Crazy Transit Pitches

F-line, would the new Tufts transfer station allow riders from Dudley (or anywhere on Washington st.) to change to a Seaport destination green line train? Or would they need to go to Boylston Station to switch ?

As I recall, all of a number of proposals for a Bay Village/TMC stop would allow riders to transfer to any of a number of Green Line branches. Dudley and Seaport trains would both go through that station, therefore they would be able to step off and step on just as they would at Park St (for example).
 
As I recall, all of a number of proposals for a Bay Village/TMC stop would allow riders to transfer to any of a number of Green Line branches. Dudley and Seaport trains would both go through that station, therefore they would be able to step off and step on just as they would at Park St (for example).

Don't forget as well...the Tremont tunnel is a 4-tracker here at the old portal wall, thanks to the flying junction inside. Tracks are configured as:

Inbound (ex-City Point) -- Outbound (ex-City Point) -- Inbound (ex-Lenox St.) -- Outbound (ex-Lenox St.)

So ideally you'd want to do due diligence and build that station as a twin island platform to use the track capacity to the fullest. Then continue the tunnel down nice, wide Tremont St. to the intersection of Marginal as a 4-tracker for future proofing. South Station would run on the ex- City Point tracks, and the ex- Lenox St. tracks would stub out at the Marginal intersection where the two Seaport branch tracks make their eastbound turn onto Marginal.

This would give you options to:

-- Short-turn Medford or Urban Ring service at Tufts on one set of platforms, while thru service to the Seaport continues on the other. 2 of the 4 tracks down Tremont to Marginal can then be a longish stub layover yard a la a mini- North Station Yard or underground Blandford St. pocket.

-- Grade separate South Station tracks from Washington St. tracks before the station, then diverge at or on Marginal. Not you need that much capacity for these branches--this is a pretty far cry from Park St.-level headways--but it's an option if you really want it that badly.

-- Future-proof for a westbound extension to Back Bay replacing Copley Jct., re-routing the E to graft onto this tunnel and the ex- Lenox St. tracks at the Marginal/Tremont intersection. This is the game-changer you want to future-proof for, even if it's going to be many many years more waiting before money's available. We've talked before about an "alt-spine" D Line if the Huntington Subway were continued out to Brookline Village. Well...you'd have a very high-capacity mainline merge here that could handle those loads on the ex- Lenox St. tracks + the Seaport/Washington loads on the ex- City Point tracks if that quadded grade separation were preserved through the new station and down Tremont to Marginal.


Best part is there's no project dependencies whatsoever on other diverging routes. Those can remain 50-year Crazy Transit Pitches considerations debated in a vacuum. You can just build the second platform set as a short-turn platform; it'll get plenty good Day 1 utilization as the Medford branch's permanent terminus and make traffic management a lot easier than making every D run end-to-end from Riverside to Route 16. Just don't be penny-wise/pound-foolish: build Tufts as a quad platform with Tremont St. tail tracks out the gate, and do the tunnel down to the intersection with Marginal at full quad width so you don't have to touch any of this stuff later if/when any bigger plans come to fruition.
 
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On this edition of Crazy Transit Pitches: Historical Edition....

In the late 1980s, the MBTA wanted to build a Saugus station on the Newburyport/Rockport Line. Would have been located where the landfill is off 107. 1000 parking spaces, costing 11 million dollars, to open in late 1991. $400,000 was plunked down for a planning study in 1988.

I suspect that it flunked on environmental concerns (a giant surface lot on top of the marsh!). The garage and high-level platform were constructed at Lynn instead, opening in 1992.
 
I could start a whole new thread for this but don't think it warrants it since it's just a question... What do people think actually be a semi reasonable but semi crazy transit pitch for Everett? Its main streets are classic streetcar line thoroughfares that get choked with traffic. Problem is, it's not quite dense off the main drags to really justify subways and it's too hilly for that anyway. It's exactly this level of density that Boston has a hard time with - dense triple decker neighborhoods that don't justify subway but have roads too narrow for a streetcar to be able to negotiate the heavy traffic.
 
I could start a whole new thread for this but don't think it warrants it since it's just a question... What do people think actually be a semi reasonable but semi crazy transit pitch for Everett? Its main streets are classic streetcar line thoroughfares that get choked with traffic. Problem is, it's not quite dense off the main drags to really justify subways and it's too hilly for that anyway. It's exactly this level of density that Boston has a hard time with - dense triple decker neighborhoods that don't justify subway but have roads too narrow for a streetcar to be able to negotiate the heavy traffic.

I’m not familiar enough with Everett to know the streets there well, and I don’t know which ones used to have streetcars. But to judge from what I can see on Googlemaps, the north-south main roads in Everett, like Main and Broadway, look awfully cramped for anything beyond bus service, even if they once had streetcars.

Here in Newton, the north-south Walnut Street seems (from aerial views) to have a tad more width to work with than does Broadway in Everett, and Walnut once had a streetcar. I just can’t see the NIMBY battle for re-installing rail ever being won, there’s just so much more car traffic now than back in those days, and ALL the north-south streets through Newton are crushed, you can’t displace the traffic there. I suspect Main and Broadway in Everett are similar: nowhere for displaced car traffic to go, and not enough certainty that improved transit service would sufficiently reduce auto demand to make it a moot point (though one could hope).

So for roads like Broadway in Everett and Walnut in Newton, I think the reasonable pitch is to crank the friggin hell out of bus service improvements. F-Line and Winston O’Boogie and some other have good posts on various a-B threads describing how far we fall short on bread and butter bus service. I have heard Stephanie Pollack also speak very eloquently to it. Signal prioritization, correct placement of stops to minimize traffic impacts to busses and cars, skip-stop scheduling, flexible dispatching (which implies pretty significant personnel management changes), better busses. Every bus line in the T’s portfolio could probably be carrying vastly more people at vastly faster average trip time, if we just worked it to the max. This would take political will (stop laughing) and money (stop laughing) though not billions of $. It’s not just reasonable, we should have started ten years ago at the latest. Bus service through and within the Everetts of the metro area could be doing so much more than now.

In a few places, like route 16 through Everett, perhaps if we improved the hell out of bus service and advertised those improvements, we would one day see ridership swell to the point that we’d have a “problem” of a bus line being over-run with ridership. On route 16, that very nice problem seems to have the space to consider inserting a Green Line type light rail. Again, it’d have to have its own lane, and signal prioritization the whole route. When I scroll along 16, I see from East to West: connection to Wonderland on Blue; then it crosses some commuter rails, perhaps some infill stations for linkages; a near connection to Wellington on Orange; then cross the Mystic and perhaps diverge from 16 to go to the GLX at Tufts (assuming optimistically that GLX gets built). I see some bus routes that generally parallel segments of that route, but nothing running the whole route. Is this because I’m envisioning a route with no demand? Or is this one of the many places Pollack discusses where existing bus lines are in place because, well, we’ve always had a bus line there? I don’t know – when I play map games with a light rail line along 16 as described above, I am way deep into crazy pitch for the current world, because a) I really have no clue if demand is even remotely sufficient for even one bus line that whole length of 16, and b) I know for a fact that we don’t yet have the fiscal / political will to get cracking on more pressing needs (Red-Blue connect, N-S link, massive systemic repairs, etc).

You mentioned subways. In places like Everett, I think you will never ever see that. Massively better bus service (relative to the T's service level) is something hundreds of cities around the world achieve daily, and in more challenging spots than Everett. If we can't achieve it, it's not because it's an unreasonable goal, but because we're an unreasonably failed polity. If we achieved that and a bunch of other reasonable goals, we might grow the system to the point that there would be some streetcars in some parts of Everett, maybe. But tut's down the line a ways.
 
I’m not familiar enough with Everett to know the streets there well, and I don’t know which ones used to have streetcars. But to judge from what I can see on Googlemaps, the north-south main roads in Everett, like Main and Broadway, look awfully cramped for anything beyond bus service, even if they once had streetcars.

Here in Newton, the north-south Walnut Street seems (from aerial views) to have a tad more width to work with than does Broadway in Everett, and Walnut once had a streetcar. I just can’t see the NIMBY battle for re-installing rail ever being won, there’s just so much more car traffic now than back in those days, and ALL the north-south streets through Newton are crushed, you can’t displace the traffic there. I suspect Main and Broadway in Everett are similar: nowhere for displaced car traffic to go, and not enough certainty that improved transit service would sufficiently reduce auto demand to make it a moot point (though one could hope).

So for roads like Broadway in Everett and Walnut in Newton, I think the reasonable pitch is to crank the friggin hell out of bus service improvements. F-Line and Winston O’Boogie and some other have good posts on various a-B threads describing how far we fall short on bread and butter bus service. I have heard Stephanie Pollack also speak very eloquently to it. Signal prioritization, correct placement of stops to minimize traffic impacts to busses and cars, skip-stop scheduling, flexible dispatching (which implies pretty significant personnel management changes), better busses. Every bus line in the T’s portfolio could probably be carrying vastly more people at vastly faster average trip time, if we just worked it to the max. This would take political will (stop laughing) and money (stop laughing) though not billions of $. It’s not just reasonable, we should have started ten years ago at the latest. Bus service through and within the Everetts of the metro area could be doing so much more than now.

In a few places, like route 16 through Everett, perhaps if we improved the hell out of bus service and advertised those improvements, we would one day see ridership swell to the point that we’d have a “problem” of a bus line being over-run with ridership. On route 16, that very nice problem seems to have the space to consider inserting a Green Line type light rail. Again, it’d have to have its own lane, and signal prioritization the whole route. When I scroll along 16, I see from East to West: connection to Wonderland on Blue; then it crosses some commuter rails, perhaps some infill stations for linkages; a near connection to Wellington on Orange; then cross the Mystic and perhaps diverge from 16 to go to the GLX at Tufts (assuming optimistically that GLX gets built). I see some bus routes that generally parallel segments of that route, but nothing running the whole route. Is this because I’m envisioning a route with no demand? Or is this one of the many places Pollack discusses where existing bus lines are in place because, well, we’ve always had a bus line there? I don’t know – when I play map games with a light rail line along 16 as described above, I am way deep into crazy pitch for the current world, because a) I really have no clue if demand is even remotely sufficient for even one bus line that whole length of 16, and b) I know for a fact that we don’t yet have the fiscal / political will to get cracking on more pressing needs (Red-Blue connect, N-S link, massive systemic repairs, etc).

You mentioned subways. In places like Everett, I think you will never ever see that. Massively better bus service (relative to the T's service level) is something hundreds of cities around the world achieve daily, and in more challenging spots than Everett. If we can't achieve it, it's not because it's an unreasonable goal, but because we're an unreasonably failed polity. If we achieved that and a bunch of other reasonable goals, we might grow the system to the point that there would be some streetcars in some parts of Everett, maybe. But tut's down the line a ways.

This analysis is pretty good, and I 100% agree that the answer lies in the bus system and a reallocation/enhancement of existing lines to better serve the population.

I propose the following crazy transit pitch: BRT lanes (separated from all other traffic a la Silver Line Chelsea) from Santilli Circle to Causeway street in Boston.
This significantly speeds up traffic for all Everett commuters. Direct shot to Boston, with a tie in to the Orange and Green lines just as other commuters from the north are getting off in the mornings (and vice versa in the afternoons). Pulls riders off the OL on a capacity crushed Welllington-North station segment, and places them directly into Boston. Make an Everett Express (pinging from Everett Square to Haymarket, no other stops); an Everett Limited (Linden Square,Ferry St/Broadway, Everett Sq, Wynn Casino, Sullivan Sq); and then locals, which can originate from different parts of Everett. Three tiers of service to really ampilfy the headways. While we're at it, throw in extensions of some Somerville/Medford buses into this busway going down Rutherford ave into Haymarket.. like the 95 and 101).
After that, use the new Silver Line gateway as a supplement. Have some buses extend from the Mystic Mall stop and go to Everett Square. The tie-in opens up many destinations and eliminates some cross-town traffic.

This doesn't solve many of the problems, specifically around congestion on the main roads and moving cross town.. but at least it clears up a pathway for a reasonable direct commute to Boston (once on a busway) and eliminates many of the transferring issues that are now prevalent and gum up the orange line. Hopefully that takes enough vehicles off the road to make the current congestion less nightmarish.
 
I suppose it's true about the buses. I still wonder about traffic, though, in all of these semi-dense Boston 'hoods... in rush hour, when most commuters are on buses just like in cars, a multi-block backup doesnt vaporize with bus improvements.. unless you have dedicated lanes. But making the Yellow Line the best it can be would certainly be a big improvement.
 
Create a new red line tunnel that splits off from the current red line at Kendall Square. Have the line cross over into Lower Allston (where new high rises will be built after I-90 is reconfigured). The new line would then follow Arsenal Street into the center of Watertown. From there it would follow river street the connect with the commuter rail in downtown Waltham. Waltham has a vibrant and dense downtown seeing a lot of new development which could use rapid transit service. The automobile traffic on main road in Waltham is horrible. The line could end there or it could continue to the route 128 office parks where a park and ride facility would be built. This corridor deserves rapid transit more than Newton which feels much more suburban.
 
Create a new red line tunnel that splits off from the current red line at Kendall Square. Have the line cross over into Lower Allston (where new high rises will be built after I-90 is reconfigured). The new line would then follow Arsenal Street into the center of Watertown. From there it would follow river street the connect with the commuter rail in downtown Waltham. Waltham has a vibrant and dense downtown seeing a lot of new development which could use rapid transit service. The automobile traffic on main road in Waltham is horrible. The line could end there or it could continue to the route 128 office parks where a park and ride facility would be built. This corridor deserves rapid transit more than Newton which feels much more suburban.

If you're going to send a Red Line spur to Waltham, I figure that it would be more practical to send it along the Fitchburg Line after Alewife. That routing might not even require a spur (and thus split frequencies) if the Red Line extension to Lexington never happens.

For Lower Allston and Watertown I see the Green Line and to a lesser extent the Blue Line as better options.

The Green Line of course used to go all the way to Watertown and served Allston Union Square; the A-Branch could be resurrected with stop consolidation and some street improvements to make it work well.

The most popular proposed routings of a westward Blue Line extension west of Charles is either along the Riverbank to Kenmore or across the river through Charlesport and back to Kenmore. After Kenmore you're very close to Lower Allston, but getting there would present significant engineering issues I imagine, though not much different than what a Red Line extension through there would require.
 
The 1945 Red Line extension plan had the subway continuing under Mt. Auburn St. to the Mt. Auburn/Belmont St. split, then an "East Watertown" superstation connecting to a Mattapan-esque trolley that grabbed the Watertown Branch through Fresh Pond and the Lexington Branch to hit Alewife, Arlington Center, and Arlington Heights. At the time the Watertown Branch still had the huge Arsenal sending boxcar after boxcar of wartime ammunition out so there was too much national security consideration riding on the Waltham-East Watertown portion of the branch. But the implications were clear: once the postwar disarmament came and the other freight started to dry out, this trolley would get extended in the opposite direction Watertown Sq. to replace the 71 streetcar with something grade-separated. And then someday you could've ended up with a long interurban feeder from Arlington to Waltham joined by heavy rail at the midpoint. The D Line was on the drawing board at the time, so interurbans at the time were "retro-hot" to planners and seen as a good way to move some of the Cambridge streetcar routes into faster, grade-separated *approximate* matches.

The East Watertown/Mt. Auburn alignment + around Fresh Pond to Alewife was in-play until the 1970's as one of the build alternatives because it would've retained all of old Harvard station and the yard tunnels without any need for the Big Harvard Square Dig. But Porter and Davis were way too yummy to pass up, and that was history.

---- ---- ---- ----

There's no way you can pick up any of these old puzzle pieces up today using the Red Line. Red can't be branched anywhere north of JFK without destroying headway management on the current subway mainline. Cambridge won't be able to function if Central thru Alewife has to get by on Ashmont or Braintree branch frequencies. There's no way to flush it full enough through downtown to handle that load without crippling the fastest-growing parts of Cambridge. All that shitting-of-bricks people are doing about Seaport-Back Bay transit and downtown radial circulation is because the Red trunk is over-capacity and is starting to falter under load. The best you can do is simply roll back the attrition at Park/DTX/SS so more of the throughput can be assigned to growth from Charles-Alewife and mainline points beyond to Arlington. The best downtown congestion management you can swing won't pry open enough new capacity to branch. No way, no how.


So it has to be Green, and Green out of Union/Porter is still very much a possibility for getting that grade-separated H2O Sq. feeder because the post-GLX north end of the Central Subway will still be well under-capacity. So long as you can reclaim enough lapsed property lines after School St. on the 1960-abandoned portion of the ROW, it really isn't all that hard. The 1996 & 2008 abandonments east of School are HUGELY wide; just walk the finished segment of Watertown Greenway and you can see there's plenty of room for rail-with-trail.

H2O Sq. to Waltham you aren't going to be able to do with any mode. Just look at how insane the grade crossings are on the west half of that ROW: all bad-angle, offset 50-100 feet from traffic lights and slicing through turn queues. It may have looked like a good prospective interurban starter route in 1945 to slowly expand out until it tied together the NW-of-river suburbs, but by 1960 and the D Line's shocking initial success blowing out even the most wildly optimistic ridership projections...it wouldn't have worked. What they thought would've been operable just spiffy on a handful of PCC singlets running once every 10 minutes would've had to have been adjusted up to much heavier and car-hungry frequencies like with the D. It would've been a nightmare of bunching and trolley-on-car/pedestrian accidents west of H2O Sq., especially with how unforgiving all those Main St. and Pleasant St. intersections it sliced through used to be before the town started reworking turn lanes and signaling on those thoroughfares in the last 20 years. So the only way you can practically hit Waltham is with a branch split after Porter: one to Watertown on the half of the H2O Branch with good grade separation, one bolted to Fitchburg Line ex- Tracks 3-4 out to Beaver St. that then swap commuter rail over to the landbanked Central Mass ROW so light rail can take the existing CR tracks to Waltham Ctr. and Brandeis.

That's pricier, and a lot more far-fetched. Certainly one of the very last inner-burb rapid transit extensions you'd mount in any master plan because Blue as far out as Salem, Orange as far out as Reading, and Red to Arlington Heights or Lexington are simply going to move more people. The Watertown Branch would probably get built a good 25 years before anyone thinks about the Waltham Branch. But we don't know what Waltham is going to look like in 2050. It's entirely possible by that point we could be wanting something a bit more than what a Zone 1A Indigo train on the Fitchburg Line is capable of doing by that point. I just wouldn't lump Watertown and Waltham in the same boat, because Waltham does have one of commuter rail's least congested mainlines to pump full of Indigos today while the Watertown, Arlington, etc. puzzle pieces leftover from 1945 do not.
 
The 1945 Red Line extension plan had the subway continuing under Mt. Auburn St. to the Mt. Auburn/Belmont St. split, then an "East Watertown" superstation connecting to a Mattapan-esque trolley that grabbed the Watertown Branch through Fresh Pond and the Lexington Branch to hit Alewife, Arlington Center, and Arlington Heights.

I'm thinking the 1945 plan for the East Watertown superstation (the planned terminus of the heavy rail Red line) was configured for the eventual extension of the Red Line to Watertown Sq and Waltham along the railroad right-of-way. That would have been a good plan for serving the entire western/northwestern metro area. As an alternative, they could have run a light-rail line from the superstation west to Watertown Sq and Waltham along the same route.
 
I'm thinking the 1945 plan for the East Watertown superstation (the planned terminus of the heavy rail Red line) was configured for the eventual extension of the Red Line to Watertown Sq and Waltham along the railroad right-of-way. That would have been a good plan for serving the entire western/northwestern metro area. As an alternative, they could have run a light-rail line from the superstation west to Watertown Sq and Waltham along the same route.

Maybe the Square, but there's no freaking way they could've done Waltham with all those grade crossings. An overpass every block wouldn't have been worth doing even back then. It would've been a de facto El, and there was no need for that at inner-suburban middle density.

Recall also that the '45 plan had a heavy rail line planned for Tracks 3 & 4 of the pre-Pike Worcester Line out to Riverside approximating the current Indigo proposal. By proximity that would've negated some of the need for an HRT direct to Watertown and skewed the build priority the opposite direction towards Arlington where there was nothing. The H20 Branch interurban could've pooled into Newton Corner on the other end and served as a very useful proto- Urban Ring pingback between two HRT transfers. For assigning builds based on need that was probably the most effective transit proposal that could've eventually served Watertown, while Red on the Lexington Branch via Arlington (much like today) would've been the tactically easier and more beneficial way of eventually reaching Route 128.


In 2016 the only puzzle pieces you can't physically put together now are rapid transit along the Worcester Line. And, practically but not theoretically speaking, trolleys from Watertown to Waltham because of how unsuitable those grade crossings are for modern LRV's and likely frequencies. All the rest is still hypothetical fair game, even with Red taking the Porter-Davis alignment instead.
 
Apparently this ridiculousness was discussed at the NE Transportation Camp...
http://transitx.com/

slides.002.jpg


Edit: I see that UrbEx commented on the Reddit thread.

BBJ says Everett and Chelsea have signed letters of intent with TransitX.

http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/f...e-things-you-need-to-know-today-and-tito.html
 
BBJ says Everett and Chelsea have signed letters of intent with TransitX.

http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/f...e-things-you-need-to-know-today-and-tito.html

Could certainly see the utility and novelty of something like this to cross the Mystic from Assembly to the casino. Especially in the Winter or in bad weather when walking might be out.

Practically speaking does it have an effective switching mechanism? Having pods stop at each stop regardless of whether the occupants need to stop will bottleneck a system of these.

Edit: Interesting video on a proof of concept in Mexico City. http://www.cctv-america.com/2016/03/02/mexico-city-proposes-gondola-like-apparatus-as-alternate-transportation

Still not clear how it switches lines to make a stop or go down a different line.
 
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Is it a DMU line?

I was thinking more low-frequency starter service with regular commuter sets. Or low frequency DMU/EMU connector service. Either way, just a start to something grander. Could just as well have Fitchburg, Lowell, and Rockburyport services of the same idea, but that would be less connections/less ring-ish.

I think an all-stops local from Worcester to Logan would be incredibly successful, even with low frequencies. People plan to sink a lot of time for the TSA, so low frequency matters not so long as reliability to the schedule is high.
 
How exactly do you propose to have a commuter rail line running through an active busway, an active haul road, a well-used public park, a gigantic highway interchange, and a hotel?
 
For the stretch that goes along the under-construction Silver Line Gateway ROW, you could do a short TBM run that breaks into a station box built under Aquarium station (underpinning Aquarium or reconstructing it). Continue the TBM through the station box, new transit hub under the parking garage at Terminal B.

At that point, you could continue with the TBM under the runways and the harbour to the Seaport to come up to a sub-surface station box next to Drydock Road to connect it back to track 61.

I'd also contend that if we do something like this, we run it full service from day 1. The whole 'run it with light service and ramp it up when the ridership shows up' mentality is all the backwards service planning at the T. That's not how transit works. One word: Fairmount. Build it right, run it right.

Ex: London Overground - they ran service at high frequencies (15-min headways in some parts off-peak, as low as 4-8-min headways during rush) with smaller trains. It attracted so much ridership that they added a car to all their trainsets (now 5-car trains). This is how we should be adding any new services.
 

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