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It's not the cars. I'm pretty sure the flats are 79-mph max and the bilevels are 90-max. Fitchburg had a ton of track work in the not so distant past, which might have something to do with it.

Did I miss where it was announced this had anything to do with the new cars?

Throw in some green to indicate a couple of the bigger parks, maybe add icons for a few of the major landmarks, and you've got the makings of a pretty decent geographic map that would work at least reasonably well as a schematic map. Obviously there's a limit to how far you can take this...

No. You'd need at least seven of them to electrify all the RI->BOS morning-weekday runs alone. More to the point, why on Earth would they bother? Unless they're going to get serious about electrification, dual modes make less than zero sense as anything but a (stupid) stunt. Does the Sharon...

I can't entirely say I agree. It's more like Covid blew off the vinyl siding, revealing that the wall underneath had been devoured by termites. Even if Covid hadn't derailed the gas tax hike, there's no guarantee that the money would have a.) gone mainly to the MBTA or b.) been spent...

"Starve the beast", but applied to a city. Certain industries cannot effectively be operated remotely, many derive considerable benefits from being located in specific places, and many more are very unlikely to go fully remote or redistribute outside the city without unending, ongoing...

And replace it with...what? Turn the ROWs into highways? Oh yeah, it can definitely get worse. If there was actual money to be made in public transit, someone would be doing it. I suppose it's might be theoretically possible to run a private system in Boston...except it would be far more...

Pretty sure that's from the slide deck from the presentation of the T's EMU RFI to the board a couple years ago. I don't know if it's Stadler's work or not, but it's something. (I particularly like how literally zero effort was taken to make the T logos match the perspective, they're just...

Reads like it was written by someone who has no idea how any of the details work. To be fair, while the specific dates are wildly unrealistic in and of themselves, that error is something that is easily fixed by legislative fiat (feels like the kind of thing that'd get modified after its first...

I'm curious if it's the ADA proper or the state-level regulations on top of it. It sounds like the problem with rebuilding the stairs is that if they touch them, that would trigger the need to make it and that entrance in particular fully accessible, which they clearly haven't geared up for yet...

I mean, yeah, if nothing changes politically, nothing's going to change with regards to the Silver Line. Political decisions are inherently subject to change. Should the political winds shift, whether due to advocacy, shifting coalitions, or just the vagaries of what specific power-brokers...

Ultimately it's not up to them. The T doesn't make those decisions, the state does. If the politicians should come around to thinking that the Silver Line is woefully insufficient (admittedly, politicians' collective ability to recognize reality is something of a crapshoot), then it doesn't much...

That's Amtrak's track geometry car Corridor Clipper. Usually runs on the T's lines a couple of times a year.

Boylston's geometry makes that prospect difficult. The merge from track 3 to track 4 (eastbound fence and wall tracks) is midway along the outbound platform. You'd either have to somehow share space on Track 4 between the LRVs and the buses, or cross the buses over from 4 to 3 (which isn't...

It's a two-things-can-be-true-at-once kind of service. It's objectively better in a number of ways than the T's standard bus service, while at the same time (particularly on the Washington Street end) being inferior to both other forms of rapid transit (which the T pretends it is) and to what...

Wouldn't it make more sense to have a dedicated thread for the MBTA's successes? We wouldn't need more than one thread for that. (Honestly not sure if this deserves a /s or not... 🙃)

Interesting post. One point I want to bring up that I think has specific relevance for transit station naming, is that, ideally, a station/stop name will concisely and uniquely identify its location for wayfinding purposes. (See the previous discussion about Aquarium, for instance. "Long Wharf"...

Yeah, but the clearance under Seaport Boulevard's quite a bit higher than the deck level of the Northern Avenue bridge (probably how it could be built as a fixed span). I agree that a fixed span for the Northern Avenue replacement is probably possible, just that it probably requires more than a...

Would there be any problem doing that given that the current bridge is a (locked-open) swing bridge? I feel like the feds might have some issues with sticking a fixed bridge over what I think is still technically a navigable waterway. (And rebuilding the approaches to have a higher fixed span...

Did I miss the T acquiring that stretch of line? I thought it was still CSX/Pan Am/whichever shell company the blue behemoth out of Jacksonville is using today. Even besides the ever-present annoyance of CSX freight disruptions (and they're not particularly prone to caring about whether their...