Cape Cod Rail, Bridges and Highways

wicked said:
Thanks. I didn’t think it was, it was just a throwaway question.

It would be nice if the state could get more bridge lowerings for the rail lines.
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Agreed - if ever there was a time for MA leadership to secure that, it would have been the previous four years. Doubt we're gonna get lucky on this front with the Army Corps of Engineers for a while now.
 
themissinglink said:

CapeFLYER Reaches Record Ticket Sales for 2025 Season | News | MBTA

Official website of the MBTA -- schedules, maps, and fare information for Greater Boston's public transportation system, including subway, commuter rail, bus routes, and boat lines.
www.mbta.com www.mbta.com
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I must be underestimating people's (tourists) willingness to just Uber everywhere once they get on the Cape, lol. Which to me is crazy.

The only thing to me that would make sense with Providence would be to go to TF Green. But I don't know if MA wants to encourage that. For people on the Cape, taking the bus to Logan shouldn't be a big deal.
 
jklo said:
I must be underestimating people's (tourists) willingness to just Uber everywhere once they get on the Cape, lol. Which to me is crazy.

The only thing to me that would make sense with Providence would be to go to TF Green. But I don't know if MA wants to encourage that. For people on the Cape, taking the bus to Logan shouldn't be a big deal.
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Some of us are just doing a day trip to Hyannis, which this works for. Would love more opportunities to Falmouth or Chatham.
 
JeffDowntown said:
Lots of people go to Provincetown by ferry and navigate the area successfully without a private automobile.
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I think Provincetown and Hyannis are both reasonable places for a car free visit. The issue is whether the train or ferry serve people well if they have other destinations. I'd say only in the way that @millerm277 suggest is it serving the rest of the Cape. And I've done both options with a pickup by somebody already there. But fundamentally, aside from a few select village centers, the Cape is a very pedestrian hostile environment.
 
I would like to see the return of the Cape Codder from New York . With the arrival of New Amtrak equipment the schedule could be quicker than in the 80's and 90's. Add the upgrade from East Taunton to Middleboro and ,hopefully, to Buzzards Bay, travel time would be very competitive from New York and Connecticut.
 
jklo said:
I must be underestimating people's (tourists) willingness to just Uber everywhere once they get on the Cape, lol. Which to me is crazy.
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It's not that crazy. I did a car-free vacation to the Cape over the summer for a whole week (in Dennis Port). I'm doing the same thing next summer, too. I relied on my electric bicycle instead of Uber or Lyft, and I also used the buses quite a bit while I was on Cape.

Full-time Commuter Rail service, a connected sidewalk network, and an expanded Cape Cod Rail Trail would make car-free living or tourism on the Cape much easier. There's a lot more demand for it than you'd ever expect. So many people don't want to sit in traffic or drive everywhere on the Cape like people do at home in the suburbs.
 
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jklo said:
I must be underestimating people's (tourists) willingness to just Uber everywhere once they get on the Cape, lol. Which to me is crazy.

The only thing to me that would make sense with Providence would be to go to TF Green. But I don't know if MA wants to encourage that. For people on the Cape, taking the bus to Logan shouldn't be a big deal.
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You should ride it some time and see how heavily used the bike car is before you assume everyone is Ubering everywhere.

I've ridden the CapeFlyer twice, both times with a bicycle, and never once taken a rideshare on Cape Cod. That appeared to be a very, very common approach.

The very convenient and high-capacity bicycle car is a good model that I hope the Commuter Rail can follow, rather than having so many empty, blocked-off coaches off-peak.
 
themissinglink said:
a connected sidewalk network
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The part about the lack of sidwalks is real for sure. As a ped I'd just stop and menacingly watch people drive by.

The problem with Full Time is that I think people would just drive outside of the Super Peak where getting over the Bridges does get very bad. Wouldn't be surprised ridership drops if they manage to complete the new Sagamore Bridge.

Even from a commuting perspective... the lack of salaries for people working on the Cape (think Town Employees) means a lot must be living somewhere off Cape. Probably Plymouth or Fall River. But I think bus' flexibility would be much more useful to them.
 
jklo said:
The part about the lack of sidwalks is real for sure. As a ped I'd just stop and menacingly watch people drive by.
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The lack of sidewalks throughout all of suburban Massachusetts (but especially the Cape) is honestly baffling. I don't understand why building new sidewalks isn't a bigger priority. I hear people complain about the lack of sidewalks in my area (MetroWest) all the time, but nothing ever really comes of it. I've been advocating for a sidewalk on my street for the past couple of years (I even started a petition), and my town is in the initial stages of evaluating the feasibility of building a sidewalk. But I really don't understand why it's taken until 2025 just for them to start looking into building a sidewalk here. Around 20 years ago, an elderly pedestrian got hit and killed by a drunk driver on my street, but even that wasn't enough for my town to put in a sidewalk. Most suburban towns in Eastern Massachusetts should have spent the past 40-50 years building out a complete sidewalk network.

jklo said:
The problem with Full Time is that I think people would just drive outside of the Super Peak where getting over the Bridges does get very bad. Wouldn't be surprised ridership drops if they manage to complete the new Sagamore Bridge.
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I don't think this will be a serious problem. Every Commuter Rail line is less patronized during the off-peak, and it hasn't been that big of an issue for any of the other lines. Besides, a Commuter Rail line to the Cape would benefit from having major destinations at both ends, unlike most of the other Commuter Rail lines. The Cape is a huge destination itself, so you'd have people traveling by train to the Cape for vacation, day trips, dinners, etc., in addition to Cape-based commuters using the train to travel into Boston for work.
 
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themissinglink said:
in addition to Cape-based commuters using the train to travel into Boston for work.
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Hopefully there aren't too many people doing that. Although... the bus I am familiar with has stops at: Hyannis, Sagamore Bridge, South Station, Logan Airport.

You'd have to take a bus which leaves at the buttcrack. But you'd have to do that no matter the option.
 
themissinglink said:
The lack of sidewalks throughout all of suburban Massachusetts (but especially the Cape) is honestly baffling. I don't understand why building new sidewalks isn't a bigger priority. I hear people complain about the lack of sidewalks in my area (MetroWest) all the time, but nothing ever really comes of it. I've been advocating for a sidewalk on my street for the past couple of years (I even started a petition), and my town is in the initial stages of evaluating the feasibility of building a sidewalk. But I really don't understand why it's taken until 2025 just for them to start looking into building a sidewalk here. Around 20 years ago, an elderly pedestrian got hit and killed by a drunk driver on my street, but even that wasn't enough for my town to put in a sidewalk. Most suburban towns in Eastern Massachusetts should have spent the past 40-50 years building out a complete sidewalk network.
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Trees and front yard configurations in general.

It's easy to shove a sidewalk into your average modern subdivision even after the fact - with an average recent subdivision, front yards are mostly a sea of empty lawn. If you didn't build sidewalks up front, not such a big deal to add them later.

In MA you've often got dense, mature trees lining a narrow road or significant homeowner landscaping/fence/rock wall right up to it, high odds of having all the utility poles sitting right where you want to put the sidewalk and needing to be moved, etc. And a decent portion of homes, especially in the oldest areas, sitting very close to the existing road.

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I lived in a town in NJ that investigated putting in a sidewalk on a road of similar description to many of MA's. (Narrow road that dates to the colonial era and so do a couple of the homes, most of the rest 1800s-1950). Conceptually, everyone agrees that a sidewalk would be a good idea.

But the initial result for like one mile of sidewalk, even if no one actually sued, was going to be an absurd # of tree removals, having to relocate a bunch of power poles, a bunch of yards that really would be wrecked, and at least one house very close to the road that would lose all it's screening vegetation and go from being mostly invisible to having people walking 3ft from the windows.

As you may guess, it was tabled after that - both for the cost estimate that was many times what you'd expect and how poorly it was expected to go over with the community.

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Edit: And I forgot something massive - drainage! Many of these roads don't actually have stormwater systems in place now or only have them in the low/worst spots. Most water just runs off into the dirt wherever. Sidewalks mean curbs, curbs mean you now need to do full storm drains on the entire road. That's also a big part of the $$$$. Now you're talking total road reconstruction. Maybe you can get away without if you only do single-sided sidewalks on the uphill side of a road with a consistent grade (where runoff always went to the downhill side and still can), but that's not most roads.
 
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millerm277 said:
Trees and front yard configurations in general.

It's easy to shove a sidewalk into your average modern subdivision even after the fact - with an average recent subdivision, front yards are mostly a sea of empty lawn. If you didn't build sidewalks up front, not such a big deal to add them later.

In MA you've often got dense, mature trees lining a narrow road or significant homeowner landscaping/fence/rock wall right up to it, high odds of having all the utility poles sitting right where you want to put the sidewalk and needing to be moved, etc. And a decent portion of homes, especially in the oldest areas, sitting very close to the existing road.

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I lived in a town in NJ that investigated putting in a sidewalk on a road of similar description to many of MA's. (Narrow road that dates to the colonial era and so do a couple of the homes, most of the rest 1800s-1950). Conceptually, everyone agrees that a sidewalk would be a good idea.

But the initial result for like one mile of sidewalk, even if no one actually sued, was going to be an absurd # of tree removals, having to relocate a bunch of power poles, a bunch of yards that really would be wrecked, and at least one house very close to the road that would lose all it's screening vegetation and go from being mostly invisible to having people walking 3ft from the windows.

As you may guess, it was tabled after that - both for the cost estimate that was many times what you'd expect and how poorly it was expected to go over with the community.

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Edit: And I forgot something massive - drainage! Many of these roads don't actually have stormwater systems in place now or only have them in the low/worst spots. Most water just runs off into the dirt wherever. Sidewalks mean curbs, curbs mean you now need to do full storm drains on the entire road. That's also a big part of the $$$$. Now you're talking total road reconstruction. Maybe you can get away without if you only do single-sided sidewalks on the uphill side of a road with a consistent grade (where runoff always went to the downhill side and still can), but that's not most roads.
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A few years ago I was sitting on the capital committee of one of our small towns and we had a state funded project to put in a stretch of sidewalk that was fairly straightforward - no drainage requirements, no tree removals, no pole relocation (they should have been done - no way is the finished product ADA compliant), was on town land in the town center. The entire project was 3 very straightforward parts - replace some deteriorated asphalt sidewalk, build ADA compliant curb cuts and crosswalks, and build a stretch of new sidewalk.

The documentation showed that the entire process to that point had taken 17 years, between studies by the MPO, grant applications and engineering. With state money in hand, it then took nearly a year of select board meetings which drew 50+ in person commenters, a 250+ signature petition and over a dozen letters to the editor of the local paper - almost all unanimously opposed to the construction of any sidewalk at all, and some advocating for the removal of what sidewalk there was. There were much histrionics about the damage this would do to the historic town center, how it would urbanize a historic small town, do grave harm to the environment and small business. In the end it got built during the pandemic, and everything is perfectly fine - folks got used to it, but the pushback it got was real.

Notice I didn't say how much sidewalk we built for all that palaver. We installed exactly 286ft of new sidewalk, and reconstructed another ~1200ft for a total cost of just shy of $700k. Since then, the town is likely to get an major extension built as part of a major complete streets reconstruction, which saw some but less strenuous objections. I attribute to the extension being outside of the town center and where folks actually want to go which is rather perverse but 🤷‍♂️.
 
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In the 1990s when I was living there, Burlington embarked on a sidewalk installation and building program and built sidewalks on most existing major roads that predated the town's suburbanization (after when developers building new roads were required to include a sidewalk on at least one side). The ancient colonial-era street I grew up on got a sidewalk on one side, with the added benefit of stone wall reconstruction where the new sidewalk and existing stone walls ran together (we lived on the other side, so the stone walls surrounding our yard weren't restored), so most of the abutters were generally fine with it. This was all made a little easier because the Town owned about eight to ten feet of each shoulder beyond the curb, including most of the stone walls, so no takings were required. A town report a few years after the Mill St sidewalk was completed noted an increase of pedestrian traffic townwide, and an increase of visitors to the parks near where the new sidewalks were put in. Another thing I noticed was that the DPW takes responsibility over clearing the sidewalks on major roads of snow and is usually pretty quick to act, my parents report that the Town's sidewalk plow has usually cleared the sidewalk across the street by the end of the day of a snowstorm, if not by the next morning.
 
www.bostonglobe.com

Feds freeze funding for Cape Cod’s aging bridges due to government shutdown - The Boston Globe

Governor Maura Healey and other Massachusetts lawmakers immediately expressed concern about the federal money, which was earmarked in the spring of 2024 for the replacement projects.
www.bostonglobe.com www.bostonglobe.com
Hundreds of million in federal funding to help pay for the replacement of two aging bridges that carry traffic on and off Cape Cod suddenly appears to be in flux. The Trump administration on Friday announced a pause in $11 billion in U.S. Army Corps of Engineers projects in Democratic cities, including Boston, due to the government shutdown.
Governor Maura Healey and other Massachusetts lawmakers immediately expressed concern about the federal money, $350 million for the Sagamore Bridge and $250 million for the Bourne Bridge, which was earmarked in the spring of 2024 for the replacement projects.
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