Crazy Transit Pitches

[George_Apley]

I'm pretty sure that the Dedham Branch is no longer concurrent. They built the Avery Elementary School and the High School's big track and field complex on the ROW in 2011.

 

[citylover94]

That is why a tunnel was mentioned as necessary for that branch to be built so that it could go under the fields. I think that means this is a crazy pitch but it would be cool if it could happen.

 

[Arlington]

I like the idea of the Mattapan LRT going to Readville, but what's the case for going beyond? Once you're going past Readville, I guess I'd rather see a case made for concentrating the LRT/CR firepower at Dedham Corp Center and promoting real TOD there (or park and ride?) Its a great location totally underused/underserved.

 

[Shepard]

One other "crazy" extension route would take the "High Speed Trolley" north onto Blue Hill Ave, all the way up to Dudley via Warren*. (I had something like this on fantasy maps in years past!)

Not a one-seat ride downtown, of course, but still an improvement over the bus. And the trolleys would be a nice aesthetic upgrade for that entire corridor.

*Yes there would need to be street-running for a few narrow blocks around Warren.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

I'm pretty sure that the Dedham Branch is no longer concurrent. They built the Avery Elementary School and the High School's big track and field complex on the ROW in 2011.

It's an easement, so ownership blockers and the legalese of a de-landbanking aren't the problem. Too many crossing schoolkids are the problem, making practicality rather than legalities the blocker. So, yes, tunnel is the only equitable solution. Wouldn't be nearly as expensive as that atrocity in Hingham that went under streets, had its walls resting against abutting basement foundations, and incurred half its costs in construction mitigation. Think Wellington where a hole is quickly ripped in the ground, cement poured in a shallow pit, and the bare concrete roof slab becomes the driveway/sidewalk/running track restoring the surface to exact same appearance.

Would not be a major expense. Whole shebang can probably still clock in at well under < $100M in spite of it. But it's enough that it has to be its own project. It's still low-hanging fruit...just not bottommost-hanging fruit.


Dedham being this weird anti-transit enclave inside 128 makes present-day advocacy a moot point. Gets a lot more reasonable in 15 years when their traffic gets intolerable. They have to feel the effects of their transit isolationism first before they start to get it. Others trying to point it out for them has proven waste of time for the last 40 years.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

One other "crazy" extension route would take the "High Speed Trolley" north onto Blue Hill Ave, all the way up to Dudley via Warren*. (I had something like this on fantasy maps in years past!)

Not a one-seat ride downtown, of course, but still an improvement over the bus. And the trolleys would be a nice aesthetic upgrade for that entire corridor.

*Yes there would need to be street-running for a few narrow blocks around Warren.

I think you have to get trolleys to Dudley first. Arse-end-up doesn't solve the biggest problem of one-seat w/ fare portability to downtown via Dudley.

Get the dead-obvious one done first and THEN the 28X corridor looks a lot juicier for something greater-than the 28X proposal itself. Of course...if you're thinking Dudley-Mattapan trolley connected to or run-thru from Downtown-Dudley, loads increase enough that Mattapan becomes a very large terminal indeed. And that's going to push demand over-the-top for a real Red conversion to adequately serve all that's going to be slamming Mattapan terminal.

Put it this way: where's your car supply going to come from on LRT if Mattapan becomes a mini-me Forest Hills terminal? The Green Line branch has to trade longer trains for sparser headways to manage bunching on the long trip through the subway portal. Ashmont and Mattapan have little yard space to serve any more cars than the current PCC fleet, with no nearby expansion space. That leaves Readville as the only large yard.

Well...having to run all out of Readville makes load-balancing very difficult.

• The Blue Hill Ave. branch can only take loose headways because of the need to carefully manage bunching. You probably manage that by having more cars per train and going all-in on managing 'accuracy' of headways to offset the upper limit on quantity.

• Readville would have lots of space for a yard. However. . .

• Ashmont doesn't. The empty triangle in Codman Yard doesn't allow for storing lots of trains that can shoot on/off the loop quickly to bolster headways. It's a much better yard for sticking the trolley maintenance building. So you're probably looking at little more than a couple tail tracks where run-as-directeds can park when they have to be scrambled for a headway correction. Most else is going to continue looping.

• Mattapan's yard is tiny; it pretty much fits just the current PCC fleet with little expansion space for more. Fine for the Blue Hill Ave. route, but if this is the mini-me Forest Hills-type terminal for staging many routes, you're seriously pinched.

• The High Speed Line is the highest-demand 'mainline'. Make Mattapan a diverging terminal, and it gets more important as the pipeline to downtown. The Blue Hill Ave. branch is primarily going to be a local route. Anybody closer to Mattapan than Dudley is going to be taking the High Speed Line for its faster transfer trip to downtown.

This is a problem when Readville...not the highest-demand 'mainline'...is the primary car supply. Ashmont-Mattapan needs the best headways, but Ashmont-Readville will be the actual best-headway segment because it's the primary car supply.

Problem. You end up dumping passengers into Mattapan terminal faster than they can move out of Mattapan terminal, because the demand direction is a sizeable mismatch to the supply direction. The terminal becomes an escalating traffic clog. Forest Hills is already suffering some of this problem from sheer number of bus routes piling in and growth therein. But it still has Orange, and a better-frequency Orange coming in 3 years when the new cars increase the car supply. You do not have that relief coming with Mattapan if it's an LRT outpost strung-out on capacity. It's going to start to become a problem that precipitously gets worse until it hits paralysis.
​

• Make that faster road to paralysis with each additional diverging route. Especially the longer extensions to Dedham that pass by Readville Yard instead of terminating at it.

Doing all this doesn't defer the need to bring Red to Mattapan. It makes it desperately necessary. To have a functional mini-me Forest Hills at Mattapan the mainline has to feed it at mainline capacity. Doubly so when all the future Downtown radial transit expansion explodes the demand at Ashmont transfer. You're only getting that with Ashmont Branch headways extended down to Mattapan terminal. Otherwise it gets more unbalanced with each passing year.

Therefore, all these efforts to avoid converting Mattapan from trolleys by predicating a new branch network on it...just make the conversion have to happen faster. And we're worried about Cedar Grove, Butler, Valley Rd., and Capen St. mobility...why again? So we can push Mattapan on a trajectory where it eventually can't function as a terminal?



No. Just keep it simple. Grab these easy-grab pieces with the nearest available mode to pre-reserve them. Then when it's time to connect them all make damn sure Mattapan is fed like a real terminal should be fed: with a high-capacity, high-frequency mainline with one-seat to downtown. If you still want to run trolleys to all diverging points off Mattapan terminal...fine. The Readville 'mainline' ends up much better able to supply diverging routes when all of the forking routes have much sparser headways than it. Instead of the inverse.

 

[bigeman312]

My crazy transit pitch is about public transit funding. I'm looking for objective critique and, admittedly, this is crazy. Also, sorry for the list format, it was the easiest way to post this.

• Split the state into different regional transportation entities with a high level of autonomy. The Greater Boston Transportation Entity (GBTE) would roughly include:
  • Suffolk County
  • Essex County
  • Middlesex County
  • parts of Worcester County (Harvard, Southborough, Milford, Hopedale, Mendon)
  • Norfolk County
  • most of Plymouth County (excluding Rochester, Wareham, Marion, Mattapoisett)
  • parts of Bristol County (Easton, Mansfield, Norton, Taunton, Raynham, Berkley, Dighton)
• There would be a head of the GBTE, appointed by the Governor (similar to Stephanie Pollack now).
• The funding for regional/mass transportation, as well which projects are undertaken, are decided by the State Senators and the State Representatives who represent the areas in the GBTE, as well as the head of the GBTE. No state politicians from other regions would have a say. They have the authority to:
  • set a regional gas tax, in addition to any federal gas tax.
  • set a higher regional sales tax, in addition to any state sales tax.
  • collect non-fare mass-transit related revenue (parking, advertising, real estate).
  • implement and collect any tolling, including congestion-based, open-road, highway tolls.
  • collect any RMV fees from their region.
  • implement a VMT.
  • work with municipalities (especially Boston) on coordinating parking fees, and congestion charges.

The GBTE would decide which infrastructure projects get funding, and be responsible for funding and building those projects. This includes bridges, rail extensions, and any transportation currently undertaken by the state, MBTA, or RTAs.

Smaller transportation projects that are currently undertaken by municipalities would remain unchanged in their local funding and undertaking.

Operation of mass-transit routes would be put out to bid. Companies would decide, in their bid, which routes they want to operate. The winning company (based on reputation, $, number of routes selected, service levels, etc) would operate the routes they chose and see as profitable. They would be held to their service level promises (OTP, number of trains, etc) and heavily fined otherwise. The state would supply a subsidy of $1/passenger on any route so that the operator is incentivized to serve more people than it otherwise would have. What this would look like:

Company X would win with their bid. They sign on to operate their target routes: let's say the Red Line, the 71, the 73, and the 77. The GBTE would be responsible for maintaining the infrastructure. (I haven't decided how vehicle procurement/maintenance would work.) They would have their own employees and decide their salaries. There would be a minimum service requirement: at least y number of trains per day serving a, b, c stations, and things of that sort. Company X could request capital improvement (i.e. we really want an infill station at Port Norfolk, Dorchester because it would boost ridership. We need bus lanes on these blocks, because they are slowed by traffic.).​

This could be for any bus route, any rail route, and even routes that aren't currently offered, etc.

For any route that the GBTE wants to maintain, but no company bids on, it can be operated as public transportation.

What do you all think?

 

[DigitalSciGuy]

The regional governance issue has recently become a pet issue of mine, especially after meeting Nicole Badstuber of UCL at NYC TransportationCamp last November who's doing research in precisely this policy field.

We discussed the same topic at DC TransportationCamp earlier this month (my notes here, though it's hard to take notes of a very involved conversation while still being engaged enough to participate) and it's likely we'll reengage the topic at TransportationCamp New England in April.

There are a number of ways you can execute regional governance and I think we've talked about it up-thread quite a bit, but it always seems to be the thing that is so pie-in-the-sky that I even loose my fellow board members at TransitMatters when I start talking about it.

I'm in agreement with the rough outline of the region that you've described, but I think these entities already largely exist though are woefully underfunded and have very little political power - the MPOs. They're already doing quite a bit of the heavy lifting of determining project priorities by measuring ROI and doing ridership studies. CTPS is effectively the staff of the Boston MPO.

The problem is that the MPOs are federally funded, of which there are a lot of mouths to feed nationally. The MPOs should be further funded by regional taxes of the municipalities it represents. There's promise for this in the regional ballot initiative bill, but it's still not guaranteed that the regional body that is made from any particular ballot initiative that could be put forth would be the MPOs. This regional ballot initiative would do precisely what you describe.

HOWEVER... I would add one thing and disagree on another:

I would add that the MPOs should have even deeper powers over roads to eliminate some of the jurisdictional squabbling and cacophony of voices the T must work with when trying to just get transit signal priority to be a thing. The MPO should be grown into a regional DOT with coordinated districts that operate with one fleet of equipment manned by one department of transport workers to ensure consistent road conditions - asphalt, ploughing, etc - while gaining economies of scale.

I would disagree that we should NOT divvy up transit operations, if only in the first half century of this level of governance being installed. As we've learnt from commuter rail operations, privatisation is NOT the panacea of our service quality issues. Give them shitty equipment and it doesn't matter if you fine the company into oblivion; they'll never reach service quality targets that everyone is screaming for. Even if we could instate this type of regional governance only for Boston in the next 5-10 years, it would take well over 20-40 years for us to get our transit capital to a state where we can start setting ambitious service level requirements for bidding where we'd gain any sort of advantage from private competition.

I would add that regional governance is an issue that NYC, DC, and every other major city in the US that has outgrown its municipal borders in urban area is seeking answers to. Some have had more success than others. The Eno Center for Transportation has released a report on it. Nicole, herself, is looking at how urban areas around the globe can learn from the example the UK has set forth with the GLA (and TfL from the lens of transport) and various metropolitan counties to the north without needing a Margaret Thatcher or other catastrophic political event to tear everything down before we can build everything back up.

In many ways, I think hitting the governance angle (and by way of it, the financing and planning angle) is getting to the root of the problem and is less crazy transit pitch and more practical exercise in figuring out how we should be trying to build consensus. At the moment, it's incredibly prudent to continue driving better relationships with every. single. municipality. It has this warm and fuzzy narrative that we as a democratic state are coming together to cooperate and do all of these wonderful things. On the level of execution, it's maddeningly counterproductive and is something we should only be doing in the short-term. The fact that there's no regional entity with any sort of power between local and state levels of government make almost any conversation about funding the T comprehensively a non-starter - it's immediately an east vs west state argument that we'll never win so long as neo libertarian ideas continue to bounce around in politics. Let us fund transport regionally and then let anyone west of Worcester realise that they are not economic hubs that at all compete with Boston and that the lion's share of their transport dollars to date have come from taxable economic activity within the Boston region.

 

[Proposition Joe]

Transportation funding, particularly from sources like RMV fees and the gas tax, are not going to be cordoned off and remain in their own regions. Although Western Mass complains constantly of "subsidizing the T" it really works the other way around and you would see a lot of regions in the state (if not all but Boston) suddenly have no means to pay for transportation maintenance and new projects. We'll see if value capture and MPO assessments come to pass in the near future to alleviate some transportation funding shortfalls through local/regional means, but with a Republican governor I doubt the later will have much of a chance.

MPOs play a crucial role in transportation because of their role with federal funding. DigitalSciGuy goes over a lot of the points, but what is also missing is their sometimes singular focus on and responsibility for transportation. If MPOs had more responsibilities outside transportation (land use, housing, etc.) not just in goals but also in new powers and authorities, then their planning could be a lot more proactive and efficient than it currently is now.

I would be interested to see if Anthony Foxx's proposal to grant federal transportation funding directly to certain municipalities takes off, because a city is much more likely to flex those funds to transit projects than even an urban dominant MPO.

On another note with MPOs, the legislature is currently overseeing a commission looking into MPOs. As far as I know they haven't begun to discuss much of anything as of their last meeting at Park Plaza, but hopefully we'll see if some interesting ideas spring up.

 

[Equilibria]

Transportation funding, particularly from sources like RMV fees and the gas tax, are not going to be cordoned off and remain in their own regions. Although Western Mass complains constantly of "subsidizing the T" it really works the other way around and you would see a lot of regions in the state (if not all but Boston) suddenly have no means to pay for transportation maintenance and new projects.

It's also important to note that while that Western Mass benefits indirectly from the economic health of Boston (the standard response to their complaints about subsidizing the T), Boston benefits far more directly from the health of major infrastructure in Western Mass. You get between cities by going through rural areas.

 

[cbrett]

It's also important to note that while that Western Mass benefits indirectly from the economic health of Boston (the standard response to their complaints about subsidizing the T), Boston benefits far more directly from the health of major infrastructure in Western Mass. You get between cities by going through rural areas.

The only benefit to Boston coming from Western Mass's infrastructure is the 2-3 lane mass pike, and the former B&A line, which provides the majority of freight traffic plus the daily Lake Shore Limited. Maintaining those two routes, one a federal highway and the other a private railroad, to provide connectivity to the rest of the country is both incredibly important and cheap for serving Boston's needs. Aside from it's colleges, the rest of Western Mass has a negligible effect on Boston.They can bitch about subsidizing the T all they want, because Boston's economy is what funds this state. Springfield is linked more directly to the economy of the Hartford/New Haven corridor, but currently needs the rest of the state or the feds to chip in and help it rebuild it's rusted husk of a downtown.

One issue that I don't think is being addressed by dividing districts up like this is the problems with regional transportation. The T pretty much functions as a Greater Boston section already, and we've seen what happens when Amtrak gets pissy about the NEC or New Hampshire refuses to allow CR expansion. Who calls the shots and makes decisions on shared corridors like the NEC or I-90, where commuter and regional transportation share the same infrastructure? Also, what about the desire of Providence and Worcester to grow as something other than sattelites of Boston? Does it make more sense for funds to be divided amongst them, or shared among a larger organization?

 

[Equilibria]

The only benefit to Boston coming from Western Mass's infrastructure is the 2-3 lane mass pike, and the former B&A line, which provides the majority of freight traffic plus the daily Lake Shore Limited. Maintaining those two routes, one a federal highway and the other a private railroad, to provide connectivity to the rest of the country is both incredibly important and cheap for serving Boston's needs.

No, it's more like the Pike, and I-91, and I-84, I-395, MA-146 and US-7 (because people in Boston need to get to Tanglewood somehow) and all the roads around Amherst and Northampton that get people to all of those colleges and universities that Boston folks send their kids to. Add Williams to that list as well. Then we have the rail lines to New York, Connecticut, and Vermont. Also, the infrastructure that serves the Quabbin Reservior. Also all of the roads that bring us construction materials from concrete plants, quarries, etc.

 

[JumboBuc]

Crazy transit pitch: Electrify the Fairmount Line and drop it underground at (an expanded) South Station where it can take over the Silver Line tunnel through the Seaport. Give developers leeway to build up vacant/underused plots along the Fairmount corridor and sell them based on their one-seat connectivity to the Seaport.

Please, archBoston, explain to me why this is a terrible idea (as it probably is)...

 

[393b40]

Please, archBoston, explain to me why this is a terrible idea (as it probably is)...

It's too expensive.

 

[JumboBuc]

It's too expensive.

I'm working off the assumption here that the South Station expansion is a given. Adding a portal as part of South Station Expansion shouldn't be too bad, and beyond that all you really need is new rolling stock (which is required whatever the futures of Fairmount and Silver end up being) and electrification. As far as "crazy transit pitches" go this one seems pretty cheap.

Edit: You'd also need to lay track through the Silver Line tunnel.

 

[393b40]

How about the whole dig a tunnel part?

 

[JumboBuc]

How about the whole dig a tunnel part?

But there's not too much of a tunnel here to dig. The Fairmount line reaches South Station above ground and the Silver Line comes in underground. You'd need enough of a portal and tunnel to connect and align them within South Station. This is far from trivial, but in the realm of "Crazy Transit Pitches" it's not that big of a deal.

Edit: Quoting F-Line's map from the Green Line Reconfiguration thread. You'd only need enough tunnel to reach the grey dot of the current Silver Line turnaround.

There has to be a bunch of reasons why this is a terrible idea other than the cost of joining the two lines within South Station.

 

[George_Apley]

Is the transitway capable of handling EMUs? I know it can be converted to LRV, but an EMU?

Also, it would cut off the Logan connection to South Station via the transitway. Replaced by a surface bus??

 

[JeffDowntown]

But there's not too much of a tunnel here to dig. The Fairmount line reaches South Station above ground and the Silver Line comes in underground. You'd need enough of a portal and tunnel to connect and align them within South Station. This is far from trivial, but in the realm of "Crazy Transit Pitches" it's not that big of a deal.

Edit: Quoting F-Line's map from the Green Line Reconfiguration thread. You'd only need enough tunnel to reach the grey dot of the current Silver Line turnaround.


There has to be a bunch of reasons why this is a terrible idea other than the cost of joining the two lines within South Station.

The I-93 northbound tunnel is under Atlantic Avenue all alongside the South Station tracks. It is diving downward at that point, eventually under the Silver Line turn around. You cannot get to the gray dot from the South Station tracks without going THROUGH I-93 northbound.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Is the transitway capable of handling EMUs? I know it can be converted to LRV, but an EMU?

No. Too tall from combination of raw vehicle height + the big difference in safe wire clearance for 25 kV AC (Amtrak) vs. 600 V DC (MBTA HRT/LRT/TT's) electrification.