Yeah you can forget about any ROW re-use past Gibson St. And of course there's the inescapable problem of splitting the OL before Malden Center, which should remain off the table without a damn good reason. Perhaps this segment could be tied into an orbital line... somehow, but without going to Malden Center I'm skeptical of the utility of such an endeavor.
If you're doing any mined or bored section then there's no point jumping through however many hoops both politically and financially to demolish a bunch of buildings. Just make the tunnel slightly longer. And again, that's just the demolitions you'd need. You'd need to take something like a hundred backyards too.
Compared to branching at Sullivan it's definitely less bad but the portion of northside OL ridership that comes from Malden Center is just massive, and the area continues to be a hotspot for development. Then what happens when Rivers Edge gets built and you get more demand north of the branch-point? And then what happens when it's time to electrify the line to Reading, likely in the form of an OL extension?
The NIMBY shite-storm would be of legendary proportions. Taking all the backyards plus demolition would be politically undoable.
I can see the issue if it became a question of trade-offs between serving just Medford or Malden + north, but I was coming at it from the idea that there really doesn't even need to be a trade-off, because there's no world where anything more than half of a theoretical maximum capacity on a 2-track line would be necessary to adequately serve Malden + north.
On the property-takings side, part of what inspired this thought was that I heard about the North Houston Highway Improvement Project involving the displacement of 1000+ residents, and it changed my perspective a bit on how politically feasible it is to demo houses for transportation projects in the 21st century (although of course that's Texas and this is Massachusetts...)
Malden Center serves 12 bus routes that collectively slug over 20,000 daily Blue Book boardings. You hurt a lot of transit users by halving frequencies to MC and wrecking their 2-seat trips. It is absolutely the greater harm to consign those transferees to 9-minute peak frequencies forever, and there is no freaking way Medford Square's 5 routes can make up the difference by gaining 9-minute rapid transit frequencies.
I actually agree with you on this. Thousands, if not millions, of homes nationwide were wiped out in the US for highway projects during the last 75 years, but now that new transit projects need land acquisition, it's difficult for that to happen. I would be all for a more aggressive approach to acquiring land for transit expansion.
Yeah so that's really just not true. OL trains pre-COVID were regularly stuffed to the brim coming into Sullivan, even when frequencies were fine. (Which was admittedly the exception rather than the norm...)
That still doesn't make it good. Extremely literal NIMBYism is not unfounded.
Unclear. I believe the new signalling system would cap at 3 minute headways, so you'd need to move to moving-block CBTC. The other problem is dwell times. The Red Line, which has much better station design downtown owing to its later construction and already runs 3-4 minute headways during the peak, regularly sees 90-100s dwells at some of the busiest stations during rush hour. Pre-COVID the Orange line regularly saw 2+ minute dwells at busy stations even when train frequencies were fine. It seems doubtful to me that 2 minute headways would be sustainable long-term.
That's a bold assumption. That probably more than doubles the cost of any OL branch project right there. That money could go to a lot of other things.
I totally agree about a Medford Square OL branch not justifying the extreme residential condemnation that would be needed along the now non-existent old RR ROW. I do, however, think there needs to be a balanced approach to enable sensible and justifiable acquisition of ROW for other necessary future transit extensions. The rails-to-trails program is a great one, but it unfortunately may place some potential future transit routes out of consideration. There may be cases that come up in which we have to sacrifice a segment of rail-to-trail for a new transit or rail extension. All I would like to see is transit expansion not being unduly blocked by a zero tolerance for ROW acquisition, compared to highway projects that have been robustly acquiring ROW literally like a steamroller for the last century. Even the upcoming Sagamore Bridge project is requiring some demolition of residences. Rail and BRT transit expansions are the future of transportation, and I'd like to see them able to happen with all the needed ROW acquisition that may arise.
I think if the red line’s going past Braintree it has to go to Brockton. That’s where the density is. Would a red line extension to Brockton plus cape main mostly single track through Brockton be a better value than an OC double track project? I’m not sure but it may be worth exploring. I assume that to do this, SCR phase 2 would be a prerequisite. The RL would extend to Campello and absorb Holbrook/Randolph and Montello. Dual CR/RL station at Brockton center. I count 5 grade crossings that should be eliminated. The ROW looks to be at least 3 tracks wide, maybe 4 tracks in some spots allowing for passing tracks in some locations for the CR. It’s at least something that should be looked into as an alternative to OC double track to see how it pencils out.
I was thinking the same thing actually but didn’t mention it. Red X may be a requirement for this but that would need to be analyzed. In any case, I figured that not all trains would continue past Braintree
How does this function as an alternative to OC double track? You're not eliminating any of the CR lines since you're not extending all the way down to Middleborough. And you can't even decrease the CR frequency on the Middleborough line that much. The capacity constraint on the single track would still very much be there.
You don’t have to eliminate any CR lines, the target goal is to increase frequency to Brockton specifically. Beyond that frequency for the CR can be hourly. Does anyone know what the capacity of the OC line is from Braintree-SS? Bi-directional All day hourly frequency for the other 2 lines may be doable. That’s only 6 TPH in the single-track sections.