Crazy Transit Pitches

[tangent]

I wish people would consider basic facts of geometry before posting inane ideas like "ripping up tracks for autonomous vehicle lanes." Especially on this forum, where we're supposed to be a bit more thoughtful than the typical Herald, etc, contributor.

Sorry but I thought a thread labeled "Crazy Transit Pitches" needed to be a bit more outside the box flare.

The reason I bring all of this up is that 2,000 cars per hour per lane is REALLY REALLY LOW considering the potential capacity of the right of way.

Ah yes, but as I pointed out the potential for 1800 cars per hour compares with current commuter rail actual running capacity of just over 1400 passengers per hour.

And as you say, we don't need to be just talking about cars, but multiple sizes of vehicles including buses, so at least when we are talking about commuter rail I think the capacity issue is not a real issue... in fact the argument works in reverse considering how little capacity is being used currently.

I admit with the subway system it is a different story with more frequent trips and fairly consistent demand making it realize a much higher capacity. Still I think long term you should consider whether a true BRT (using something like articulated Volvo B340M with elevated platforms for level boarding and prepaid passengers) could do essentially the same job as rail, but do it more flexibly and more cheaply and they could share the road.

In fact, it's so foolish that it sounds an awful lot like an ideologically driven agenda. Much like Elon Musk's lame attempt to throw up "whoa look! Hyperloop!" or the idea of autonomous electric cars as some kind of replacement for HSR, I'm suspicious of people who think that magical technology can somehow contradict basic facts about geometry and reality.

Today's reality is that we have roads over capacity and commuter train lines that aren't even approaching half the capacity that they could handle if they were converted to roads. What is foolish is today's reality.

Autonomous cars aren't pie in the sky dreaming like hyper loop or flying cars. Autonomous cars are on the road today and have been for years now. And I think their potential is worth discussing.

 

[Matthew]

Today's reality is that we have roads over capacity and commuter train lines that aren't even approaching half the capacity that they could handle if they were converted to roads. What is foolish is today's reality.

The answer to commuter train lines that only run once per hour is simple: run them more often!

There's nothing except cost and poor present-day management practices preventing the commuter rail system from being upgraded to frequent, high-capacity service in the future. Talking about how a commuter train only runs "once an hour" and therefore only carries 1,400 passengers per hour is meaningless. Yes, the current system is broken and poorly utilized, relatively speaking. But the potential is there, so long as we don't destroy it.

Maybe in 30 years we'll begin constructing the North/South rail link. It'll look really, really stupid if we "paved over" any of those rail rights-of-way in the meantime to give it over the private vehicles. Unbelievably short-sighted, in fact, no matter how handy autonomous cars might be.

Why? Because "paving over" any railroad right of way automatically caps its potential capacity for all time. It caps it at a rather low value that cannot accommodate growth past a certain point -- for fundamental reasons having to do with geometry and physics. And don't forget: the railroad can achieve those high capacities within a very narrow right-of-way -- unlike any highway to date.

With enough effort, we might eventually be able to create BRT technology that can approximate the carrying capacity of trains within the same narrow cross-section. But why go through so much trouble just to recreate what we are already able to do with century-old technology? I'm sure there are uses for such automatically guided buses, which is why I'm a supporter of the idea, but that's no excuse to trash our inherited legacy of existent railroad rights-of-way with their already-high potential.

 

[tangent]

The answer to commuter train lines that only run once per hour is simple: run them more often!

That will never be a realistic option. Train cars cost $2 million or more a piece. An Articulated Bus costs under $1 million. You need to consider the system as a whole and adaptability to demand and not just max capacity.

There's nothing except cost and poor present-day management practices preventing the commuter rail system from being upgraded to frequent, high-capacity service in the future. Talking about how a commuter train only runs "once an hour" and therefore only carries 1,400 passengers per hour is meaningless. Yes, the current system is broken and poorly utilized, relatively speaking. But the potential is there, so long as we don't destroy it.

The flaws are more fundamental than that. Not being able to get people where they need to go is the fundamental limiting factor of the train network. It is a chicken and egg problem, not just capacity.

Maybe in 30 years we'll begin constructing the North/South rail link. It'll look really, really stupid if we "paved over" any of those rail rights-of-way in the meantime to give it over the private vehicles. Unbelievably short-sighted, in fact, no matter how handy autonomous cars might be.

Why? Because "paving over" any railroad right of way automatically caps its potential capacity for all time. It caps it at a rather low value that cannot accommodate growth past a certain point -- for fundamental reasons having to do with geometry and physics. And don't forget: the railroad can achieve those high capacities within a very narrow right-of-way -- unlike any highway to date.

The narrow right-of-way is the reason you would limit the former train right of way to autonomous vehicles that could automatically participate in some collaborative routing. So priority given to mass transit buses, but when there was extra capacity other vehicles could use the routes... That is the big win.

Where now you have rights of way sitting idle 90% of the time you could maintain the same capacity as the former commuter rail with more frequent bus service and between buses you could squeeze in other vehicles in an automatically coordinated way.

With enough effort, we might eventually be able to create BRT technology that can approximate the carrying capacity of trains within the same narrow cross-section. But why go through so much trouble just to recreate what we are already able to do with century-old technology? I'm sure there are uses for such automatically guided buses, which is why I'm a supporter of the idea, but that's no excuse to trash our inherited legacy of existent railroad rights-of-way with their already-high potential.

I don't think the cross section is that much of an issue if we are talking about paving over train tracks and redoing stations anyway. Those buses already exist on the Silver Line for example and can approximate the capacity of the trains, especially trolley cars, pretty easily with more buses. The basic geometry of how many people can take up a space is the same whether you are talking about trains or buses, or cars.

Whether the vehicles that move people around have wheels that run on rails or wheels that run on tires shouldn't be such an emotional issue for serious people. Nor should people ignore the many serious shortcomings that have limited the potential of trains and why people have preferred cars. That's not ideological, that is just looking at the trade space.

The basic fact remains that autonomous cars will substantially address one of the major shortcomings of cars which is finding a place to park and will create new opportunities for development patterns around major cities and smaller cities and it will also present new challenges.

I don't think any discussion of transit in the 20 or 30 year time frame is remotely complete without a discussion of the potential impact and benefits of autonomous vehicles.

And I think in the immediate term that things like the green line extension to Somerville should instead be converted to use the Silver Line type buses instead of extending the Green Line trolley system. The capacity issue is not an issue because we are talking about trolleys versus trains and the potential for making more efficient use of those rights of ways shouldn't be ignored.

And in the medium term, for the same reasons, I think conversion of the Green Line as a whole to use Silver Line style buses would make sense also.

 

[tangent]

In your scenario, where the majority of public transportation is undertaken by driver-less cars, why not use this existing, paved right of way, and convert some of that to public-transit-only usage?

Okay I've come around to this with a twist. I would say focus on development of dedicated BRT lanes with the intention that autonomous vehicles will also eventually gain access via collaborative scheduling and routing. So, when a dedicated lane was at 20% capacity with BRT vehicles then vehicles could schedule access on some sort of priority. So, it addresses the serious issue that dedicated lanes take up valuable capacity away from the road network and then that capacity often sits idle or is used inefficiently even in peak times.

But like I just wrote in the previous post I think this means eliminating trolley tracks. And also commuter rail tracks in some areas, based on the usage. But I realize that things like the Silver Line are given second class status in many circles. Not even included on many transit maps and new T stops do become focus of development like we see at Assembly Square unlike what we have seen at Bus stations, so perception is an important consideration.

I just don't see the math working out in trains favor for a good portion of the current network and the unused capacity of these routes is needed today.

Maybe if the tracks could be retained and the rail bed adapted to share duty with buses and autonomous vehicles that would be ideal so that we could retain the train infrastructure for the peak capacity times, but not let it go to waste the rest of the time.

 

[cden4]

The other problem is once you pave something, even if you try to restrict it's use, it's very tempting to open it up to everyone. See: South Boston Bypass Haul Road.

 

[fattony]

Tangent, you seem to be arguing that A) trains don't work well and B) people don't like to ride trains anyway. That is an extraordinarily suburban American way of thinking. Have you been to Europe or Asia? Or even New York City? Trains are the beating heart of urban areas the world over. They DO get people where they are going and people DO choose them over cars.

American cities and commuting patterns are the anomaly. Post-war America took on our unique arrangements due to an unusual abundance of cheap land, cheap fuel, racism, and classism. We've had a grand experiment in moderate density living - something in between the rural and the properly urban. The suburban experiment still has many fans, but there is a tsunami of Americans demanding a return to urban lifestyle in high density cities. Trains crush all other forms of transportation in dense urban environs for all the reasons Matthew explained thoroughly.

And by train I don't mean steel-on-steel per se, but as Matthew pointed out it needs a dedicated right of way and level boarding. There is nothing wrong with the Paris Metro because it runs on rubber tires - it runs in tunnels and has level boarding. You simply cannot replicate the efficiency of having people come together on foot, have the vehicle pull up in front of them, and they step on. When they get close to where they are going, they step off and complete the trip on foot. That is the most common form of transportation in the world because it works REALLY well.

I see 2 fundamental flaws in our CR system:

1) Communities disallow population density around stations. The space is there. The people COULD be there. The equipment COULD be purchased.

2) We have a very weak network architecture. Hub and spoke is OK for bedroom communities feeding a single employment center. Boston is not really organized like that, yet our rail network is. Worse than that, we have the North-South divide and subway lines that don't intersect.

There is nothing wrong with trains as transportation mode. The mode is a good fit for dense population centers. The problem is trying to jam a square peg (millions of automobiles) into a round hole (a dense population center).

 

[Matthew]

That will never be a realistic option. Train cars cost $2 million or more a piece. An Articulated Bus costs under $1 million. You need to consider the system as a whole and adaptability to demand and not just max capacity.

This statement is completely insane. Not only are frequent trains a realistic option, they have been a realistic option for over a hundred years, and remain a realistic option that are employed successfully in hundreds of cities all over the world including Boston.

What, are you going to deny the existence of the Red Line next? You are seriously going to propose replacing a system that carries 250,000 passengers a day with one that can barely handle 20,000?

Enough. I can only type so much.

 

[citylover94]

It is technically possible for the commuter rail lines to run 20 minute service all day as far as I can tell on both the Northern and Southern lines other than the Old Colony lines because of the one track pinch point. The only reason that commuter rail in the USA runs infrequently is we operate it in a very inefficient manner.

If the Providence line for example ran every twenty minutes all day from 5 am until 9 pm with each train containing six single level cars that have a capacity of 122 people it could carry up to 35,136 people each day. If it used bi-level coaches it could carry 52,416 people per day.

It just isn't possible for what you are proposing to reach those levels of service.

 

[Riverside]

And I think in the immediate term that things like the green line extension to Somerville should instead be converted to use the Silver Line type buses instead of extending the Green Line trolley system. The capacity issue is not an issue because we are talking about trolleys versus trains and the potential for making more efficient use of those rights of ways shouldn't be ignored.

And in the medium term, for the same reasons, I think conversion of the Green Line as a whole to use Silver Line style buses would make sense also.

I'm not prepared to comment on the ways that widespread, free-range (as opposed to fixed-path) automated vehicles will change private and public transportation. Seems to me that there are enough details that still have not been figured out– details that I think would make a big difference in assessing the effectiveness.

However, I do feel quite comfortable commenting on what I've quoted above.

The biggest problem with your proposal is revealed by the behavior of Silver Line bus drivers in the Transitway tunnel: they have to drive really slowly in order to make sure they don't hit the walls. The advantage of rails in a tunnel is that you are able to go very fast through a narrow space without having to worry about steering; it reduces the possible of dimensions of travel to a single one, allowing you to focus both the driver's cognitive efforts and the engine's mechanical efforts on moving forward at an appropriate speed.

Now, if we wanted to develop dual-mode trolleybuses that use tracks underground but free-range rubber wheels aboveground, that could be an interesting conversation, though my sense is that it would be an overcomplicated solution to a problem that doesn't really exist.

The other thing is that buses and trolleys aren't really equal in capacity. First of all, you'll notice that virtually the entire floorspace of a trolley is available for riders. A bus, on the other hand, must devote at least some floorspace to an engine.

Likewise, you can safely fit more people into a trolley than a bus of the same size. Why? It goes back to the tracks; a trolley will have a much smoother ride– vastly fewer bumps, more controlled turns, smoother acceleration and deceleration (though, to be fair, this last concern can be minimized with electrical buses). So you can have more people standing up without fear of them falling over each other.

I agree with you in principle: the current model cannot hold. We either need to change the way we live and work to be more oriented toward fixed route public transportation or we need to modify our public transportation to be more flexible.

I very strongly am a proponent of the former; in every conceivable respect, it leads to a better outcome.

As for what will actually happen, though, yes, I am sympathetic to the argument that the second scenario will come to pass, and it is worth considering how we will adapt to that.

 

[cden4]

They could use buses with guide wheels. When in the tunnels, all the drivers need to do is accelerate and decelerate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guided_bus

 

[cden4]

Trolleys are also smoother because their stops are in line with their path of travel. Traffic engineers generally like for buses to pull out of traffic and then back in again, which makes the ride not nearly as smooth. You can build bus stops that jut out into the parking lane so that the bus doesn't have to pull in and out of traffic. Cambridge has a few of these. But then the traffic engineers whine about how the bus delays all the car traffic.

 

[vanshnookenraggen]

I've been working on a 25 year MBTA expansion map and naturally I wanted to adda D-E connection from Brookline to Huntington. It's been discussed ad nauseam here but one thing that keeps coming up is the actual connection in Brookline Village. The area is totally built up and building a portal would require either cutting off a rail connection from BV to Kenmore (which is both harmful to commuters and train operations) or require land taking (in Brookline? Never.)

What I realized is the only place with enough space to build a portal was closer to Longwood Ave along the Riverway. Building the portal that far north of Brookline Village (station) seems circuitous until you realize that it would allow for a tunnel under Longwood Ave. More expensive for sure but it would mean that commuters would be transported to the middle of the LMA instead of along the edges.

This has a few major advantages over a tunnel under, say, Mission Park. First is that the portal has more room to be constructed (and thus cheaper), second that a tunnel under Longwood Ave would be much more beneficial to commuters (thus justifying the higher costs) and third is that a LMA tunnel has been proposed as part of the Urban Ring for a while and could be integrated into a future light rail UR.

It would be possible to construct a portal along Huntington Ave to still have service to Heath St as it currently operates. It would be much more beneficial to operations to still have the Heath St line operating for the sake of redundancy. Originally I had designed a tunnel under Brigham Circle with a terminal but I foresee that being value engineered out, hence the portal. A Huntington Ave portal also keeps the hopes of all you Arborway Restorationists alive!

I have stations at Foresyth Way (Northeastern-MFA), Longwood/Huntington (WIT-MassArt) and LMA-Brookline Ave. The station at Longwood/Huntington would have to be two levels to accommodate the merge. If this proved too expensive then the Foresyth and Longwood/Huntington stations would be combined into a large station between Ruggles and Foresyth. I wouldn't recommend that due to the large numbers of college students along Huntington Ave; two stations would be needed to handle the crowds.

 

[citylover94]

That is an amazing solution and it seems like it would work well for the urban ring later on too.

 

[vanshnookenraggen]

I'm toying with some different routes. There has to be a fine balance between areas that need to be served and routes that are cost effective.

 

[George_Apley]

A grade separated D to E is definitely a good idea. Here's another option based on conversations in this thread:

I question going right down the gut of LMA. The district is already totally walkable to transit (Fenway, Longwood, LMA, Brigham Circle). What it's missing isn't a stop on Brookline Ave, it's a radial connection to Cambridge.

 

[vanshnookenraggen]

That's the dollar store version. I don't think it's worth it though since you are going from grade separated>street running>at grate>subway. It will disrupt service way too much.

And like you said what's missing is a Cambridge connection. A Longwood Ave tunnel would allot for that connection in the future. An at grade D-E connection wouldn't.

These are a few Urban Ring route ideas I'm playing with that would feed into the Longwood Ave tunnel. All would require tunneling; the St Mary's would require the least and would utilize both B and D line tracks but bypass Coolidge Corner, the Babcock/Coolidge Corner route would need the most new tunneling but serve the heart of Brookline, and the Kent/Armory Sts route is the compromise.

As you can see any of the alternative routes would hook up with the Harvard-BU branch (which has been discussed here as well) and also allow for a continuation of the Urban Ring along Melnea Cass Blvd.

Also it's worth noting that the Longwood Ave tunnel may have to be double stacked with 4 tracks in order to minimize merges. I feel that if any tunnel through the LMA is built it would be easier and cheaper to build one double stacked tunnel than two separate tunnels. The tunnel could be built with a second, unfinished level for future use to save on costs.

 

[The EGE]

At the ROC meeting today, someone from an organization I've never heard of suggested that the T buy some PA-4 cars from PATH to supplement the Orange Line fleet. They claimed the only modification needed would be to change the height of their third rail shoes. This seems slightly suspicious to me - the PATH cars are only 52' long versus the 65' Orange Line cars, so you'd have to run in 7 or 8 car sets, and that's been thrown out in this thread before. The PA-4s are newer than the OL cars - 1986-built - but they haven't been used in revenue service in four years.

 

[davem]

At the ROC meeting today, someone from an organization I've never heard of suggested that the T buy some PA-4 cars from PATH to supplement the Orange Line fleet. They claimed the only modification needed would be to change the height of their third rail shoes. This seems slightly suspicious to me - the PATH cars are only 52' long versus the 65' Orange Line cars, so you'd have to run in 7 or 8 car sets, and that's been thrown out in this thread before. The PA-4s are newer than the OL cars - 1986-built - but they haven't been used in revenue service in four years.

I had assumed they were scraped years ago when I had a similar thought, so I never brought it up. Even if they don't run, getting spare parts off of them wouldn't hurt. Four years is a while, especially if they were flooded when Sandy hit. But it's not like the guys at Seashore haven't gotten equipment running after sitting in the woods for a decade, so I'm sure qualified people at the T could.

 

[FK4]

A grade separated D to E is definitely a good idea. Here's another option based on conversations in this thread:

I question going right down the gut of LMA. The district is already totally walkable to transit (Fenway, Longwood, LMA, Brigham Circle). What it's missing isn't a stop on Brookline Ave, it's a radial connection to Cambridge.

As expensive as it is to tunnel under, the LMA really does need a subway station in the heart of it. The peripheral streetcar stops just dont cut it. They may look not that far on a map but theyre suburban green line stops and they feel like that because theyre a schlep to get to. Certainly neither station is worthy of the massive minicity and employment ctr that the LMA is now. The bullet needs to be bitten on LMA transit sooner or later.

 

[George_Apley]

As expensive as it is to tunnel under, the LMA really does need a subway station in the heart of it. The peripheral streetcar stops just dont cut it. They may look not that far on a map but theyre suburban green line stops and they feel like that because theyre a schlep to get to. Certainly neither station is worthy of the massive minicity and employment ctr that the LMA is now. The bullet needs to be bitten on LMA transit sooner or later.

Well, the D-to-E connectors concepts that are tossed around on here entail the sinking of the E-Line along the whole length of Huntington Ave, which would make both LMA and Brigham Circle would be Prudential-style subway stations.