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The station names still need to make sense for riders on the commuter rail, though. The broadness of a station name is related to the broadness of the mode. Station names on a regional mode should be clear to riders across the region - if there's only one station in an municipality, it should...

Blandford Street: unclear about the exact route, but everything Blandford seems to trace back to Blandford Forum in England. Its name apparently comes from being a ford where blay (bleak) fish are found. The town of Blandford, Massachusetts, is named for the ship HMS Blandford, itself presumably...

Some other name changes I agree with (from this thread and others): East Somerville → Brickbottom: Better placemaking; East Somerville also includes a lot that's closer to Sullivan Square. Silver Line Way → Starboard Way (or Pavilion, or something else): anything to make it a useful name World...

Upon further look I found this: https://arlhist.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/2003-4-Spread.pdf It notes that some Arlingtons in the US were definitely named for the earl, mostly pre-Civil War. More were named after the war for Arlington Cemetery, which can be conclusively traced to Arlington...

In general, I've soured on naming things after people - morality shifts over time, and most people do both good and bad things. (In particular I hate naming stations in honor of people - unless the name is (or is intended to be) the name of the area, it doesn't give any clue to where it is.)...

Green Line trunk: Medford/Tufts: the origin of the city's name is unclear - it may have been "meadow by the ford" in the Mystic River, or one of two towns in England. Ball Square: the square is named for John Nichols Ball, a businessman and politician who had a factory there Magoun Square: the...

A discussion in the Transit Planning $h!tposting thread led me to be curious about the origin of MBTA subway station names. Here are the non-obvious ones on the Red and Orange lines: Alewife: named for the creek, which is named for the fish species. Davis: Davis Square is named for Person...

Thanks so much for posting these. I am extremely unhappy with the seemingly recent trend where slides are shown on video at public meetings, but the PDF is not posted anywhere. PDFs are easy to save and provide a permanent record; videos disappear whenever the hosting service dies.

The near-term B and C accessibility/stop consolidation projects are not part of the Core Capacity program.

$42M design-build contract awarded for C Branch accessibility: https://cdn.mbta.com/sites/default/files/2025-04/2a._Green%20Line%20C%20Branch%20Accessibility%20-%20A26CN04%20%20V2.pdf Also an update on the Core Capacity Program...

For a single-line system it's probably more based on site (and labor) availability than anything else. (CapMetro, for example, is colocated with a bus yard.) I will also note that FrontRunner and Rail Runner are both substantially bidirectional systems - FrontRunner with the biggest metro at the...

That's the nature of transit pitches - it's very common for multiple people to independently come up with similar ideas, especially in a 300-plus-page thread! If you look at the very first page of this thread, there are ideas there that we still discuss 15 years later - and there's someone...

I think that's been proposed on here before, and I know Ari Ofsevit has proposed it. It's certainly not easy - you're talking 4-5 miles of new tunnel, almost entirely under water and filled land - but certainly intriguing.

It makes a bit more sense within historical context. South Acton has always been one of the more significant stations on the line - it was the junction for the branch to Marlborough (after the 1930s, Maynard), and has been a short turn terminal since the late 19th century. Littleton never was a...

Those all seem generally logical. My very quick add-ons: Riverside expansion is tricky because of the proposed development. There is a plausible case for double-decking the storage tracks, though. The inside of the Needham Junction wye was proposed in the 1945-47 Coolidge Commission plan...

There was also a century less of buried utilities and high-rises to complicate construction. And while the BERy's subway/surface transfer stations tended to be spacious, the downtown stations were often rather cramped, never mind modern needs like elevators and escalators and their machinery...

Yeah, and South Acton does have a bit more parking - 287 spots versus 203.

This is clearly the whales' revenge for the MBTA extending service to the Whaling City.

Thanks for this - where are these slides from?

Wickford Junction was never expected to generate substantial ridership to Boston - it was always intended for high-frequency intrastate service. That never materialized, and now it's a sore thumb.