General MBTA Topics (Multi Modal, Budget, MassDOT)

A building collapse on Hancock St in Quincy has screwed up the Red Line shuttles for the day.
 
Shepard said:
Joel, I've posted this idea before, which is quite similar to what you're saying - substitute your downtown routing for the Greenway and they would serve a similar function. I routed things this way to envision Dewey Sq/South Station as a transportation hub and transfer node among the various routes.

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I love this, or one that runs on Congress St NS-Haymarket-Fidi-SS in a reservation. We could be doing so much awesome with buses in the core, yet we content ourselves to have Everett take the lead.
 
So the Honolulu public transit system is called TheBus? I bet the can't wait to finish the rail system so they can ride TheTrain.
 
whittle said:
One thing to note is that they are using MSA to define cities. Hence cities with MSAs that don't stretch far into suburbs (like SF) over perform. In contrast, Chicago, wherw the MSA stretches deep into Indiana, under performs.
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Yeah, there is absolutely no way that SF is higher than Chicago or DC. Also no way that Philly bumps out Chicago, either.
 
Why on earth must people wait until something becomes becomes a crumbling mess before it is fixed or repaired?

Look at Wallaston Station. The whole thing was torn down & is being rebuilt, I guess, to make it ADA accessible.
 
Jahvon09 said:
Why on earth must people wait until something becomes becomes a crumbling mess before it is fixed or repaired?

Look at Wallaston Station. The whole thing was torn down & is being rebuilt, I guess, to make it ADA accessible.
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Wollaston was torn down to make accessible because it was so prefab that it was literally the cheaper option to nuke/rebuild rather than try to retrofit such a low-value structure. Especially since the new construction also addresses the longstanding flooding problems by the entrances that would've driven up the cost of a straight structural retrofit. In the end it's similar to how Savin Hill and Fields Corner on the Ashmont Branch were totally cleanroomed rather than renovated for their ADA.


Alewife...yup, they deserve every bit of skewering they've got coming to them. That garage has been a near-deathtrap for over a decade and the consultant report they did nothing with but throw in the file cabinet spelled all those facts out with brutality. This end was eminently preventable, and exactly predictable.
 
Seems like a golden opportunity to build a walkable, urban entrance to the Alewife neighborhood, a ton more housing and retail, and keep a larger, modern garage hidden behind urban facades.
 
MBTA: Alewife garage will reopen fully tomorrow at 5 AM. No overnight parking (1 AM-5 AM) & will be closed next weekend for ongoing follow up assessments & repairs.
 
curcuas said:
Seems like a golden opportunity to build a walkable, urban entrance to the Alewife neighborhood, a ton more housing and retail, and keep a larger, modern garage hidden behind urban facades.
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The way Cambridge keeps zoning boxes with big private parking garages all around there, it's getting to be too little too late for "walkable and urban" feel at Alewife. The path connectivity is awesome and improving by leaps and bounds, but the suburban development mindset the city stuck in out there after all these years is positively maddening. I lived a stone's throw just on the other side of Danehy Park for 9 years until fleeing the rising North Cambridge rents a couple years ago, could see the congestion spiral further out of control almost in real-time...and watched as they just kept greenlighting more parking for every new building and perma-ruined Acorn Park with the stoopidest massing decisions known to man.


There's nothing wrong with Alewife station on-spec. Yes, MassHighway could and should be doing more to de-gunk the 2 rotary...but that's not for lack of practical but unacted-upon proposals the T itself can't decide on. The location is exactly where you want a major parking sink at a rapid transit stop to suck up the cars...in same vein as Riverside, Quincy Adams, Braintree, and Wellington. Short of poking an uncooperative MassHighway and City of Cambridge with a stick to agree to realign and compact the Cambridgepark/Rindge intersection for signaling sanity and do something more substantial with the rotary than the most recent ineffectual lipsticking-on-pig, the actual configuration of the station works about as well as it could. It's just been falling apart almost since it was built, and they let it go beyond the pale. That includes the disappointing retail selection, which is less a factor of configuration than fact that the storefronts themselves are also leak-damaged dumps due to the compromised garage above.

Properly maintained, the functioning of the station shouldn't be an issue. Cosmetic looks can always be cheaply updated to spiff up the dim concourses and uninviting storefronts to something that feels nice and modern. It's more a matter of whether the T is doing all that's necessary with the upcoming few $M package of structural upkeep, which seems very limited in scope given how thoroughly and continuously the decay has advanced across the structure over decades. We need an end to band-aiding here, and it doesn't seem like they've budgeted nearly enough in renovations to achieve that. The rest of the neighborhood's disappointing aesthetics is a crayon you'd have to remove from City of Cambridge's brain.


As for actual load relief...nothing on the horizon in the near-term, but they really need to get moving soon on that public-private pitch for a Fitchburg Line multimodal stop at the 128/20 interchange serving the Polaroid redev. That's the only build that will actually peel traffic off of 2 heading into Alewife, and you'll need that ASAP because so much new intra-128 demand is slamming that garage that it'll very soon no longer have any capacity to spare for commuters coming from-or-beyond 128 unless they get in their cars in the wee hours of the morning. It'll be full at 6:15 every day instead of 7:15. Unfortunately, lot of players to coordinate out by the Waltham/Weston town line for station siting and access to that Fitchburg stop (incl. MassHighway who are floating new frontage roads from the interchange to Route 117). The state hasn't yet had much interest in sitting down with the interested biz & civic parties pushing it, so relief for Alewife overload won't come nearly soon enough via that (otherwise promising-looking) vector at 128.
 
Maybe this time Alewife garage will get the levels 6&7 its original columns, lobby, and elevators were built for.
 
Like with the I-93 Medford bridges, the Commonwealth has to learn the hard way. My girlfriend was supposed to park at Alewife this weekend for Billy Joel. She could've been killed. I still use Alewife sometimes (not as much though since I'm closer to Wellington). But for people coming in from the north and west, this hurts. But as cynical as this sounds, maybe it takes something like this to light a fire under MassDOT and the MBTA.

Three years ago it took me - not even joking - one hour to get from Exit 60 to the Alewife garage off ramp. And this was in the evening during summer. No rhyme or reason. Just a lack of long term engineering and planning. Love watching these luxury apartments go in the area while Alewife crumbles into the ground. Very classy. Priorities.

As someone mentioned earlier, $6M is a drop in the bucket for what this station needs. Cleaning the gunk from all mess the NIMBYs made when they blocked that highway from going though Cambridge/Somerville is something that we all need to address. Because this problem goes beyond the station. The recent reconfiguration is nothing more than just a band aid. At some point MassDOT is going to have to look at grade separation between Alewife Brook and Storrow/Memorial Drive. It might involve taking homes and paying families along Fresh Pond Parkway millions of dollars but whatever works.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
The way Cambridge keeps zoning boxes with big private parking garages all around there, it's getting to be too little too late for "walkable and urban" feel at Alewife. The path connectivity is awesome and improving by leaps and bounds, but the suburban development mindset the city stuck in out there after all these years is positively maddening....

...That includes the disappointing retail selection, which is less a factor of configuration than fact that the storefronts themselves are also leak-damaged dumps due to the compromised garage above.


....The state hasn't yet had much interest in sitting down with the interested biz & civic parties pushing it, so relief for Alewife overload won't come nearly soon enough via that (otherwise promising-looking) vector at 128.
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1.) I have mixed feelings about that new neighborhood of said "boxes with big parking garages." On the one hand, great density and proximity to Alewife, obviously. Also it's encouraging, assuming the apartments are close to fully occupied, that folks are relatively indifferent to the decidedly non-lovely giant hulking transmission grid substation there.

2.) On the other hand, once you're in there, it's such a crazy labyrinth of streets, and so walled-off from everything else due to the substation, etc., that it seems to approach West End levels of insularity.

3.) Also: Alewife Reservation Path is great. But there needs to be a bike/pedestrian flyover of the Fitchburg Line so that you can go on a SW--NE (or vice-versa) slant from the corner of Blanchard/Concord St., through the new neighborhood of high-end apartments, to Alewife Garage, and thereby avoid the rotaries 'o' death on Alewife Brook Pkwy. I went on my bike from Blanchard/Concord St. corner to Alewife Garage to renew my T pass recently, and thought I could just kind of poke my way through. But for now the Fitchburg Line is a barrier.

4.) After several dead-end attempts, I finally capitulated and got there by going through the aforementioned rotaries ... and saw, once I descended into the subway station, that the drycleaner space has vacated from that retail section, leaving just the Dunks'. Grim. I bought an OJ just to give myself an excuse to interact with the lone Dunks' cashier. I can't even begin to imagine the soul-sucking loneliness of the end of last shift there, past 9 pm on a weeknight.

5.) about those "interested... civic parties" you allude to re: hoped-for Rte 128/Rte 20 superstation--just a friendly reminder that that still includes a Waltham mayoral administration that is still stumping for a monorail as of June 2018. Because, you know, if Disney can make it work...
 
DBM said:
3.) Also: Alewife Reservation Path is great. But there needs to be a bike/pedestrian flyover of the Fitchburg Line so that you can go on a SW--NE (or vice-versa) slant from the corner of Blanchard/Concord St., through the new neighborhood of high-end apartments, to Alewife Garage, and thereby avoid the rotaries 'o' death on Alewife Brook Pkwy. I went on my bike from Blanchard/Concord St. corner to Alewife Garage to renew my T pass recently, and thought I could just kind of poke my way through. But for now the Fitchburg Line is a barrier.
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The city wants a bridge, and from what I've heard they're using this incident as a way to press the issue, since it'll increase the number of people (not cars, *cough previous poster cough*) who can access Alewife station.

see Envision Cambridge report, p. 43: http://envision.cambridgema.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2018-05-16-Alewife-Public-Meeting.pdf
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JeffDowntown said:
This point is painfully obvious to any rider of the T, but this is a pretty brutal assessment of the state of MBTA infrastructure, by the T itself:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2...ators-state/NmBZzzikqN5DrPlfX9lY3M/story.html
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I must say, this grading system, despite how simple it is, is a pretty good indicator for the public of how bad some of the facilities are. While they do mention that they have comprehensive repair/renovation plans in place, some of these repair/maintenance requests have been sitting idle for years, even some high-priority ones. We wouldn't have seen what happened on the Blue Line a few weeks ago at Maverick had senior management continuously ignored/withheld funding for what were considered high priority repairs. Of course, now that the fiasco with the shuttle replacements and passengers walking in the tunnels happened, the repairs are finally happening. And they were simple repairs too, and that's just one example of dozens.

I'm holding out hope though. By 2022, a lot of upgrades will be brought online and more are planned thereafter, both on the public service side and support side. Should see some drastic improvements.
 
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Nuggets of note from the MBTA Web Site:

There is a public meeting (with comment period) on the "Rail Vision" project on Thursday at 10:00 am. This is the study looking at regional rail, electrification, freqency, etc.

The FCMB has the Red-Blue Connector on its agenda for next week AND looking at constructability for a date TBD
 
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