Re: Orange Line Extension
At the same time, I'd like to understand what the biggest obstacles are to the full build of Orange to West Roxbury and Green to Needham and how difficult they actually are. Is the EIS for the bridge across the Charles to Needham going to involve any significant challenges? Would cutting rush hour headways at Riverside in half to 12 minutes be a problem? Is anything about the Orange Line construction from Roslindale Village to West Roxbury difficult?
Neighborhood politics in W. Roxbury are peculiar, but keep in mind that the OL conversion is not your normal advocacy-driven transit build: it's going to be forced by an external 3rd party--Amtrak--gobbling up Needham's CR slots to the point where W. Rox is staring down transit loss. And the literal cheapest fix for that is not widening the SW Corridor, which would cost over a billion, but biting the bullet on this rapid transit conversion. That's a very different value proposition from anything we've seen before with a transit proposal, so the NIMBY interactions won't be over the usual issues. What the state needs to advocate for--as all NEC member states are advocating for--is federal match funding on these kinds of transit improvements that compensate for the NEC's commuter rail capacity limits in an Amtrak-heavier future. For Boston that's the Needham trade-in. But in New Jersey that might mean the feds ponying up for match funding to build the West Trenton commuter rail line and Trenton-West Trenton extension of the RiverLINE to take load off the overcrowded NJ Transit Trenton Line on the NEC. In Maryland that might mean giving MARC's backwater Camden Line a total makeover so it's a more effective D.C.-Baltimore load-reliever for the Penn Line. In Philly that might mean some rapid transit augmentation to carve out some long-term breathing room at 30th St. and streamline the intra-city loads on the SEPTA Wilmington and Trenton Lines. Boston's one of several cities that'll be doing this kind of aggregate-improvements bargaining with the feds over the next 20 years re: local impacts to HSR planning.
As for Needham/Newton, see the thread in the Dev subforum for recent redev goings-on in Newton and Needham that have lit a new fire locally under doing that spur and the big TOD-driven ridership projected around Upper Falls and the Route 128 office parks. Those towns have never stopped advocating for it at the local level; it's always a Master Plan advocacy in those municipalities subject to regular local meetings. It just doesn't get much attention outside those towns because the state has pretended for 40 years that this advocacy doesn't exist. The current tactic is to push for the spur to 128 or Needham Heights on its own merits bound tightly around all this TOD activity, then let momentum carry through on the full conversion to Needman Jct. as "Duh!"-obvious follow-up after the first leg proves itself and those Amtrak considerations go front-burner. It's very early yet...we're talking the beginning-of-the-beginning for this latest TOD-driven Master Plan. But those are the talking points they've wrapped it tight around to maximize their chances over pressure and time. It's a different twist on the Rozzie +1 proposal: highlight that the Phase I spurs are
not a down payment on the Amtrak inevitability, but have specific and more urgent needs in their own right. Then use that distinction to raise the profile for investment on the corridor. It's no accident that Newton-Needham coalesced around the TOD argument for the Green spur within months of Marty Walsh stumping on the campaign trail for the bus-centric Rozzie +1 solve on its own (i.e. de-coupled from W. Rox) merits.
I presume there's at least a small cost savings (on the order of millions of dollars) if the entire Purple to Orange conversion happens all at once and only two tracks are ever needed here.
Yes, but keep in mind the differences in mission statements between Rozzie +1 and the whole thing to W. Rox. W. Rox not only has a dependency on doing the entire Green Line conversion in Needham as a tag-team, but it's going to have to be funded with heavier federal contribution because of the Amtrak factor and the feds' obligation to best-compensate for the commuter rail slots they're taking. Rozzie +1 is self-justifiable for Yellow Line reasons and general Lower Washington frequencies alone, because of how much Forest Hills terminal is slated to suffocate from overload after another 15 years of breakneck-pace development in JP, Roxbury, and Roslindale. It's not really accurate to frame it in terms of "down payments" anymore. That's why the advocacy has shifted so much in Boston and Newton-Needham about those first steps having wholly development and congestion mitigation justifications, while conversion of the rest is being re-framed as just a federal path-of-least-resistance. We're seeing more separation in the mission statements due to changing conditions, and it'll probably help the advocacies' chances over time to bullet out those justifications separate-but-clear instead of shotgunning mixed motives. Especially when those motives have--in just the last 5 years--taken on sharper local vs. federal divide.
In actual terms, it's not that big a cost difference because the ROW footprint doesn't need modification, and may indeed save money over the long run by having a faster start on 1/3 of the route miles instead of going monolithic and having inflation jack the ultimate full price to W. Rox. The more bang-bang and less overwrought the planning process is, the less overhead the state chews up in project management. See the GLX vs. Silver Line Gateway project histories for the price we pay for overthinking a monolith too many years in advance of first shovel in ground. Rozzie +1 done right can be more a SL-Gateway type fast start if the keep their planning pace brisk and uncomplicated.
If Roslindale Village becomes the new Orange Line terminus, is there really any need to continue to have a commuter rail platform at Roslindale Village at all?
Probably, because you don't want to induce transit loss for any interzone commuters who still use it. It's the highest-ridership non-terminal CR stop in Boston-proper, and that has to matter for something. The only reason not to do it is if the Phase II to W. Rox is coming much sooner on the calendar.
It's negligible expense to do the CR platform if they watch their cost control. Keep it offset away from the main station, and do up just the rote-generic platform spec for a single side ADA full-high. That should not cost more than $5-8M. Maybe they even relax the length requirement to trim costs because it's a short and dubious long-term future CR branch; go with a 450- or 600-footer matching the rest of the Needham platforms instead of a regular CR-standard 800-footer. They've got a big problem with contractor bloat as evidenced by the recent Blue Hill Ave. project starts announcement that had suspiciously off-scale high price tag for another prefab Fairmount platform. They have to stop killing themselves on unnecessary station costs for both new builds and rehabs in order to get anything accomplished within budget on any build. Prefab platforms like we're talking here were an order of magnitude cheaper per unit when they were building the Old Colony stations 20 years ago, and inflation alone doesn't explain the jarring change. Neither the Orange nor the CR platform here have any justification for costing so much when the T's base platform accessibility specs are generic enough to be counted in fixed costs for materials & labor. Solve the institutional problem with contractor management (or lackthereof) and this shouldn't be nearly as big a worry as it's been on present-day and recent-past station projects.
