F-Line to Dudley
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Cambridge is exploring (again) this transit pitch:
1) A bike-ped overpass over the Fitchburg line in the Cambridgepark Dr area
2) A Fitchburg Line commuter rail platform under that overpass
Roughly, the idea is to connect "the Qudrangle" to "the Triangle" in this map:
The Cambridge City Manager has requested $190k to study this afresh (last looked at in 2013 but a TIGER grant failed and DMUs arent' going anywhere)
City Manager Says:
Also check it out in Bing: http://binged.it/1JzJ340
It is a $25m bridge, but if it is undertaken, it really ads value to the Quadrangle, giving it a decent walk to Alewife. If that bridge happens, adding a CR stop seems a big benefit for small incremental cost. Obviously, they have to be careful where it goes (not to mess up the MOW yard/shop), but since the main goal is not a direct tie to Alewife T, they're freer in what locations they consider than past Red-to-Fitchburg superstation pitches here (they are free to push it fairly far west).
They've ballparked ridership at an Alewife CR stop a couple times before. Looking at the 2003 PMT they calculated +60 CR trips per day and +40 new transit riders. So small that despite the meager total capital cost the cap cost-per-rider--without the ped connection--was >$100K and extremely unfavorable. I doubt they'd find anything substantially different with a 2016 re-study than they found in '03 or all the times before and after they gave it cursory glances. It's too damn far a walk from Alewife station and the Cambridge Park Dr. office buildings--or the Concord Ave. office buildings--at >1000 ft. outdoor stroll + crosswalks on the busy access road or parkways to generate its own native demand. The area might be getting more dense, but the Fitchburg ROW is still the ground-zero most sprawled out part of the neighborhood. And that's not a fixable problem unless you've got an ingenious ideas for relocating the commuter rail work facility and the huge NStar substation facing themselves across the tracks at greater-than football field's width of dead zone.
It's also not going to matter that the immediate area has gotten denser when another 60 seconds on the train will get you to a 100% integrated indoor transit facility at Porter. Porter gets you climate control, in-lobby announcements of the next approaching train on either mode if you're feeling like a gambler (many, many station users already do re: timing arrivals for the free inbound CR trip to NS-Green/Orange vs. taking overstuffed Red to Park/DTX), higher-frequency buses, and much more compact surrounding environs. Plus a two-seat transfer ride to Alewife in the contraflow direction on an empty Red train that's been S.O.P. for all CR riders for 30 years now. In an Indigo scenario, which is going to be the easier station to manage: the one with the integrated fare lobby that offers up good possibility and favorable logistics for free transfers, or the one where the long walk physically prevents that?
More riders are going to (continue to) orient themselves around the big fat dense transit center than be swayed by the platforms flanking the asphalt and security fence moonscape by the parkway bridge. Especially in shitty weather when the 1000 ft. walk to any of the employment destinations draws people to Red or 74 @ Harvard by default. Shitty weather just reinforcing the overall psychology that ends up valuing the transfers and the convenience of tight integration over the somewhat sprawled-out one-seat. There's simply too few scenarios where the Alewife stop comes out advantageous vs. Porter for a rider making a snap decision, and too many scenarios where the infill 98 lb. weakling has to inefficiently try to cannibalize ridership adequately served in pre-existing fashion by Porter to justify its existence. That's just not sound reasoning for building a CR platform, with the anemic ridership projections bearing that out each time they re-study this. These are the same reasons why the periodic proposals to do an integrated CR station with GLX @ Union Sq. or Blue Line at Wonderland always similarly flop on their ridership projections.
Unfortunately Cambridge is looking a little too superficially at the TOD fairy leading the station siting by the nose. Same mistake as when it's been proposed before, but they're expecting different results with more buildings up. I'm pretty sure if you refreshed the MPO's numbers from 12 years ago with all the new development active and pending that you probably would still be mired at around 5-6 dozen projected daily boardings and maybe 8-10 dozen alightings. It'd bear out the same disparity between the awkward accessibility of the Alewife infill and the supremely good integration down the street at Porter offering too little a value-added alternative when all the needs of transit riders are tallied up.
Since those dynamics really aren't going to change, they should instead put their energy on leveraging the interconnections when studying their Alewife transit master plan:
- More bus routes out of Alewife, especially for filling in the complete absence of connecting routes to the west out of that busway (Mt. Auburn, Watertown, etc.). This is far and away North Cambridge residents' #1 pet peeve with their buses. Watertown is harder to get to on transit from Alewife than Burlington is.
- Bring the 83 directly into the busway by doing that badly-needed square-up realignment of the Rindge & Cambridge Park intersections.
- Paths, paths, paths. Get the back connection between Fresh Pond/Concord Ave. and Terminal Rd./behind-Trader Joe's established to close the last path gap from Charles River to Alewife. Lay down a side path on the Fitchburg ROW to Sherman St. and Mass Ave. Safe access to Danehy Park to/from Rindge and the Russell Field station entrance.
- Build the Mass Ave. busways.
- Study extension of the 77A wires to Alewife so the 77A and 79 form a matching Cambridge + Arlington local pair. OR...study one more midlife rebuild of the Silver Line dual-modes for 77/77A duty when the new Transitway vehicles replace them.
- More leveraging of the contraflow direction of the Red Line. Stuff like extending the 71 to Newton Corner and that would-be CRstation would have North Cambridge coattails on the Watertown/Mt. Auburn overlap of those new western bus routes out of Alewife, as well as getting tangible numbers of Worcester Line commuters using the 71 NC-Harvard crosstown to get to Alewife via empty Red trains.
- Indigo on the Fitchburg, with staged step-up service using conventional equipment. Porter, Belmont Ctr., Waverley, Waltham, Brandeis, Weston/128 superstation. Clematis Brook infill when you've got tack-on money for later infill. Focus on the rich bus selection hitting these stops, Zone fare equity, and advocate hard for free Red transfers at Porter. Other than level boarding/ADA and the 128 superstation there is less capital cost required to get Fitchburg up and running at Indigo/near-Indigo frequencies than any other line except Fairmount, thanks to all the track upgrades now wrapping and how luxuriously under-capacity the line is. All of the others--especially Worcester--have a bigger SGR to-do list before they're truly ready, so for getting the Indigo rollout un-stuck this is one you'd consider reshuffling the priority order for.
- Continued GLX-Porter advocacy. Don't bark too loud too soon for it until the rest of the mess is fixed, and Route 16 station needs to go first on the +1's pecking order. But the need and the huge upside for the Porter super-node are still there, and it serves all manner of North Cambridge redev if the build is bootstrapped with air rights cover-over of the canyon along Somerville Ave. For Alewife, this is where putting eggs in the Porter basket and leveraging the contraflow Red transfers pays off big...where the path connections down the ROW to Porter pay off big...where the 77A tie-in to the Alewife busways pays off big. STEP hasn't forgotten about this for its long game; North Cambridge master planning needs to keep quietly digging too for more stakeholders and tighter integration.
