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To clarify, I'm not saying to operate the 15" difference on our infra but rather that changing the shell design of yet unbuilt trains to be for 15" higher floors is easier than for 26" higher floors which would be the deviation from the standard FLIRT. The point of mentioning that was a...

From what I understand about modern railcar manufacturing they are built to be able to adapt the same car for a wide variety of different European platform heights because they only need to change the shells' layout while maintaining almost entirely the same mechanical and electrical...

Track realignment underway at Springfield to reduce delays from freight trains and decrease train traffic congestion. Via Steve Fainer on twitter I'm struggling to find anything but does anyone have more specific info on the work being performed?

This is the most full I've ever seen the Readville lot on a normal weekday (3:45pm Tuesday). More frequent Fairmount + Franklin w/ Foxboro running ~30min peak + now the Providence stops select trains here = a lot more service for residents of Dedham and Hyde Park. The lot on the other side by...

I think it's gonna require the city taking action to remove street parking for dedicated bus lanes on most if not all of Mass Ave, or a serious operator surplus, for the MBTA to get Route 1 headways back to what they once were. Traffic is so bad and schedule adherence is near impossible, so it's...

Where were you picking it up? If you don't mind me asking. Now that school's completely back in session this section of the 86 and 66 routes is actual hell. All scheduling on those routes goes completely out of the window regularly in the evening rush. Constant cancellations and 10-20min...

Buses stuck in traffic with very limited capacity compared to the train make them not a reasonable option for most people to take for regular trips. The train comes with trip comfort and schedule reliability that a bus in mixed traffic cannot compete with making it work for a much larger net of...

The MBTA posted a video to their YouTube channel yesterday describing the goals of the September Braintree Branch shutdown and in it Phil Eng states directly that at the end of it the Red Line will be restored to full 40mph operation, and a few months following the completion of work speeds will...

It's not like I've never been to New Bedford before but the ease and comfort of a train as opposed to a bus on a highway make it a much nicer proposition for a day trip. Rail travel is simply more attractive to people and gets attention. The same goes for why it'd be good for Greenfield when you...

I think New Bedford is a quaint New England town with a decent bit to offer aside from being home to nearly 200,000 people in the cities proper. A rich Portuguese heritage and a historic downtown. A key difference in extending rail to New Bedford and Fall River from Boston as opposed to...

With how insanely busy the Providence Line is on weekends (420 passengers/train on weekends compared to 300/train on weekdays) doubling weekend service on the Providence Line will surely bring large ridership returns since the demand is clearly there but also make trips a little more comfortable...

Despite being a long time coming, expensive, delayed, and problem-plagued, we did manage to complete a rapid transit extension through the region's most densely populated city and are set to finally complete a regional rail extension to the states 9th largest city and Fall River next year. While...

They need to wait until the new Charlie Cards that work with the fare readers are implemented. Riders still overwhelmingly use Charlie Cards over tap to pay and doing all door boarding on buses would just be a free pass for Charlie Card users to fare evade unless they have a massive fare...

Isn't boat transportation the most expensive to operate per passenger except for some bus service due to the much higher maintenance and labor costs? If that's the case a private company would have to charge an amount unappealing to anyone seeking regular use in order to turn a profit. The $4.25...

Orange Line has been running 16 trains during rush hour today and has been keeping 5-7min headways for the most part save for the cascading effects of a disabled train at Wellington about an hour ago

Commuter Rail Trends Part I For the first part of my dive into CR ridership data I took a look at how ridership panned out during June 2024 which has been the highest ridership month for the CR so far post-pandemic (data is unfortunately unavailable prior to 2020 besides the 2018 counts)...

The way I look at it is if you compare it to a 30min bus the train ridership exceeds those frequency buses by a couple thousand. It's low for it's total capacity but consider that those living in the region haven't had useable rail service there for the better part of a century so changing their...

So I'm working on that Commuter Rail data parsing and I found that, as expected, the day of the Celtics Parade was the highest individual ridership day of the year so far by many thousand on each line... except the Greenbush Line. There's actually a not insignificant drop off of a few hundred...

The exceptions probably go as far as a human-powered vessel or university teams training to bring glory to the City of Boston, the former probably only being possible by the latter (bar some insane Looney Tunes-esque kayaker or paddleboarder).

CBS has run with a story bringing this up again and the comments have people eating it up saying things like, "I can't believe this hasn't been done before! If only the MBTA had innovative thinkers like this! The private sector beats the government again!" But to humor their ambitions, is there...