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.
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.
No, it's not death by a thousand cuts. The time suck is from the speed restrictions, not the stop density. OK...the North Shore Transit Improvements and other studies have gamed this out. Chelsea and Riverworks were supportable on a brisk schedule 30 years ago before the restrictions got slapped down. The intermediate stops and their usage didn't change much...actually, Riverworks usage has shrunk a bit and is bypassed more than it ever was as the GE plant has shed employees. The speed restrictions were what changed.
What part of "the T doesn't maintain Riverworks" is so hard to understand here? It's an inanimate slab of pavement GE maintains to $0 public expense; it's front-door boarding only with zilch impact on the automatic door coaches; and it exempt from ADA. $306K annual offset by $0 in expenses is PROFITABLE. I'll say it again: focus your ire on the Mishawums of the world if you hate low-use flag stops that much. Those are the loss leaders on the commuter rail that the T periodically decides it has to money-dump a slew of cosmetic and accessibility improvements to try in vain to convince people it wasn't a failed experiment.
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.
That part of the 1 viaduct is not related to the Tobin. The Tobin approach terminates at 4th St. about 1/3 mile away. I don't know how you would ever sink the viaduct or even straighten it there with all the abutting residential density. It straddles property lines. It's damn near impossible to change the configuration without blowing up fewer than 10 houses. All the feasible rework on 1 comes after it returns to embankment-grade after Spruce St. where the next segment of viaduct over Carter St. and Orange St. probably does have flex to realign or sink.
You really wouldn't want to change the grade of the tracks at all because 2nd St., Everett Ave., and Spruce St. are so damn engineering-easy to overpass. N. Shore Transit Improvements have a
design and
costs (p. 52) in mind for Eastern Ave., which is the most complex of the road overpasses to build because of the extreme width of the road and abutting structures. $19.6M. That's probably lowballed a lot, but say $40M. Figure the potential liability of Chelsea's infamous tanker truck traffic asploding in a giant fireball after evading the gates, and it's worth it on that alone. Establishing that as the high price point, figure similar for Everett Ave. with closeby intersections and less for 2nd St. and Spruce St. overpasses. 3rd St. outright closed. $130-150M for -5 crossings. That is probably half the cost of attempting to grade separate downtown Framingham on the Worcester Line. Who cares if Chelsea station can't be grade separated for 25 more years if ever because of Route 1 dependencies. It's a station stop for both the Eastern Route and future Urban Ring at a low-volume intersection. It's a safe crossing with cosmetic improvements and would be totally unrestricted for an express train if the Everett Ave.- and Eastern Ave.-induced restrictions went away.
You don't NEED perfection here; there is no value-added. It contributes not one extra cut to the death by a thousand cuts. Grade separation only matters in the places where there's a bottleneck on train or road traffic, safety issues, or on a >125 MPH line (which the Chelsea jog physically can never be). It is not a bad thing to have grade crossings when they're unconstrained. Chelsea Station and tiny Oak Island Rd. (which would only go if the Blue Line is sharing the ROW there) can remain forever and do nothing whatsoever to any traffic levels you want to push through this line.
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.
Abutting the grade crossing on the current location spanning the Arlington/Washington block is the most convenient location if there's an additional ADA egress built up to Washington St. Multiple bus routes touching both ends of the station. You don't get that if you shift it anywhere else. Especially flipping to the viaduct side. There's a lot of upside to be had with ADA access and bus shelters to facilitate the transfers. That's the whole crux of its alleged importance to the T and future as an Urban Ring stop. Plus...abutting a grade crossing at a low volume intersection that can be further protected by traffic signals is the preferred place to site a station when there is a nearby crossing. Trains have the stopping distance to avoid cars and pedestrians. You wouldn't get that shifting up, say, to the Washington-Broadway block when it's going through at a higher speed. And the ADA high platforms are dirt easy and cheap to install at a grade crossing where they can just incline-down 15 feet to the crosswalk. They can get the station accessible by installing a prefab high with prefab shelter, then figuring out Washington access ramps later.
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."
No. Because an 80% reduction in Beverly bridge openings buys you all the schedule flex you need, and buys you whole weeks in winter where the thing won't open at all. Stop it with these tactical nuclear strikes...it fucks up abutting residential properties and fucks up a residential intersection where there's already 100% grade separation. If there's zero benefits gained you do not get carte blanche in this universe or one of several parallel universes to blow millions in totally superfluous frills and run roughshod over people's quality of life. That's not noble. It's irresponsible, unethical, and not how this country works. Move on...it's out-of-line.
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.
No, it can't. The boat landing requires vertical clearance at the grade crossing for pulling boats out for offseason storage in the parking lot. There's not enough running space to elevate the tracks the requisite 25 ft. or whatever after Norton's Point Rd., and you are NOT dictatorially blowing up that overpass either. Move on. It's a stub branchline that doesn't have a ridership ceiling exponentially higher than the pretty robust current service, and isn't tapped out of its own off-main capacity.
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.
The replacement is going a little higher with a much wider shipping channel underneath. I don't think 10-12 feet high...more like a half-dozen. But the big thing--and the frill the Manchester and Beverly replacements will get--is separate bascules for each track. They raise and lower much faster that way, and permit single-track operation if one track's out of service or has a stuck mechanism. Sort of like a much-minaturized/compact/joined-at-hip version of the North Station draws. All of the NEC bridge replacements are doing this too. It also lets them tear down half the old draw span at a time to install half the new draw span at a time so the line can run single-track during construction without bustitution and still allow openings for the boats.
Separated draw carriageways are the fastest and most reliable type of movable bridge outside of (maximally expensive, for extremely high and wide clearances) lift spans. (Swings like Beverly are the slowest and least reliable). It's vastly better and more nimble than the bridges they're replacing. The existence of draws isn't a bad thing if they move fast enough to keep up with headways. Replacement Rockport bridges of this type can definitely move faster than the highest headways the line can handle. The current ones are small enough that they're not much of a constraint either except for the fact they're so decrepit they keep breaking down.
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.
Except when it's not a papercut. Jeez...if we follow this logic to the nth degree why do we have any intermediate commuter rail stops at all. Why not grade separate everything, blow up every structure in a curve's path, and run EMU's on 3 minute headways at 150 MPH to the terminus. Sure, it'll only get half the ridership...but who cares?
That's a flippant way of saying that over-counting the number of papercuts is not only counterproductive to solving real problems...at a certain point it crosses into pure masochism.
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.
Except...the core commuter rail constituency doesn't need a clock-facing schedule. People from Newburyport and Rockport need a commute-hours schedule and semi-regular 45 min. off-peak without large unexplained gaps. That's it. It's rapidly diminishing returns to keep stuffing through all-day trains that are going to run nearly empty. You think the private RR's would've ever gone bankrupt if there was still demand for that? The commuter rail can't cover its costs with clock-facing off-peak. That's why there's no commuter rail on the continent outside of maybe the Long Island RR's electrified mains that attempts even quasi- clock-facing .
Lynn-Salem is a rapid transit audience. So set a goal of real rapid transit in stages. Build Lynn, make the buses on the outskirts less dysfunctional. Do due diligence on the Eastern Route restrictions so it's firing on all cylinders as a CR line and has good enough headways. DON'T think you're doing them a favor by recasting the CR mode in BRT-like marketing with this clock-facing schedule gimmick. It'll never serve their need or ceiling for full rapid transit, and ultimately becomes a distraction and cop-out against achieving that goal. The logic in setting no price limit on commuter rail upgrades does not wash when the act of attacking all that and then some now punts rapid transit out another generation.
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.
And I'll say it again, that is a horrible and ominous attitude responsible for a great deal of irredeemable destruction to the urban fabric in the name of 20th century "progress". It's antithetical to a representative democracy to have oligarchs and dictators unilaterally telling people what's in their own interests and totally snuffing out input. It's antithetical to people's quality of lives to reduce humans to 'collateral damage' on a map. It's absolute power that corrupts absolutely. It's dehumanizing. If that means backing down on some (non- openly coddled) NIMBY complaints, so be it. The very act of people being allowed to vote their own interests on balance ends up preventing more destruction than it impedes progress. Robert Moses is dead. Stop trying to dig him up. It's off-the-deep-end irresponsible to push this as a default argument to blow up and remake every single inch of transit infrastructure in this state. Even the stuff that ain't broke. Resources are finite. Perfection is impossible. People in this country do (and should) have their quality of life and self-determination given more weight than their leaders...who ostensibly represent, not dictate them. Refusing to ever ever acknowledge that or rationalizing it as an argument for unilateral dictates over the will of stupid rubes is borderline
unhinged.
