I would say in regards to SCR its critical to get to Taunton first, and then see if anything further is needed. 95 minutes is a long commute. However I'm familiar with the region and for both the north end of Fall River and the north end of New Bedford which are the more suburban parts of each city, its not a bad ride at all up 24 or 140 respectively to get to Taunton. That should be the main driver of ridership.
They probably should think about how much screwing up the Taunton station siting with this asinine Phase I is going to hurt the cause, then. What was originally supposed to be a TOD-integrated station behind the Taunton Depot shops has now been kicked down the road to the end of a desolate factory driveway with the other side of the tracks fronting a teeny-tiny cluster of about 2 dozen single-family homes sitting on the Berkley side of the town line. There's no potential for mixed-use anything anymore; it's just a parking sink for the 24/140 interchange to be 'blessed' with the worst headways on the system, meaning it will probably be very underutilized. And it won't be reachable by most of the buses in Taunton, which were to cluster to the downtown station on the Stoughton Line. The interplay between the two Taunton stops was one of the strengths of the Stoughton Alternative.
They've succeeded wildly in basically zeroing out Taunton transit--no mean feat considering how much it used to anchor the project's ridership--in their zeal to build an arse-end-first route to the cities for purposes of saying "we gave you a train...you were never specific about stating it had to be a
usable one!" Phase I's stop isn't even a good Pn'R stop at those service levels...but since else that was good about the original Taunton Depot site has been chucked away it's now got no other means of keeping its own lights turned on and snow plowed than raw lot utilization numbers. The very same thing we just spent pages talking about is such an awful metric for trying to stake a commuter rail stop's viability atop!
In all this discussion the last few pages on what does/doesn't make for a good station, "It's the frequencies, stupid!!!" comes up #1 with a bullet and good mixture of location + surrounding dev + supporting transit vs. asphalt wasteland on an offramp comes in #2.
¡Frequencies! is where you have to seriously look at how much "transit orientation" the TOD at these new stops will actually have, when there's barely any usable transit in the schedules being proposed. Land might fill up around a Freetown or Kings Highway station after they open, but will it be redev that drives any new transit riders when the service levels and schedule lengths are so beyond-horrible? Or will it just be a few more unsustainable big-box stores to throw on an already big, run-down pile of 'em littering K Hwy.? The value recapture (or lackthereof) of service-just-to-say-you-have-service-and-nothing-more vs. service that's actually USEFUL is where those sites can either hit paydirt or sputter endlessly. Right now pretty much every one of the extension stops save for maybe downtown New Bedford is staring into that abyss of "Where's the transit orientation around near-nonexistent transit?". The very same stuff that is trying to re-pivot the Greenbush Line stops around greater transit orientation--and struggling through a mixed bag because the train frequencies just aren't very good--, only from-scratch and with a much more pessimistic service outlook. And I also count Fall River Depot in that "abyss" category too despite the surrounding downtown density because the rail line is askew from the city's central bus depot at City Hall Plaza...and no incarnation of SCR has ever so much as paid lip service to how multimodal connections would ever usefully be made with the transit centers being that far apart.
When everybody clamoring for a train-for-trains'-sake has crawled back into a hole, these municipalities are going to be struggling mightily to hold to the transit orientation of the surroundings when the stops themselves host so little transit.
