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Though it may be in a plan somewhere, is having heavy rail access to the port of Boston really that important to the city's, region's, and country's economic competitiveness? Given how the area around it is developing, having heavy freight trains rumbling through there would seem incongruous at...

I recently read that for low-speed, adhesion-limited acceleration (ie up to maybe somewhere in the range of 30mph) DMUs and EMUs are pretty comparable, and far superior to anything hauled by a locomotive, even an electric locomotive. When adhesion limited, the extra weight of the diesel motors...

I would entertain mitigations like this, but if you're only meaning connecting ramps to the Pike from Storrow as-is, east of the "Throat", and to SFR as-is north of the "Throat", then I think this is missing the point. What's the specific plan you have in mind? I'm very interested.

So the only way to change is to add new stuff, never take away old stuff? There's a word for people who live like that - they are called hoarders. Sometimes things that may have made sense in the past or just fit the zeitgeist of a bygone era need to be revisited and relegated to the dust bin of...

I don't think the impact would be all that huge, certainly not along the lines of turning neighborhood streets into 24/7 bumper-to-bumper so residents can no longer sleep with the windows open, as some have suggested. In addition, although current users of Storrow/SFR are likely to feel the...

So they have already agreed to the design with SFR on a viaduct with all the extra elements. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there is little to no possibility that they will walk that back at this point, even if activists try to push for more. The next step in getting rid of Storrow and SFR is...

This is the way to improve welfare one individual at a time. But at the same time, if we freely make available an option that actually has enormous negative externalities, you can't necessarily fault an individual for making that choice to benefit themselves, but in this case, the fact that...

Fair enough - if all of these extra elements do actually get built, this is far from a status quo highway project - but just because something makes it *harder* doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. The fact that MassDOT has bent this far already shows that they actually are listening. In the past...

I do admit to pulling the $1 billion number out of thin air. I thought I recalled reading that the most recent alternative was something like $1.6 billion, whereas the initial option of rebuilding in place was something more like $600 million. At any rate, surely the SFR viaduct portion of the...

This is absolutely true. In my estimation this is at the core of the conflict driving the "yellow vest" protests in France - and pushing too far, too fast can get extremely ugly. But I should also point out that France/Paris are way, way, way further down the road in terms of doing "harmful"...

My basic argument is that Storrow/Soldier Field is insignificant enough (not saying it's objectively insignificant, just that it's insignificant *enough*), and that it has enough negatives in terms of making the river, perhaps Boston's greatest natural asset, that much less accessible and...

Can you think of a single case where an urban highway removal actually resulted in a carpocalypse? Not saying it hasn't happened, but I can't think of an instance where a pre-planned highway closure resulted in chaos. I guess the best I can come up with is the 35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis...

To me this perspective does not consider externalities enough. I know you could technically wrap that up under the umbrella of "cost" but in standard transportation planning parlance I believe the more common term is "impacts". Nobody is looking at whether Storrow, etc is actually a net benefit...

I think nearly anybody who talks about congestion pricing is implicitly making this argument. The revenues from congestion pricing should be dedicated toward non-car transportation. You do want to maintain the same throughput of people, after all. On the other hand, I do actually believe that...

Congestion pricing would render the capacity of SF/Storrow unnecessary in the first place. You can set the congestion price to whatever brings demand below the capacity of your roads. Although I do love the city, I don't live in Boston (live in NC) so I don't have a dog in this fight, but this...

This plan to put SFR on a viaduct seems to be a step in the right direction. The next step in that direction is to say that SFR will be closed entirely during construction in order to save money on phasing and maintain traffic on Masspike. The third step is to observe, as has been observed in...

Re: North-South Rail Link I think you must be exaggerating or using hyperbole here (it's hard to tell these things over the internet) but to me this looks like something squarely between stacks of paper/vaporware/nothing physical and a fully operational completed vehicle. At any rate it looks...

Re: North-South Rail Link I think you must be exaggerating or using hyperbole here (it's hard to tell these things over the internet) but to me this looks like something squarely between stacks of paper/vaporware/nothing physical and a fully operational completed vehicle. At any rate it looks...

Re: North-South Rail Link Curious why you say this. The dual height boarding is about the best solution I have seen for the transition from low to high platforms (Beats trap doors by a country mile IMO.) If nothing else it shows how creative and flexible the Euro manufacturers can be as long as...

Re: North-South Rail Link I think I see the point. It's not about overloading/underloading bores. It's about simplifying. Current plans would allow every train from every line to be able to access both surface terminals AND the NSRL. But what about connecting NSRL *only* to Fairmount/Old...