 days at 89%, 3 days at 93%, 1 day at 94%, rest of the time at 96% or above. 16 days this past month a perfect 100%.
www.bostonglobe.com
Spoiler: Train winsCommuter rail train hits tractor-trailer in Littleton - The Boston Globe
There were no injuries, said Richard Sullivan, superintendent of the MBTA’s Transit Police. The truck sustained heavy damage.
This prompted me to update and expand my analysis of North Adams service via Springfield. Looking more closely at the numbers, it really is a no brainer -- bootstrapping into the CommPass rail improvements (using the NNEIRI model) would be extraordinarily less expensive, would be equally fast or, at worst, increase travel times to Boston by 40 minutes, and would serve a stronger market to boot.
