Operationally, what about branching the Orange Line just south of Jackson Square and tunneling to Ashmont via Atherton, Columbus, Seaver, Washington, and Talbot? Totally crazy, indeed, and expensive! But you'd get stops at Egleston Square, Grove Hall, Four Corners/Geneva (connecting to Fairmount Line), Codman Square, and a connecting station at Ashmont. These are many of the heavy hitters in terms of population outside of the urban core. My understanding is that OL frequencies have room to grow. If the OL branched south of Jackson Square would service from Green St to Forest Hills suffer too much, or at all (assuming you had the trainsets to support both branches in full)? Both branches would serve the employment centers at LMA, Back Bay, and Downtown.
In terms of construction I would assume that, given the width of Columbus/Seaver, a good portion of this route wouldn't be terribly complicated in terms of abutters. Some TBM would probably be needed for the rest of the route. At Ashmont perhaps there's a way to eat up the reservation left by the bus loop for station construction, and then ultimately restoring the loop once completed. Construction would probably have to temporarily eat up a portion of the SW Corridor to make room for the additional tracks to descend into the tunnel.
Blah blah blah, priorities X, Y, Z make this infeasible. I get it. I'm not floating this as anything realistic. Just fun to think about.
Plus I could finally take my family to the zoo without renting a car or an hour-plus T ride with multiple transfers.
Great work! EGE had some useful design tips and accuracy catches. This, to me, is pretty much my "reasonable" future map. Two things I might add:
1) GL to Chelsea - I don't see how that's any less realistic than Seaport via Tufts Medical
2) Since you've included the NSRL, how about possibly some DMU rapid transit lines to parallel the CR.
3) Also, as I understand it, NSRL would open up the Grand Junction in Cambridge. Worth including?
Observation: The full-build GL becomes quite a monolith on the map. I've wondered for a while from a design perspective what the best way would be to break it up. C-Combat had an interesting solution to that, which is to depict each branch as a different shade of green. http://archboston.com/community/showpost.php?p=194569&postcount=1701
You have a minor missing harbor tunnel issue [$$$] for GL to Chelsea. Airport and Chelsea remain SL buses for the foreseeable future. GL and SL share the Seaport Busway.
Nothing wrong with designations like Line A, B, C, D; Line 1, 2, 3, 4. Or if you are really stuck on color: G1, G2, G3, G4, G5, G6... R1, R2, R3..., O1, B1
This took longer than I care to admit:
Highlights:
-Separated individual GL branches (Lines A-H)
A: BC to Park St
B: BC to Dudley
C: Cleveland Circle to North Station
D: RS to College Ave
E: Needham Junction to Design Center
F: Heath St to Porter
G: Dudley to Porter
H: Design Center to College Ave
-GL to Needham Junction
-OL to West Roxbury
Still need to make some slight adjustments (GL Branch colors and spacing, etc.) but I need to take a breather for a bit
Masterful!
I still think that highlighting the DMU lines would be a great addition but as f-line mentioned it could skew the geometry of the map. Maybe there's a middle way.
Also, with green-eats-SL-Seaport I'd think you'd still want to show the BRT airport link from South Station (whether that shares a dual-use transit way, uses a summer street bus lane, etc)