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I really appreciate what you are all doing but I fear I've been misunderstood. In the sandbagged 2018 study (pg. 63 onward is where we're looking), upstream investments account for $1.32 Billion and Electric trains account for an additional $2.44 Billion which leaves $17.73 billion remaining...

Agreed. TBM issue aside (theoretically could you dig out the station and leave the tbm in place to dig the tunnel later? I would assume not because by the time political, financial, and logistical will is in action to finish the job it probably wouldn't be usable). My question was not about...

Could we break it up into smaller pieces to get smaller levels of federal funding? Say electrification of the network comes with a "South Station Under" That just happens to be in the correct spot with the portals correctly built all for NSRL?

This will be the way out. In the UK they are moving from Townhouses and semi-detached housing (duplexes, triple-deckers, and quadplexes) into higher density as their space requires and we are moving toward more townhouses and semi-detached housing as our space requires. The question is whether...

I personally don't take that hardline stance, but I fully understand it. The egalitarian utopia of people having their own personal space is offset when they clear cut natural vegetation and replace it with monocultures (usually eliminating most/all tree cover and/or replacing it with non-native...

This is one of the big challenges of our generation: convincing a large swath of society that grew up in a single family home with a yard to make a concession on square footage, privacy, and control of a green space because all of those things are collectively unsustainable (climate, municipal...

@Tallguy this is a terrible example to make your point. The double tracking of the rapid transit lines through the city center is almost a daily issue (certainly a weekly one) when the trains break down and service stops until they can clear away the disabled train(s). This issue has been...

It has been my understanding that Readville is necessary for the Grand Junction to move off of the CR network. More than that, it's not like a full-fledged push for Regional rail is going to diminish the need to use diesels in the interim while catenary goes up from end to end. This is...

Where would you put them, in the lane? Medford/Tufts is three lanes so you could feasibly have single direction stop without eminent domain from Tufts but Broadway at Ball lost the four lane bridge in the GLX cuts and so there is no location for the bus to stop without it being directly in traffic.

I can see why you made the assumption but that's not what my point is. I'm pointing out that here in Massachusetts, taxpayers as a monolith are reluctant to spend a single dollar on transit so the only way we get them through the legislature is through lawsuits and shortchanging the outcome (see...

You're familiar with Cheap/Fast/Good? GLX is prime cheap/good and then lost good (by NA standards) to cheap alone. If you have a building model that sidesteps cheap and fast by explointing migrant workers outside of a union by making them work for low wages AND long hours you can achieve good...

Agreed, but we can compare to Europe for that. It's pretty well established that many of our cost differentials are because we do not have a dedicated apparatus for building transit infrastructure. We've talked about it here on AB how the T needs a dedicated construction/project oriented unit...

Not really a fair comparison. I really wish the transit sphere would stop using China, India, and other exploitive countries for their cost estimates and delivery speed models. Yes, these countries have had explosive growth but at a similar cost to our explosive rail growth in the 19th century...

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I dug up one of @F-Line to Dudley's most concise take-downs of Track 61 proposals. F-Line has spent a great many posts railing (no pun) against Track 61 proposals and this one doesn't cover all of the points but it has many of them, especially why it cannot be dual-mode tracked. I've split it in...

I think @Brattle Loop's quote really hits the nail on the head: @Blackbird's pushback is actually a good look at why transit funding in our region (and country for that matter) is in such a dire state. If a reasonable and thoughtful person, like @Blackbird, who is aware of the benefits of...

Here's a real question unbefitting of a God Mode thread: Why do we/would we want to remove/preclude a rebuild of a freight connection to our Intermodal port? In a desired future where we can see more trucks removed by rail freight, this seems really short sighted. I get that Boston isn't the...

@Riverside, Looks like you need more friends at the Globe to get this kind of exposure.

I think it's also important to remember that industrial/commercial zones along train tracks isn't surprising because presumably some of the original tenants were freight serviced. It's like the industrial zone along the Medford Branch past Ball Square. It historically made sense to plan it that...

I'll put this in crazy pitches, but it seems reasonable to me, just not in one big setup: Regional/Commuter Rail for Worcester and Springfield. Pros: -Gives New England's second and fourth largest cities their own rail network. -Fosters development/Economic opportunity in these...