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Re: Tremont Street Tunnel, the Silver Line, D-E and retiring Copley Junction You're extending it in the wrong direction. If you're trying to connect the convention center with South Station, North Station, and Back Bay, the correct way to do that is to have people walk from the convention...

The only positive routes are the SL shuttle, SL1, and SL5 (and SL1 is free in one direction, but the MBTA still gets paid, by the airport); see data here. SL2 is not fare recovery-positive, although to be fair it's the least fare recovery-negative among the fare recovery-negative routes...

My standard only applies to things with positive transportation value. I don't think light rail to the Seaport has any transportation value, and if it diverts Green Line trains from the Tremont Street four-track trunk then it has negative transportation value. It's Boston's equivalent of the 7...

Re: Tremont Street Tunnel, the Silver Line, D-E and retiring Copley Junction Of course it isn't! But I'm also not sold on the branch to Harvard. Allston-Cambridge service is circumferential, so it's better to just go the whole way on a circumferential line and build one, underground, all the...

Re: Tremont Street Tunnel, the Silver Line, D-E and retiring Copley Junction I really think it's two separate levels of proposal. Tremont Street to Dudley and thence Forest Hills and/or Mattapan via Blue Hill is a mostly at-grade light rail project, railstituting the city's busiest bus lines...

But only half the trains make the adverse move, which means that an almost-2-minutes travel time is not as big a deal. The limiting factor coming from the terminal is the dwell time (which can be sub-1 minute) plus the arithmetic average of the sum of the adverse and straight move. A useful...

On busy lines, trains don't turn at through-stations. New York doesn't randomly turn 4 or 5 trains at Bowling Green at rush hour, and it deals with mechanical issues by maintaining rolling stock to such standards that the MDBF is high enough that this doesn't happen routinely. Unless there's...

Okay, so the MBTA dispatchers want to be able to decide on a minute's notice to tell passengers on a northbound train that they all have to get off because the train's going to terminate, even though it was signed as "Alewife" when they got on. And what's more, apparently the dispatchers can...

This only happens when the lines are designed together. The MTR designed the four core subway lines at once, so it could make provisions for cross-platform transfers. Ditto Chatelet-Les Halles: the RER A and B were designed at once, with provisions already made for the RER D, so they have a...

Why is it so important to keep the platform clear until the preceding train has left the interlocking (or vice versa)? A train can enter the platform and dwell at it while the interlocking is switched. If for some reason it's super-important to have off-schedule short-turns (which is one of the...

You keep saying that, but no, actually, the equipment brakes faster in slow areas than in fast ones. Think about it.

Well, yeah, some trains would turn at Park, but the point is that south of Park, the Tremont Street Subway trains would not be at the expense of any preexisting Green Line capacity. Which branches end up turning at Park and which get to go farther north is a different question.

Those are the connections between different systems in Hong Kong. But the four core MTR lines meet in cross-platform transfers, with multiple shared stations for most pairs of lines to allow reverse-direction cross-platform transfers. The East and West Rail Lines have a cross-platform transfer...

There's a lot of general demand to Forest Hills. I don't know if it's from Dudley specifically, but it's one of the busiest subway stations, so that Coney Island-like convergence of multiple rail branches is acceptable. That said, the Blue Hill Avenue corridor is better, although I still think...

That's really not much better. SL2 has shit ridership too, and American cities overinvest in transit to waterfront condos as much as in transit to airports. You should see the sort of stuff that New York politicians come up with - ferries with double-digit per-rider subsidies are in vogue right...

Eh. First, SL4/SL5 is a reverse branch; each destination - South Station and Downtown Crossing - only has half the frequency. The Green Line would not have this split. Second, the report does give the Green Line 34,000 weekday riders, twice the ridership of SL4/SL5, and more than each of the...

Funny, I would have pegged it as a stupid airport line more than anything. No other reason to connect the two Silver Lies; if the point is just to give Roxbury better access to Downtown Boston, then a Green Line extension is both much cheaper and much more useful. Although, coming to think of...

It's not about the airport. I hate that people make it about the airport. The airport is not the busiest East Boston stop; Maverick is. Boston already has too much airport transit. Rich Cantabrigians might care about an airport line that they're not going to use much anyway, but most of the...

First, CBTC, a.k.a. moving-block signaling, means not having any signal blocks. Second, don't be helpless! Just add more signal blocks - when the train is slow, the stopping distances are reduced, allowing shorter blocks. New York has some truly nasty curves on the numbered lines, including...

The Red/Blue connector isn't about capacity; as I ranted in the crazy transit pitches thread, Boston does not have track capacity problems to speak of. It's about providing a reasonable two-seat ride from East Boston to Cambridge.