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With how insanely busy the Providence Line is on weekends (420 passengers/train on weekends compared to 300/train on weekdays) doubling weekend service on the Providence Line will surely bring large ridership returns since the demand is clearly there but also make trips a little more comfortable...

Despite being a long time coming, expensive, delayed, and problem-plagued, we did manage to complete a rapid transit extension through the region's most densely populated city and are set to finally complete a regional rail extension to the states 9th largest city and Fall River next year. While...

They need to wait until the new Charlie Cards that work with the fare readers are implemented. Riders still overwhelmingly use Charlie Cards over tap to pay and doing all door boarding on buses would just be a free pass for Charlie Card users to fare evade unless they have a massive fare...

Isn't boat transportation the most expensive to operate per passenger except for some bus service due to the much higher maintenance and labor costs? If that's the case a private company would have to charge an amount unappealing to anyone seeking regular use in order to turn a profit. The $4.25...

Orange Line has been running 16 trains during rush hour today and has been keeping 5-7min headways for the most part save for the cascading effects of a disabled train at Wellington about an hour ago

Commuter Rail Trends Part I For the first part of my dive into CR ridership data I took a look at how ridership panned out during June 2024 which has been the highest ridership month for the CR so far post-pandemic (data is unfortunately unavailable prior to 2020 besides the 2018 counts)...

The way I look at it is if you compare it to a 30min bus the train ridership exceeds those frequency buses by a couple thousand. It's low for it's total capacity but consider that those living in the region haven't had useable rail service there for the better part of a century so changing their...

So I'm working on that Commuter Rail data parsing and I found that, as expected, the day of the Celtics Parade was the highest individual ridership day of the year so far by many thousand on each line... except the Greenbush Line. There's actually a not insignificant drop off of a few hundred...

The exceptions probably go as far as a human-powered vessel or university teams training to bring glory to the City of Boston, the former probably only being possible by the latter (bar some insane Looney Tunes-esque kayaker or paddleboarder).

CBS has run with a story bringing this up again and the comments have people eating it up saying things like, "I can't believe this hasn't been done before! If only the MBTA had innovative thinkers like this! The private sector beats the government again!" But to humor their ambitions, is there...

Could say the same about any road to a Greenfield development (pun intended). The reason you build out useable infrastructure is to enhance the economy of the region and in this case that would be improving job access and alleviating poverty and homelessness. That and at the same time improving...

That is incredibly interesting the lack of travel to Lowell and the surrounding area from the North Central region considering the jobs in medical care and the 2 universities (including Merrimack) plus community colleges, especially with the commute on 495 being in reverse of Boston traffic...

Idk if it has been discussed before but a routing via Lowell branching at Ayer with an intermediate stop in Westford/Chelmsford would be interesting. Express from Lowell to North station is ~35min, add on ~20min from Ayer to Lowell (40mph average speed) and you get a 1:23 trip from Wachusett to...

Officially 3 new RL trains active in rush hour today. I haven't looked any other day this week so no idea if this has been ongoing all week.

To keep playing the part of the optimist: I don't think a total budgeted officer positions difference of 56 drivers will make a big difference in the grand scheme of things (a -3% decrease). At that point in time when the BNRD was expected for 2023, the Columbus Ave bus lanes were not complete...

I'd assume you don't mean it this way but it comes off as if 1,819 drivers were always active or on standby to drive the buses. That is not the case and is just the roster of employed bus drivers. The T only has about 1079 buses total with also not all of those in-use at once. The construction...

Currently working on a dive into Commuter Rail Weekday v Weekend ridership data in relation to service provided, such as the percentage ridership drops off compared to the percentage drop in service, as well as other interesting trends in ridership. It'll take some time to sort out but the first...

I'm just the messenger, but Keolis and the MBTA will be leasing the BEMUs not procuring a build-order so they will be significantly cheaper (the whole project budget is ~$60mil). Being the only way to get the state to actually fund some form of electrification in the nearer-term the idea is to...

Interesting question and response from Eng at the Fairmount battery train live thing today: Someone asked about the decision to go with battery electric trains as opposed to fully electrifying with catenary. The response was a lot of the usual capital costs too high for what the T gets from the...

Their sources are a very complex network of connections, observation, and the MBTA's own press releases so it'd make sense they lag a bit behind. I think it's 2 people that are the maintainers of the site