MBTA "Transformation" (Green Line, Red Line, & Orange Line Transformation Projects)

So lurking around, I found this guy who seem to did some back-of-the-napkin math.


If this guy is right, we'll need 5-6 years of weekend downtown shutdowns. Is this what we're looking at? Shutting down whole weekends in the Downtown core to replace ~300'-~500' feet of track against 58,000' of track for the Orange Line alone?

If this guy is right, then the start of the weekend Downtown shutdowns was not a "ripe-the-banndaid" moment to finally start to bring service back to someone respectable. It's the start of a new even lower-service normal. And that amount of track they're replacing, is 300'-500' a number indicating a make-the-most-of-it-round-the-clock replacement work? Or more indicative of a cost-cutting measure of track replacement that could be achieved overnight? Or is it neither, like it is round-the-clock, but incredibly slow (or is actually even fast)?

I don't know, but that's why I post here. Is this what we're looking at?

Circling back around to this, today's presentation on RL/OL weekend work says they did (among other things) last weekend:


OL: Replaced 520 linear feet of track + Installed 2,682 linear feet of Continuous Welded Rail strings (I'm unsure why they split up the numbers like this)

RL: Replaced 2,400 linear feet of track between Harvard and Porter Square

So it seems it is possible to do much more work in a weekend than we've seen out of previous weekends of work. Didn't have time to watch to see if any explanation was provided regarding the drastically increased productivity, but it looks ike some of the productivity assumptions from the initial weekends may not be accurate.
 
It may be due to the fact that the work being done previous weekends was in the pit areas at stations, which may have limited movement for workers and equipment.
 

Bid advertised for expanding RL Codman Yard at Ashmont by 6 additional tracks and to replace all the switches and crossovers in/out of the station in support of the headway bump to 6 min. branch frequencies. This will infill about three-quarters of the unused weedy infield inside of the loop (possibly with the rest of the slack being landscaped for more formal materials storage than today's random piles of rail/ties).


Note that Codman's empty 35,000 sq. ft. 'wedge' area bookended by the Red loop track, Hillsdale St., and the Mattapan Line is still fair game for building an LRV maint garage and mini-yard for the Type 9's, as Mattapan maint shed isn't long, tall, or spacious enough to jack a modern LRV up on lifts with all the right tools. Ultimately, busting Mattapan down to strict car storage and moving maintenance to 24/7 staffed and securely-enclosed Codman probably ends up the better deal.
 
^ Is Braintree getting a similar expansion, or is there enough storage space there already?
 
^ Is Braintree getting a similar expansion, or is there enough storage space there already?
"Upgrades"...whatever that means...but no expansion at Caddigan Yard since it maxed out all available space upon being first built. I've rarely seen Caddigan get as full for storage as Codman so there's probably less need out there.
 
Is there a chance they can upgrade/expand other facilities to free up land in fort point/south bay? Itd be great to clean up a lot of that mess some day and get room to build.
 
All of this looks good to me, though I wonder about how branching would impact Orange Line headways. Malden is currently accustomed to 6 minutes. OLT promises 4.5 minute headways, but with a split at Assembly, each branch would only get 9 minutes, a 50% reduction for Malden.

It is, of course, a huge improvement for Everett.
 
Is there a chance they can upgrade/expand other facilities to free up land in fort point/south bay? Itd be great to clean up a lot of that mess some day and get room to build.

Absolutely effing not if you even want to have transit capable of moving all the people going to those supertall SimCity acid dreams. There's not enough transit storage downtown to begin with...we can't be shortsightedly squeezing the acreage.

Start here: The northern 2 city blocks of Red Line Cabot Yard have already been provisioned for air rights cover-over for 49 years now. Just like all those unbuilt Pike air rights that have been malingering for 55 years. Why don't we learn first to take two hands off necks planning-wise--MassDOT, BDPA, and City Hall--and start using the prime air rights acreage we already have before wishing more transit capacity away in the name of ground-level land hungriness. This is scarcity by planning incompetence, not REAL scarcity. Building a new city block along the Broadway Bridge over the Red yard tracks already spaced for stilts ends up being 10x the sweeter location than the Widett Circle 'bowl' and its far shittier street grid. But we haven't figured ass from elbows on how to finance these builds so all those choicest existing over-transpo parcels continue to languish while folks keep asking if we can evict one more mission-critical storage yard from ground level.

No...that's not an excuse for avoidance. The dev planning powers that be have to learn how to bloody utilize the better-located stuff that was set aside specifically for them to build over, not keep begging for more transpo-use land to get unilaterally forked over because it's "easier" to covet new acreage than follow-through on a set plan that happens to be boo-hoo hard.
 
All of this looks good to me, though I wonder about how branching would impact Orange Line headways. Malden is currently accustomed to 6 minutes. OLT promises 4.5 minute headways, but with a split at Assembly, each branch would only get 9 minutes, a 50% reduction for Malden.

It is, of course, a huge improvement for Everett.

Branching is an utter nonstarter. You can't slash frequencies to a bus terminal as major as Malden in half and not have ruinous effects on bus frequencies and utilization. It's a big enough terminal that the frequency reduction there outslugs all the gains from the Everett branch. Branching Orange could happen AT Malden if there was a willing trajectory from there...but not any point before Malden.

Multimodally this doesn't come close to justifying the pain threshold. Why the working group got fixated on this (even setting aside the steep construction infeasibility) is a head-scratcher. Especially when Urban Ring LRT can get delivered to the doorstep of Sweetser Circle with zero of the demerits of an Orange Branch being sourced out of Brickbottom from multiple Green Line frequency sources. Not that I think branching a branch spur out of Sweetser is a swell idea for all the same construction cost demerits as (subwaying???) under Broadway....but at least you could cobble together enough frequencies out of Downtown and Cambridge to serve it without depriving someone else of service. The specific choice of Orange was never so much as explained in terms of possible benefits...nevermind how they were going to compensate for the steep and obvious downsides for existing multimodal transfers. Somebody just put it there in the proposal and they're running with it, even though it is 1000% self-defeating of their own transit dreams when it inevitably gets ruled a nonstarter. So why lead with the nonstarter when there are other configurations on the table that "fix the glitch" of not killing Malden Terminal while checking off all other boxes??? That makes no rational sense. It takes a sort of willful blindness to proceed anyway.
 
Absolutely effing not if you even want to have transit capable of moving all the people going to those supertall SimCity acid dreams. There's not enough transit storage downtown to begin with...we can't be shortsightedly squeezing the acreage.

Start here: The northern 2 city blocks of Red Line Cabot Yard have already been provisioned for air rights cover-over for 49 years now. Just like all those unbuilt Pike air rights that have been malingering for 55 years. Why don't we learn first to take two hands off necks planning-wise--MassDOT, BDPA, and City Hall--and start using the prime air rights acreage we already have before wishing more transit capacity away in the name of ground-level land hungriness. This is scarcity by planning incompetence, not REAL scarcity. Building a new city block along the Broadway Bridge over the Red yard tracks already spaced for stilts ends up being 10x the sweeter location than the Widett Circle 'bowl' and its far shittier street grid. But we haven't figured ass from elbows on how to finance these builds so all those choicest existing over-transpo parcels continue to languish while folks keep asking if we can evict one more mission-critical storage yard from ground level.

No...that's not an excuse for avoidance. The dev planning powers that be have to learn how to bloody utilize the better-located stuff that was set aside specifically for them to build over, not keep begging for more transpo-use land to get unilaterally forked over because it's "easier" to covet new acreage than follow-through on a set plan that happens to be boo-hoo hard.

At the very considerable risk of incurring your wrath, I humbly venture the (very probably) stupid question: "Would the NSRL help with some of the in-town transit storage issue"?

.
 
Last edited:
All of this looks good to me, though I wonder about how branching would impact Orange Line headways. Malden is currently accustomed to 6 minutes. OLT promises 4.5 minute headways, but with a split at Assembly, each branch would only get 9 minutes, a 50% reduction for Malden.

It is, of course, a huge improvement for Everett.

If Boston pulled up the big boy pants, they could do 90 second headways like the developed world. 3 minutes per branch sounds great to me.
 
40TPH is highly unusual (Moscow tops out at 38tph with multiple signal blocks per platform), and extremely difficult to achieve with branching due to merge conflicts. Alon does extensive research before making the "developed world" remark, this ain't it.
 
At the very considerable risk of incurring your wrath, I humbly venture the (very probably) stupid question: "Would the NSRL help with some of the in-town transit storage issue"?

.

No. Because the surface terminals aren't going away, Amtrak in 2040 is going to be running way more surface service, and the Red Line and buses aren't going anywhere. Where does NSRL uncork a land bonanza???

At "most" maybe if Widett goes to all ground-level train storage with provisions for a deck-over you might be able to reduce the T's 30 trainsets of ground-level storage and trade that space over to more bus storage. Not a single "easy" acre gets freed up. You're still taking both hands off neck to learn how to cleanly build air rights. And you're still targeting the Pike and Cabot parcels that have been advertised for 50 years on more centrally located parcels first.

Nothing changes. Nobody's going to out-lazy the air rights dilemma for planners by making it easier to steal transit properties. As is we need more transit properties...like Widett...to make this century buildable. MOST of it can be air rights'ed, so that's not a problem. The institutions who can't fucking wrap heads around air rights are the problem. This is on them to start belatedly figuring it out.
 
No. Because the surface terminals aren't going away, Amtrak in 2040 is going to be running way more surface service, and the Red Line and buses aren't going anywhere. Where does NSRL uncork a land bonanza???

At "most" maybe if Widett goes to all ground-level train storage with provisions for a deck-over you might be able to reduce the T's 30 trainsets of ground-level storage and trade that space over to more bus storage. Not a single "easy" acre gets freed up. You're still taking both hands off neck to learn how to cleanly build air rights. And you're still targeting the Pike and Cabot parcels that have been advertised for 50 years on more centrally located parcels first.

Nothing changes. Nobody's going to out-lazy the air rights dilemma for planners by making it easier to steal transit properties. As is we need more transit properties...like Widett...to make this century buildable. MOST of it can be air rights'ed, so that's not a problem. The institutions who can't fucking wrap heads around air rights are the problem. This is on them to start belatedly figuring it out.


OK, thanks for the answer. I had been under the impression that NSRL would take a lot of the non-revenue turn-around and "overnighting" Amtrak stock out of that area and around North Station (perhaps to be stored in less congested areas north and south of the city).
 
Last edited:
OK, thanks for the answer. I had been under the impression that NSRL would take a lot of the non-revenue turn-around and "overnighting" Amtrak stock out of that area and around North Station (perhaps to be stored in less congested areas north and south of the city).
It is an absolute reduction in downtown storage needs because the system will be better-distributed to the endpoint layovers and shift changes will be a lot lower-'intensity' than the jarring all-or-nothing peak vs. non-peak of today. But the notion that some transpo advocates who should know better (Ari Osevit...looking immediately in your direction) have erroneously spouted that storage starts getting zeroed-out en masse because "the trains are always in motion" is utterly divorced from all reality. Does NYC not have a whole slew of giant honking subway yards even though they run some of the densest all-day service in the world...with an overnight revenue shift...because they have so many trains in constant motion? Of course not...the more trains and the bigger the fleet the bigger the staff shift changes are going to regularly be, the more floors there are to pause and sweep, the more onboard toilets there are to empty...and so on. The same Eurozone that the transpo blogosphere loves to lecture us on our inferiority towards has city-size passenger yards for its immense layer cake of hyper-local, semi-local, urban-regional, intercity-regional, and HSR services. That's not born failsons failing to keep the trains forever moving...that's simply the raw-most network effects of their enormous scale showing itself. If we want that kind of scale, we're going to have to support it with matching facilities. That really shouldn't be a hard concept to grasp because we get it intuitively when bus and rapid transit modes are the topic. But bring up NSRL and/or RUR and all of a sudden Boston Engine Terminal becomes this physics-melting 'white hole' where trains go in and high-rent supertalls spit back out. The thought doesn't even follow its own logic to arrive at that endpoint from an ostensibly service-centric point of origin. Some of Ari's recent writing on the subject of yards has bungled this bad by tipping its hand too obviously about a craving for a new real estate canvas to SimCity with rather than any actual concern for transpo network efficiency.

With South Station/South Bay it's simple.
  • Red Line is going nowhere, because it cannot physically run 3-min. headways without a maxed-out Cabot firing on all cylinders. But we shouldn't be coveting anything on the interior of Cabot anyway because the Broadway-Traveler block and Traveler-Ft. Point Channel blocks have been pre-provisioned for air rights infill for 49 years and those are 'the' greatest-location parcels of all for knitting SS, South End, Southie, and Seaport together at their crossroads.

  • The 3 downtown bus garages are going nowhere if you ever want more BRT-ification of the most overloaded Yellow Line routes within 2 miles of the CBD. The T is already aggressively investing to max out Southampton garage's footprint with expansion to get more 60-footer capable routes running near the CBD. Remember Boston 2024?...this garage was being coveted along with razing half of everything else around Newmarket Sq. for Olympics facilities. The T is very intentionally trying to act faster than City Hall and the BDPA can poke their heads in and interfere it to spit. Albany Garage sits on very highly-coveted property. Unless the state can somehow get interference-free buy of the whole of the ground-level Widett bowl where some of the space (say, by the to-be-relocated BTD tow lot) can be worked in for bus storage, they can't afford to listen to any real estate offers for Albany. And...shit...the Olympics coveted Cabot Garage on Dot Ave., too, an even more mission-critical facility than Albany. But no matter how many times you tell the City that they won't have a functioning bus system without these 3 dead-center downtown garages or equivalents very nearly across the street...pols still buy into magical thinking like everything will be just fine if you parked every Yellow Line vehicle overnight in Weston like that's no big change.

  • Amtrak is not going to be running thru NSRL to Woburn or something with every train. Every Boston run of theirs--whether it's an Acela, Regional, Downeaster, Lake Shore Ltd., future Inland Route and Montreal service, or future long-distance trains super-extended up here from New York after the Gateway Tunnel opens--all come with mandatory between-run downtime for crew changes, food service restock, cleanup, and a run around the loop to change directions since the lion's share of their trains (all Regionals + Lake Shore) are run pull-only not push-pull. With NSRL you'll probably see Downeasters (which by that point will probably have been extended outward to Bangor) going through the tunnel just so they can join the rest of the Southampton crowd between-runs, and then a modest share of Portland- and Concord-badged Regionals continuing north Virginia-style (with the necessary caveat that NH + ME ≠ VA + NC on demand, so by no means will it ever be more than a minority share of Regionals continuing up). AMTK needs Southampton Yard forever just to turn around and head back out to D.C. or Albany/Springfield in one piece; it can't practically be done with an on-platform reverse out in the suburbs given the nature of those services and their crews' work hours. So plug all of their 2040 Superduper Regional/HSR growth and the NEC FUTURE study's most acid-fever expansionary dreams into surface South Station. They are already figuring out how to expand Southampton Yard space by reimagining the whole currently non-railed side of the property along Frontage Road: moving employee parking offsite, stacking the collection of sheds and signal bungalows vertically by the main building so they can lay more track, and even trenching underneath the Fairmount Line embankment so they can ram a bunch of new yard tracks straight into the loop while passing underneath Fairmount. Every square inch of that yard is, like RL Cabot, sacrosanct.

  • The T right now needs an enormous increase in downtown southside storage because they lack the ability to effectively pair-match train lengths with routes...and that's going to be a problem with RUR because even if headways stay more even-keel there's still big demand spikes and dips to handle at rush. The 3-4 car trains you have rolling out on regular 15-30 minute churns all day aren't elastic enough--even with denser headways--to upshift to 5:00 when Providence can fill an eight-pack to standing room. And conversely it's going to maim operating costs if you have to over-hedge on train lengths for the far emptier off-peak from lack of flexibility. Even EMU sets assigned to NSRL duty are going to need to skip a shift for a yard stop to split/combine into bigger or smaller trains for those shift-related dips and surges. Readville (which the city also covets way too much for redev) is too far away for that; it's got to be nearer to downtown. And Boston Engine Terminal in Somerville is soon to be maxed out for space once they claim the last available strip along the Northpoint property line, with its shop duties becoming all the more intensive the more total trains you run. Further, the tunnel isn't replacing SS Surface so "the trains are always in motion" fantasy deeply held by some doesn't apply at all to NSRL. Systemwide capacity doesn't increase without utilizing both tunnel and surface, and the tunnel's upper limits for mixing-and-matching pretty much constrain all manner of surge service, alt routing, and otherwise non- rote-standard schedule types to choosing the surface rather than trying to worm their way into the churn down below. So even if/when NSRL reduces the storage needs, it won't be by massive amount. And for what substantial amount it does reduce in Purple Line storage, Amtrak and buses have immediate need for gobbling right back up. They really need the Widett 'bowl' and BTD lot. It's 30 trainsets (avg. 6 cars apiece) of space immediately available, where the Beacon Park easement next to would-be West station has already been withered down to 8 trainsets by a land-hungry Harvard and is likely to get zeroed out. And ALL of it would be built with decking provisions, which actually makes it easier than the harebrained Olympics plan to have the developer float the whole cost of building up from the 'bowl' to the street grid on stilts. Then if NSRL reduces the total storage requirements for Purple Line trains, a little bit of Amtrak overflow from Southampton could be accommodated and you can change over some of those storage tracks to bus parking bays for 100+ Yellow Line vehicles. Maybe that's what ultimately lets them barter Albany Garage for redev.
However it works out, ain't no way the total acreage needs for all-modes transpo storage will ever decrease. And that's after it substantially increases to plug the dire downtown storage shortfalls facing Purple, Yellow/Silver, and Amtrak in the immediate term. It'll shape-shift with changing needs, but always have to be there. Fortunately, nearly all of it except for the tall structures like actual Cabot Carhouse, Cabot Garage, Southampton Terminal, etc. is pre-designed for air rights. So again, the problem is that our civic planners can't seem to stop perennially pwning themselves like Stooges on the air rights opportunities we've already had in-hand for 50 years...not that there isn't so little golden land available in the CBD for playing real-life SimCity that we somehow have no choice but to shoot all our transit networks square in the head with eviction notices.
 
Last edited:
40TPH is highly unusual (Moscow tops out at 38tph with multiple signal blocks per platform), and extremely difficult to achieve with branching due to merge conflicts. Alon does extensive research before making the "developed world" remark, this ain't it.

Paris Line 14 is every 85 seconds. Mexico City does 90 seconds.

You are correct that branching does make it harder. You really need a grade separated interchange.

Even at 2 minute headways, or just 30tph, you get a train every 4 minute on each branch.
 
It is an absolute reduction in downtown storage needs because the system will be better-distributed to the endpoint layovers and shift changes will be a lot lower-'intensity' than the jarring all-or-nothing peak vs. non-peak of today. But the notion that some transpo advocates who should know better (Ari Osevit...looking immediately in your direction) have erroneously spouted that storage starts getting zeroed-out en masse because "the trains are always in motion" is utterly divorced from all reality. Does NYC not have a whole slew of giant honking subway yards even though they run some of the densest all-day service in the world...with an overnight revenue shift...because they have so many trains in constant motion? Of course not...the more trains and the bigger the fleet the bigger the staff shift changes are going to regularly be, the more floors there are to pause and sweep, the more onboard toilets there are to empty...and so on. The same Eurozone that the transpo blogosphere loves to lecture us on our inferiority towards has city-size passenger yards for its immense layer cake of hyper-local, semi-local, urban-regional, intercity-regional, and HSR services. That's not born failsons failing to keep the trains forever moving...that's simply the raw-most network effects of their enormous scale showing itself. If we want that kind of scale, we're going to have to support it with matching facilities. That really shouldn't be a hard concept to grasp because we get it intuitively when bus and rapid transit modes are the topic. But bring up NSRL and/or RUR and all of a sudden Boston Engine Terminal becomes this physics-melting 'white hole' where trains go in and high-rent supertalls spit back out. The thought doesn't even follow its own logic to arrive at that endpoint from an ostensibly service-centric point of origin. Some of Ari's recent writing on the subject of yards has bungled this bad by tipping its hand too obviously about a craving for a new real estate canvas to SimCity with rather than any actual concern for transpo network efficiency.

With South Station/South Bay it's simple.
  • Red Line is going nowhere, because it cannot physically run 3-min. headways without a maxed-out Cabot firing on all cylinders. But we shouldn't be coveting anything on the interior of Cabot anyway because the Broadway-Traveler block and Traveler-Ft. Point Channel blocks have been pre-provisioned for air rights infill for 49 years and those are 'the' greatest-location parcels of all for knitting SS, South End, Southie, and Seaport together at their crossroads.

  • The 3 downtown bus garages are going nowhere if you ever want more BRT-ification of the most overloaded Yellow Line routes within 2 miles of the CBD. The T is already aggressively investing to max out Southampton garage's footprint with expansion to get more 60-footer capable routes running near the CBD. Remember Boston 2024?...this garage was being coveted along with razing half of everything else around Newmarket Sq. for Olympics facilities. The T is very intentionally trying to act faster than City Hall and the BDPA can poke their heads in and interfere it to spit. Albany Garage sits on very highly-coveted property. Unless the state can somehow get interference-free buy of the whole of the ground-level Widett bowl where some of the space (say, by the to-be-relocated BTD tow lot) can be worked in for bus storage, they can't afford to listen to any real estate offers for Albany. And...shit...the Olympics coveted Cabot Garage on Dot Ave., too, an even more mission-critical facility than Albany. But no matter how many times you tell the City that they won't have a functioning bus system without these 3 dead-center downtown garages or equivalents very nearly across the street...pols still buy into magical thinking like everything will be just fine if you parked every Yellow Line vehicle overnight in Weston like that's no big change.

  • Amtrak is not going to be running thru NSRL to Woburn or something with every train. Every Boston run of theirs--whether it's an Acela, Regional, Downeaster, Lake Shore Ltd., future Inland Route and Montreal service, or future long-distance trains super-extended up here from New York after the Gateway Tunnel opens--all come with mandatory between-run downtime for crew changes, food service restock, cleanup, and a run around the loop to change directions since the lion's share of their trains (all Regionals + Lake Shore) are run pull-only not push-pull. With NSRL you'll probably see Downeasters (which by that point will probably have been extended outward to Bangor) going through the tunnel just so they can join the rest of the Southampton crowd between-runs, and then a modest share of Portland- and Concord-badged Regionals continuing north Virginia-style (with the necessary caveat that NH + ME ≠ VA + NC on demand, so by no means will it ever be more than a minority share of Regionals continuing up). AMTK needs Southampton Yard forever just to turn around and head back out to D.C. or Albany/Springfield in one piece; it can't practically be done with an on-platform reverse out in the suburbs given the nature of those services and their crews' work hours. So plug all of their 2040 Superduper Regional/HSR growth and the NEC FUTURE study's most acid-fever expansionary dreams into surface South Station. They are already figuring out how to expand Southampton Yard space by reimagining the whole currently non-railed side of the property along Frontage Road: moving employee parking offsite, stacking the collection of sheds and signal bungalows vertically by the main building so they can lay more track, and even trenching underneath the Fairmount Line embankment so they can ram a bunch of new yard tracks straight into the loop while passing underneath Fairmount. Every square inch of that yard is, like RL Cabot, sacrosanct.

  • The T right now needs an enormous increase in downtown southside storage because they lack the ability to effectively pair-match train lengths with routes...and that's going to be a problem with RUR because even if headways stay more even-keel there's still big demand spikes and dips to handle at rush. The 3-4 car trains you have rolling out on regular 15-30 minute churns all day aren't elastic enough--even with denser headways--to upshift to 5:00 when Providence can fill an eight-pack to standing room. And conversely it's going to maim operating costs if you have to over-hedge on train lengths for the far emptier off-peak from lack of flexibility. Even EMU sets assigned to NSRL duty are going to need to skip a shift for a yard stop to split/combine into bigger or smaller trains for those shift-related dips and surges. Readville (which the city also covets way too much for redev) is too far away for that; it's got to be nearer to downtown. And Boston Engine Terminal in Somerville is soon to be maxed out for space once they claim the last available strip along the Northpoint property line, with its shop duties becoming all the more intensive the more total trains you run. Further, the tunnel isn't replacing SS Surface so "the trains are always in motion" fantasy deeply held by some doesn't apply at all to NSRL. Systemwide capacity doesn't increase without utilizing both tunnel and surface, and the tunnel's upper limits for mixing-and-matching pretty much constrain all manner of surge service, alt routing, and otherwise non- rote-standard schedule types to choosing the surface rather than trying to worm their way into the churn down below. So even if/when NSRL reduces the storage needs, it won't be by massive amount. And for what substantial amount it does reduce in Purple Line storage, Amtrak and buses have immediate need for gobbling right back up. They really need the Widett 'bowl' and BTD lot. It's 30 trainsets (avg. 6 cars apiece) of space immediately available, where the Beacon Park easement next to would-be West station has already been withered down to 8 trainsets by a land-hungry Harvard and is likely to get zeroed out. And ALL of it would be built with decking provisions, which actually makes it easier than the harebrained Olympics plan to have the developer float the whole cost of building up from the 'bowl' to the street grid on stilts. Then if NSRL reduces the total storage requirements for Purple Line trains, a little bit of Amtrak overflow from Southampton could be accommodated and you can change over some of those storage tracks to bus parking bays for 100+ Yellow Line vehicles. Maybe that's what ultimately lets them barter Albany Garage for redev.
However it works out, ain't no way the total acreage needs for all-modes transpo storage will ever decrease. And that's after it substantially increases to plug the dire downtown storage shortfalls facing Purple, Yellow/Silver, and Amtrak in the immediate term. It'll shape-shift with changing needs, but always have to be there. Fortunately, nearly all of it except for the tall structures like actual Cabot Carhouse, Cabot Garage, Southampton Terminal, etc. is pre-designed for air rights. So again, the problem is that our civic planners can't seem to stop perennially pwning themselves like Stooges on the air rights opportunities we've already had in-hand for 50 years...not that there isn't so little golden land available in the CBD for playing real-life SimCity that we somehow have no choice but to shoot all our transit networks square in the head with eviction notices.


Thanks, F-Line for the detailed answer. As always, much to review and digest, but always great insight.

.
 
Paris Line 14 is every 85 seconds. Mexico City does 90 seconds.

You are correct that branching does make it harder. You really need a grade separated interchange.

Even at 2 minute headways, or just 30tph, you get a train every 4 minute on each branch.

Paris 14 is no comparison. Only 9 stops over 5.6 mi. vs. 20 stops on Orange over 11 miles...and generally wide stop spacing between most stops (avg. 3/4 mile) allowing way more headway-packing in the running tunnels than you could ever get here where station pairs like State-DTX and their platform dwells set Orange's practical upper limits. But most significantly nearly two-thirds of Line 14's stops are transfer stations to other rapid transit lines meaning it has an extreme wealth of dwell-taming radial relief that the extreme-overloaded State + DTX do not have for getting moving faster. And Line 14's expansion plans will eventually have it interlining with other builds in the Grand Paris Express system and gaining yet more transfer stations in the process, so the considerable lengthening that could've come with some downside of starting to gap out those ultra-short headways ends up being counterbalanced by new supply-side and dwell-taming sources.

I mean...if you gave the same engineers who built Line 14 infinite money to retrofit Orange to as close as humanly possible to the same...automated operation, platform screen doors, and all...they would never be able to get headways from the 4+ minutes that the OLT upgrades propose to anything more than a handful of seconds under 3. Simply because trains cannot get their doors closed fast enough at DTX, State, and often also Back Bay and Haymarket because the whole crush of systemwide transfer loads that hit it at too few overall transfer stops. Then add the extreme-short running distance between those overloaded transfer stops and the State-DTX pair ends up setting the ruling limit.

Red, too. How are you ever going to get it below 3 mins. promised by RLT with Park, DTX, and SS chaining their transfer overcrowding together in a row? It can't be done. Not when platform-screen doors or open gangways don't in themselves do anything to the fact that crowding on the Park platforms crushes the one end by the egresses while leaving the other empty. The best minds in the world aren't going to be able to do anything radically different with that set of circumstances. As is, Red-Blue only buys us enough load-spread relief to think our way through the long process of starting from scratch on the Transitway with figuring out a new Green Line-Seaport hook-in. Eventually Red overtops itself in self-congestion yet again unless both radials get built. And even then you probably are still looking at Urban Ring before taking a gander at pushing the envelope on ruling headways set by Harvard Curve, because RUR and NSRL both project to dump a whole lot more new ridership on Red when they're cranking up.


The competency question here ends at whether or not we can run reliably within the upper-bound headway limit. The upper-bound limit itself isn't so questionable. The things that set it are very, very concrete. As in: you'd need transit staff armed with cattle prods to physically move that many people through the doors at Park St. any faster to eke an actual shorter minimum Red Line frequency. Jetsons Shit tech and a transpo managerial class full of eggheads can't do very much about a foot-traffic problem in a 100-year-old cavern that's laid out the way it is because of the incumbent angle of intersection between transit levels. I mean, yes...do that secondary Common egress from the Red level at Park to spread the crowding a little more optimally and empty the bag of tricks for an umpteenth time on the DTX concourses to carve out ever-so-slightly better flow. But it's not going to fundamentally change the foot-traffic dwells through the doors that set the ruling limits on these lines unless you start physically removing the excesses of transfer crowds from those platforms. We're missing 3 or 4 radial touches here that could/should be doing that. Paris 14, rote-same design and all, for sure as fuck doesn't achieve 3:00, let alone 90 second, headways if its whole universe of transfer options is crammed down into a gravitational singularity of 2 consecutive downtown stations. No amount of technological or managerial superiority overcomes a blocker that big.
 
At the very considerable risk of incurring your wrath, I humbly venture the (very probably) stupid question: "Would the NSRL help with some of the in-town transit storage issue"?

.


F-Lines responses would be soooo much better if 1. They were much shorter and 2. He didnt try to belittle everybody who asks a question.

This is the transit section of the forum, if you dont know something about transit this is where you should ask a question, I dont get what the problem is. People shouldnt feel like if they ask a question in here theyre going to get shit on, thats ridiculous. We can be better than this. If you have a question, ask it, you shouldnt feel like youre going to get anybodys “wrath”. Not everybody knows everything, thats why questions even exist, plus everybody learns if someone asks a question, even the ppl who didnt ask. It should be encouraged to ask questions and get respectable answers. Everybody wins in an environment like that.
 
Last edited:
F-Lines responses would be soooo much better if 1. They were much shorter and 2. He didnt try to belittle everybody who asks a question.

This is the transit section of the forum, if you dont know something about transit this is where you should ask a question, I dont get what the problem is. People shouldnt feel like if they ask a question in here theyre going to get shit on, thats ridiculous. We can be better than this. If you have a question, ask it, you shouldnt feel like youre going to get anybodys “wrath”. Not everybody knows everything, thats why questions even exist, plus everybody learns if someone asks a question, even the ppl who didnt ask. It should be encouraged to ask questions and get respectable answers. Everybody wins in an environment like that.
At the risk of incurring wrath from known sources

Act like this is a specialized Wikipedia

  1. Put the highlights in the top section which most will read
  2. Link the details which you provide to series of #'d references
  3. Put the References at the End of your posting
    1. Link to other sources of information through the same numbering system

Thus [as a purely hypothetical example]

I disagree with X's comments because my experience with measuring YYYY GHz signals *1 In particular X quoted the work of Prof BagsofDogWaste*2 and Mr. CatBoxContents*3 neither's of which information are apropos to the discussion and my original posts -- because of the excessive amounts of Ground Water*4 during the period mentioned by X compared to recent periods.

References:
*1 my [hypothetical] personal experience with measuring GHz signals including my published papers *5,6
*2 Prof BagsofDogWaste paper
*3 Mr. CatBoxContents testimony in front of Congressional Committee Chaired by Rep Markey [Congressional Record March 17, 1988]
*4 US Dept of Agriculture Report on Ground Water levels in Southeastern Middlesex County 1950 through 1960
 

Back
Top