Crazy Transit Pitches

[Charlie_mta]

Perfect time to site this study again. Even in fall 2019, the absolute peak of modern MBTA ridership, Alewife had more passengers accessing the station via bus than by parking at it.
View attachment 39510
Alewife also being the rapid transit station with the most available parking spaces at 2733 had hundreds of spaces left unoccupied. Braintree and Quincy Adams have terrible bus service and don't see the same numbers. This extends to Commuter Rail stations to.
View attachment 39512
If there isnt parking, people will use other modes, and even if there is parking, if theres an alternate way to comfortably and conventietnly reach the station, people will do that instead.

Getting rid of the Alewife garage is an intriguing idea, and I like it. For one, it would reduce the traffic at the Rte 2/16 intersection and at the intersection in front of the station at Alewife Brook Pkwy. The footprint of the removed garage could be developed into residential TOD, with retail on the ground floor. A couple of well designed 30 story towers would make a great entrance to Cambridge from the northwest.

 

[Tallguy]

Getting rid of the Alewife garage is an intriguing idea, and I like it. For one, it would reduce the traffic at the Rte 2/16 intersection and at the intersection in front of the station at Alewife Brook Pkwy. The footprint of the removed garage could be developed into residential TOD, with retail on the ground floor. A couple of well designed 30 story towers would make a great entrance to Cambridge from the northwest.

Might work if a Weston P&R was built in RR world. And a LRT extension from Arlington Heights to Burlington would be more sellable or even a version of those rubber tired trams that China is using...

 

[Teban54]

Alewife also being the rapid transit station with the most available parking spaces at 2733 had hundreds of spaces left unoccupied. Braintree and Quincy Adams have terrible bus service and don't see the same numbers. This extends to Commuter Rail stations to.

Didn't Alewife also have bad bus connections that are somewhat comparable to Braintree? The 62, 67, 76, 79, 84, 350 and 351 weren't exactly frequent by any means.

 

[Koopzilla24]

Didn't Alewife also have bad bus connections that are somewhat comparable to Braintree? The 62, 67, 76, 79, 84, 350 and 351 weren't exactly frequent by any means.

Yes indeed, and all those routes were/are commuter-focused routes rather than all-day service. Yet despite that bus transfers still beat out car parkers. Shows how little relative importance the garage really has to the functionality and usage of Alewife.

 

[Riverside]

My vote is an extension all the way to Burlington Mall along the utility corridor (tunnel under the hill or do as an elevated structure nature will recover). HUGE employment center there and it'd be a place for kids to easily access to hangout via RLX.
View attachment 39513

A corridor like this could extend further, especially if it's LRT. (Or could be split between LRT and HRT.)

A combination of median-running along Burlington Mall Road and the powerline ROW northeast of Exit 51 allows you to connect the Burlington employment center with the intermodal hub at Anderson/Woburn.

The eastern half of this route along the powerline ROW would probably traverse the 3.6 miles non-stop. As a rough estimate, Concord <> Lincoln is 3.4 miles and is traversed by the commuter rail in 6 minutes at an average of 34 mph; LRT has a lower top speed but faster acceleration, so running at 30+ mph seems plausible enough. That would put the travel time through this section at 7 minutes, which is definitely competitive with a shuttle bus running via the highways (and would have better reliability either way):

How far you continue the LRT route toward the west depends on which extensions you end up going for on the Minuteman and where you choose to plop the terminus. But an LRT route could

• terminate at Burlington Mall
• continue south down the Minuteman
• continue west to Hanscom via street-running on Hartwell Ave and Barksdale St
• turn northwest and terminate in downtown Bedford (with an extension to Concord if you feel like jousting with the rail trail)

The biggest argument against an Anderson/Woburn <> Burlington Mall LRT line is that, AFAIK, there currently is no bus route between the two. Reverse commuters to Burlington are probably driving or taking the 350. However, increased frequencies on the Lowell Line might change this; today Anderson/Woburn gets 45 min peak/1 hour off-peak frequencies, but in a future where it serves 30-min service to Lowell, 30-min service to Haverhill, plus an additional services layered on top, it would become much friendlier to transit-based reverse commutes.

 

[jklo]

The point of extending transit to Burlington is to get the riders to Kendall. The Lowell Line has bad synergy with Kendall, but perhaps that could be fixed.

 

[Aprehensive_Words]

A corridor like this could extend further, especially if it's LRT. (Or could be split between LRT and HRT.)

View attachment 39715

View attachment 39716

A combination of median-running along Burlington Mall Road and the powerline ROW northeast of Exit 51 allows you to connect the Burlington employment center with the intermodal hub at Anderson/Woburn.

The eastern half of this route along the powerline ROW would probably traverse the 3.6 miles non-stop. As a rough estimate, Concord <> Lincoln is 3.4 miles and is traversed by the commuter rail in 6 minutes at an average of 34 mph; LRT has a lower top speed but faster acceleration, so running at 30+ mph seems plausible enough. That would put the travel time through this section at 7 minutes, which is definitely competitive with a shuttle bus running via the highways (and would have better reliability either way):

View attachment 39717

How far you continue the LRT route toward the west depends on which extensions you end up going for on the Minuteman and where you choose to plop the terminus. But an LRT route could

• terminate at Burlington Mall
• continue south down the Minuteman
• continue west to Hanscom via street-running on Hartwell Ave and Barksdale St
• turn northwest and terminate in downtown Bedford (with an extension to Concord if you feel like jousting with the rail trail)

The biggest argument against an Anderson/Woburn <> Burlington Mall LRT line is that, AFAIK, there currently is no bus route between the two. Reverse commuters to Burlington are probably driving or taking the 350. However, increased frequencies on the Lowell Line might change this; today Anderson/Woburn gets 45 min peak/1 hour off-peak frequencies, but in a future where it serves 30-min service to Lowell, 30-min service to Haverhill, plus an additional services layered on top, it would become much friendlier to transit-based reverse commutes.

I like the idea!

I suspect you're leaving out some important demand nodes by following the utility corridor past Cambridge Street/3A instead of trying to use parts of the 128 ROW, though -- the Cummings Tradecenter at the Woburn rotary (and its adjoining multifamily developments) and the ex-Woburn Mall development at Exit 54. And since this would be out in the suburbs, it'd be a shame to go so far north you miss a chance to pick up bus riders from Woburn and Stoneham.

Maybe if you run elevated (HART-style) down the center of the highway, perhaps deviating to the north when it's time for a station since that's where the biggest walk-up demand generators are? Could still connect to the Lowell Line via a rehabilitated station at Mishuwam and still have the option of going all the way to Reading to link up with the Reading-Melrose corridor whether that ever gets Orange'd or not. The Haverhill ROW there is amusingly triple-tracked almost the whole way between Reading Center and 128.

(FWIW pre-pandemic there was a limited bus shuttle run by either the town or a business improvement district that linked hee Burlington Mall to either Anderson or Mishuwam, and Burlington is aiming to pretty radically upzone that whole Mall Road corridor: https://www.burlington.org/801/MassDevelopment-Mall-Road-Corridor. B&T had a story over the winter that quoted "4.4 million square feet of new development including 1,815 housing units" as a hypothetical maximum build-out)

EDIT: Correcting track count on Haverhill Line ROW in Reading.

 

[Koopzilla24]

This is getting to the point where a Green or Red extension is becoming a 128 circumferential line or Reading-Lexington Interurban. This got me thinking there's a certain area of the state with very good potential for an interurban, the Merrimack Valley of Lowell-Lawrence-Haverhill, and potentially Nashua.

As far as I can tell the Freight Main Line via Wamesit has enough ROW Lowell to Andover but I'd imagine it's a whole separate freight line due to heavy freight traffic so that may be off the cards. The old Lowell & Lawrence ROW seems almost entirely extant and unblocked as a utility corridor minus some condo parking lots. The easiest and most straightforward way to go about it would be using Stadler DMUs and operating on the freight line via Wamesit adding a second track. The 4 cities have 364,000 people including Nashua and 272,500 without. There's the potential for a big economic revival of the Merrimack Valley region with better mobility in the region that is already in progress.

 

[jklo]

re: Alewife, I wouldn't be surprised if the parking ridership was depressed because of how awful it is to get in and out of there. I imagine there's a ton of people who just decided it was just better to keep going and go to a garage in Cambridge.

I think fixing that rotary-whatever-it-is is too difficult because of the wetlands.

 

[Riverside]

I like the idea!

I suspect you're leaving out some important demand nodes by following the utility corridor past Cambridge Street/3A instead of trying to use parts of the 128 ROW, though -- the Cummings Tradecenter at the Woburn rotary (and its adjoining multifamily developments) and the ex-Woburn Mall development at Exit 54. And since this would be out in the suburbs, it'd be a shame to go so far north you miss a chance to pick up bus riders from Woburn and Stoneham.

Maybe if you run elevated (HART-style) down the center of the highway, perhaps deviating to the north when it's time for a station since that's where the biggest walk-up demand generators are? Could still connect to the Lowell Line via a rehabilitated station at Mishuwam and still have the option of going all the way to Reading to link up with the Reading-Melrose corridor whether that ever gets Orange'd or not. The Haverhill ROW there is amusingly triple-tracked almost the whole way between Reading Center and 128.

View attachment 39722

(FWIW pre-pandemic there was a limited bus shuttle run by either the town or a business improvement district that linked hee Burlington Mall to either Anderson or Mishuwam, and Burlington is aiming to pretty radically upzone that whole Mall Road corridor: https://www.burlington.org/801/MassDevelopment-Mall-Road-Corridor. B&T had a story over the winter that quoted "4.4 million square feet of new development including 1,815 housing units" as a hypothetical maximum build-out)

EDIT: Correcting track count on Haverhill Line ROW in Reading.

Yeah, very good thoughts, and yes, I'd definitely love a HART-style elevated along there. To your point about Reading: I was loosely imagining leveraging @F-Line to Dudley's suggestion to loop a Reading OLX over to terminate at Anderson/Woburn -- that would solve your Orange Line connection issue.

This is getting to the point where a Green or Red extension is becoming a 128 circumferential line or Reading-Lexington Interurban.

Yeah, to be clear, I don't see a Woburn <> Burlington service through-running all the way into the core. At most, I could see it terminating Ashmont-style at Alewife or somewhere in Arlington. A Red/Green extension to Burlington with a separate circumferential service seems like the best middle ground.

This got me thinking there's a certain area of the state with very good potential for an interurban, the Merrimack Valley of Lowell-Lawrence-Haverhill, and potentially Nashua.

As far as I can tell the Freight Main Line via Wamesit has enough ROW Lowell to Andover but I'd imagine it's a whole separate freight line due to heavy freight traffic so that may be off the cards. The old Lowell & Lawrence ROW seems almost entirely extant and unblocked as a utility corridor minus some condo parking lots. The easiest and most straightforward way to go about it would be using Stadler DMUs and operating on the freight line via Wamesit adding a second track. The 4 cities have 364,000 people including Nashua and 272,500 without. There's the potential for a big economic revival of the Merrimack Valley region with better mobility in the region that is already in progress.

I would need to look again, but the last time I'm looked at this idea -- and I agree that it's extremely tempting -- it seemed like it would be very hard to compete with an intercity bus service running via the highways (even with traffic). The problem is that the junction at Ballardvale requires a very significant deviation to the south, compared to the highway, which hews closer to the as-the-crow-flies route. The rail route from Lowell to Lawrence is something like 13 miles, compared to 8 miles as the crow files.

Maybe with modern equipment the trip could be shortened, but back in the day, IIRC, it took trains over an hour to go from Lowell to Haverhill -- much longer than I expected.

 

[Koopzilla24]

I would need to look again, but the last time I'm looked at this idea -- and I agree that it's extremely tempting -- it seemed like it would be very hard to compete with an intercity bus service running via the highways (even with traffic). The problem is that the junction at Ballardvale requires a very significant deviation to the south, compared to the highway, which hews closer to the as-the-crow-flies route. The rail route from Lowell to Lawrence is something like 13 miles, compared to 8 miles as the crow files.

Maybe with modern equipment the trip could be shortened, but back in the day, IIRC, it took trains over an hour to go from Lowell to Haverhill -- much longer than I expected.

I'm most concerned with the lack of capacity of an intercity bus and the worse quality of service making it an infrequent and not very usable service. During peak hours, driving from Haverhill to Lowell takes up to 45min. An intercity bus via the highway would immediately lose competitiveness with the existing MEVA Route 24 if it makes any stops between the cities. The point of a potential rail service between these cities would be to provide a single-seat connection between the centers of Lowell, Tewksbury, Andover, Lawrence, and Haverhill (potentially Nashua). There is currently no such service that exists besides the 2hr long MEVA Route 01/24 and the projected population and job growth of the region would make a traffic bypassing more climate-friendly travel solution a good bet for the future.

As-is Haverhill to Ballardvale during peak is 20min over 12.5 miles with three stops. Ballardvale to Lowell is about 9 miles with one stop in Tewksbury. The line has minimal curves and a handful of grade crossings so with minor track upgrades to even just 40mph operational speeds I'd think the absolute most the segment would take is 25min. That would put it right in line with a bus with no stops in peak traffic at 45min.
The startup costs to make such a thing happen would definately be prohibitive in a place that hates transit spending compared to just running a bus, but thats why its a crazy tansit pitch and not a resonable one.

 

[Riverside]

I'm most concerned with the lack of capacity of an intercity bus and the worse quality of service making it an infrequent and not very usable service. During peak hours, driving from Haverhill to Lowell takes up to 45min. An intercity bus via the highway would immediately lose competitiveness with the existing MEVA Route 24 if it makes any stops between the cities. The point of a potential rail service between these cities would be to provide a single-seat connection between the centers of Lowell, Tewksbury, Andover, Lawrence, and Haverhill (potentially Nashua). There is currently no such service that exists besides the 2hr long MEVA Route 01/24 and the projected population and job growth of the region would make a traffic bypassing more climate-friendly travel solution a good bet for the future.
View attachment 39756View attachment 39757
As-is Haverhill to Ballardvale during peak is 20min over 12.5 miles with three stops. Ballardvale to Lowell is about 9 miles with one stop in Tewksbury. The line has minimal curves and a handful of grade crossings so with minor track upgrades to even just 40mph operational speeds I'd think the absolute most the segment would take is 25min. That would put it right in line with a bus with no stops in peak traffic at 45min.
The startup costs to make such a thing happen would definately be prohibitive in a place that hates transit spending compared to just running a bus, but thats why its a crazy tansit pitch and not a resonable one.

Certainly a convincing argument!

 

[Charlie_mta]

On the Reasonable Transit Pitches thread, Henry Alan reported on a proposal to extend the Mattapan/Ashmont line to Readville. Since there is a fairly extant abandoned RR ROW from Readville to Dedham, I am thinking, why not extend it even further to downtown Dedham? Light Green would be surface (except for a flyover at Readville to get over the tracks and roadways), and red is tunnel. Stations are shown as a red tram symbol on this Google map.

Note: edited to correct the reference to Henry Alan

 

[Teban54]

On the Reasonable Transit Pitches thread, George Apley reported on a proposal to extend the Mattapan/Ashmont line to Readville. Since there is a fairly extant abandoned RR ROW from Readville to Dedham, I am thinking, why not extend it even further to downtown Dedham? Light Green would be surface (except for a flyover at Readville to get over the tracks and roadways), and red is tunnel. Stations are shown as a red tram symbol on this Google map.

Great work! @F-Line to Dudley actually wrote about similar proposals on an extension to Dedham Center via Readville, except he did it as a Red Line extension and not as light rail. This post and this post provide some details.

In a Regional Rail world with :15 freqs on the Providence/Stoughton Line, I think LRT may indeed be more realistic in the short term (most Dedham passengers will probably transfer to RR at Readville), perhaps with provisions for a future RL conversion. Especially when an RL extension to Mattapan in the short term is looking less likely with the momentum for Fairmount electrification.

 

[ritchiew]

On the Reasonable Transit Pitches thread, Henry Alan reported on a proposal to extend the Mattapan/Ashmont line to Readville. Since there is a fairly extant abandoned RR ROW from Readville to Dedham, I am thinking, why not extend it even further to downtown Dedham? Light Green would be surface (except for a flyover at Readville to get over the tracks and roadways), and red is tunnel. Stations are shown as a red tram symbol on this Google map.

Note: edited to correct the reference to Henry Alan

Is there a reason you put the final Dedham stop where you did? You could tunnel the last small section to go under the Providence Highway to put the final station at the current parking lot at High St and Eastern Ave, right among the shops and restaurants. There's obviously the cost of an added tunnel, plus I also don't really know Dedham and wondering if there's something else I'm missing.

There are a bunch of more modern stations that take passengers near-ish-but-not-directly-to where they're trying to go (like some GLX stops) or leave them in some pedestrian unfriendly spots (like Community College or Sullivan Sq). They make the public transit less convenient, pleasant, or useful. Your proposed station location is a pretty minor example of the kind of thing I'm talking about. But still, it could be shifted one block west to a much more pedestrian friendly area.

 

[WarpedReality]

Dedham-Mattapan-Ashmont LRT plus a Needham Green Line Branch would cause endless frustration as amateur urban planners on the internet try to crayon a connection between the two.

 

[Charlie_mta]

Is there a reason you put the final Dedham stop where you did? You could tunnel the last small section to go under the Providence Highway to put the final station at the current parking lot at High St and Eastern Ave, right among the shops and restaurants. There's obviously the cost of an added tunnel, plus I also don't really know Dedham and wondering if there's something else I'm missing.

There are a bunch of more modern stations that take passengers near-ish-but-not-directly-to where they're trying to go (like some GLX stops) or leave them in some pedestrian unfriendly spots (like Community College or Sullivan Sq). They make the public transit less convenient, pleasant, or useful. Your proposed station location is a pretty minor example of the kind of thing I'm talking about. But still, it could be shifted one block west to a much more pedestrian friendly area.

As you alluded to, the line could go further into downtown Dedham with a tunnel. I was looking to keep as much of the line on the surface as possible, but a tunnel where you described would be viable.

 

[ulrichomega]

Dedham-Mattapan-Ashmont LRT plus a Needham Green Line Branch would cause endless frustration as amateur urban planners on the internet try to crayon a connection between the two.

Extend the Red line to Arlington via Riverside.

1. Existing Mattapan Line.
2. Fairmount Line
3. Dedham Branch all the way around to existing Needham Line
4. Needham Line to Newton Highlands
5. Existing D Branch
6. I-95 ROW up to abandoned Waltham ROW
7. Minuteman Bike Trail to I-95.

 

[Delvin4519]

View attachment 40135

Extend the Red line to Arlington via Riverside.

1. Existing Mattapan Line.
2. Fairmount Line
3. Dedham Branch all the way around to existing Needham Line
4. Needham Line to Newton Highlands
5. Existing D Branch
6. I-95 ROW up to abandoned Waltham ROW
7. Minuteman Bike Trail to I-95.

How about looping back from Riverside into Newtonville and Newton Corner, then go up the 57 bus to Watertown Yd./Watertown Sq., then Watertown branch to West Cambridge/Alewife/Porter, then Minuteman Bike trail

 

[ulrichomega]

How about looping back from Riverside into Newtonville and Newton Corner, then go up the 57 bus to Watertown Yd./Watertown Sq., then Watertown branch to West Cambridge/Alewife/Porter, then Minuteman Bike train

snip

Seems a little too practical.

You can also use some of the Alewife Brook Parkway and tunnels through Medford to get over to the Northern Strand. I call it the Suburban Ring.