Do they have an estimated ridership for the Rozzie square extension? I'd be curious how that compares to BL Lynn or RBConnector?
Also, am I right that the Forest Hills - Hyde Park segment is three or four-tracked all the way down after the Needham line branches off? That seems like an even easier OL extension than Needham/W Rox.
They only projected FH-128 via Rozzie and didn't segment it by stop, but that was +11,300 riders. A whole lot of that was diversion from buses, which is sort of the whole point with 9 slow routes duplicating each other between FH and Rozzie. Rozzie should be at least as large a bus transfer than FH if they were segmented out, and the largest stop on this extension by ridership. I truly believe that if we had a Mayor who acknowledged at all that that neighborhood existed that this would be rolling by now, especially being able to punt the whither CR/Needham question down the road by first-phasing it on the portion of the ROW wide enough to fit both modes.
The 35/36/37 duplicate Bellevue and Highland before diverging at West Roxbury and the 52 passes within a couple blocks, so that's point in favor of second-phasing it there. Going all the way 128 I'm not sure is worth doing on Orange. Relocating Hersey to Greendale Ave. is still not close enough to the Great Plain Ave. exit to be much of a draw and there's no TOD potential there, so I think the ridership past W. Rox is going to crater too severely to merit it. Highland Ave./Green is a much better 128 stop by location, density, and redevelopment attention, and the ridership curve on that route to Needham Jct. doesn't fall off a cliff like Orange would past W. Rox.
Probably worth a re-study segmenting this out further. But Rozzie's going to be the biggie that also makes the bus system run a whole lot better. And West Rox is the effective cutoff point before it dwindles to a trace.
The Hyde Park routing fared poorer on ridership--4700 boardings--because the 32 is the only bus that parallels the whole route and station spacing was a lot wider with only Mt. Hope as intermediate stop between FH and HP. Hyde Park station's largely duplicated by the Fairmount CR stop 3 blocks away, so Orange headways over high-frequency Fairmount CR don't have the same ridership boost here as with the Needham Line stops. Also would impose serious capacity constraint to reduce the NEC from 3 to 2 tracks, requiring half the trains to be sent over the Fairmount missing Back Bay. No bloody way in hell is Amtrak allowing that with its trains, so that would bust the number of Franklin, Stoughton/South Coast, and Providence riders with Back Bay access down to a minority (small or zero minority for the branches) of the schedule. Which also would be hugely unpopular.
4th track's coming back anyway in Amtrak's NEC cap improvements plan to handle projected 2030 loads, so it could only be 5 years before the ROW is maxed out. They want slow Franklin and Stoughton trains on totally separate tracks from Amtraks and potentially faster Providences so they can get up past 100 MPH between FH and Westwood/128 instead of crawling through Readville. And that's probably the appropriate move for the kind of intercity growth we can expect. Doing Fairmount-to-128 at good headways is good enough.
(Besides, Hizzoner couldn't be arsed to pull any favors for his home base. Cleary Square vicinity is lucky the Big Dig commitments give Fairmount and Readville the love they're getting, because it sure wasn't due to their favorite son's efforts.)
EDIT: Blue-Lynn is +21,000 riders, Red-Blue +6500 (that's Blue-exclusive new paid boardings, not Red transfers who boarded elsewhere on Red.) Yeah...those are still the two undisputed one-ton elephants of the needs list.
