AirTrain Boston Logan

[Equilibria]

This is not feasible. Making it rails instead of roads doesn't make the Robert Moses mentality of blowing up anything hell-be-damned to get multiple straight-line paths from everywhere to everywhere any more feasible. On the scale you're proposing it's caustically disruptive and unsustainable. Move on from this mapmaking perfectionism; it's divorced from any plausibility.

F-Line, how do you define an "existing" transit corridor? I see your point that the projects most worth doing are the low-hanging fruit on existing facilities (and your analyses of those prospects have been excellent), but there ARE markets in Boston underserved by transit, and there IS a conceptual need for new facilities. Are you simply in favor of using existing ROW instead of blazing new trails?

Also, the big difference between the Robert Moses (or William Callahan, for Boston) mentality for roads and any build-it-big mentality for transit is that you can drive to highways from anywhere without leaving your seat. Having redundant highways, even 5 or 10 miles apart, is problematic since the same people could drive to either road. Transit, particularly in the periphery, has a much smaller service area and generally speaking can only serve people either originating or arriving within walking distance of a station (unless you want to transfer on both ends). Since different lines have different destinations and purposes, that does allow for some redundancy. The 3 GL brances in Brookline are all within a half a mile at Cleveland Circle, for instance, but they all do fairly well in ridership.

My issue with your cost logic - that you should always take the cheapest and easiest option - is that it's never cheaper to build something than it is right now. Construction and materials prices only go up, even faster than inflation. If BERy had built the Esplanade subway or the Red Line extension to Lexington or any of the other projects they never got to do, those would be "existing infrastructure" now and for a much lower cost than they could ever be built today. If we go with your plan and build the Silver Line under the NEC, where it misses serving any of Downtown but South Station, I worry that it will always be something we didn't do because it was hard, and we ended up with a sub-standard system, the same way we already have with the Orange Line and even the GLX.

I'm all for transit extensions favoring existing ROW, that just makes sense, and I love the idea of picking low-hanging fruit like signal renovations and multiple units. I think that's the immediate future of transit improvements in Boston if there is one at all. But for larger projects, new lines, routings, etc, we should be like Daniel Burnham and make no small plans. If we can only do it on paper, at least we can do it right.

 

[massmotorist]

I think the only improvement that needs to be made at the airport is somehow being able to access heavy rail without the shuttle buses. There needs to be some sort of skyway or underground connection or the station needs to be moved. There's certainly no need for an airtrain connecting the terminals because Logan is a ridiculously compact airport.

^this.

If you've used Logan via virtually every means possible over the last 15 years you see how much good the improvements have done but also where they're sorely deficient.

The modernization project improved vehicle circulation around the airport roadway system a lot. Car access is no longer an issue. The climate-controlled walkways are a huge upgrade. Silver Line access is pretty good. But Central Parking is enormous, and if you need to get from one terminal to another, most of your trip involves walking through a dingy parking lot without any kind of pedestrian accommodation and with unclear signage. And the Blue Line shuttle bus transfer sucks. I dunno what the solution is. An Atlanta-style unmanned tram from the station to Central Parking perhaps, plus moving walkways within Central Parking?

 

[Commuting Boston Student]

^this.

If you've used Logan via virtually every means possible over the last 15 years you see how much good the improvements have done but also where they're sorely deficient.

The modernization project improved vehicle circulation around the airport roadway system a lot. Car access is no longer an issue. The climate-controlled walkways are a huge upgrade. Silver Line access is pretty good. But Central Parking is enormous, and if you need to get from one terminal to another, most of your trip involves walking through a dingy parking lot without any kind of pedestrian accommodation and with unclear signage. And the Blue Line shuttle bus transfer sucks. I dunno what the solution is. An Atlanta-style unmanned tram from the station to Central Parking perhaps, plus moving walkways within Central Parking?

If you're going to build a tram from the station to anywhere, you might as well build it to loop around the terminals.

The best solution is one that doesn't need to go through Central Parking at all - no amount of pedestrian-friendly improvements, beautification, cleaning up et cetera short of removing all the parking itself is going to ever making going through Central Parking a pleasant or desirable experience.

Even if we think it's a bad idea to build an AirTrain around the terminals and to the station, we could at least build a moving walkway like T.F. Green's Interlink connecting the station to Terminal A and/or Terminal E, and then build additional moving walkways from A to B to C to E that go around Central Parking instead of through it.

And if we ever decide we can get past the frankly stupid idea of trying to combine the terminal shuttles / a terminal train with the Urban Ring, we can maybe go back later and convert the moving walkways back into an elevated transit way.