Crazy Transit Pitches

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.
 
nick said:
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.
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Crazy from an engineering/mitigation standpoint, kinda crazy from an ops standpoint, not at all crazy from a strategic standpoint.

Prior to the Ashmont Ext., BERy cycled through a number of plans for the ROW through Dorchester; there was a buried Boston St-Columbia-Under Mt. Bowdoin-Wash.-Codman Square proposal, a loop using the Shawmut Branch (current Ashmont Line), the Hi-Speed ROW, and the Midland/Fairmount and ending at Dudley. They settled on the OC Main + Shawmut Branch alignment obviously, but the early plans are interesting in that they're better calibrated to both the trolley hubs and commercial/population centers of Dorchester than the Shawmut Branch was/is. Hitting those clusters and places like Egleston that lost in-square walk-up stations with the SWC realignment would be a centuries-old good idea that still carries great potential.

Not going to get into the legal/construction-related issues, but ops-wise the danger in such a loop would be the impact on Forest Hills. That's a Tier 1 bus hub, it's consistently the most or second-most trafficked donor station in the system (i.e. more people start a daily rapid transit commute there than any other station, save for Harvard in some years), and it's the terminal station on a line where most riders are going downtown. "Do no harm to Forest Hills" is the doctrine concerning OL south of downtown.
 
Just dabbling in some future-T map-making. I haven't done graphics like this before- thoughts?



A larger, thinner-lined version (I'd recommend checking this out full-size):
 
Very well done all told. You've done a nice job integrating the OLX, GLX, BLX, and especially the NSRL. I like your North Station/Haymarket segment a lot better than the official map.

Some design considerations (many of which are common to the official map, and mostly pretty minor):

  • On the rare occasions that Boston gives you an actual straight line, use it. The Green Line should be arrow straight from Boylston to Hynes and Kenmore to Cleveland Circle. There's no sense in making the OL and RL as straight as possible while mangling the Green Line.
  • Chestnut Hill Ave, Cleveland Circle, and Reservoir should be as near each other as possible. Brookline Village and Riverway too, if at all possible.
  • Since this is a future map, go ahead and lop off two of the stops between BU West and Babcock Street.
  • Greenbush branches off before Braintree, not after.
  • The Worcester Line crosses under the B Branch between BU Central and BU West. That's much more important with West Station in the picture - it is north of the B Branch.
  • All indications are the Blue Hill Ave will actually open around the same time as West Station.
  • No way you're doing the Riverbank Subway with a Hatch Shell stop but neither Mass Ave or Dartmouth Street. Mass Ave buys you the 1/CT1 bus transfers plus equally good walkability to the center of MIT as the Red Line. Dartmouth gives you a one-seat ride from the Copley Square area to Airport station, the waterfront, MGH, and the large population in Eastie, Revere, and Lynn.
  • The Saugus River is between POP and Lynn, not Beachmont and Revere Beach
 
It's nice how the distance of the green Bolyston/Tufts/SS loop is minimized on that map, reducing the amount it appears to double back.
 
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
 
Shepard said:
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
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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.

Also, with this level of GLX, we really need to drop the absurdity that sharing a tunnel means you are the same "line". Time to adopt the more standard practice that every set of terminuses is its own line. You can use color to make the map readable, but the line designations should probably be alphanumeric.

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
 
JeffDowntown said:
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.
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I meant GL to Chelsea from Lechmere via Everett - via "casino" if you will.
 
JeffDowntown said:
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
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+1

I really think that should be how the lines in Boston should be handled. It would be a very similar system to the MTA where each line is given a color based on the trunk line it follows and then a letter or number based on its terminus.
 
Thanks for the feedback, everyone! A lot of good suggestions to think about and implement. I'll post an updated version when I finish it.
 
Here's my crazy pitch:

tumblr_mjx8odibZH1rxl92fo1_1280.jpg
 
Only if I can sit on the outside when the weather is nice. Bring back open-air cars!
 
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
 
Downburst said:
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
Click to expand...

Well done! These are always fun to view, and since this is the internet, critique.

Overall I think this is going in the right direction, but the Green Line trunk is just overwhelming. There has to be a better way to present the routing in a more straightforward manner than shades of green. What about using colors to communicate the direction? For example, trains using the outer tracks at Park and Boylston (and thus are using the Tremont portal alignment) a different color entirely. This way there's two groups of light rail colors to simplify signage at Park and Boylston and to ease confusion on the map, especially for people out of town. I get that the letters help see where trains start and stop, but its very easy to lose the line in between.

Also, you can probably cut the routing from BC to Dudley. The diagram obscures how convoluted that route is, and I'm not sure this is a high-demand connection, anyway. Cut it and simplify. People can rely on a transfer at Boylston if they really need to make that trip.

It's also probably not worth renaming existing lines. Keep the B the B. Leave the A for any sort of reintroduced service to Oak Square or, what I'd prefer, a connection through Beacon Yards to Harvard.

Again, congratulations on putting this together, very well done.

EDIT: Combined with the D and the Needham route, the BC to Dudley route also brings a crazy level of service to Brookline on the reservation between Cleveland Circle and Brookline Village. The density is just not there.

Also, F-Line can speak to this better than I ever could try, but I'm worried about the levels of through service crammed in between Park and North Station, which is only two tracks. Is this even feasible without doing short turns, like the B does today at Park? Park to Boylston seems doable, but north of that...
 
-- Route 16. Add it...it'll get tacked on when GLX is open and all the drama is water under the bridge. STEP and Medford pols are still chomping at it, and Tufts investment on that end of Boston Ave. is going to compel it sooner than later.

-- I'd make Chestnut Hill Ave. as the merging point for the alt service patterns to BC, since that's as simple as flipping the platforms to the opposite side of the intersection and makes for better stop spacing vs. Reservoir/Cleveland Circle.

-- If you're doing the South End jog for the Transitway connector on Green, consider an Ink Block intermediate on the Washington-Harrison block where the school tennis courts serve up an easy drill-down for station space. Your choice, but compelling upside.

-- If you're doing stop consolidation on the GL branches, these are good alterations:

  • Relocate South St. to Foster St. South is uselessly close to Chestnut Hill Ave., but CH and BC do need an intermediate. Foster gets the spacing right.
  • Combine Allston and Griggs at Long Ave. (i.e. slightly shift Griggs platform a block west). This is being for-real debated with the last phase of the Comm Ave. rebuild.
  • Brandon Hall and Dean Rd. are long-overdue cuts for the C. BH is uselessly located. Dean has extremely low ridership due to no bus stops and very close proximity to Beaconsfield, making the slight over-spacing between Tappen and Cleveland Circle no disadvantage.
  • Kent and Hawes are problematically spaced, but I don't know if there's a solution here. Stet unless you've got any elegant ideas.
  • Definitely whack Back of the Hill, the single-most useless rapid transit stop on the system. If Fenwood is worthy of consolidation, BoTH damn sure should go with it.


-- Blue Line Lynn extension:

  • If using the Point of Pines ROW, stick to past expansion studies and give Oak Island an intermediate. That segment of Revere Beach Blvd. is a particularly lousy walk from Wonderland and a distinct density pocket in its own right.
  • Lynnport on the other side of the river is a must-have, since that'll be the private redevelopment of River Works CR station complementing the new housing towers going up there. It'll also be the closest stop for accessing any Lynn waterfront revival.
  • West Lynn used to be a former Boston & Maine stop at the ex- Saugus Branch wye until 1958. Another possibility if centered at Commercial St. for tapping the density around Lynn Commons. Would be compatible with default Blue Line stop spacing, but debateable if you think that's too many stops to build at once. Maybe omit for starters but consider as later infill if demand merits?
-- Blue Line Kenmore extension

  • Re-use of the Storrow EB road tunnel (assuming this is done as a teardown of the parkway or reduction of the parkway to a 2-lane road on the WB carriageway) serves up the space by the ex- Copley exit ramp for a full station. So you probably want to shift Dartmouth east into the repurposed road tunnel and call it Esplanade station. It's a silly-easier build that will draw much more patronage because of more direct outflow to employment and event centers in the CBD. Dartmouth's in a very quiet residential neighborhood where most people aren't home 9-5...probably going to be pretty dead for large portions of the day unlike Copley. Not much lost if there's no spacer between higher-demand Esplanade and Beacon/Mass Ave.


-- Red Line Braintree Branch

  • Neponset infill on the north side of the river between JFK and N. Quincy, coincident with likely redevelopment of that strip mall section of Morrissey Blvd. Exact siting negotiable, but this is a major transit cavity for the adjoining neighborhood and people are starting to talk about this as BRA and developers lick their chops at reimagining Morrissey there.


-- Other

  • Unclear if you want to consider Red Line conversion of the High Speed Line into an Ashmont Branch extension. It's probably higher-priority than Blue-Kenmore because it's such low-hanging fruit. If yes, Milton is the lone intermediate stop between Ashmont and Mattapan. The underpass offers ample room for a full fare-controlled station and concourse, with just a Charles-like poke in open air to the west. Central Ave. wouldn't be a candidate because the grade crossing would have to be eliminated with a rail overpass, and abutting buildings are too tight for an elevated station. But the ridership easily combines at no loss of mobility if you route the Central Ave. buses down Eliot St. and up Adams; the Riverwalk paths already offer excellent ped/bike coverage spanning the Central-Adams block.
  • The geometry of this whole map would have to change dramatically if you attempted to include any Indigo Lines like SS-Riverside on it, so don't torture yourself making this even busier than it needs to be. If you want to acknowledge the Indigo network's existence, maybe use a bolder indigo-colored line for Fairmount, Riverside/Worcester, Reading, Salem/etc., Waltham/Fitchburg and add Newton Corner to the Worcester Line. But otherwise keep the arrows and treat it like a separate spider map for sanity's sake.
 
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)
 
Shepard said:
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)
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SL1 would keep looping down in the Transitway at SS like always. It's built for future dual use, so no reason to not take advantage of the dual use. Probably easiest way to do that is use a silver color and simple "S" indicator for the termini. Then don't worry about any other BRT routes for map sanity's sake (including SL Gateway, because of that same geometry-warping problem as with Indigo). SL1 goes a cut above all others in importance. If drawing the airport terminal loops is too much, then you can just have it trail off with an arrow at the Ted crossing for sanity's sake. Co-mingling at the prepayment stations is the most important part for depicting on a map that's otherwise limited to rapid transit-only.
 
How would re-routing today's E Line to Back Bay and beyond functionally work? In other words: How would the new GL tunnel interface with the OL, and how would Back Bay station be configured? Where would the GL run east of Back Bay?
 
Shepard said:
How would re-routing today's E Line to Back Bay and beyond functionally work? In other words: How would the new GL tunnel interface with the OL, and how would Back Bay station be configured? Where would the GL run east of Back Bay?
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If the 4-track Tremont tunnel is continued through Eliot Norton Park/Tufts Station and down Tremont St. to Marginal as a 4-tracker, it's under urban renewal space more than wide enough to fit the tunnel footprint. This block is easier tunneling than straight down Oak St.

  • Then the traffic island @ Marginal serves up the room to hollow out a cavern for the tunnel split and the wye track for any-direction routing.
  • The SS and Washington St. branches would then bang a left at the traffic island onto Marginal, slip under the Orange tunnel at the corner of Oak, and continue on their way
  • Washington tunnel forks off the SS tunnel with an at-grade junction (headways too light for this to be a bottleneck), and crosses under the pike on the Shawmut-Washington block. Portal on the NEC trackbed along the Herald St. retaining wall on the space formerly occupied by the Boston Herald freight siding (and now just a couple electrical boxes). Graft incline up the Herald St. wall to Washington, then graft trolley light cycle onto the Washington/Herald intersection. It must be on this block because the Orange tunnel is crossing under the Pike + NEC on the Tremont-Shawmut block and the N-S Rail Link portal goes on the Washington-Harrison block; this is the only unobstructed block.


For the E replacement, bang a right at the traffic island. Note that the flying junction in the old tunnel has already fully traffic-separated the E from the SS and Washington branches before ever reaching Tufts Station.

  • Stay under Marginal, the Pike ramps, and the greenspace all the way to Columbus or Clarendon. Easy tunneling, same as the SS branch along Marginal.
I think we've talked before about an option that slips delicately past Trinity Pl. I'm feeling less confident about building impacts there...really, really not-confident the closer I squint. So let's chart a new and more fail-safe path.


  • Columbus Ave. @ Cahners Pl. is the first point where a building becomes a close shave. Dive off the Marginal/parkland alignment and cut diagonal across the Pike to under the Worcester Line tracks. Orange has already long since portaled-up, so there are no tunnels on this block. Worcester Line service will have to be suspended inbound of West Station and re-routed via the Grand Junction to North Station for duration of the construction disruption (so do this before the Urban Ring takes the GJ!).
  • At BBY build the GL platforms on other side of the wall from the Orange platform where the Worcester tracks currently pass...and downstairs.
  • Stay under the Worcester tracks at as shallow a level as possible when approaching Huntington Ave. To the point where the tunnel roof is the Worcester trackbed. Turn off of Worcester the second you hit the corner of the Copley Place Garage and onto Huntington Ave.
  • Reinstate Worcester Line service ASAP.
  • The existing Huntington tunnel makes a sharp curve alongside Exeter St. under the 1-story Pru garage entrance and straightens out roughly where the Duck Tours waiting shelter is. I'm not sure what level it's at...pretty sure it's deeper than the Pike ramp tunnel that passes very shallow underneath Star Market. Structural ambiguity...study further.
  • Do an adjustment incline in the new tunnel to square levels with the old Huntington tunnel. Again...pretty sure that Pike ramp tunnel is too far upstairs to matter if it doesn't impact the old tunnel. Punch through the Huntington Subway wall at the end of the curve right before the foot of Prudential Station.
  • Re-route all E service through Boylston-Tufts-BBY, but retain Copley Jct. for service disruptions and any part-time alt. service patterns deemed necessary.


Note: this build is largely west of the worst of the flood risk in the NEC cut, which is east of BBY station. You're sticking to shallow digs under the frontage roads in that whole area, and that's good news for the entirety of the South Station leg and all of the BBY connector out to Columbus/Clarendon. Huntington Ave. is also only in the moderate-risk zone, so the BBY connector isn't at super-high risk on the west-end connector. The two key flood-proofing areas are:

  • The Herald St. portal for the Washington St. line. You need bulletproof flood doors here.
  • The lowest-depth tunneling under the Worcester Line through BBY station, particularly at the point where you incline-down off Marginal to cross the Pike. At risk for the storm-drain effect. Will need Netherlands-strength pump rooms right here. And probably a secondary backstop when the grade changes near the interface with the Huntington tunnel (though that's probably not a big concern).
The good news is these maximum-risk areas are single-point vulnerabilities, not big linear vulnerabilities like much scarier-looking sections of the Red Line. So throwing kitchen-sink flood protection at single-point vulnerabilities is much easier and less worrying than some of the other linear transit floodproofing Boston will have to do in a sea level rise era. Don't get too bent out of shape by the single-points; just do your due diligence.





^^Costly package, probably equal in expense to the SS connector. Certainly feasible since all that digging stays well between the spacious air rights support pegs in all the places where you have to go deeper underground than the Pike retaining wall on Marginal.
 
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