General MBTA Topics (Multi Modal, Budget, MassDOT)

Some of these are brutal. It's one thing for congestion pricing of roads and street parking, but what are they expecting to happen when they soak people for this much? I assumed park-and-ride is exactly the kind of behavior they'd want to encourage but commuters are going to get clobbered for it.
 
bigeman312 said:
Many people drive from Arlington, Lexington, and Bedford to park at Alewife (especially in the winter). There’s no reason to believe Belmont and Waltham would be any different. The Minuteman and Mass Central/Wayside are great things. Many people do bike to Alewife and that’s great! But bike infrastructure is not enough for those towns. Arlington would be well-served by the Red Line. Extending the Red Line to Arlington Center (cut-and-cover under Minuteman, for example) would be a net positive for regional connectivity and would alleviate a bit of pressure from Alewife parking. Improving transit connection in belmont, Waltham, and Lexington would do even more to that end, especially if there was a park and ride (either Commuter Rail or Red Line) at 128 in those communities. Some people don’t, won’t, and or can’t bike 12 months a year in this region. And that’s okay.
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Arlington fought against the red line extension in the 80s.
 
cadetcarl said:
Some of these are brutal. It's one thing for congestion pricing of roads and street parking, but what are they expecting to happen when they soak people for this much? I assumed park-and-ride is exactly the kind of behavior they'd want to encourage but commuters are going to get clobbered for it.
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If the lots are full then the limiting factor is capacity, not price. It makes no sense to keep prices low to "encourage" commuters if at those low prices the lots are full and commuters have nowhere to park. I'd agree that prices should be kept low to encourage public transit use if the lots had infinite capacity, but they don't.

Garage pricing should be treated the same as street parking: we don't want rates so high that spaces sit empty or so low that the lots fill up early and potential parkers are turned away. Rates should be set at the equilibrium point where most spaces are full but there are just enough available spots so that nobody gets turned away. Obviously it's impossible to achieve this balance perfectly in the real world as demand fluctuates constantly and prices will always have some stickiness and will never be able to change fast enough to keep up perfectly. That doesn't mean that we can't get closer to achieving this balance, or that we shouldn't even try.

So yeah, increase prices at lots that fill up when they fill up and decrease prices at lots that don't fill up when they don't fill up. This might be tough to swallow for some people who benefit from the current pricing set-up, but it will lead to better utilization of resources overall.
 
You're not wrong at all, I totally agree. I'm just a little frustrated, this is going to ding me for an extra $60/mo or $700/yr +/-.

Though in other instances I've been fond of saying, if you can afford a car, you can afford to park it and insure it and fuel it and maintain it. Guess it's my turn.
 
The problem is that they are too aggressively structuring the dynamic pricing model. I understand the rationale for raising rates at garages that are at 100% capacity.

However the problem is on the other end with the lots that are below full capacity, they are not lowering the cost of parking at my lot, Riverside, which is way below capacity each work day. It will remain $6 a day. As I stated previously, the # of cars parked at Riverside declined after the last significant parking rate increase ($3 to $6) and in my estimation has never fully recovered. It seems like under the dynamic pricing model, they should start lowering parking rates to recapture the amount of commuters who used to park there years ago prior to them significantly increasing the parking rate.

That is not going to happen, of course, because the bottom line is that this is not a revenue neutral proposal. The share of commuters who are going to pay significantly higher parking fees is going to substantially outweigh the commuters who get a break with lower parking rates.
 
While we’re on the topic of commuter rail stations, does anyone think that the price reduction at Quincy Center could get made permanent? If N. Quincy gets a similar overhaul to Wollaston, then there’d be more reason to keep it ‘temporarily’ reduced for another year or two. Perhaps some pressure could be applied to make it formally zone 1a.
 
Crazy morning on the Providence Line. The 5:45 from Wickford pulled into PVD as a double-length consist, obviously having rescued the front half earlier. Must have been 18 cars! (Including the locomotives.) Passengers in the last car needed to move forward a car to disembark at Back Bay. (Not sure why— maybe not enough space between front of platform and a crossover they didn’t want to foul while dwelling?)

An early-morning Stoughton train was out-and-out canceled. Shuttle bus to Canton Jct. Residual delays.

I thought I saw (and believe that I saw a report on the MBTA Rail app that confirms) the Cape Flyer consist heading down to Providence. The reports are a five-car set of singles— one of which has no seats (according to reports) and has a bike rack. (This train is usually, I believe, an 8-car mainly of doubles.) Apparently was SRO already by the time arrived at Mansfield.

Even now, I’m getting alerts about the outbound Stoughton train being held at Canton Jct and about the inbound 7:50am Stoughton train only now departing, ~30 min late.
 
Anyone else signed up for the MBTA's pilot auto-pay program? I signed up for it for July and they are supposed to mail you a new CharlieCard that you need to use the program. Lo and behold, I haven't received it yet and it's July 2nd. Anyone else had to deal with this bs? I refuse to pay fare after paying for my monthly pass.
 
MBTA wants to put barriers, doors on subway platforms

The platform doors are included on a draft list of projects the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority is targeting for 2040, giving them similar priority status as a planned extension of the Silver Line to Everett and a pedestrian tunnel between the Downtown Crossing and State Street stations. While these projects aren’t guaranteed to happen, that they made it onto the agency’s official planning documents indicates the MBTA is serious about deploying them.
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I think I can hear F-Line screaming from here.
 
Platform screen doors allow for platform air conditioning.

I think what the MBTA and other transit agencies need to do is get the cash from Homeland Security.

Any Joe terrorist with his backpack bomb can hop into the tunnels from the station and kill millions, if not billions. Surely the MBTA deserves $10-$50 billion in homeland security funds to keep us safe?
 
jass said:
Platform screen doors allow for platform air conditioning.

I think what the MBTA and other transit agencies need to do is get the cash from Homeland Security.

Any Joe terrorist with his backpack bomb can hop into the tunnels from the station and kill millions, if not billions. Surely the MBTA deserves $10-$50 billion in homeland security funds to keep us safe?
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At least it might actually help with all the track fires, and the occasional person jumping across platforms at Park.... but, yeah, if the feds pay for it why not (use it or lose it), otherwise seems like funds are better elsewhere.
 
statler said:
Globe

I think I can hear F-Line screaming from here.
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Nah. It's great all-around practice if you can afford the very high cost of initial buy-in. But I agree that sans a ton of federal Homeland Security kickstarter to get the ball rolling via the security angle that initial buy-in hardly registers as an utmost priority for pure meaningful downtown platform congestion mitigation. There's too much more that can be done with state-initiated funds at Park/DTX/etc. via second egresses (e.g. far Red level to Common @ Park, far Blue level to City Hall Plaza @ GC) and misc. concourse improvements within all those stations' structural limits which would all have much greater bang-for-buck on improving pedestrian flow. Not to mention all manner of critical deferred expansion projects like Red-Blue and Transitway-Back Bay that would physically remove great swarms of transferees off those most crowded of platforms to perma-solve the platform congestion problem from the supply side.

Platform screen doors, while all-around helpful, are still very much a luxury item until you can tap a big enough lode of dedicated security funding sources justifying a higher build priority for project starts. At a practical level (here and elsewhere like NYC), ball's very much in Homeland's court on how much mass transit security matters to their core mission to rigorously fund this movement. Absolutely the T would be wise to take advantage of all the benefits platform doors bring if that security kickstarter were available, but doesn't appear Homeland rates it highly enough now or likely 1 election from now to have any inclination of offering stimulus.
 
Apologies if this has been discussed previously, but does anyone know much about the MBTA's plan to deploy ultra-wideband signaling? There's been talk about the NYC MTA considering it but waiting to see how it goes in Boston before making a decision.
 
Anyone else notice that the Orange Line seems to be more of a mess than usual this summer? It doesn't seem to be mechanical breakdown-type long delays but more day-to-day larger-than-normal headways and really horrible bunching. I'm guessing it is probably just due to a lot of T workers taking summer vacations and causing scheduling headaches, but I don't remember it being this bad in the past.
 
I thought we had a terrible winter and spring with mechanical delays, and then late spring/early summer was really awful with crush loads and bunching thrown into the mix of disabled trains. Then it was absolute bliss the last three weeks between the end of school and everyone leaving town for the holiday.

I observe this week that we're in normal summer mode: seems like trains are bunching up because the peak drops off more sharply. So an inbound train can be packed and dwelling like crazy while the one behind is very comfortable and relatively empty. It's sailing along until it gets stuck behind the slow one. Happened to me four days in a row now, inbound and outbound, Wellington-DTX.
 
bakgwailo said:
Campaign targeting Worcester/Framingham MBTA line to push reverse commuting
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An update of sorts, saw this:
http://framingham.wickedlocal.com/news/20180727/reverse-commute-bus-to-framingham-to-debut-monday

Reverse commute bus launching August 1st. Not MBTA but does seem more realistic than what the MBTA had tried, even though it is only one bus each way. Leaves near the Arlington Green Line stop and arrives at several West Framingham employers including Bose and Staples. The commuter rail stop is nowhere near this.
 
We shouldn't be letting them get away with having people walk through crowded orange line platforms being called "connecting" the red and blue lines. And it's definitely not a big idea.
 
I just want to say, the Peter Pan buses that are shuttling between the B line stops of Babcock Street and Blandford Street are traveling 3 times faster than the B line. If they want to rehabilitate all the tracks to BC and run the shuttle through every stop, I'm all for it.

I honestly believe that if they were to end the B line at Blandford St, dig up the tracks and convert it to a car lanes then convert the lanes closest to the side walk on Commonwealth Ave into a Bus lane and run articulate buses, the travel time into downtown would be considerably faster than what exists today.
 
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