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I really have no idea. Based on ridership predictions, I would guess that it would be a Fall River train that gets dropped, rather than a New Bedford one.

Holy shit, they actually decided to do this! From https://www.mbta.com/news/2024-09-18/mbta-general-manager-shares-south-coast-rail-updates-taunton: My full analysis here: https://archboston.com/community/threads/fall-river-new-bedford-commuter-rail-south-coast-rail.1553/post-414879

Caltrain's electrified service is now in operation. Among other things, it looks like this will reduce travel time by 5 minutes on the express service and by 25 minutes (!) on local service. Setting aside the "inside baseball" around how the thing came to fruition, hopefully from a PR...

I googled "eastern route chelsea beach branch" (because I was intrigued by a comment in the BRB&L's Wikipedia article) and yep, this thread was the very first thing that popped up, and yup, it had exactly what I was looking for. (Tangentially, from what I can tell from reading Wikipedia...

This is the big one. I have a series of maps I've been working on (slowly) showing what places are 1SR, 2SR etc from a particular job destination. Red-Blue means that all of the North Shore gets the same level of access to Kendall + Harvard as everywhere else in the region -- for example...

Perhaps I'm overly cynical about the world, but I see Eng's remarks as a (very reasonable) bit of political strategy here. Think about it -- there are 4 possible scenarios: Eng supports BEMUs while maintaining a long-term preference for catenary; the BEMUs magically appear by 2028, and, woohoo...

@F-Line to Dudley can comment further, but I believe that freight service into the Fore River port remains very active. Just to go briefly waaaay down the rabbit hole here, let's say you could triple track from Fore River to Braintree, and leaving the Middleboro Line as mainline for freight...

There are two oddities that sorta fit this bill. First, the NJT River Line uses diesel light rail vehicles (which do street-running in Trenton -- which is why they need to be "light" rail) on mainline track that it uses on an unusual "timeshare" basis, where freight is only allowed to run at...

Looking into an alternate history past rather than a hyopthetical future, you might find this piece that I wrote earlier this year interesting: The Boston Metropolitan Railway: an imaginary version of the MBTA. Yes, I think this would be the problem, and part of it comes back to this: The...

Yes. But. It should be very doable for the following bus driver to be notified, "Hey, we just short-turned a bus at Newton Corner, please board all doors and don't collect fares at that stop." Like @The EGE said, it sounds like dispatchers don't have the bandwidth to do that, but I do wonder if...

Like this?

Looks to me like it should be doable to put platforms in parallel east of a wye: The existing Highland Branch ROW would need a little bit of realignment to accommodate full tangent tracks, but I don't think it would be earth-shattering. This alignment would also avoid interlining at the...

Right, this is the key thing to bear in mind here: these tracks are really close to each other. Like, "1000-feet-as-the-crow-flies" really close. Even with the S curve F-Line drew here, it's still only 1500 feet of track. And yeah -- the only way the street grid goes away is if we get Urban...

@TheRatmeister I finally got a chance to look at these on a larger monitor, and they really look fantastic. Stunning work.

These maps are excellent -- and I'm glad my maps were useful enough to be worth updating! Re frequency threshold: it is worth calling out that you are definitely using a looser threshold than I did (not that I'm criticizing you for doing so -- your reasoning makes sense). The approach I took...

Yeah, I pretty intentionally excluded Lechmere from the set of hubs. First, it's much much closer to Downtown than almost any of the others. Maverick is about as close (depending where in Downtown you measure from), but Boston Harbor artificially inflates that distance in practice (being...

Fair question! I think solutions using either framework will be interesting. So perhaps we’ll say that either approach is good, just clarify up front whether your solution is in a “stet” framework or “blank slate”. (Also bear in mind that one could also do realignments — eg realign Red to have...

Let's draw some lines on some maps. Let's assume that Boston has five "downtowns": Downtown/Financial District, Back Bay, Longwood Medical Area, Kendall, and the Seaport. (This is a somewhat arbitrary assumption, I grant.) Let's further assume that there are five "BERY-style" bus transfer...

Aha yes, this was it, thank you both! And yeah, even if dwell times didn’t necessarily improve in certain ways, the increased ridership is an obvious winner, IMO. It’s also possible that the 28 is a bit of a special case, and that lower ridership routes — maybe even very-high-but-not-28-high...

I appreciate that you may have more context and so can’t confirm or deny, but this definitely sounds like an internal draft that is still WIP, possibly testing some other aspect of the map while leaving things like the SL in an unfinished state. That said, if they demote the Silver Line, I...