We should remove all stops, then? Not to be absurd, but what's the point?
No, just the ones that are locked off from public access/usage. That's really my only issue with it, especially given the proximity to at least
one (possibly
two or
three depending on where precisely you draw the property lines for the plant) much better locations that would be accessible and useful to the general public.
Really, the best possible location is probably "no stop at all" considering how close any of those locations and River Works itself are to Lynn. No chance any train can even hit top speed out of one stop before having to slow down for the other.
It's a very large plant, much larger still when that stop was added in 1965. And they have no reason to get rid of it when it's still chucking in more paying riders than several other full-time northside stops. GE's a union shop you can set a clock to the shift changes; like three-quarters of its use comes crammed on just a couple rush hour trains per day. It's an insta-skip the rest of time. Find something else to get infuriated about than a non-issue like this. It's a strip of asphalt the T doesn't have to maintain or ADA that's paying more revenue than several full-time stops they choose to spend real money on, like Mishawum.
Employee flag stops are nothing new.
This one, halfway between Mishawum and Anderson, was only for employees of the Lechmere furniture warehouse in Woburn, and lasted until they went out of business in '96. No, they are not going to consider adding any new ones for that expressed purpose, but they are not going to get rid one for 'purity' reason when it's still chucking in healthy daily profit.
Low boarding platforms, grade crossings and too-tight curves are three other things that have been around forever, and we're trying to eliminate as many of those things as we possibly can, too.
Actually, much like low boarding platforms, grade crossings, and too-tight curves, all these minor little not-real-issues-in-a-vaccuum pile up and become exponentially worse and worse, until you end up killing yourself with thousands of tiny little paper cuts. Maybe we can't fix all of them, but fixing some of them also makes the ones we can't fix look that much more tolerable.
So, yeah, if we're able to zap every grade crossing on the line, high-level everything up and down, and solve every problem area leading to a speed restriction that's less than 79 mph on the ROW... then yeah, I'll stop bitching about the one tiny little not-really-a-problem that is River Works.
Until that time, 140 riders daily at a Zone 2 fare is $6, $840 daily - multiply that out by 365, we're making somewhere in the vicinity of a whopping $306,000 a year on River Works. It wouldn't cost us anything other than that revenue to drop River Works from the schedule tomorrow, so, sorry that I hold it in about as much regard as I would any grade crossing that we could totally get rid of for $300K.
The location isn't a problem. Grade crossing is the best location for this stop on safety because the trains are slowing to a stop, and it causes no schedule drag around the crossing with everything stopping there. And this is the one crossing that can't go because of the expressway overhead and the viaduct's pilings making it almost impossible to sink the tracks. But it doesn't need to because 6th/Arlington isn't a busy intersection at all.
In tangentially related news, New Hampshire seems to be rallying to finish the Capitol Corridor/NH Main Commuter Rail study. It's too early to tell, but this might be the first signs that New Hampshire is actually maybe getting its act together, in which case there's a non-zero possibility that Portsmouth Commuter Rail is coming down the tracks, and I'd be shocked if it was stopping at Chelsea. We've already got at least one train daily that blows through Chelsea, the 27-minute express trip from Salem you mentioned earlier.
Or, at least, I imagine it would be blowing through Chelsea - but instead, it's crawling through that grade crossing.
It's not a problem, yet - but what's 'working but bad form' in 2013 can certainly balloon into a disaster in 2035. I'd rather have a plan, at least - we don't have to act on it - in place to get rid of the thing if all signs start pointing towards problem, rather than being blindsided in 2035 when "Oops, turns out those things we all dismissed as insignificant non-issues are in fact, Big Problems!"
Death of a thousand paper cuts. Add that grade crossing to the pile with River Works.
For the record, I think that you should be looking at sinking the road and not the tracks, but in the event that the viaduct pilings really are a problem, we'll get a crack at solving that problem when it comes time to replace the Tobin.
The stop just needs to get brought out of the bottom division on basic amenities and ADA. Real shelters, including for all these bus transfers the T wants to encourage. A bench that can fit more than 4 people. Access from both the 6th/Arlington and Washington sides. A traffic light, full set of ADA crosswalks. Better signage around the neighborhood, better lighting under the viaduct. A kiss-and-ride or maybe just a few parking spots on
this empty adjacent lot. Basic 'presentation'...the location itself is pretty good for the surrounding density and bus routes, and the problem crossings are all west and east of it.
No real argument from me on this, except to say that relocating underneath the viaduct and building out to Spruce Street still leaves the station platforms right up against the grade crossing, and also provides enough space for the MBTA to go hog wild with the overbuilding without having to re-landscape a fairly dense neighborhood - and I doubt that the MBTA can really be talked out of going hog wild, especially since everyone keeps talking about how important Chelsea is going to be.
Look at the GLX station designs. Look at South Station Expansion. Hell, look at South Coast FAIL. Prudent, minimalist, common-sense station fixes are an alien concept to the MBTA.
There really isn't. Just wait until Global Petroleum in Eastie finally gets all its permits in order to start accepting rail deliveries of ethanol on the mothballed East Boston Branch. Pan Am's going to be sending 60-car freights there 6 days a week. Rousselot Gelatin in Peabody's expected to go up to 3 deliveries per week this year, and town of Peabody is trying to attract new freight customers at the industrial park just south of the 95/128 interchange. Everett Terminal traffic's growing. Pan Am needs those off-peak slots for freight. This line does better than most maintaining consistent frequencies, but you can't finagle something resembling a clock-facing timetable. There are other users of the line and the waterways. It can be improved by crawling out of the maintenance hole and tackling the speed restrictions, but it's always going to be a commuter rail-type schedule until they find that billion dollars lying around for parallel rapid transit and megatons of bridge and tunnel concrete.
Zapping the Chelsea grade crossings is chump change. Eastern Ave. and Everett Ave. can easily elevate over the tracks, and the North Shore Improvements rec was pretty much DO IT NOW for Eastern Ave. You are not blowing
this up, however. That overpass can't change elevation with abutting homes and an intersection, and they are not messing with streets already grade separated.
There's no reason whatsoever why we can't drop that street back to surface level and elevate the tracks instead, other than the arbitrary "well it's already been separated out and we're not messing with it anymore" - and, yes, as a package deal with a brand-spanking-new $1B+ bridge, the cost of redoing one grade crossing so that the street goes back to surface level and the tracks are elevated instead is a rounding error. I'd expect that it'd add an even $1 million to the final price tag - or a massive 0.1% cost increase to get rid of all our bridge openings instead of most of our bridge openings.
I have trouble honestly believing that there's any real person who would look at something like that and say "Okay, I'm prepared to sink $1 billion into a brand new bridge, but $1.001 billion is where I
draw the line."
80% lower bridge openings is a LOT fewer openings. That's zero schedule constraint. There are going to be days at a time in the offseason where it won't need to open at all. You don't need an Essex Bridge on rails; that's unnecessary perfectionism. Remember, Rockport has 2 un-raiseable and very heavily used drawbridges of its own in Manchester and Gloucester. Plus close stop spacing and a lot of grade crossings. It doesn't have an exponentially higher traffic cap. Newburyport does to much greater degree, but they're pretty firmly in the 128-to-495 commute hours demographic that doesn't need more off-peaks.
The Manchester drawbridge can absolutely be disposed of - all the boat facilities are on
the other side of the tracks, so it's just a matter of mitigating the loss of
this little cove as navigable waters, and it doesn't look to me very much like anything larger than your average speedboat can navigate into that cove already.
I'm not convinced that we can't eliminate Gloucester's drawbridge - we can certainly raise it 10~12 feet without having to touch any existing overpasses. But, even if we can't take care of that bridge entirely, we can mitigate it and zap the other two bridges.
Or, you know, we can say that none of these bridges are that big of a deal, really, and add all three to that "death of a thousand paper cuts" pile of minor issues not worth bitching over that I've been piling up throughout this post.
Peabody/128's the primary beneficiary of mainline improvements, and that makes a lot of sense with the highway/Mall/Lahey Clinic stop and lots of bus connectivity (Beverly only has the 451 out of Salem once an hour). But it still slams headfirst into the freight schedule off-peak. If you can't get a clock-facing schedule out there, you can't get a clock-facing schedule to the upstream branches.
You don't have to "Fairmount" the line and get headways down to 20 or 15 minutes to have a clock-facing schedule. The important thing is that the train times are all consistent. Frequency is a bonus, don't get me wrong, but if you can get to the point where "the next train is always, always, always going to be X minutes behind the one that just left," then you've got a clock-facing schedule and it doesn't matter if X is 15 minutes or 45/50/60 minutes.
Blue-Salem is unbuildable to the Taj Mahal garage because they're not even sure they can 2-track the tunnel. 4 x 4 is almost certainly beyond reach. South Salem is going to be the higher-ridership stop for local traffic with the college, hospitals, and equal-or-better downtown ped access. And that matters more for a rapid transit audience than a park-and-ride audience. Besides...look at the size of this almost totally unused yard:
http://goo.gl/maps/RTPwO. That's bigger than Wellington. Throwing down absolutist conditions that it MUST be North Salem and MUST be a new tunnel is an excellent way to ensure nothing ever happens. The unconstrained ROW to Castle Hill is lower-hanging fruit than some of the stuff they're trying to build today. It's pointless to eliminate it altogether on arbitrary conditions.
If we're going to keep both stops, then that's fine. And if we really want to have two huge garages in North and South Salem, then that's also fine. I'm not convinced that's what we want, but maybe it is.
Here we go again with the tactical nuclear strike for mapmakers' perfection. It's an old, built-up downtown. They might be able to expand the tunnel to 2 tracks. They might not. But the second tunnel, around building foundations...serious doubts that's feasible. Do you seriously want to propose a Big Dig through downtown Salem that potentially destroys or requires billions in mitigation to a historic downtown reliant on tourist income? For the perfection of a 'max build' studies don't even think are necessary. We've been through this before. Civil engineering planning isn't a dictatorship. Citizens do get a say on where their money is best spent, and get a say on what's "good enough". Real quality-of-life harm far beyond the made-up complaints of NIMBY's is not something that can be unilaterally pushed on people. Learn to deal with it.
In a perfect universe, cost would never be an object towards getting things done and we could complete all of our infrastructure projects now and forever without ever causing real quality-of-life harm.
We're not living in a perfect universe. We're living in a universe where, yes, sometimes NIMBY pearl-clutching over the impacts of doing X is just that. And, sometimes, doing X really will cause quality-of-life harm, or require a sledgehammer application of eminent domain, or leave a swathe of destruction in its wake - but, unfortunately, X is also mission critical to the success of project Y, and failure to do X will result in the failure of project Y, possibly to the great detriment of far more people than you 'avoided harming' to begin with.
To be clear, I'm not convinced that the tunnel or tunnels really are mission critical - and, fortunately, it's going to be a long time before we necessarily need to come to that "they are / they aren't" conclusion. As far as the Blue Line component of all this - I'm certainly open to the idea that we cut it at South Salem - my chief argument against cutting it at South Salem is that doing so will probably result in a second garage being built and the first one at North Salem being wasted.
But if the rail tunnel turns out to be mission critical for rail services, and at the end of the day the choice is between leaving ourselves with a crippled set of services OR doing real quality-of-life harm to some people, then, yes, sorry, I'm going to go with "do harm to people." It's not realistic to expect that we do everything that needs to be done without eventually harming somebody, somewhere.
When that time comes, if that time comes, it certainly won't be unilateral - I expect it to be a messy, uphill struggle to get anything big done, with hearings and lawsuits and a lot of very sad stories about the Real Life Impacts on the ground. The difference between you and I is that I expect it to happen anyway - I expect the voices of the people who don't want to live with a broken system to be louder than the people who don't want to live through the collateral impacts of fixing it.
Google Maps has really shitty resolution in Maine. The active tracks go underneath the US 1 Bypass bridge across the NH-ME border. Then there's this gash that crosses 95 out to NH 236. Then there's this wide power line ROW to the west of 236. The ROW used to directly hug 236, but was shifted back a few hundred feet in a land swap when the power lines went up so they could build on 236. But the trajectory's intact. When 236 does its little 'bulge' near NH 101 near the river it turns due north (very hard to see here since it peels away from the power lines) then hugs 236 closely out to NH 91, then keeps going straight until it hits the Western Route. There used to be another segment that kept going straight past the junction and went almost due straight to bypass that sharp right turn the Western Route takes into Wells. Then meets back up with the Western Route at Biddeford (trailed here). But they probably won't have problems retrofitting the Western Route in low density past N. Berwick.
I agree 100%. That's a post-2050 thing. But electrification could be a no-go out that way. At least on the B&A there's tri-track options to run the double stack freights alongside on unpowered tracks. Western Route doesn't have those options, and Pan Am's got a lifetime clause on the Downeaster trackage rights saying that no one can fuck with their current or future clearances. It might have to be a forever-diesel line. That's a killer dilemma IF the day comes, and the only reason an alternate ROW would be on the table. Not a need so much as the terms of engagement they have to mull if/when a need ever arises.
I think I see it now. Thanks. Also thanks to Equilibria for drawing the line, that helped some.
"Absolutely done"? On what evidence other than personal preference. Show me the GL's ceiling as a well-functioning streetcar feeder, not the crippled joke it is today, and then we can talk what "absolutely" has to be done with another several-billion tactical nuclear strike that only replicates existing routes for Transit OCD perfection. BTW, I'm not opposed at all to Riverbank-as-Blue or flipping the D into it if it comes to that well down the priority pile. That brings the GL back to the future as a more purely focused streetcar feeder. You can always loop the Riverside half of Blue at Logan and the Salem half of Blue at Charles as overlapping branches if end-to-end is too long and service density doesn't merit to the 'burbs. The East Boston tunnel can handle the overlap.
Right. I don't need to show you the GL's ceiling as a streetcar feeder because between the D, any potential extension on top of what GLX is getting us already (Porter, Medford, further out on top of Porter/Medford), I feel confident in concluding that the
Green Line is not being used as a streetcar feeder, and the branches of the Green Line that merit real-deal heavy rail are the largest obstacles to its returning to use as a streetcar feeder.
I think it absolutely needs to be done because for the capital cost and effort that we would place into the Riverbank Subway as an extension of the Blue Line, converting the D the rest of the way towards acceptable heavy rail usage, forking either the Red or Orange Lines somewhere to feed back into GLX... By that time, you've already built a complete and cohesive HRT line from Riverside/Needham (or Kenmore, if you can't get D done and B/C/E remain non-options) out to Anderson RTC - you've just chosen to divide it out along two or three different rapid transit lines instead of leaving it whole and intact.
At the end of the day, I'm not really going to lose any sleep if the Green Line stays the Green Line and the converted-to-heavy-rail bits get called the Yellow Line, or the Gold Line, or any other color, but I believe that the converted heavy rail line needs to be kept intact instead of split piecemeal over the rest of the system as a bunch of branches.
I'm not seeing the sanity in blowing up the entire B and C to replicate the same thing as billion-dollar subways bored into steep hills. Much less abdicate any ability to run streetcars into downtown. "Touristy" things do not serve the need the GL surface branches do. BERy and the MTA hemmed and hawed and repeatedly backed off heavy rail conversion for a reason. Relieve it, load-shift it, augment it with easy-dig subway construction under the E reservation and inner B reservation, connect it to the Urban Ring or Transitway...whatever. But eradication of the light rail mode shits all over the neighborhoods we can't subway or grade separate, and shuts out all the routes that NEED light rail into downtown. The neighborhoods have a big enough chip on their shoulder from the T unilaterally lecturing them on what modes are and aren't in their best interests. Good luck kicking that up a notch.
Again, there's been a miscommunication - I'm not out to destroy light rail into downtown. I just don't want light rail doing heavy rail's job if we can at all help it, and I think that the first chance we have to seize the moment and separate the heavy rail corridor from the light rail system, we should do it.
The idea of LRT on the Riverbank as a scenic touristy thing is mostly a marketing strategy to get past the people who would bitch about rails on the Esplanade (and to be fair, it's easier to cross LRT tracks than HRT tracks), much like how we probably wouldn't ever be able to run LRT on the greenway without a similar marketing hook.
Second...evidence, please, that the Link needs 4 RR tracks. Evidence, please, that this is EVER going to have the traffic levels NY Penn does today on its 2 lead tracks. The Link will already be built with crossover redundancy in a track outage that the Penn tubes don't have. And the surface terminals are not going away for commuter rail. They can't physically fit enough platforms under building pilings at SS and NS to run everything-to-everything. They'll be 3 x 3 or 4 x 4 platforms max, more or less segregated for inbounds/outbounds. Kill off that unbuildable Central Station with its fewer platforms and there's no traffic choke in the middle; trains merge and split on equal number of platforms on either side, and proceed one after the other. No crazy merging like SS surface, no drawbridges like NS surface.
BET is still Commuter Rail World Headquarters and one of the primary selling points of the Link is the ability to have trains deadhead directly there from the south side without having to go over the Grand Junction. The north side also has more breathing room to absorb extra out of service trains than the south does even with a South Station Expansion and a bigger Readville Yard. On the north side, having trains terminate in South Station is a huge boon considering its much more central location - so I predict that you'll see most of the north side's traffic redirected into the Link as well as a fair number of south side trains dead heading into BET.
I don't think it's a particularly wild dream to assume that we could end up with a train needing to go through the link every 2 minutes, which would be more than enough of a huge traffic demand to justify four tracks.
Frankly, the value proposition of cramming another 100,000 daily commuters through there on the rapid transit side outslugs the commuter rail's and Amtrak's wildest dreams by a stupidly wide margin. And costs less to build than asinine frills like Central Station and portals from everywhere to everywhere.
I disagree. Splitting the Link that way would require grade separating the rapid transit side from the rail side. It would also require an expensive and messy reconfiguration to either the Red or Orange Lines, possibly both - and for what? Of the three (NS/SS not counted) rapid transit stops you could expect the Link to serve - Haymarket, Aquarium, and Rowes Wharf - two of them are served already and all three are just as easily served by a Green Line branch down the Greenway. The only immediate beneficiary is Rowes Wharf, which is nowhere even close to the "100,000 daily" figure you've cited, and a single seat ride from North Station, Haymarket, or South Station to Aquarium, which also isn't a huge ridership grabber. The North Station - South Station direct is just as easily done on the rail side of the Link.
So, really, I have to ask where these 100,000 daily riders are coming from? I think I already know the answer - most of them are probably coming off of the commuter rail, which means there's very little difference between a 4-0 and a 2-2 Link configuration.
How so? Orange isn't anywhere near capacity today with its vehicle shortage. It's 20-25% short of the line's current signal capacity at peak. It doesn't use the express tracks at all. CBTC it on 3-minute headways and it can handle two NB branches equivalent to today's headways and a downtown trunk at twice today's service density. It's arguably got better-placed yards and capacity-balancing frills than Red does for supporting its two branches.
Last I checked, the express tracks were never actually finished out. That having been said, while you're probably correct, I don't predict headways to ever get better than 5 minutes even with CBTC and branching the Orange Line means each branch loses half of its maximum capacity to the other half. Sullivan Square is an extremely important bus hub, and to a lesser extent, Wellington is as well. I'm willing to be convinced that branching it would work and is feasible, but I'm still concerned about redirecting a lot of traffic away from those two stops.
