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Just adding a data point. Had to get a 10:30pm bus at Alewife and hopped on the Red Line at 10:03 with a little concern. I shouldn't have worried. Arrived at Alewife in exactly 20 minutes. I can't remember the last time I got from Harvard to Alewife in that time.

Totally separately, I rode the Orange Line for the first time in about 3 years this weekend, and was completely blown away. I tapped to pay with my phone and the only time the train slowed down was to make station stops. It was like 2002 all over again, but with more convenient payment options.

I've posted it elsewhere, but the document that really makes me want to cry is the original 1940's transportation planning documents. They contain all of the ambitious highway plans, but also very strongly state that the highways are only half of the solution, as an equal investment in rapid...

Are you saying that it's better to have real world experience than Real World experience? Jokes aside, I'm cautiously optimistic for the reasons you mentioned. A big concern I have is lack of investment in infrastructure, and while I'm not holding out for significant investment in transporting...

I couldn't find any definitive, except for a reference to a 1998 design charrette ("Under the Overpass: A Day of Visions for a Sad Landscape") where a participant noted that the curved walls adding nothing to the space, which seems to imply some decorative intent.

Having previously lived car-free in the area for a number of years, I consider myself to be a bit of a connoisseur of the 5XX express buses, including the 504. I'm not sure how things are post-COVID, but in the before times, timekeeping heavily depended on the current state of Newton Corner...

I'm all for this as long as we actually get improved transit out of it. Speaking as someone who literally enjoys riding the T in all of its forms and who has lived car-free in Boston before, there are times where the T just doesn't cut it due to completely terrible schedules, overcrowding, or...

It's crazy transit pitch material, but I always felt Woburn Center or even continuing further to Route 128 would be the best terminus. It has similar density to Winchester and worse access to downtown. While it has some express buses and the 134 (and I've taken them all) they're not convenient...

This whole thing is insane. Looking at a May 2024 timetable, Acela 2151 is scheduled to run the 156 miles between BOS and NHV in 119 minutes, for an average speed of 78mph. The remaining 75 miles takes 104 minutes, for an average speed of 44 mph, which is insanely slow for a trip with one...

Many moons ago, I had a car-free commutes from Arlington and downtown Boston to the Rt 128 corridor in Waltham. Both of those commutes worked surprisingly well due to one key element that's missing now, which is the connection from Waltham Center to the Rt 128 area. Getting to the Center...

The "non-railfan" opinion of my wife and son are that Moynihan is vastly superior to the old Penn Station, but zero attention appears to have been paid to the queuing situation.

Recently, I had the "pleasure" of driving from central Florida to the Kennedy Space Center. A decent chunk of the drive paralleled the Brightline line. One (obvious as soon as I thought about it) thing I didn't really consider was that a dedicated passenger line can be much less restricted on...

As a former resident of Melrose, I can confirm that the 3(!!!!) commuter rail stops there have turned that town into a post-apocalyptic hellhole. I had to move to Winchester, which only has two stops, but I still keep the door locked and rarely leave my house due to the rampant train-related...

As a parent that raised a kid downtown, I felt this very acutely. We did a lot of bike riding, and getting from the Esplanade to the Necklace required a significant break in the action. Of course, this was also when the Lower Depths featured hot dogs, so we'd often make a detour to the surface...

The quote below made me chuckle until I realized that there's a separate plan to connect Reading to Philadelphia. The overall context of a longer-term Harrisburg, Reading, Allentown, NYC route is also pretty interesting, but I know nothing of the area or whether this is realistic or not.

It's a massive improvement over what's currently there. My only real "complaint" is that I would have loved to have seen more ground-floor retail along the riverfront on two sides of the building.

It's a much better option than the parking lots that are there now. My hope is that more people downtown means more support for local businesses. We've lost two of my favorites (Fuller Cup and Olive Branch) this year. They were literally the only places I went with any regularity.

At the period of my life when I frequented the Dive Bar and/or Sir Morgan's Cove, I was rarely in a condition to take stock of the surroundings. It wasn't until many years later that it wasn't just a dive bar, but there was actually some amount of nautical theming as well. Also, RIP Tortilla...

Great to see the I-95/Route 1 barrier to those trails getting breached, though it does emphasize the lack of connection to Peabody Square and Salem. I wonder how long before we see a "trail-use" agreement for the all-but-defunct railroad branch in that area.

In all fairness to the Globe, it is wildly overbuilt with what seems like more interior space* than all other downtowns combined, all in support of a one of the lowest capacity mass transit modes available. I was a year 1 rider and coming out of the huge, shiny station into a sea of parking...