I don't think its a good idea, but it's been proposed.
I don't think anyone else thought it was a good idea when it was proposed back then, either. (How old are those?)
I do however think Blue Line to Salem is a good idea. You are too Boston-centric in your thinking. I think you would see the same inverse commuting and town to town trips you see on the D line after a few years, it wouldn't just be people riding from Salem to Boston.
Yes, I'm being Boston-centric - because Boston is at the center of the system, and the entire system is impacted in ways that aren't always immediately evident when you extend its reach or alter its service patterns. You brought up the D branch, which is an excellent example of 'unintended consequences' - as the unexpectedly high demand it placed and is still placing today on the Central Subway is very much a significant contributor to why the Green Line wasn't/isn't able to support any more growth - and why the Green Line started shrinking just two years after the D came online. Bad load-balancing is to blame there. That's not to say it's the only reason and that's not to say we never should have done it - but I think it makes a great case for stopping and thinking about how our farthest-flung extension plans are going to impact the system in its core before we rush forward and end up having to cut headways because, oops, those can't lose ridership projects added to the existing capacity problems downtown mean our entire system locks up at crush hour without fail.
For the record, we know that this will happen because the system is already struggling to handle peak demands at Government Center and State. Things like this are why we can't move forward on ANY Blue Line Extension until Red-Blue is completed. I'm sorry that it's a very Boston-centric argument, but the core has to be fixed before anything else.
Salem is also a must see trip, and tourists are FAR more likely to ride the subway than the commuter rail. They almost certainly have a pass already. People passing through Lynn would also be a boon to the area, I could see it developing a scene all its own, especially with a Salem State stop.
I'll get back to the main thrust of my argument in a minute, because I don't really like rearranging quote blocks, but "tourists won't ride the commuter rail" is a branding/marketing issue, not a technical one. And, for the record, I think that our time, energy and capital is much better invested in making the commuter rail a more attractive proposition - because it is a vital part of our mass transit network. The subway and the commuter rail shouldn't be in direct competition with each other.
Youve also got people riding from Pelham and Eastchester into Manhattan, as well as the Rockaways. Yes its NYC and not Boston, but this is also the Blue Line and not the IRT. Going express between Airport and Lynn also will make a huge difference in trip times, probably getting you downtown faster then the commuter rail could even with identical headway's.
Express routings are another thing that can't realistically enter the conversation because our system can't really handle express routings. We're not NYC. We could be NYC, but that would require a serious, messy, and very expensive investment into our transit network.
NYC's system has redundancies all over the place, and is built out to the point where it can actually handle 24-hour operation, express routings, and far-flung extensions every which way. Ours is not, and the price tag to get that kind of operational flexibility is well above what anyone is willing to pay.
Would I like to be able to hop on the Blue Line and ride it all the way to Salem, or Waltham, or Watertown? Sure! Would I like to be able to ride that train at 3 AM? Absolutely. And, hell, would I like to maybe get off at Charles/MGH and get on a Red Line Express that doesn't stop again until Porter? Sign me up! But do I think that we can realistically have any of those things with the system as it is now? Not as such, no. There's a lot of work to be done - we've still got a long, long way to go to get to where we need to be. And we really, really shouldn't be talking about where we want to be before we've gotten where we need to be.
Fix the core first, knock out the improvements that should have been made in 1983 (or, in some cases, 1953) instead of 2013 second, and then - when the system isn't so precariously perched on the edge of a cliff - then we can come back to this and talk about BLX to Salem or GLX to Woburn/Anderson or flipping the Reading and Needham Lines as OLX, because then it'll be a whole hell of a lot less likely that we end up becoming victims of our own success.
First, regarding Blue Line to Natick/Framingham: it's a cool idea, and is something I'd love to see someday (along with Orange Line to Norwood, Green Line to Bedford, Red Line to Burlington and Brockton, et cetera). But I think, in and of itself, it's not really equivalent to Blue Line to Salem (which I also think should happen, and more immediately than any of those other extensions I mentioned), for many of the same reasons already mentioned. (I was going to toss Salem State out there, but then I realized that Framingham State is almost as big.)
Second: that 128 issue is fascinating to me. I think I've said this before, but Boston, and to an extent, Metro Boston, really are lopsided, mainly because Boston City annexed much more to the south than it did to the north. The city of Boston's southernmost point is 1.5 miles from 128– and almost all of that is nature preserve. Its easternmost point (in West Roxbury) is less than half a mile from 128. (Also mainly nature in that stretch.) But it's northernmost points, in Charlestown and Orient Heights, are more than 7.5 miles from 128, with multiple suburbs in the space between.
Plus, in the south, you have Quincy, the 3rd largest city within 128, after Boston and Cambridge. Indeed, of the largest twenty cities in the commonwealth (by population), none of those within 128 are located more than about 5.5 miles north of downtown (Boston, Cambridge, Quincy, Newton, Somerville, Waltham, Malden, Brookline, Medford), except for one: Lynn. If you go 5.5 miles south of downtown, you're around Morton Street and Gallivan Blvd; still have several more miles of urban communities ahead of you.
So density within 128 is clearly concentrated in the southern half and the eastern "quadrant". (The western "quadrant" would be Boston Harbor.) This, combined with CBS's good point about Reading, Needham and Norwood, gives me pause regarding the "128 rule of thumb".
I didn't point out mileages purely for my own benefit. It might not be the most 'equitable' way of determining who should get the T and who shouldn't, but engineering and logistical realities aren't always fair.
To expand on my response to davem and my initial panning of Blue - Salem, I'm not denying that there's big ridership numbers tied up in that. (The only thing I'm skeptical of is the idea that five-sixths of the riders evaporate if it's a Commuter Rail project and not a Blue Line extension - more on that further down.) What I'm saying is that the system cannot support such a far-flung extension. The ridership numbers add up, but the engineering ones don't. What good is Blue-Salem going to do anyone, for example, if a dead train at Swampscott causes the entire line to lock up, possibly for an hour or more, in the same way that the Red Line dies if a train goes down at Porter or Broadway (or anywhere else, but I'm struggling to remember incidents that weren't one or the other)? Say we need to pull a train off the tracks way out there - where's it going? How are you going to get it back to Orient Heights Yard? I'm not saying it can't be done, it can very easily be done, but the butterfly effect of something going wrong somewhere out on the fringes rippling downstream and becoming a monumental disaster isn't exactly me standing on the rooftops screaming about the end times.
It happens already. Hell, sometimes the entire system locks up when there was no real problem to begin with!
Much like how the improvements to Readville Yard that I called and am calling for aren't sexy enough to make the front page like a South Station Expansion, it would allay my fears of disaster a lot if Blue-Salem was a package deal with a maintenance facility out on the edges there - and please, if that's in the plans somewhere, I'd love to see it - but I have the sinking feeling that if there is one in the plan, it's never going to make it out to build.
Also, CBS, I'm sorry I never replied to your post replying to my post about short-turned shuttles. I understand your argument, but I still worry about the complexity of such a system. What if a breakdown occurs in one of those "trunk" sections? (Particularly between Park and GC.) With short-turns, the system is already designed to contain and lessen the effects of such incidents.
And, in my defense, I was discussing short-turn LRT in the context of a converted-to-HRT mainline. If we're gonna maintain the LRT system, then I'm much less enthusiastic about short-turns. (Though I see now in hindsight that what I wrote makes that unclear; mea culpa.)
For the system to work, the trunk needs to have some level of redundancy - basically, we need three or four tracks so that things can still flow reasonably well even if a disabled train takes one of the tracks offline. (Side note: three or four tracks is also required for 24-hour operation, so that you can deliberately take one or two tracks at a time down for routine maintenance instead of taking the entire system offline.)
The real issue with the Park-GC segment is that it's impossible to expand. Fortunately, it's also not that large, and there's room to grow on either side. If something goes wrong, it's just a matter of dragging the disabled train back to one station or the other and then just routing all the trains that were using the now-disabled track onto the track that's still working.
Again, the biggest problem is the ripple effect that anything going wrong causes. In the case of the parts of the Central Subway where we've got four tracks, it's not that hard to route around the problem (and, worth mentioning, you can only take a track out of commission once - if a second train breaks, you can just tow it over to sit behind the first broken train) - the problems start coming when you're 7 or 8 miles away from the nearest turnout, you have no way to get your dead train off of the line and you're down to a single track while your maintenance department scrambles to figure something out because nobody was thinking about failsafes when you set this whole thing up. Then you've got the ripple effect and your one disabled train turns into an hour delay and a bunch of pissed off people sitting on platforms up and down the line.
That said, though, even if it is logistically possible for more LRT to go into downtown in the current tunnels, the T has basically said that it isn't possible, which may, in and of itself, create problems.
Fair enough. I said earlier in this post that the D branch was hosing a lot of the Central Subway's capacity, but that it wasn't entirely to blame. And, in fact, when the T says "we can't run any more trains through those tunnels" - they're right. As the system is now, we've hit the ceiling and growth is impossible. The funny thing is, that ceiling's pretty fragile and we already know exactly what needs to be done to break it. The problem is, the T is treating it as a solid, impenetrable upper bound when it's not.
The Green Line is still using technology that was state of the art in 1899 - America's oldest subway system is showing its age, and that's the biggest problem. A proper, 21st-century signaling system - beyond probably preventing most of the recent Green Line crashes - would open up entire new worlds of capacity in the Central Subway, and what it can't fix, better load balancing will.
I'll be honest: I don't know jack about a lot of things. As such, I don't know how to evaluate the T's statement about Central Subway capacity. I know what they've said, I know what you and F-Line and Van have said, I know what the APTA has said, I know the levels those tunnels historically operated at. But I don't have an exhaustive understanding of the topic, nor do I have any way to evaluate what I do know, except through logical reasoning (ie. "Well, that makes sense.")
I'll admit I don't have all the answers - I'm not on the MBTA's payroll and I don't have access to anything they're not publicly disclosing, so realistically, I can't have all the answers.
I'll also admit that I have good days and bad days, sometimes I'm on my game and sometimes I'm not. I'm human, I make mistakes, I say stupid things sometimes. I like to think, however, that I'm capable of learning from my mistakes and admitting when I'm wrong and growing as a person.
And for all the back and forth that I do here and elsewhere, I'm genuinely learning a lot, and I'm grateful for all the opportunities I've had to talk (and argue) with people about this sort of thing - and I try to apply what I've learned wherever I can. There's bound to be a lot of missteps along the way, but that's part of the learning experience.
There was a lot more rambling here, and this is probably going to end up in the "posts I made and then regretted the next day" file, but the point I'm trying to get to is this: I think you're selling yourself short. A willingness to learn, to learn as you go and to be wrong is the most important thing you can have.
So, as such, I must allow for the possibility that, in fact, the T is right and the rest of us are missing something (what, I have no idea) and the tunnels really are at capacity.
However, in any case, the T has painted themselves into a corner here politically. No more trains in the Central Subway. So the case very well may be that the only way we will see additional service on the Green Line is to use short-turns. So I think, problematic as they are, short-turned service should be considered in our discussion of crazy transit ideas.
I welcome the discussion. I just don't think that short-turns are the right answer - there is value in through-running.
