Crazy Transit Pitches

[DominusNovus]

We wouldn't be running it under the Purple Line flag. There's already a strong proposal and completed study about doing New Haven-Springfield-Boston as a permanent reassignment of the Amtrak Springfield Shuttles. At those distances and travel times, commuter rail accommodations just become unwieldy. You need bigger seats, better cushion, more legroom to be sitting that long. You need more charging ports for gadgets. You need bigger luggage racks because that's going to be a longer day. You need easier restroom access. You need more intensive staff assistance. On the ops side you need efficiencies in crew rotations that are segmented fundamentally different from the 1:00-1:25 system-average of trip increments. And it even helps to be running locomotives ordered in the larger intercity-configuration fuel tank size to keep the number of duty cycles before refueling par.

The T doesn't have those; to customize a subset of its equipment and organize a subset of its crews apart from the rest would make the route a steep loss leader. Amtrak does have the right capabilities and right organization today, up to and including the existing staff base in Springfield and (if MassDOT stops ducking its funding responsibilities) a bigger maintenance base to come at the planned combo- ConnDOT Hartford Line + Amtrak layover yard in Springfield. With the Shuttles being a state-sponsored train still subsidized to commuter fares by CT until the Hartford Line's north-of-Hartford schedule fills out more, it's also easy to make fares commuter-friendly. At Zone Umpteen or whatever Springfield would otherwise be from Boston, you pretty much are already in Shuttles price range...and certainly have justification for paying a little extra for the less ass-hurty interior livery at those differences. Therefore, MassDOT taking up its subsidy share of what ConnDOT has long been doing with Amtrak ends up a much easier reach to begin with and a much better bet for building ridership.


We could be advancing this right now since the NNEIRI study concluded this was the slam-dunkiest of slam dunks. But for whatever reason MassDOT is flooding the zone with more studies like that Albany-Pittsfield train and--worse--that "Berkshire Flyer" Boston-North Adams via Fitchburg extreme longshot. Instead of just pulling the trigger already, Baker/Pollack have some nervous tic about really really wanting to do it but forever hesitating.

Excellent info, thanks! Follow up if you don’t mind, since I definitely phrased my question not exactly as I meant to (but I still got some good info): What other projects would have higher priority than improving the Boston-Springfield route (regardless of who runs it)? More or less, at what point would we reach “well, we’ve built out everything else?”

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Without cost being the factor. Could we build express tracks for red, orange, and blue in tunnels directly under each line. Obviously this would only really be needed if the lines got their extensions.

No.

(1) It's probably not needed. Boston's subways are as congested as they are because of unbuilt relievers like Red-Blue and Silver Line Phase III, and because of constipated egresses at major transfer stations like Park and DTX. The congestion isn't because we're at real New York levels of ridership requiring separate local and express patterns to manage it all. Boston's still a far cry from that. Our issues are fixable by catching up on stuff that should've been done decades ago.

(2) It's probably physically impossible to stack express tracks anyway because of all the upper/lower stations downtown, number of water crossings we have, and the landfilling on large parts of the subway network. You wouldn't net more than insignificant, non-useful lengths of express track. And widening is just as big a pain under our narrow streets. Take a look at Summer St. between Park St. and Dewey Square, for instance; there's no way the Red Line tunnel is getting any bigger under a street that narrow.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Excellent info, thanks! Follow up if you don’t mind, since I definitely phrased my question not exactly as I meant to (but I still got some good info): What other projects would have higher priority than improving the Boston-Springfield route (regardless of who runs it)? More or less, at what point would we reach “well, we’ve built out everything else?”

That's an unanswerable question, because we have to walk and chew gum at the same time to solve all the region's transit needs. Many projects need to advance simultaneously covering a wide spread of audiences.

The Inland Route is definitely the most important intercity project in New England. The reason for that is it's the main capital expense enabling an array of route combos anchored around Springfield Hub. The NNEIRI study details more of this, but you can piece a very robust array of route configurations together like tinker toys.

• "Standard" Inland Shuttle: New Haven-Springfield + Springfield-Boston. One-seat.
• "Standard" Vermonter/future-Montrealer: Washington-New Haven-Springfield + Springfield-St. Albans/Montreal. One-seat.
• "Standard" Springfield NE Regional: Washington-New Haven-Springfield.
• Boston-Montreal (new) route: Boston-Springfield piece of standard Inland + Springfield-Montreal piece of standard Montrealer. One-seat.
• standard Montrealer meets opposite-direction standard Inland: an Inland slot to/from Boston gets timed to meet the daily Montrealer round-trip, allowing gain of additional BOS-MTL slot via two-seat w/cross-ticketing. Schedule for this second two-seater slot would be ideally spaced near-opposite end of the day from the direct train to offer up beneficial schedule flex for riders.
• Boston-Montreal meets Springfield Regional: the daily BOS-MTL round-trip hits a timed transfer with either an Inland or a full-blown Regional offering Vermonter/Montrealer patrons a second daily round-trip via two-seat w/cross ticketing. Likewise, spaced near-opposite end of day from the regular direct train to max the schedule flex.
• New York-Portland: otherwise regular Inland slot originates in NY, diverts over Grand Junction Branch to North Station, reverses direction to follow standard Downeaster route. Tiny margins for NY-POR patronage are supported by the passengers riding it as a more-or-less standard Inland or more-or-less standard Downeaster.

The "tinker toys" routes are all very low-cost to operate because their margins are hidden inside of the much bigger mainline Inland patronage, but that's how we end up getting more Vermonter/Montrealer (de facto) slots and Boston-Montreal slots out of it. As well as things on NNEPRA's bucket list like that NY-POR train that wouldn't be able to exist without having its margins well-embedded inside other routes. Everything ends up greater than sum of its parts.



You can branch off from there once things get better-established, such as engaging the B&A westbound to the Berkshires and Albany or seeing if there's more to tap in VT or CT. Real Boston-Albany service would no-doubt see itself getting established by doing these matchups of somebody's one-seater vs. somebody's timed transfer in order to give its starter schedule at least a couple decent options each direction on opposite ends of the day. Ditto if MassDOT has aims of tying in the Berkshires. And, yes, the commuter rail coattails are major if Springfield becomes a large Amtrak transfer hub. That's a big stimulus for Hartford Line growth and could influence the makeup (independent ops vs. run-thru w/ Hartford Line) of the eventual Knowledge Corridor CR service.

 

[sneijder]

No.

(1) It's probably not needed. Boston's subways are as congested as they are because of unbuilt relievers like Red-Blue and Silver Line Phase III, and because of constipated egresses at major transfer stations like Park and DTX. The congestion isn't because we're at real New York levels of ridership requiring separate local and express patterns to manage it all. Boston's still a far cry from that. Our issues are fixable by catching up on stuff that should've been done decades ago.

(2) It's probably physically impossible to stack express tracks anyway because of all the upper/lower stations downtown, number of water crossings we have, and the landfilling on large parts of the subway network. You wouldn't net more than insignificant, non-useful lengths of express track. And widening is just as big a pain under our narrow streets. Take a look at Summer St. between Park St. and Dewey Square, for instance; there's no way the Red Line tunnel is getting any bigger under a street that narrow.

Right.. just look at the amount of people that the Central/Northern/Picadilly lines move in London with two local tracks. We are no where near that, even on the Red Line trunk.

 

[George_Apley]

Yeah, Boston's crowding problems will be solved by better connective and radial service, no express tracks needed. F-Line mentioned Red-Blue and SLIII, but I'll add GLX to Porter and UR on the Grand Junction that would provide a lot of relief to Red between Harvard and Park, and transfer relief at Park Street itself.

Honestly I can't imagine what stops would be axed from the existing HRT lines for express service. Maybe if we ever have a dream expansion world with Orange to Reading, Red to Lexington, and Blue to Salem there would be problems with packed trains before even they even hit Wellington, Davis, and Maverick respectively, but even that wouldn't justify trying to build express tracks, better to just have some layover tracks built into each line, or use existing tracks at Wellington, Alewife, and Orient Heights to schedule empty trains into the urban core at the rush.

 

[JeffDowntown]

Yeah, Boston's crowding problems will be solved by better connective and radial service, no express tracks needed. F-Line mentioned Red-Blue and SLIII, but I'll add GLX to Porter and UR on the Grand Junction that would provide a lot of relief to Red between Harvard and Park, and transfer relief at Park Street itself.

Honestly I can't imagine what stops would be axed from the existing HRT lines for express service. Maybe if we ever have a dream expansion world with Orange to Reading, Red to Lexington, and Blue to Salem there would be problems with packed trains before even they even hit Wellington, Davis, and Maverick respectively, but even that wouldn't justify trying to build express tracks, better to just have some layover tracks built into each line, or use existing tracks at Wellington, Alewife, and Orient Heights to schedule empty trains into the urban core at the rush.

If we ever envision Express Service, I see it much more likely as 128 parking magnet sites to urban job centers (basically all heavily urban stops), so the express runs would most likely be surface.

 

[George_Apley]

If we ever envision Express Service, I see it much more likely as 128 parking magnet sites to urban job centers (basically all heavily urban stops), so the express runs would most likely be surface.

I guess this would only be applicable with the Orange Line to Reading. If Red ever makes it past Arlington Heights, there won't really be enough stops to justify express tracks and they'd be at wide, Commuter Rail intervals. Same goes for Blue past Lynn. If Blue goes to Salem there will maybe be four or five stops past Lynn Center.

IIRC, in New York trains tend to be locals on the branches and expressed once they hit a main line on Manhattan, which is not something we could do here.

 

[cubalibre]

What steps would be necessary before it made sense to run the commuter rail/regional rail from Boston to Springfield?

Not sure if that was already covered, but two articles about the feasibility studies about regular train services to Western Massachusetts, from using exiting rail to building new tracks for “high-speed” transit. No mention about costs for each option

https://www.masslive.com/news/2019/...-must-balance-speed-cost-and-convenience.html

https://www.masslive.com/news/2019/07/massdot-cites-6-options-for-springfield-boston-rail.html

 

[tysmith95]

I guess this would only be applicable with the Orange Line to Reading. If Red ever makes it past Arlington Heights, there won't really be enough stops to justify express tracks and they'd be at wide, Commuter Rail intervals. Same goes for Blue past Lynn. If Blue goes to Salem there will maybe be four or five stops past Lynn Center.

IIRC, in New York trains tend to be locals on the branches and expressed once they hit a main line on Manhattan, which is not something we could do here.

For the BLX, the Commuter Rail could be the "express" service.

 

[bakgwailo]

For the BLX, the Commuter Rail could be the "express" service.

In a RER world it would even be true at 15 minute head ways.

 

[George_Apley]

For the BLX, the Commuter Rail could be the "express" service.

Essentially, yeah. There would only be one RER stop between Lynn and Salem Depot (South Salem transfer to Blue), and then it would part ways with the Blue Line south of Lynn.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Essentially, yeah. There would only be one RER stop between Lynn and Salem Depot (South Salem transfer to Blue), and then it would part ways with the Blue Line south of Lynn.

Chelsea (Urban Ring), Lynn (Blue + buses galore), and south-of-portal Salem. The resetting of Lynn Terminal to bus equipment-cycling sanity with Blue's presence would then allow Salem to become a mini- bus terminal of its own for the communities on the currently hard-to-reach upper portions of 128 that have very poor frequencies and sparse route selection today.

So it would basically be a zero-fat RER schedule covering only the highest-leverage essentials with last-mile transfers now becoming the name of the game. That's going to be extremely valuable if NSRL gets built because the taut, transfer-plentiful schedule is just the bonanza southsiders are looking for at gaining access to the hardest-to-reach portion of Eastern MA from their perspective. It's a whole lot more than one-seat rides at stake; the destination selection available to them from hitting the Urban Ring, the outer end of a densely-populated subway line, and a major bus terminal they could never before get to. And the schedule trimming by having Blue swallow up the non-transfer stops backfills the capacity to do more pair-matching. That's needed with southside having a sharp disparity in number of lines, and the Reading Line likely needing to go away to Orange because it can't match well enough on capacity. So if you're mix/matching 3+ schedules on the Eastern, it helps a lot that the trains will be hitting Newburyport and Rockport in 45 minutes instead of an hour and that local crowding will be significantly tamed by Blue holding down the local stops to make dwells speedier on schedules that may be coming from a long way south.

It's always been a be careful what you wish for with NSRL. Enacting it INCREASES the pressure on building lots more rapid transit lines. This is one example. Blue would absorb a lot of local ridership if you extended it all the way to Salem. But it wouldn't cannibalize anything for North Shore ridership because RER's just going to load up for bear if the once-inaccessible southsiders get their run thru opportunities. In an NSRL future you probably need to do it all the same just to keep Eastern Route trains from exploding like burst soda cans at all the new faces.

 

[cats10000]

Would an underground walkway system be possible in Boston like the Toronto path or are the streets too narrow? Has it been proposed before? If it is feasible would this warrant a new thread.

 

[Charlie_mta]

Would an underground walkway system be possible in Boston like the Toronto path or are the streets too narrow? Has it been proposed before? If it is feasible would this warrant a new thread.

Under Washington Street is very narrow, as evidenced by the staggering of NB and SB Orange Line station platforms. I don't think a pedestrian tunnel could be built there. Along Summer Street it would have been possible to extend the concourse pedestrian tunnel to South Station, but the Central Artery tunnel cut it off in the 1950's. In the 60's the BRA had proposed an elevated, automated walkway above Summer Street from SS to Downtown Crossing, because tunneling wasn't possible.

The only feasible pedestrian tunnel idea I've heard of is to connect Bowdoin Station with Charles Station under Cambridge Street, but you might as well extend the Blue Line if you do all that utility relocation.

 

[cats10000]

How large could it grow? could we have a system of tunnels running from dtx to the pru? Could it even go further, to Longwood? What about mgh? How wide is tremont?

 

[fattony]

How large could it grow? could we have a system of tunnels running from dtx to the pru? Could it even go further, to Longwood? What about mgh?

Why would you want that? Is so horrible to walk on the street?

 

[Tallguy]

Under Washington Street is very narrow, as evidenced by the staggering of NB and SB Orange Line station platforms. I don't think a pedestrian tunnel could be built there. Along Summer Street it would have been possible to extend the concourse pedestrian tunnel to South Station, but the Central Artery tunnel cut it off in the 1950's. In the 60's the BRA had proposed an elevated, automated walkway above Summer Street from SS to Downtown Crossing, because tunneling wasn't possible.

The only feasible pedestrian tunnel idea I've heard of is to connect Bowdoin Station with Charles Station under Cambridge Street, but you might as well extend the Blue Line if you do all that utility relocation.

I think you are focusing more on connecting t stops than the proposer is. NYC has a few places where interconnected basements provide a fair distance out of the weather

 

[George_Apley]

Would an underground walkway system be possible in Boston like the Toronto path or are the streets too narrow? Has it been proposed before? If it is feasible would this warrant a new thread.

I don't think it's feasible. Aren't most city's connected underground/out of weather walkways either connecting transit stations or built by private developers? Seems like skyways would be much more appealing for pedestrians than little tunnels, but the whole enterprise seems like a waste of money.

Maybe make a new thread if you want to dig in deeper. It's not really a crazy transit pitch.

 

[cats10000]

Why would you want that? Is so horrible to walk on the street?

It would be good for the winter and summer.

 

[Massachoicetts]

How crazy would it be to add a North Station to Charlestown/North Point to Everett to Chelsea to Revere to Blue Line connection at Revere Beach? Maybe call it a deviation of the Orange Line, or maybe call it the Yellow Line.... running pax from NS to Chelsea and Revere via Everett/Casino, would be a hugely profitable line and help speed up redevelopment in Everett, Chelsea and Revere... Then when the Blue Line extends to Lynn, they could change somewhere where this New Line meets the Blue Line and go to Chelsea, Casino or North Station alot quicker.

Why isnt this an option?