Crazy Transit Pitches

citylover94 said:
Someone had talked about this before on a thread and the ROW is not wide enough and Amtrak relies on it for emergencies and the Franklin line will need it to keep service levels reasonable in the future because of capacity constraints on the NEC.
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Yes. Fairmount is definitely not wide enough north of Blue Hill Ave. to widen it out for anything extra. Just trace on Google Maps how densely abutted it is by residential. As EGE also notes, Franklin Line is going to need to gradually transition more of its schedule over to Fairmount over time as NEC slots get harder to come by in a couple more decades of exploding Amtrak and Providence traffic. Foxboro CR is already proposed to run full-time via Fairmount. Franklin circa 2040 is probably likewise going to be a full-timer on Fairmount that never touches the NEC (note: plenty of capacity to juggle Franklin + branches with Indigo).

And for various long-term reasons, you can't salt over the last freight route into Port of Southie when the 50-year economic considerations for ship-to-rail transloading would harm the regional economy if sealed off. Worcester Line's been purged of freight with Beacon Park's closure and is no longer a high-capacity option. Freights aren't allowed in the SW Corridor tunnel on the NEC, doubly so post-electrification. And when the Old Colony was rebuilt the fixed span over the Neponset River became the most severe RR grade in Massachusetts (the old fire-destroyed drawbridge used to sit waaaaaay below the Red Line bridge), ill-equipped for hauling anything heavy in/out of town. So you need Fairmount on the 12:00am-5:00am shift, the staging area at underutilized Readville, and the Franklin Line clearance route for dispersing goods all around 128- and 495-land.

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South of Blue Hill down to Readville is formerly a heavily industrialized area, evidenced by the still-scuzzy rump end of Hyde Park Ave. down there. Fairmount used to have a thicket of freight sidings down there keeping it at almost constant 4-track width, and the much-shrunken train yards down there used to have much fatter # of tracks and stretch further north than they do now (reason why that last Neponset crossing remains an active 4-tracker). You can see all sorts of trace evidence of the former rail-connected industrial property by the dam, by the still-vacant properties, by the sheds of the auto shops along the ROW, by the curious below-grade driveway next to the Fairmount station inbound platform, by Neponset crossing #2's ridiculously over-wide abutments...all the way down.

That is a rapid transit augmentation candidate that wouldn't foul any of the existing Fairmount passenger or freight capacity. But the only source for rapid transit is Red out of Ashmont/Mattapan...and some undetermined type of tunnel, El, or river-hugging embankment construction that closes the 1500 ft. lateral gap between the Mattapan and Fairmount Lines which was never filled by the RR's (Mattapan was Old Colony, Fairmount was competing New York & New England) in the 19th century before all that residential filled in.

And it would be a Hyde Park-serving line only, because Dorchester is the constrained part of the Fairmount Line that can't flip modes. This wouldn't rate as a high-priority extension given all the ones that are much more urgent, but it is wholly viable. Consider that Orange out of Forest Hills down Tracks 3 & 4 of the NEC used to be a viable studied extension for bringing rapid transit to Hyde Park. That's no longer possible because NEC growth requires all 4 tracks to keep feeding the Amtrak and Providence/Stoughton beasts through mid-century. So Red via Mattapan ends up accomplishing the same without gobbling anyone else's capacity. You just can't be all things to all people and get rapid transit on the west flank of Dorchester from Newmarket to Morton St. when 2 Fairmount RR tracks have a lot of mouths to feed. That's always going to be an Indigo route triaged with the best headways an xMU has to offer, and pumped up east-west bus route frequency. Doubt anyone's going to complain about that as a permanent condition when it's several orders of magnitude better than today.
 
I'm not sure how I feel about this specific proposal, but I do like the idea in general.

I also like how it's out of the box. As much as I love rail, I think we should be open to new ideas. The rise of the automobile slaughtered the streetcar and deeply wounded mainline rail. I think we are totally underestimating what effect the rise of automated vehicles, especially when paired with on-demand services, will have on the Western city.

I didn't have enough to say at the time to comment, but I'm reminded of tangent's proposals about converting rail ROWs to automated vehicle roads. Again, I think the details of that idea weren't quite right, but I thought the intent of the proposal was sound and felt that we all went a bit overboard with criticism, tossing the baby out with the bathwater.

I'm also with Charlie_mta–*we need to be open again to elevated rail. The necessary footprint has been vastly reduced in the last 25 years, and I don't see tunneling being feasible beyond a pretty small range of projects.
 
I'm not averse to elevated trains either (I think Bostonians are overly whiny about the matter; the Chicago L is nice, NY puts up with plenty of noisier and more obnoxious els, and European cities do a good job with them for the most part -- I noticed a few in London that I could hardly hear at all).

This Ctrain thing seems to be really dumb though. Boston Architectural College ... sigh. I guess they don't teach multiplication there? 2*10 is 20 people. Per train. Yeah -- that's going to replace the T. Sure.

I'm guessing that politicos and other wishy washy types who support these things are people who never ride transit, or do so with blinders on their head. They only think about themselves. They can imagine themselves getting onboard this proposal. Sure -- they'd line at their preferred slot and hop in a seat. Just like a private car. They don't think about the thousand other people who might be wanting to do the same thing at the same time.

I still think the future of Boston transit is improvements to surface vehicles. We're not going to be able to build anything above or below for reasonable amounts of money and without endless whining. Plenty can be done at the street-level and the nice thing is that accessibility is relatively easy when you don't have to change grade. No stairs or elevator needed. Just got back from Munich and it was a real pleasure to just hop on and off buses, trams, subways and commuter trains through any door -- without having to queue up and wait for a stupidly slow farebox to process customers.
 
Modern els can be very nice - parts of the dc metro are like this and extremely quiet, as is the, quite old, Queens Blvd viaduct. The key really is concrete + modern propulsion technology. These pie in the sky schemes only give a bad name to a potentially very useful technology
 
The issue with proposals like this is that they don't really work maybe in places like disney or even for low capacity transit in suburban or less dense cities but this doesn't sound like it would scale well. I am also wondering what those support arches are made of because I don't think they can be as thin as this person is proposing.
 
I mean that modern el design or whatever sure looks pretty, but everything else is crackpot city. $2 billion to replace the ENTIRE FUCKING T with these dinky little elevated trams? It's costing us more than that to build a light rail line on a pretty much existing ROW. Then there's the part where his proposal is the same half-assed PRT scheme proposed by a million other developers, basically a billion dollar skyway for limited functioning Ubers.
 
PRT crackpot schemes are this decade's equivalent of the 90's to mid-aughts BRT crackpot schemes. Hyperloop was only the beginning. This is the shiny object that's going to go viral once every 3 months when some short attention span reporter picks it up and gets a bunch of short attention span dim-bulb politicians to start repeating the talking points. It'll get destroyed into a smoking crater by the transpo experts (who short attention span reporters will ignore), and the pols will lose interest the second they get the report that it'll cost 5x as much for 1/5 less service. It'll disappear, then periodically reappear and disappear again.

And then 4 months later some other Silicon Valley 'disruptive innovator' or think tank full of unpaid architectural interns will puke out another such proposal that sets the world on fire for another round of short attention span theatre.



The difference here is that--unlike the great Bogota BRT myth--I'd be shocked if anyone actually attempted a serious study, much less build, of a PRT system. When it gets down to the nitty-gritty, no politician wants to go out on a limb getting taken for all his/her city is worth by Lyle Lanley's repackaged monorail. And that's all these crackpot schemes are right now. So we only have to put up with the tiresome distractions, not mortgaging our future for it.
 
JeffDowntown said:
This would really screw with the Seaport developers (who are already committed/done). The height limits in the Seaport would really jump up!
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By the time all the airport improvements/changes are done, the first modern seaport buildings would probably be ready for redevelopment anyway.
 
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A southbound portal at the intersections of Blue Hill Ave, Washington St (Dorchester), and Geneva Ave. BHA widens significantly in this area so shave a lane off of each side + the median. With this you could theoretically have a 1-car 23 trolley street-running on Washington St, and a 2 or 3-car 28 trolley running in the wide median of Blue Hill Ave. This would have no effect on access to Geneva Ave.

With this portal you could have a cut/cover subway all the way from the Grove Hall area through Dudley Sq under Warren Street, and then to Boylston under Washington Street (South End), using the tremont tunnel. To compensate for the lost bus service on the surface, increase the frequencies of the 14, 19, 22, 29, and 45 routes that serve that area.
 
Given the traffic and demand I'd suggest that the portal should be south of the Washington St intersection. Blue Hill Ave is designed for light rail in the median but Washington St would require street running and would complicate things. Build a station at Washington St to sop up bus transfers and you are good.
 
I agree with Van,

That being said, a Green Line branch tunneled from Boylston Station, via Dudley Sq to Washington St (in Dorchester), then running down a Blue Hill Ave separated median to Mattapan, should be a top priority transit extension. Even if the Fairmont Line ever gets up to near rapid-transit headways, this Green Line extension would still be essential to serve this highly dense, large, under-served sector of the city.
 
Charlie_mta said:
I agree with Van,

That being said, a Green Line branch tunneled from Boylston Station, via Dudley Sq to Washington St (in Dorchester), then running down a Blue Hill Ave separated median to Mattapan, should be a top priority transit extension. Even if the Fairmont Line ever gets up to near rapid-transit headways, this Green Line extension would still be essential to serve this highly dense, large, under-served sector of the city.
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Man...if you can get your hands on a time machine, go back to 1987 and convince them to cancel demolition of the Washington St. El. Because we could've had exactly this if they:

  1. Relocated Orange as-planned.
  2. Demolished the Chinatown and Dudley-Forest Hills portions of the El.
  3. Done complete refurbishment of the Dover-Dudley El structure and stations.
  4. Built a new (re-)connection to the Tremont tunnel with a (New England/Tufts) Medical Ctr. Orange transfer station on the 2-block subway extension for getting across the Pike on-alignment.
  5. Pumped Green through there: Lechmere-Dudley, with the El platforms at Dover, Northampton, and Dudley converted to low-level.
  6. Spent the 1990's having tortured studies-about-studies for branchlines out of Dudley, and if we're lucky actually get one built starting with Mattapan.
  7. Baked this into the Urban Ring plan as the opposite compass point to Lechmere for splitting the light rail Ring quadrants. Ability to cut clean through from Lechmere where the NE/Airport and NW/Cambridge quadrants meet to Dudley where the SE/Southie and SW/Roxbury quadrants meet, with nuthin' but a grand tour of transfer stations in the middle.

And the cost could've been in the low several hundreds of millions given availability of retrofit/rehab of the pre-existing structurally sound El, and been open for business before the first traffic cone was plopped down for a Big Dig detour. Instead of God knows how many billions it would take to build a cleanroomed subway under there in 2050.


Grumble, grumble...stupid "Dirty Old Boston" divisive neighborhood politics. :(
 
Converting the Orange Line elevated to Green Line elevated to Dudley Sq actually was being considered around 1970. As you describe, it would have tied into the abandoned Tremont St. tunnel.

It would have made too much sense, of course....
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
Man...if you can get your hands on a time machine, go back to 1987 and convince them to cancel demolition of the Washington St. El. Because we could've had exactly this if they:

  1. Relocated Orange as-planned.
  2. Demolished the Chinatown and Dudley-Forest Hills portions of the El.
  3. Done complete refurbishment of the Dover-Dudley El structure and stations.
  4. Built a new (re-)connection to the Tremont tunnel with a (New England/Tufts) Medical Ctr. Orange transfer station on the 2-block subway extension for getting across the Pike on-alignment.
  5. Pumped Green through there: Lechmere-Dudley, with the El platforms at Dover, Northampton, and Dudley converted to low-level.
  6. Spent the 1990's having tortured studies-about-studies for branchlines out of Dudley, and if we're lucky actually get one built starting with Mattapan.
  7. Baked this into the Urban Ring plan as the opposite compass point to Lechmere for splitting the light rail Ring quadrants. Ability to cut clean through from Lechmere where the NE/Airport and NW/Cambridge quadrants meet to Dudley where the SE/Southie and SW/Roxbury quadrants meet, with nuthin' but a grand tour of transfer stations in the middle.

And the cost could've been in the low several hundreds of millions given availability of retrofit/rehab of the pre-existing structurally sound El, and been open for business before the first traffic cone was plopped down for a Big Dig detour. Instead of God knows how many billions it would take to build a cleanroomed subway under there in 2050.


Grumble, grumble...stupid "Dirty Old Boston" divisive neighborhood politics. :(
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I would argue that if you keep the El on Washington, you do not see the urban redevelopment on that street. Washington in the South End has made a pretty dramatic turn around in the past 3 decades. Those lofts, etc. would likely not have been built facing an El.

Main Street in Charlestown has had a similar level of transformation. Bostonians seem to value being away from an EL more than access to transit.
 
JeffDowntown said:
I would argue that if you keep the El on Washington, you do not see the urban redevelopment on that street. Washington in the South End has made a pretty dramatic turn around in the past 3 decades. Those lofts, etc. would likely not have been built facing an El.

Main Street in Charlestown has had a similar level of transformation. Bostonians seem to value being away from an EL more than access to transit.
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This is a question of causation versus correlation. It's hard to prove that the El's demolition caused the turnaround in Charlestown and the South End when such gentrification and "urban renaissance" was occurring in other parts of Boston and other US cities at around the same and without the removal of an El pushing it along.

As far as I know, there're plenty of gentrified corridors in NYC along elevated rail lines in Brooklyn and Queens. I'd imagine that housing demand in Boston would have pushed redevelopment and gentrification regardless of whether the El was torn down or not.
 
JeffDowntown said:
Main Street in Charlestown has had a similar level of transformation. Bostonians seem to value being away from an EL more than access to transit.
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I would argue that during the time when the EL was torn down it was more that the whole nation for several decades made the decision that living in a city and living near transit was a negative not a positive and that it was more a nationwide rejection of the city and transit than a specific regional rejection of the EL. Following that idea it then makes sense that as cities have improved and transit is again seen as a desirable feature that the South End around Washington and Dudley Square could have had the same rebirth as is occurring now or it might even be stronger because of better transit.
 
BussesAin'tTrains said:
This is a question of causation versus correlation. It's hard to prove that the El's demolition caused the turnaround in Charlestown and the South End when such gentrification and "urban renaissance" was occurring in other parts of Boston and other US cities at around the same and without the removal of an El pushing it along.

As far as I know, there're plenty of gentrified corridors in NYC along elevated rail lines in Brooklyn and Queens. I'd imagine that housing demand in Boston would have pushed redevelopment and gentrification regardless of whether the El was torn down or not.
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Charlestown and Roxbury were also completely different situations. The Charlestown El was always a wounded animal:

-- Malden extension was never completed, so it had that awkward Everett terminal and all trains terminating at Sullivan off-peak and weekends.
-- No intermediate stops whatsoever between Thompson Sq. and Sullivan, one of the longest (if not the longest) skip-overs on the system.
-- Shitty design in a couple places, like having to make a hairpin turn in a very active Sullivan yard to get to Everett.
-- Harder to maintain. More sharp curves, like Causeway St. Movable bridges. Really high sections.
-- A much more readily available relocation candidate. Once the Malden El got canceled they were already talking substitute extension to Wellington on the Western Route ROW, which begat the conversations about whether they should just redo the whole thing at the RR grade. Pre-War, not post-War debate.


The only transit loss that occurred when they relocated it was City Square. And City Square in the early-70's was a depopulated hellscape of elevated highways; there was no City Square left to save. Thompson Square is 800 ft. from the Community College footbridge. Sullivan is across the street. And Main St. between the two never had a station to begin with. It was not a hard sell to the folks who had to ride the 92 directly underneath the El for 6 stops in order to reach an El station.

Washington St. El relocation was always tied hand-in-hand with urban renewal and the SW Corridor. Be it the highway SW Corridor, or the post-moratorium SW Corridor. It was intensely political all-around, intensely racially-political all-around. And still is. Only the Forest Hills extension past Dudley got something resembling "equal or better" from the relocation. And even that's borderline with Egleston Sq., where the neither-here-nor-there station spacing of Jackson vs. Stony Brook created more of a walking distance cavity from the old Egleston entrance than there needed to be. "Equal or better" raged from Day 1 of studies in the South End and out to Dudley, and went hand-in-hand with the politics of urban renewal and urban expressways. It went hand-in-hand with the politics of "rich man's rail" vs. "poor man's bus" because of the way the Dudley terminal routes have been broken for 30 years by the mangled Ruggles & RX loopage. Just an all-around morass of division and conflict that's been going on in those neighborhoods in some form--from initial planning to actual event to the Silver deke to "what now?"--for now exactly half a century.
 
citylover94 said:
I would argue that during the time when the EL was torn down it was more that the whole nation for several decades made the decision that living in a city and living near transit was a negative not a positive and that it was more a nationwide rejection of the city and transit than a specific regional rejection of the EL. Following that idea it then makes sense that as cities have improved and transit is again seen as a desirable feature that the South End around Washington and Dudley Square could have had the same rebirth as is occurring now or it might even be stronger because of better transit.
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OK, but what Washington Street deserved was better transit than the El, not better transit than the bus replacement. I bet that the Washington Street corridor rebirth would have been much faster had the city gone ahead with the 1948 subway plan out to Dudley, rather than the neighborhood against neighborhood "freeway centric" southwest corridor alignment.

Parts of the South End were already turning around in the late 70's (Union Park for example) -- it could have spread faster over to Washington Street.

I do agree that this is a causality versus correlation argument. Impossible to prove either way because there is no controlled experiment.
 
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