Crazy Transit Pitches

Blue Line over the Highland seems a lot more like "well, the Blue Line ends downtown, so let's send it...somewhere" than anything else. It looks good on paper because hey, grade-separated ROW. But Newton is perfectly adequately served by light rail - perhaps better than heavy rail - with common-sense upgrades:

* Upgrade power and procure rolling stock so every car's a 3-car train during rush. Every station can handle the length, and the extra capacity will be a lifesaver in the Central Subway.
* Every station made accessible (I believe you can do that without any elevators whatsoever), given better passenger shelters, etc
* LRVs that can run at speed without derailing, for fuck's sake.

As davem said, heading west to Allston would be a far better routing for the Riverbank subway. My personal preference would be to run under the Pike from there (deep-boring would be surprisingly easy; there's not going to be many deep utilities, and the state owns the land).
 
vanshnookenraggen said:
My rebuttal

http://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/_index/2014/07/thoughts-on-the-blue-line-back-bay-bypass/
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Very nice Van, also nice job with the restrained yet blunt calling out of thievery.

Two quick typos:
When the Huntington Ave Subway (E Line) was built the connection was a simple at grate crossing meaning...
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and

...2.5 miles long including three stations (Charles/MGH, Dartmouth St, and Yawkee Way).
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Yawkey Way, I know you've been out of the area a while ;-)
 
Word, thanks!!

I emailed the professor mentioned in the article. I'm curious to read the whole presentation but I also want him to address plagiarism. I wasn't even asked about using the maps but to go the extra step and edit out my copyright is really bad.
 
Van, thank you for that well-thought and thorough rebuttal. I had never considered Stuart Street as a parallel subway corridor before but it makes sense. I also hope that the students in question give you the credit you deserve...

For what it's worth, I do think eventually extending the Blue to Kenmore is a good idea, and that eating the D Branch is a poor one. I hadn't thought of the pedestrian crossing and station issues, believing that grade separation was "enough" to allow HR conversion.
 
Downburst said:
Van, thank you for that well-thought and thorough rebuttal. I had never considered Stuart Street as a parallel subway corridor before but it makes sense.
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We've discussed this idea a few times on this thread. The problem, as Van points out in his blog post, is that locating and then relocating all the under-street utilities would make the project much more expensive than it has to be. When you're also proposing a Huntington Ave. subway extension as part of the same project, that's a big lift to run a subway 2 blocks from a parallel line.

The alternative idea, of course, is the Marginal St. cut proposed by F-Line and others, which keeps the Back Bay/Copley access for D-Line passengers but adds transit access in the South End, in addition to being significantly cheaper.

I've believed for a while that D-Line HRT is a bad idea for Newton and Brookline (in addition to precluding a Needham extension). That said, the corridor served by the Green Line subway is a heavy rail corridor, probably the busiest on the T if it had that mode. It's denser, for longer, than at least the Blue and Orange line corridors. It doesn't matter how many Green Line trains you divert, they're still 2-3 cars long at max where the corridor really calls for 8.

Finding some way to address that corridor with HRT would, in my mind, be a better use of $3.3 billion than any additional LRT subway capacity. We really shouldn't be building more LRT tunnels in Boston. It's the wrong mode for a city this size.
 
Just fantastic Van. You should submit this to Boston Magazine or something. It should be published. The graphics alone are beautiful, but the text and explanation of why you chose the things you did are impeccable and what really sell it. This is the kind of stuff that should be presented to MassDOT.
 
I'd like the Blue to use an Immersed Tube (such as was used for the TWT) down the center of the Charles: no utilities, no foundations, no ROW acquisition and easy prefab-and-sink construction. Then take your pick:

1) Gentle curve south to enter Fenway under the Muddy River to Riverway
2) Create a "MIT Shoreline" station or "MIT West" the Hyatt and do Grand Junction out to Allston
3) Stick with the tunnel-sunk-at-shoreline and add Stations at River St and terminate at Harvard Sq.
 
Arlington said:
I'd like the Blue to use an Immersed Tube (such as was used for the TWT) down the center of the Charles: no utilities, no foundations, no ROW acquisition and easy prefab-and-sink construction. Then take your pick:

1) Gentle curve south to enter Fenway under the Muddy River to Riverway
2) Create a "MIT Shoreline" station or "MIT West" the Hyatt and do Grand Junction out to Allston
3) Stick with the tunnel-sunk-at-shoreline and add Stations at River St and terminate at Harvard Sq.
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I'd argue the best use for an immersed tube would be to create a new subway that runs the route of the #1 across the Charles, so maybe next to the Mass Ave bridge. The weakest link in the entire system is the fact that there is no North-South rapid transit across the Charles from the Fenway/Back Bay to points north in Cambridge. This would relieve so much congestion in the Central Subway.
 
Van, needs a quick copy editing, but the way you lay out the argument is clear, concise, and follows along logically. Great piece!
 
Equilibria said:
Finding some way to address that corridor with HRT would, in my mind, be a better use of $3.3 billion than any additional LRT subway capacity. We really shouldn't be building more LRT tunnels in Boston. It's the wrong mode for a city this size.
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I disagree. Expanding the Green Line within the core is the way to go to a) increase capacity in the central subway, b) serve more areas like Dudley, Needham, Seaport, Chelsea & Urban Ring north, Navy Yard, etc. and c) build out a network of transit in the core that would approach Paris in terms of station density - especially when rapid transit DMU service is added into the mix.

Regarding Van's proposal in particular, Stuart Street subway seems too expensive an option compared with the relative ease of the Pike routing, especially considering that the Pike routing takes you out to the South End and ultimately the Seaport whereas Stuart Street really just doubles up on existing service.

My guess as to how to phase this would be:
1) TST to Dudley
2) TST branch off to Seaport (eats SL) via Pike
3) D-E connector
4) E line tunnel extension via Pike to meet the other new services at a wye (Davem diagrammed this very well)
5) Bury E line to Brookline Village
6) Branch new services: Chelsea, UR and Airport via Sullivan; Navy Yard via Canal Street incline; Needham Branch; etc.
 
datadyne007 said:
I'd argue the best use for an immersed tube would be to create a new subway that runs the route of the #1 across the Charles, so maybe next to the Mass Ave bridge. The weakest link in the entire system is the fact that there is no North-South rapid transit across the Charles from the Fenway/Back Bay to points north in Cambridge. This would relieve so much congestion in the Central Subway.
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As someone who lives in the Fenway area and works in Harvard Square, I am all for this, but didn't F-Line take down any notion of a Mass Ave/#1 Bus subway at one point? I need to dig through a few pages...

Equilibria, my bad for not being clear- I have much greater support for the Tremont Street subway/Marginal cut , etc. than this, I just had not considered Stuart St. before.
 
fattony said:
What you are really doing here is carving out the D/E and making a practically independent line. If the B/C terminate at Park, then the D/E and B/C only overlap a 2 stations. Give it a new color or at least a different shade of green and the map will be a lot simpler and cleaner as well.
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Why would the B/C terminate at Park in this scenario? At the very least you'd want another line going north (since the D/E are just one line now) to serve the two-pronged GLX.

Also, I don't see how adding another color to the map, and breaking the right now hard-and-fast rule that lines do not share tracks, makes the system simpler or easier to understand...
 
novitiate said:
Why would the B/C terminate at Park in this scenario? At the very least you'd want another line going north (since the D/E are just one line now) to serve the two-pronged GLX.

Also, I don't see how adding another color to the map, and breaking the right now hard-and-fast rule that lines do not share tracks, makes the system simpler or easier to understand...
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I think you end the B and C at Park because that is where the 4 tracking ends. I don't know - Van wrote the piece, not me.

However to the notion that "lines don't share tracks" that is ridiculous. Coloring the "Green Line" one color doesn't make it one line. It is 4 lines that share tracks and it is completely ambiguous where each line terminates to the north. It will absolutely be worse to have two lines with the same color running next to each other on the map. That just exacerbates the problems we have now over "which Green Line" you mean when you say "Green". If our local custom was to never use the term "green" at all and just use the letters (as in NY) then maybe an extra color would be unnecessary, but the map still fails to show the northern termini and it would still be odd to have the same color on separate, parallel tracks.

2 shades of green go a long way if a whole new color is undesirable. Then "Green" is synonymous with "trolly" and maybe people start just using the letter designations to avoid the new, exacerbated ambiguities.

Anyone more graphically talented than I am interested in drawing up a couple map versions of Van's concept?
 
The EGE said:
Blue Line over the Highland seems a lot more like "well, the Blue Line ends downtown, so let's send it...somewhere" than anything else. It looks good on paper because hey, grade-separated ROW. But Newton is perfectly adequately served by light rail - perhaps better than heavy rail - with common-sense upgrades:

* Upgrade power and procure rolling stock so every car's a 3-car train during rush. Every station can handle the length, and the extra capacity will be a lifesaver in the Central Subway.
* Every station made accessible (I believe you can do that without any elevators whatsoever), given better passenger shelters, etc
* LRVs that can run at speed without derailing, for fuck's sake.

As davem said, heading west to Allston would be a far better routing for the Riverbank subway. My personal preference would be to run under the Pike from there (deep-boring would be surprisingly easy; there's not going to be many deep utilities, and the state owns the land).
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I don't know about "surprisingly easy". That's all Charles Basin silt out to roughly Newton Corner that gets waterlogged when it rains. I think you're going to have an extremely difficult time doing anything new with the Pike Canyon at the subsurface with how difficult it's going to be to waterproof. Even the Central Subway is built above ground level at Hynes in the Muddy River basin.

The advantage of the Riverbank on the Storrow EB roadbed abutting Back St. is that it avoids all subsurface waterproofing for a Hynes-like box-and-cap job. With only waterproofing required where it physically passes under the Muddy onto Beacon at Charlesgate (roughly tracing the footprint of the Storrow WB-to-Bowker offramp. Probably with some metal shielding around the tube stuffed into the hole under the river from a staging area on the old Storrow cut near Mass Ave.


If you absolutely have to plow through Newton that's what a Watertown Branch with eliminable grade crossings and a tunnel under Galen (if that's even necessary) can do. You probably can underpin the Pike or B&A through that hillier bedrock and get to Riverside Jct. from the north that way.

I don't really see the market for such a Porter-H2O Sq.-Newton Corner-Riverside line, but that's the only way you're getting out there without being impeded by the Charles Basin.
 
Ok here is a quick and dirty version showing each line and where they would terminate. I've extended the C train to North Station for rush hour and events.

d8YVdGq.png


The major benefit of this type of routing is that you can greatly increase headways on the B and C Lines.
 
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