Crazy Transit Pitches

[AndrewOnTheMBTA]

I think someone posted about this before - but an interesting and pretty crazy pitch would be running a green line LRT extension from North Station and in the median of Rutherford Ave with stops at City Square and the Hood Park. Then cut n cover under Sullivan Square to the beginning of Broadway with a possible underground stop at the Sullivan Square circle. The Sullivan stop could be a transfer point. Then, the light rail could resurface on Broadway and cut under 28. Then, the rail could run in a median up Broadway all the way to Magoun Square or Ball Square to replace that bus lane.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

I think someone posted about this before - but an interesting and pretty crazy pitch would be running a green line LRT extension from North Station and in the median of Rutherford Ave with stops at City Square and the Hood Park. Then cut n cover under Sullivan Square to the beginning of Broadway with a possible underground stop at the Sullivan Square circle. The Sullivan stop could be a transfer point. Then, the light rail could resurface on Broadway and cut under 28. Then, the rail could run in a median up Broadway all the way to Magoun Square or Ball Square to replace that bus lane.

For what audience? No transit routes whatsoever run on Rutherford today because it skirts the majority of Charlestown's density and the road is barely 400 ft. from the Orange Line tracks until the Bunker Hill CC campus wedges in-between after Austin St. And there hasn't been a "City Square" to speak of in 70 years ever since old elevated Route 1 nuked the once-vibrant square to the ground. The only reason it's still placemarked as such is because the old Orange Line station malingered for 20 years after the neighborhood was razed for the highway (with Route 1 literally blowing right through the middle of the station).

This proposal is a hammer desperately searching for nails. There hasn't been so much as an attempt at finding BRT use for the Rutherford corridor because: (1) the neighborhood flat out ends like a wall before there with no appreciable hyper-local ridership existing exterior to Main St.; and (2) North Station is a bus desert served only by the 4's loop, thanks in no small part to the Orange Line's original design goal of culling most of the them outside the CBD at Sullivan Terminal.


I *sort* of get the pitch behind un-capping the Green Line's Haymarket portal and running a Navy Yard streetcar up/down Chelsea St. Waaaaay, way down on the priority pile since that would mostly be a tourist perk, but it's eminently build-feasible and not at all expensive. But there's goddamn nothing to be gained running on the Rutherford median, least of all past the Chelsea St. intersection. You simply stare out the windows watching Orange run much faster within eyesight, and Hood Park is extremely walkable from both Sullivan and CC (moreso if Sullivan Rotary gets tamed). And the Green Line would already hit Sullivan if you build the Urban Ring...or not even the full Urban Ring but just a down-payment first stab that extends off the GLX carhouse leads and drags C trains from North Station to a Sullivan stub-end in the interim before bothering to tackle the Mystic crossing in a later phase. The only transit that's ever going to use Rutherford itself is a Downtown-Encore shuttle van paid-for by Wynn Resorts explicitly catering to out-of-towners who don't know the T well enough to find their way to Sullivan. It's a vacuum of a corridor demand-wise.

 

[Stlin]

I *sort* of get the pitch behind un-capping the Green Line's Haymarket portal and running a Navy Yard streetcar up/down Chelsea St. Waaaaay, way down on the priority pile since that would mostly be a tourist perk, but it's eminently build-feasible and not at all expensive. But there's goddamn nothing to be gained running on the Rutherford median, least of all past the Chelsea St. intersection.

Speaking of uncapping portals... Has there been a proposal here to cut into the Eliot Yards lead at Harvard for a northern Red Line fork? (I assume the portal itself hasn't existed in years, nor would surface running through Harvard Kennedy be feasible) Perhaps tunnel under the charles twice, serving Lower Allston/ Stadium then go back across to Watertown and Waltham? I get that that's more a GLX via Porter thing, but would it merit being included in an alternatives analysis for rapid transit service proposals to Watertown/Waltham?

Looking at Van's map, it looks like the flying junction to Eliot still exists, and that previously proposed service using it... went to Watertown then back to Alewife along the Watertown Branch (why...)?

 

[AndrewOnTheMBTA]

On another note, would a further extension of the Chelsea SL3 ever have a use beyond into Everett? There would have to be a lot of development in the area for ridership to be there it seems when looking at a map. Also, on a map it seems like there's a possible ROW along the commuter rail there going towards the casino.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

On another note, would a further extension of the Chelsea SL3 ever have a use beyond into Everett? There would have to be a lot of development in the area for ridership to be there it seems when looking at a map. Also, on a map it seems like there's a possible ROW along the commuter rail there going towards the casino.

The challenge there is you have to flip from south side of ROW to north side at Sweetser Circle to accommodate the Everett Terminal freight leads. Means duck-under or flyover construction, which is a high price tag. Probably would need to have an installment plan for crossing the river on the Urban Ring to fit that into a budget. +1-2 stop wraparound alone wouldn't cut it.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Speaking of uncapping portals... Has there been a proposal here to cut into the Eliot Yards lead at Harvard for a northern Red Line fork? (I assume the portal itself hasn't existed in years, nor would surface running through Harvard Kennedy be feasible) Perhaps tunnel under the charles twice, serving Lower Allston/ Stadium then go back across to Watertown and Waltham? I get that that's more a GLX via Porter thing, but would it merit being included in an alternatives analysis for rapid transit service proposals to Watertown/Waltham?

Looking at Van's map, it looks like the flying junction to Eliot still exists, and that previously proposed service using it... went to Watertown then back to Alewife along the Watertown Branch (why...)?

No. Shivving a junction into a curve so slow it's already the native headway limiter for all of Red would degrade service levels to worse than today...while splitting the degraded headways in half on the branches. Horrible idea. The old tunnel was not preserved for branching. It's potentially usable for a Green Line stub-end platform for the Urban Ring...never ever for Red interlining.

 

[Tallguy]

On another note, would a further extension of the Chelsea SL3 ever have a use beyond into Everett? There would have to be a lot of development in the area for ridership to be there it seems when looking at a map. Also, on a map it seems like there's a possible ROW along the commuter rail there going towards the casino.

There was a working group meeting on this today. The plan is to send it up 2nd st, then back down to Sweetser

 

[vanshnookenraggen]

There was a working group meeting on this today. The plan is to send it up 2nd st, then back down to Sweetser

That seems like an odd place to end it. Why not just keep going to Wellington or Sullivan?

 

[Tallguy]

That seems like an odd place to end it. Why not just keep going to Wellington or Sullivan?

Sorry, I was just pointing out how they would get the SL over the CR. It will likely go to Sullivan and possibly to Kendall/Haymarket

 

[Stlin]

No. Shivving a junction into a curve so slow it's already the native headway limiter for all of Red would degrade service levels to worse than today...while splitting the degraded headways in half on the branches. Horrible idea. The old tunnel was not preserved for branching. It's potentially usable for a Green Line stub-end platform for the Urban Ring...never ever for Red interlining.

So, in a world where you have the urgent need to, how do you solve that curve?

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

So, in a world where you have the urgent need to, how do you solve that curve?

Buy a time machine back to 1976 and re-lobby the shit out of Harvard to do the more invasive construction option that dug up parts of Harvard Yard for a wider arc, pretty much. The curve is what it is what it is as long as it follows the street grid rotely like it does.

Mind you, that's not a bad thing when 3 min. headways are the limiter we have to live within. That's plenty good. Just don't get any delusions that we can re-worsen future service densities at SS, DTX, Park, and Kendall for the sake of some target fixated trans-Allston branching pattern already well-covered by an officially-vetted Urban Ring proposal. That's a bit too precious for its own credulity.

Also...I'm not even certain the post-1981 utility layout of Harvard Station allows for unbroken passage through the double-deck portion of the tunnel without relocating a shitload of physical plant at large cost. There never was a design intention of allowing new interlining usage of the old alignment after they stitched things back together. The 3-track level portion of tunnel behind the wall at the bottom of the main lobby stairs checks out pretty well as a potential Urban Ring re-use candidate for a stub-end LRT platform that berths shorter trains than Red, but the split-level bores that tied into the active RL are much dodgier because they were more heavily messed with by utility work in the stitch-up after the '81 mainline alignment change.

 

[Charlie_mta]

Here's the layout of the Harvard Square station by the EGE:

View attachment 4357

Based on what I'm seeing, it looks like it might be possible to join a new Red Line Branch to the existing line far enough east of the curve, about at the east end of the old station platform, to avoid complications with the curve. However, it looks that it might be too tight to squeeze in platforms for the new line's station anywhere, either under Mass Ave or Brattle Street. These are not wide streets.

 

[Riverside]

So this is a "theory of crazy transit pitches" question more than anything else...

I have a vague general idea of what a full-build RIDOT rail system would look like, based on cities, geography, densities, etc. (Described below.)

What does the equivalent system ("equivalent" in terms of relative craziness) look like for New Hampshire? Is it just "Nashua-Manchester-Concord" and call it a day? Do you add a branch to Milford? Do you create some sort of east-west route to hook in Durham and Portsmouth? Does Keene get a piece of the pie?

One piece that's interesting to me is the presence of the Merrimack cities on the MA side of the border (Haverhill, Lawrence and Lowell) -- that's a pretty substantial center of gravity on the opposite side of the border, which isn't structurally mirrored in Greater Providence.

I'm intrigued by the idea of a Lowell-Lawrence core segment, with branches to Haverhill/Plaistow/Portsmouth, Haverhill/Plaistow/Durham, Methuen/Rockingham, Nashua/Manchester/Concord, Nashua/Milford, and Ayer/Clinton/Worcester -- with timed transfers to Boston service at Lowell and Lawrence respectively, and layered direct Boston service from Manchester and Plaistow. In this model, a place like Durham becomes like Westerly -- one-seat ride to the satellite city (HaverLawLow or PVD), and a two-seat ride to Boston.

(This could also enable modest interurban frequencies between Lowell and Lawrence and possibly Haverhill, akin to the hopes for frequent service between, say, Pawtucket and TF Green.)

~~~~~~

Various tiers of full-build RIDOT (I'm not making super strong claims about which tier any project belongs in, just roughly organizing):

Reasonable:

• Woonsocket-Providence-Kingston
• Quonset Point branch

Crazy:

• Worcester-Providence-Westerly

Ridiculous:

In increasing order of ridiculousness, service via Attleboro to:

• Taunton
• Fall River and/or Newport (not sure if FR is stronger with or without Newport)
• New Bedford
• Framingham via Walpole
• Middleborough
• Buzzard's Bay
• Cape Cod

Most of these last ones would depend on the form SCR ends up being created in, and whether you can get reliable transfers configured at Taunton (or possibly Attleboro).

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Is it just "Nashua-Manchester-Concord" and call it a day?

For intrastate travel? Yes...pretty much the Cap Corridor and that's it. There's too little density on the Hillsborough Branch out of Nashua to do anything to Wilton/Milford. And as attractive-in-concept as de-landbanking the Portsmouth Branch from Manchester to Newfields sounds in vague concept for crafting an east-west NH 101 rail corridor...it's not all that in reality. Extreme jagged-curved ROW netting unacceptably slow schedule, and explicitly avoids some population pockets for forested land. See also NH's generally abysmal total infrastructure profile. Suburban residential areas there have comparably very low buildout of sidewalks compared to MA/RI/CT, so the station walkup catchments are utterly microscopic unless you're flat-out living in downtown Nashua/Manchester/Concord. Local bus coverage barely extends beyond the CBD's of those cities, and is absent elsewhere. MA's RTA's from gateway cities to outlying areas...which are overall not great by any means...are night-and-day compared to what's available in the Granite State 'burbs. You can theoretically live--with limitations--on transit if you're in the suburban outskirts of a secondary RTA district in Mass., or subsist on long/infrequent RIPTA or CTransit buses to get your basic-most needs met. Right now it's nearly impossible to get your basic-most needs met in New Hampshire without having access to your own or somebody else's personal vehicle.

The same thing bites the cities themselves at trying to re-establish their gravity wells as employment centers. This comes up every time we have a thread here about upscaling Manchester's skyline. How are you going to do that, exactly? NH local and state gov't won't even lay a water main big enough to flush the toilets in somebody's new Corporate HQ. That's why the likes of Fitchburg are luring companies across the border. No material support at all for density-supporting infrastructure.

So there's no there-there for a capstone intrastate transit mode absent a preliminary Marshall Plan to seed the entire southeastern corner of the New Hampshire with local buses first, and pour a few tens of millions of pounds in concrete putting sidewalks on thoroughfares. And put a shitton of elbow-grease into utilities so greater suburban density is even a supportable thing.


That only leaves...outside pings between the 3 Cap Corridor cities & Airport...Boston commutes. Where you have Eastern Route restoration to Portsmouth, some form of Downeaster augmenting-or-trading-off Purple Line re-establishment to Durham & Dover like existed until 1967, and (distantly third-priority) Manchester & Lawrence restoration.

Does Keene get a piece of the pie?

At 23K population and falling like a rock with each Census...not very likely. Keene is only a "city" in comparison to how tiny everything else around it is. The Cheshire Branch is a former North Station-to-Montreal routing and passes through Keene. It's faster and more buildable than the unbelievably bad Northern Route that was studied, but no faster than the L-shaped South Station-via-Worcester/Springfield NNEIRI proposal so doesn't exactly have good odds. And it's too far and too much nothing past Fitchburg to span any local service via Keene. The Hillsborough Branch segment that linked Keene to Nashua was abandoned too early for landbanking, so that one (with all its horrid curvature) is no option either. Give Keene a better bus. There isn't much traffic out that way on the non-expressway length of NH 101, and with that whole swath precipitously dropping population like it is you've got your hands full trying to scale even that demand.

I'm intrigued by the idea of a Lowell-Lawrence core segment, with branches to Haverhill/Plaistow/Portsmouth, Haverhill/Plaistow/Durham, Methuen/Rockingham, Nashua/Manchester/Concord, Nashua/Milford, and Ayer/Clinton/Worcester -- with timed transfers to Boston service at Lowell and Lawrence respectively, and layered direct Boston service from Manchester and Plaistow. In this model, a place like Durham becomes like Westerly -- one-seat ride to the satellite city (HaverLawLow or PVD), and a two-seat ride to Boston.

Be less intrigued. Way less. You're assuming NH templates out in any way remotely similar to RI...or even Greater Portland in Maine. It doesn't, because of the ^^granular challenges^^ outlined above with subsisting hyper-local for the essentials of living at so much as the street-to-street level without a car. Right now the only places enough people are traveling in the same direction en masse for a commute are 93, 293/3, 95 for Boston...plus some load-bearing segments of 101 & 16 spanning them. Aside from augmenting the Boston commutes with rail, they don't have any intrastate fluidity to mass off of until you build that Marshall Plan's worth of buses + sidewalks + bike infrastructure. Third World New England indeed.

 

[DBM]

So this is a "theory of crazy transit pitches" question more than anything else...

I have a vague general idea of what a full-build RIDOT rail system would look like, based on cities, geography, densities, etc. (Described below.)

~~~~~~

Various tiers of full-build RIDOT (I'm not making super strong claims about which tier any project belongs in, just roughly organizing):

Reasonable:

• Woonsocket-Providence-Kingston
• Quonset Point branch

Crazy:

• Worcester-Providence-Westerly

Who would be the main user group to target for the Quonset Point branch? Military personnel? Remember, Tricky Dick utterly crushed that crucial southern RI labor sector... 50 years ago as of April 2023.

Meanwhile, it will never happen because there are too many auto-centric vested interests (revenues/fees from all of the parking lots that fatten municipal coffers), and it would also be complicated in terms of trying to balance the southbound users from metro Providence with the eastbound users from metro Hartford/CT shoreline, but, the 23 miles of shoreline in RI from, say, Downtown Wickford to Charlestown beach really deserve a weekender May 1--November 1 "beach train" (or equivalent bus service). In normal summers, these beaches are just crushed with tens of thousands of cars.... plus the crush of cars doing the Block Island Ferry every hour. The bike path that runs from the Kingston Amtrak station/URI-ville to Narragansett beach was, of course, a legendary "beach train" spur off of the NY-New Haven RR, back in Victorian times, that apparently was wildly popular.

(I may have mentioned this years ago on AB, but simply forgot... apologies if this is a repeat from years back.)

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

West Davisville is already a proposed RIDOT infill serving primarily the Quonset Point workforce with quick/easy shuttle buses. Except for the annual Purple Line charter trip to the Air Show there will never be a reason for trains to exit the NEC.

Three quarters of RI's population lives within 20 minutes of a station on one of the overlapping proposed service patterns stretching linearly from Woonsocket to Westerly. The only "branch" or isolated/non-overlapping service they will ever have to figure out how to treat is the Newport Secondary.

 

[Stlin]

The only "branch" or isolated/non-overlapping service they will ever have to figure out how to treat is the Newport Secondary.

Has anyone really studied Newport as part of intrastate service, instead of part of a SCR extension? I can't imagine you can get across Narragansett Bay to Quonset, or to the E. Bay Bike Path running through Bristol to E Prov. (There never was a historical connection there, as I recall.) That path is too physically disconnected on both ends to even contemplate, unless you figure out two very expensive connections on both ends. Though, I think you could make the density/ service argument for that set of towns to work.

(Also, when was the last use of the street running track on Allens Ave/1A?)

 

[Riverside]

Thanks F-Line as always. The lack of robust RTAs is a major piece of the puzzle that I was missing.

Are Lowell/Lawrence/Haverhill centers of gravity in their own right? Driving/transit habits aside, do they form a meaningful satellite node à la Providence and Worcester?

You're totally right that I'm templating my understanding of NH off my understanding of RI, so I'm looking to understand where that analogy breaks down. For example, Attleboro has this unusual role of being both a suburb of Boston and a suburb of Providence. Likewise, Cranston is clearly a suburb of Providence, but also has a reasonable claim to being a suburb of Boston (albeit more distant). So I'm trying to understand how Manchester, Nashua, Lowell, Lawrence, and Haverhill relate to each other (and to Boston) in a similar way.

(Parenthetically, setting aside the question of feeder services from New Hampshire, there's still something intriguing about rail pinging back between Haverhill and Lowell -- that is a lot of active, well-maintained rail running through the hearts of multiple medium-sized cities.)

Re Quonset Point: no strong disagreement, my point is only that if the landscape ever changed significantly, running a branch to Quonset Point would be relatively easy compared to everything else. (Though, to be fair, the only circumstance that I can imagine is aggressive TOD at Quonset, plus a need for high frequencies to the north [eg to East Greenwich], combined with a reduced need for high frequencies to the south, and thus a need for some short-turn location. Very much a "stars must align thing.")

 

[DBM]

West Davisville is already a proposed RIDOT infill

More business for Fred's Antique Shop! (I always get a kick out of rounding the corner on Old Baptist Road there and seeing that country-fied spectacle.)

Also, given that one of the major arterials in the Davisville district is Devil's Foot Road, RIDOT would be completely justified in naming said station "Devil's Foot Station."

Alas, the pencil-necked bureacrats will surely succumb to fears of instigating more of our nation's chronic Satanic Panic syndrome, and will inevitably do the safe thing and name it "Davisville Station." (If that naming isn't in fact codified, already.)

 

[Riverside]

Has anyone really studied Newport as part of intrastate service, instead of part of a SCR extension? I can't imagine you can get across Narragansett Bay to Quonset, or to The E. Bay Bike Path running through Bristol to E Prov. That path is too disconnected on the providence end to even contemplate.

(Also, when was the last use of the street running track on Allens Ave/1A?)

I don't know of any formal studies. The only way I can imagine a Newport-Providence service is one that runs via Fall River, Taunton, and Attleboro. And the only way I can imagine that working is if there are timed transfers to high-speed Boston service at either Taunton or Attleboro, and if the Newport-Providence service itself is electrified and high-speed as much as possible. Thus you'd be able to capture local commuters to Fall River and Taunton, and be able to offer a transfer service for Newport commuters to Boston, and be able to capture some Fall River-Providence (and maybe Taunton-Providence) commuters. Pull all those together, and you might be able to stitch together a ridership coalition strong enough to make it viable.

(If all Boston-Fall River trains were rerouted to New Bedford, and Fall River were served by Providence trains with a transfer at Taunton, you might be able to swing high enough frequencies on both to make them effective. Maaaaaaybe.)

But yeah -- Newport-Providence via Taunton is looooooooooong. Like, 55 miles looooooong. (For reference, Boston-Wickford Junction is 57 miles as the crow flies.) RIPTA's 60 bus pings back and forth between Newport and Providence from early morning late into the night, at 15 minute headways (!) during peak, 30 min off-peak, and 60 min until well after midnight. Total journey time is about 80 minutes. After local service on Aquidneck Island, it runs local through Bristol (with stop at Roger Williams University), Warren and part of Barrington, before expressing to Providence. So, a rail route might be able to soak up some of that, and presumably there would be some ridership from Fall River and Taunton.

RIPTA's 14 runs a commuter service via the West Bay at much lower frequencies. Its travel times vary depending on number of stops -- anywhere from 50 minutes to 80 minutes.

Driving time of course is maybe 45 to 60 minutes. And seasonal ferry service is timetabled at 60 minutes.

Could a train beat those buses or driving? I mean, maybe? But, it's a looooong way round. I think the best hope is the coalition outlined above, where Newport-Providence is only a portion of the target market. (Maybe supplemented by some sort of Cape Codder service direct from Boston.)

Don't get me wrong -- I'd love to see it happen. But a lot of pieces need to be put in place first.