Have you ridden the B past Packards Corner? BC doesn't generate all that much traffic, the B is mostly a dead zone past Harvard Ave. It doesn't need heavy rail. If it did, a stop at Riverside would be sufficient, with a C shuttle up Chestnut Hill Ave for those who don't want to hoof it.
I agree on all points, but I would strive for watertown as that gets you on course to get out to Waltham via the Watertown Branch. Oak Square seems to be doing okay with the 57.
Okay Ill give you that, BUT please realize that BU isn't necessarily generating traffic in a "good" way. It's students are using the B as a school bus to get across the campus because BU has sprawled out across an unsustainable amount of land and its administration is perfectly content screwing everyone living in Allston and Brighton who needs to get downtown by having their students jam it up every single day. They also all have monthly passes, so there isn't even a positive to this in fares. They are using a transit line to get distances that should be traversed via bike, foot, or the BU buS.
I don't agree with the statement that BU has sprawled out across an unsustainable amount of land. Sure, it's a very long campus but it isn't all that wide - so, while it's shaped differently from most other campuses, I don't think that it's necessarily much larger than any of them.
Also, unlike some other colleges I could name, BU at least tries to integrate with the city around it instead of turning itself into a walled garden in a twisted, misguided attempt to shelter its students from the reality that the world doesn't end at the campus borders, nor do they post gates and guards to make sure that the unwashed masses dare not pass through the campus. (Looking at you, Providence College.)
Now, I'll agree with the sentiment that BU has way, way, way too many stops - seven on the B branch (nine if you count Kenmore and Packard's Corner) plus one that should count on the C (Saint Mary's Street) for a total of eight to TEN stops.
However, I would expect that not all of this traffic is BU kids going one or two stops at the expense of everyone else on the line, and that HRT built underneath the existing LRT reservation would still be well-patronized by BU.
Fine, here ya go. According to
the globe, the Back bay has about 18,000 residents. That's vastly less then the
estimated 30,000 residents of Allston alone (which I assume is actually more with many students claiming residence at their parents house, as well as transients). The back bay population, according to the same globe article, also rose less than 1% in a decade. You want to supply a static population that already has three transit stops with three more stops, that either overlaps the existing 1/4 mile station radius or... the Charles River. Here is a map I made just for you:
^Map. Unless I missed the pizza analogy for fractions in elementary school HALF of your 1/4 mile radius red circles are water. More than a third are directly replicating existing service. Yes you get more access to the Esplanade, but should we then also be building subways to Franklin Park and the Fens? The only glaring exception is Beacon Hill, which would be served by a Hatch Shell stop. I believe a stop there on some other service that does not go along the riverbank would be positive, like my idea for a connection to Copley. But beacon hill does have Charles, as well as Park and Arlington. Its also a static affluent population, even moreso than the back bay.
Very little of the Hatch Shell's coverage radius actually ends up in the water, and a lot of it is Beacon Hill, which could use additional service (as you mentioned.) In my opinion, the Esplanade and Charlesgate circles are much closer to 1/3 water than half, but that's probably splitting hairs over semantics.
I think the best possible setup is pushing Esplanade down some several hundred feet so that the current center of Charlesgate is right on the edge of its coverage radius. Two stops: Fairfield/Esplanade and Hatch Shell/Beacon Hill. The end result isn't ideal by any metric, but it's not that bad either.
WHAT? Hynes was designed to be a transfer station for Mass Ave service. It has staircases and passageways to both sides. it is the perfect transfer point.
In light of establishing that a Charlesgate stop isn't that useful, I'll concede this point to you.
A quick search shows that at peak, the esplanade has 20,000 daily users. Barely more than the entire back bay, less than Allston. You want to build a rapid transit line, and three stops, to serve a PEAK 20k people, most of whom are already walking. Even if you throw all that out the window, the riverbank subway does not serve anyone who would walk across the pedestrian bridges. They would still have to. Its serving people coming from the east and west, who don't have to cross a bridge, unless they are walking from the green line stations below. But no one is going to ride the green line to the esplanade anyway, the are going to access it in the West End or at Charlesgate. So really all you are doing is decreasing usage at the periphery of the esplanade, and encouraging people to ride the subway across it instead of experiencing a linear park. The esplanade is also rather overcrowded already, i'm not sure we want to be encouraging slews more people to use it rather than local parks.
Morally and philosophically, I think we should be encouraging as many people to take advantage of our myriad of parks as we possibly can. They're one of our biggest assets.
The stations themselves would augment the pedestrian bridges, providing additional opportunities to cross and making it that much easier to get in and out of the Esplanade. Granted, some people would probably ride right through and watch the Esplanade go by instead of experiencing it, but that's fine.
I don't think it's fair to treat the Riverbank Subway in a vacuum - if it was an entire new line, stand alone, then yes. 20k (probably more like 30k~40k when you factor in the increased traffic coming in from the new stations) isn't that great.
But I don't think 20k is really bad, either, and even split across 2 (10k) or 3 (6.6k) stations, those numbers seem to justify stopping. At least, they do to me.
It does, because capital to build these projects, ridership potential, equipment, and routing are all finite resources that should not be squandered to build a straight line that serves a park.
For more information on why the Riverbank is a bad idea, here is the
1911 Boston Transit Commission report detailing the reasons the project was ditched in favor of the Boylston Street subway to begin with, even after bonds were passed, money had been spent, and some construction had begun. (As an aside, I love the way people wrote/talked at the turn of the century. The BTC reports are an excellent read, most are available on google books.)
The reality of the situation is what it is - we don't have the cash on hand nor the political willpower to go ahead with Big Dig II: Dig Deeper, and we can't shut off the Boylston Street subway to LRT/streetcar traffic without an alternate routing to send it somewhere else. Furthermore, Boylston Station itself needs to stay open as a major LRT transfer point - Silver Line LRT to Dudley doesn't have very many paths it can possibly take and most of them require coming out of Boylston Station. Furthermore, as I said in a previous post, we need to keep the option open for LRT into the Seaport and South Boston - again, there aren't a whole hell of a lot of ways to get LRT into the South Station bus tunnel that don't involve Boylston Station -> Essex Street.
If we can't touch the Boylston Street subway at all, then converting the Green Line to heavy rail requires connecting Kenmore to downtown via some alternate routing. I think using the Riverbank as an extension of the Blue Line would be an incredibly foolish and short-sighted thing to do, as frankly, I'm not seeing very many alternate routings for HRT Green Line that DON'T involve the Riverbank - either as the actual HRT corridor to get as far as Beacon Hill which we stand to have a much easier time of tunneling through to get the rest of the way to Government Center, or as the LRT route to shift all the streetcar traffic, present and future, out of the Boylston Street and Central Subways. The B&A Main/Mass Pike would be the only serious contender for alternate routing, but there's no way to tunnel under the Pike without running a very serious risk of fucking up the N/S Rail Link's route, and attempting to change that is going to drop us right back where we started, staring at a $20B+ price tag on a tunneling project.
The tragic part of this whole thing is that the actual tunnels wouldn't cost us that much more than $1B, probably more like $500M - the other $19B is all preliminary work. Documentation, mostly. Tunneling in this city isn't unfeasible because there's any kind of technical or engineering limitation associated with tunneling - it's unfeasible because so much of our underpinning infrastructure, so much of what is holding Boston together is centuries-old mysteries. We don't have a clear picture of the network of pumps that keep our tunnels from flooding. We don't know what lost artifacts from 1897 are waiting to be dug up underneath Chinatown and the Financial District. Hell, we don't even know precisely where all of the wood pilings holding Back Bay up are! The best we can do is guess at what and where everything is.
Frankly, I think that's terrifying, but there's nothing we can really do about it unless and until something breaks and the worst-case scenario comes to pass, or we suddenly find billions of dollars with which to fund a city-wide infrastructure mapping effort.
(For the record, if and when that comes to pass, my opinion is that we might as well dig the new tunnels and get something tangible beyond comprehensive maps of every utility in Boston for our efforts.)
CBS: This was the sentence I was referring to, sorry for the confusion if that's not what you meant. My understanding of the N-S Rail Link is that most CR would not be through-routed, but that Amtrak would run trains from NYC to Maine and NH through it in addition to non-revenue moves. In that case, there would be no need for 2 underground stations, since those Amtrak trains would only need to stop at South Station.
Three points.
1) I would expect Amtrak to stop at North Station anyway, particularly given the huge sports market - TD Garden's right there. You don't think Amtrak would stand to make a nice chunk of change off of drunken basketball/hockey fans riding in to watch the Bruins/Celtics throw down with [insert "rival" teams as appropriate], and then stumble on to the next train back to where they came from? Besides, much like BBY and the awful curve we can't do anything about, the reality is the Rail Link is going to be too geometrically constrained for trains to ever get up to a fast enough speed to justify not stopping at North Station.
2) Most of the Commuter Rail trains coming in from the North are going to be through-routed. Unlike the south side, we can cover every north-side line with a single portal placed somewhere around
here and some comparatively minor reconfigurations to our track switches, while still having more than enough running room to sink the tunnels to the appropriate depth. Furthermore, while North Station does have a lot of value in its aforementioned connection to TD Garden and connectivity to the Orange and Green Lines, that alone isn't really enough to justify its use as a major terminal - unlike South Station. I would expect the vast majority of north-side trains to at least be run through to South Station and then dead-head back to BET, and it isn't out of the question that they might interline into a south-side train where convenient and continue on out to, say, Route 128 via Fairmount.
3) Amtrak is a peripheral beneficiary of the Rail Link - they're not even close to the main reason why we would build it. It is, first and foremost, a commuter rail project that stands to benefit Boston's commuter rail network far more than it would Amtrak.
Frankly, if the primary reason to do this was "so intercity trains can run uninterrupted from NY/DC to NH and Maine," I'd be actively opposing it, because this thing is going to cost us way too damn much for the primary benefactors to be New York, Concord, and Portland.
Much like how we expected the Feds to kick in for most of the Big Dig's cost and then they didn't, I would be downright shocked if we DIDN'T end up on the hook for 90% of the Rail Link's cost - no matter how much Amtrak/the Feds promise they'll pay for. You had better believe that I want and expect to see at least five or six Commuter Rail trains run through that Link for every Amtrak train that does.
davem: First, BU is where BU is, and takes up the land it takes. The transit options that traverse the campus need to serve the needs of the students and faculty there just as it needs to serve the needs of residents and workers in surrounding neighborhoods. By the same token, you could stay that Boston high school students taking the MBTA on student passes are using the train or buses incorrectly (BTW, as a student with a bus pass elsewhere, I can tell you that they aren't cheap and the transit agency makes plenty of money off of them).
If the system has to serve BU properly, then an express service to supplement the local light rail may be necessary. Part of the problem past BU is that while there are attractors (Harvard, New Brighton Landing, Arsenal Mall, and Watertown Square), a Northwest-bound route under North Beacon St. doesn't hit very much density. The river is a very long dead zone on that heading, the same way that the Esplanade is along the Riverbank Subway. While Oak Square may be well served at present, it also is a pocket of density missed by existing rapid transit, as is Newton Corner as long as the CR doesn't stop there. It could be better served, perhaps...
I don't think trying to find the One True Ideal Routing for HRT or LRT through Allston/Brighton/Newton/Watertown is the correct way of doing things.
If you ask me, it might be for the best to split Allston-Watertown(-Waltham?) off from Allston-Brighton-Newton. I don't think there's a huge unmet demand for a single-seat ride between, say, Newton Corner and Watertown Square, but there is a definitive unmet demand for rapid transit from EITHER of those places to Kenmore and Downtown. Allston/Union Square makes for a convenient branching point - one branch up to New Brighton Landing and over the river into Watertown (with an eye towards eventually pushing through to Waltham), the other down into Oak Square / Brighton Center and Newton Corner (and perhaps eventually out to Newtonville and Auburndale, both stops that could be dropped off of the Worcester Line without too much issue. West Newton would remain as a Green-to-CR transfer, and it's probably a better one than Riverside would be.)
Dead zone? Seriously? During rush hours every inbound train is pretty crowded - if not overly full - by the time it gets to Harvard Ave, let alone Packard's Corner. Not to mention, every station between Harvard Ave and Washington had an average of over 1,100 boardings per the 2010 blue book. After Washington is where things start to thin out, but considering everything after that is far more strictly residential, that certainly makes sense. You also get further to the end of the line where travel times to Back Bay and Downtown become far less competitive with car/taxi/bus-or-walk-to-C-or-D options.
The real "dead zone" is the Babcock-Pleasant-St.Paul-BU West cluster which sees less boardings in total and on average compared to the Griggs-Washington sector.
The issue isn't so much people riding the B on sectors that should be done via other methods, but rather the incredibly foolish station spacing along the corridor. For example, the fact that the train makes stops at BU Central and East - less than a leisurely 90-second walk apart - is what absolutely kills the B. The tiny fraction of people that are riding between the intra-BU stops is just that - a tiny fraction compared to the number of people originating or terminating their trip at one of the bazillion stops BU has.
THIS. One million times this. I can even point you to exactly which five stations would be 'dropped' in an HRT conversion. (Rather, which five stations would only be served by the LRT B branch, as BU won't let us drop them altogether.)
Babcock Street, Pleasant Street, Saint Paul Street, Boston University Central, and Blandford Street can all go without unduly impacting BU's access to the Green Line, and the stop spacing on Packard's Corner - BU West - BU East - Kenmore is perfectly acceptable as well as being in line with stop spacings east of Kenmore.
You're thinking about the Riverbank in terms of only serving Back Bay originating traffic whereas there is infinitely more traffic whose destination is in the vicinity. There are a helluva lot more people who would use the Riverbank stations in lieu of Hynes/Copley/Arlington in order to get to those exact same service areas. The Riverbank isn't about competing with the Green Line so much as is a way to compliment and augment capacity beyond anything we could ever hope for from the world's oldest subway.
As I mentioned previously, I think the Riverbank is more about bypassing the obstacles to converting the Green Line to heavy rail than it is about anything else.
As I also mentioned previously, calling the new HRT line the "Green Line" is a matter of personal preference, and while I'd like to see all of our LRT branches painted Silver, I don't
really care enough about Train Colors to make an issue of it if the streetcars stay as the Green Line and we call the new HRT line the Yellow Line, or something.
I just don't want the Riverbank used for a Blue Line extension, and that IS something that I'm willing to fight if it comes down to it and an acceptable alternate path forward for a Green Line HRT conversion isn't presented. (Note: splitting the difference and turning GLX into a branch of the Orange Line after North Station does not constitute an acceptable alternative.)
In relative terms, yes. For 6 miserable years I rode the B from Harvard Ave to Hynes at rush hour. If I had time I would walk up to Griggs to board, and I was guaranteed a seat. If I boarded at Harvard I was lucky to get a pole to hang on to. By Parkards the car was already at crush load, and most of the time it would have to express. My only point was that you don't need heavy rail beyond Packards corner (at least not on Comm Ave). A "pretty crowded" two car trolley does not justify a subway extension. Crush load to the point it has to express downtown does.
We are arguing the same point here from different angles. The multitude of stops through BU exists because its students use it as a school bus instead of leisurely walking 90 seconds. If the stops didn't exist they would use the BU supplied bus, a bike, or walk. Its the same thing as people driving wastefully, except unlike trolley stops there is not an overabundance of parking spaces at BU.
Let me just say that my biggest regret about letting so much time pass before replying to all of these posts is the amount of material I would either need to respond to two or three times to, or point people to a different part of my post to see the one response. I don't really feel like typing "see above/below" a bunch of times, so...
Who are these people? What is there that is bringing in non-originating trips other then the Esplanade or special events? What am I missing that is between Marlborough and the Charles River that people can't walk between a quarter and third of a mile that justifys THREE subway stops? I really want to know, because I don't see how the Pru, BPL, Copley Place, Back Bay Station, Hynes, and the Boylston retail strip somehow deserve a worse class of service then two blocks of three to five story townhouses and a linear park. You have also not addressed the fact that HALF THE POTENTIAL SERVICE AREA IS WATER. The only iteration of the Riverbank Subway that would be practical would be as an express bypass, because any stations there would be a complete and utter waste of money, with the possible slight exception of the Hatch Shell, where only 1/4 of the service area is water, and it also serves the commercial district on Charles St as well as the other side of the Garden, and of course the Hatch Shell itself.
I don't think that a competently-managed Green Line with several streetcar/LRT routes feeding into a Boylston Street Subway is necessarily a better or worse class of service than HRT along the Riverbank Subway. Also, referring back to your map, most of the areas that would be doubly served are covered under "Commonwealth Avenue Mall" and significant stretches of Newbury Street, which are also pretty heavy retail corridors (and a second linear park.)
Also, the Tremont Street subway is the oldest subway in the US. Hardly the world. Not even close. The Boylston Street Subway is circa 1911 I believe, and was built with similar clearances to normal subways everywhere else past the curve at Boylston.
Which subway was built before the Tremont Street subway?
Serious question.
The boylston curve doesnt have to exist, nor does the green line HAVE TO turn north onto Tremont. If we are talking a project on the scale of the Riverbank subway, I'm not sure why we arent talking about splitting the line here as was planned, running the trolleys down Washington to Dudley, and the newly heavy-rail Boylston Street subway through the provision for the Post Office Square extension and tying it into the Silver Line, or something similar. A transfer at Chinatown gets you to Gov't Center just as fine, or you could keep riding to south station for a red line transfer.
BAM, you just alleviated all the congestion from the west in the unfixable section of the Tremont subway, got an orange line transfer sooner then haymarket, cleared the transfer congestion out of Government Center and Park Street, got trolley service to Dudley, made Rifleman happy by heavy railing the bus, AND didnt have to build a redundant subway to serve ducks and two blocks worth of rich people.
You also dead-ended a bunch of streetcars at Kenmore and caused a single tear to slowly roll down the face of every resident of Brookline in unison.
Quick and dirty math, feel free to crit it because I'm not thinking too hard here.
$2 fare x 4 trips a day (2 classes) x 4 days a week x 4 weeks a month x 4 months a semester = $512
My school offered a semester T pass for around $250, I imagine BU is the same. I'm also pretty sure BU kids are using the T more than 16 times a week.
Monthly passes are actually a hilariously bad deal... for the T. The full-fare standard adult pass, at $70/month, has a break-even point of 35 trips. If you make just one round trip a day, the pass has paid for itself halfway through day 18 and the rest of the month is free. Two round trips a day, you break even just before the end of day 9, and at five one-way trips a day, you've paid for the pass in a week.
You actually have to work hard (or hardly work, as the case may be!) to make buying a monthly pass a losing proposition. Hell, given how many trips I take on the T on a regular basis, I actually looked at the Student Semester Pass deal when my school started offering it, and decided that the amount of money I would save over just buying the link pass every month
wasn't worth the trouble of signing up.
I bring that up because it suggests to me not that the student pass discount isn't big enough, but rather that the standard adult monthly pass is priced too low. That might be a conversation for the financial mess thread, though.
If you're curious, it's $249.20 for four months, representing a savings of $30.80 or 11% over four standard adult monthly passes (which, in turn, divides out to $7.70 a pass), but you have to purchase for the "Spring" (February-May) or the "Fall" (September-December) - if you want the discount over the summer? SOL. If you need the pass in January? SOL. Also, the pass is shipped out on a special CharlieCard with a programmed artificial expiration at the end of the semester at which time it becomes useless, even if you try to load stored value or a standard adult pass on it. (I'm not even sure you CAN load stored value on it, in which case, you're SOL if you try to use it to pay on one of the regional services that takes Charlie now.) You're also SOL if you lose the card or it gets stolen/damaged, because the pass can't be transferred to a new card - you'll have to wait two to four weeks for a new card to be shipped to you. Really, really not worth saving $8 per month for eight months out of the year.
The BPS kids are from different neighborhoods going to different schools scattered around the city, their usage is akin to workers commuting around the city. They also provide school buses. High school students also do not have much if any income, so a subsidized pass makes sense. This is not at all the same as a single college mobbing a few miles of an already overcapacity transit line because an overabundance of redundant stops allows them to do so. See my response to omaja above.
The system would serve BU properly by having a stop at Blanford (for whatever reason the T wants a stop at all portals), BU Central, Agganis/StuVi and Packards. Supplemental service already exists in the form of the BUbuS.
I disagree with your choice of stops, since Kenmore is an absolute must-keep and the spacing between Kenmore and Blandford is barely better than the spacing between East and Central.
Agganis/StuVi is served by Pleasant Street unless I'm completely misunderstanding the layout of BU, and while keeping it and BU Central isn't necessarily bad from a stop spacing perspective, I'm also not sure that StuVi really needs a stop at its front door and you create an imbalance of stops favoring the east side of the Pike by keeping Central, Blandford and Kenmore.
Also, call me OCD, but I think BU East and BU West looks much better than BU Central and Pleasant Street or "Agganis/Student Village."
The N Beacon routing is preferable for its present lack of density, as that equals developable space. Just as New Balance is clearing warehouses for tall office buildings and retail, other developers could do the same with the volumes of space available north of N Beacon, along Market Street, and along Western Ave, plus there is the gigantic waste of space between the Birmingham Parkway and Soilders Field Road that could sport a ton of development. Then when you cross the Charles the entire Watertown Branch is surrounded by the same low value developable land.
Oak Square and Brighton Center to contrast are pretty much built out. Without knocking down buildings you can't really add much density, similar to the Back Bay, but without the historical zoning restrictions. If any rail was to return, it would be far better served by a trolley, just like Comm Ave west of Harvard.
Oak Square and Brighton Center on their own, in a vacuum, don't justify HRT. On the other hand, Oak Square / Brighton Center / Newton Corner / Newton / Auburndale looks a lot better for HRT - and, as I mentioned previously, Newton and Watertown/Waltham are two mutually exclusive end trajectories. I don't think we should need to pick one or the other - especially not since I don't like our chances at expanding the B&A Main Line without a messy and expensive Pike reconfiguration and DMUs/EMUs aren't really going to work if there's no room for the express/intercity trains to pass them.
As long as we're already talking about digging underneath the Pike, we might as well go full-bore Rapid Transit.
Two things about my Essex St thing:
1) I came up with this Essex Street to South Station idea only as an example of the fact that you don't have to build the Riverbank subway to alleviate the issues associated with the Tremont St section. There are other solutions. However, unlike the Riverbank which had no provisions built whatsoever, the P.O. square idea has physical infrastructure as evidence its designers confidence in its future utility.
No, not to alleviate the Central Subway's issues. But with no real way to squeeze LRT and HRT into the same tunnel under Boylston Street, no real way to tunnel through Back Bay, and no real way to send LRT over/under the Pike's ROW without fucking up the Rail Link route and the provisions we have for it... it's basically Riverbank or bust as far as converting the Green Line to heavy rail.
2) I envisioned it ending at the Black Falcon Terminal, but essentially the same difference as the WTC. Extending it somewhere would be the job of the next generation, just as extending the red line out of Harvard was.
It really doesn't matter whose job it would be to extend it, nor does it matter when the right time would be, if we end up doing something that prevents the line from ever being extended.
I don't think dead ending it would necessarily be a bad thing because of the current usage patterns of the green line. Only the E goes to Lechmere, and only the C to North Station. Everything else turns at Government Center. This tells me almost everyone from the west's destination is either downtown, or a transfer to another line. If full service isn't justified beyond Government Center, I don't see it being that popular beyond South Station. Linking it up to the Silver Line is just a bonus for the Seaport.
I'm not sure that you can really draw that conclusion considering the myriad of other things that are broken re: the Green Line today that we could also attribute turning at Government Center to.
But even if you can, the Seaport and South Boston are entirely different markets serving entirely different commute patterns to the West End and the North End. Even if the majority of traffic is getting off the Green Line downtown today, they may very well be funneling onto the Red Line and proceeding directly to Southie, thus justifying the extension in a more concrete way than "well, the tunnel's there already, let's just use it."
Also, Boylston was historically a transfer station. It was so popular there were plans for a very long time to connect Park St and Boylston into one superstation. I believe, but am not sure, that historically there was more traffic coming in through the pleasant street portal from the south then there was from the west. The only difference is that the Orange Line supplemented, and eventually killed off the southern streetcars, whereas the western ones were the only option.
Times change, people change, commutes change, and the city has changed. Historical records and old, mothballed plans are all well and good, but we certainly can't exclusively rely on old BERy and MTA documentation to tell us the needs of the MBTA system in 2013.
Correct me if I am wrong, but Park and Gov't Ctr are primarily transfer stations, not so much entrance/exit stations, yes? Therefore I don't think separating the Tremont Subway away from the Boylston Subway would have too much of a negative effect, since the transfers are still there. (Well okay, you loose a one seat transfer to the Blue. This is an issue I can't see fixing without getting this this new line across the harbor. Studies with numbers would have to be done to see if the dual transfer possibility of the green and orange would be sufficient for blue line traffic wishing to go west.
While it would involve underpinning the subway, I believe you could build a new line under the old. However I'm not sure exactly what another tunnel under the existing Red or Blue lines would accomplish? I'm probably just missing something...
There is another point I keep forgetting to bring up. I was in full support of the Riverbank subway for a long time. It was on all my fantasy maps until quite recently. I argued for it. But then I started reading the BTC reports. And really looking at the places it would go and serve. And that is when I became opposed to it.
Park Street and Government Center as hugely important entrances and exits into the system, in addition to being half of the only major block of transfer stations we have. It's a two pronged problem, and you can't really say that either issue is more important to solve.
Riverworks isn't accessible to anything except the GE plant, so why should the public maintain it? It is technically open to the public if you're willing to walk 1/3 mile down the rear access driveway from Route 107...but who does that? Flag stops with that light a usage are exempt from ADA; there is nothing legally compelling anyone to put frills on that one. Are you suggesting the T plunk $75M to build a whole new West Lynn station up by Commercial St./Bike to the Sea right this instant? And make it a headway-dragging full-time stop? For aesthetic hegemony with the rest of the stops? While we're twisting ourselves in knots about death from thousand cuts? And lamenting that the T spends too much on station frills it doesn't need to?
Riverworks isn't open to the public. "Employees only" is stamped all over it, and if I recall correctly, IDs are checked at that station. That isn't even close to "accessible to the public."
No, I don't think the T should piss $75M into a West Lynn commuter rail station. I think if GE Aviation wants to pick Riverworks up and move it that 1/3 mile up on its own volition and actually open the stop to the public AT THEIR OWN EXPENSE, then that is a good thing and they should be allowed or encouraged to do that.
The minute it becomes something we have to sink any amount of money into, I want it gone. (I want it gone even before that happens, but I'll want it gone more.)
Yeah...and when exactly is the Tobin expected to be ripped down and replaced? Not before 2050; it's currently 62 years into a hundred-year design lifespan. And if they decide another major rehab is better value than an outright replacement, that might hit 125 years. It's not the Tappan Zee, ready to topple over...fugly-looking and invasive as it is that thing is it's a cantilevered truss overbuilt that there is no structural or traffic-related justification for MassHighway to prematurely replace it. You can't tie an unrelated bridge of unknown final lifespan outside of the MBTA's jurisdiction to the planned zapping of one non-critical grade crossing. Project scope isn't this unlimited thing that can balloon and start sucking up every civilly engineered structure in ever-widening radius around some little fiddely bit. Tobin replacement's a separate thread, separate project scope altogether. You have to treat its existence--and its existence forcing that grade crossing's existence--as a constant within this project scope.
And these are all 2040/2050 issues, which realigns the timeline nicely in my opinion.
Like you said, it's an ugly and invasive monster of a bridge. I don't believe the public is going to allow it to be rehabbed... once we're 90 years into its design life and it comes time to start seriously talking about what to do with that thing, you had better believe it's coming down.
Fortunately, my next point doesn't become a real issue until 2040/2050 anyway.
Who said it's going to become the northside's BBY equivalent??? It's max build is as one intermediate stop of moderate importance on the Urban Ring, a minor intermediate stop on the third or fourth-largest CR main on the system, and a bus transfer for 3+ well-patronized Chelsea routes a little bit sub- "key bus routes" on the system. It will always be an intermediate with all services passing through, and always be smaller than a genuine hub like Lynn. It barely cracks the Top 10 in potential ridership on proposed UR stops, because of how many large-ridership hubs are already included on the UR routing. What in the bloody hyperbole hell puts it in BBY's universe on utilization?
You can't have it both ways. Chelsea is either an easy skip of minor importance to the CR and future intercity network, in which case, that grade crossing suddenly becomes much more of a problem when trains are expected to be blowing through it at 80+ mph. Or, because all trains are supposed to be slowing down for a stop at Chelsea station, the grade crossing is fine because nothing moves faster than 5 mph through it - but, much like the curve means nothing can move through BBY fast enough to justify not stopping, that grade crossing is going to force a whole slew of trains to stop there that otherwise wouldn't/shouldn't be stopping there.
So, which is it? Do we want Chelsea as a mandatory stop for everyone? It looks a whole lot more attractive as a sparkling hub of intermodal traffic once you're forcing everything to stop there and the Urban Ring is online for a one-stop ride to the Airport, but that's because everything is stopping there rather than having it be in a remotely useful hub location. I shit on BBY a lot, but at least BBY is actually centrally located and useful to a huge part of the city.
Or, do we actually want Chelsea to be skippable and bypassed by the majority of rail traffic, local or otherwise, and establish Lynn as the outer hub instead? Just FYI, I don't think Lynn's that great of a hub location, either. Salem and Marblehead are too far away for local bus services to connect them to a Lynn Center Blue Line station - and god forbid I actually suggest some local North Shore bus routes, anyway. I'll have at least a dozen people screaming at me about "downgrading" their service even though local routes wouldn't and don't have to come at the expense of the expresses.
Which you CAN'T do without cutting River St. off the neighborhood street grid. The intersection rests on the bridge's abutments. Reconfigure River to preserve the intersection and you have to blow up minimum 3 residences.
No, you actually don't? Nothing about shifting the elevation of local roads requires you to change the amount of space they're taking up in any way. At worst, you have to dead-end River Street and force through traffic to go up to Webber Avenue, which is a world-ending addition of 500 feet or so at WORST. And, like as not, that's a temporary thing while the intersection is redone. No residential takes required.
There are NO additional headways you can cram through Beverly on the 20% of seasonally-skewed bridge openings remaining. The branches (esp. Rockport) don't have capacity ceiling for it to matter, Beverly itself is outside the scope of the rapid transit headway audience, and the tentatively planned higher dual-track bascule can open/close faster than the time it would take to delay any train on either side of even a clock-facing schedule. Not even the NEC needs all its movables eliminated to hit its tippy-top throughput. It's only a handful of the vexing ones on major navigable waterways--clustered almost entirely on the NHV-NLD segment--that present any real constraints. Beverly Draw and the Eastern Route don't even belong in the same conversation.
Produce some empirical evidence that this matters outside of your own sense of aesthetic perfection.
Please, tell me what makes you so certain that this area isn't going to see a resurgence or a major uptick in oversized marine traffic.
Hell, what makes you so certain that we can afford to keep some of the movables on the NEC, either? NAN was replaced with another movable, CONN is probably going to be replaced with another movable and we've been over why you don't think we can ratchet up NLC enough to zap Shaw's Cove or Thames River movables.
All of those are going to be huge problems when it comes time to start running expanded services NHV - WLY. I'll buy with some convincing that an 80% elimination on Beverly is going to future-proof it but the NEC bridges are great cases in point of how leaving the option there for future boat traffic to fuck us over just might actually end up fucking us over!
And we can't even come to a consensus on zapping the small-problem movables, what hope do we possibly have of getting rid of CONN?
That's a very busy cove. Not Gloucester-level traffic and not a large cove, but the in/out traffic is very heavy and it has legally-protected marine priority. That rests on 150 years of caselaw preventing a RR monopoly from doing exactly what you're proposing: steamroll other modes out of existence at-will. That's not going to change. Manchester-by-the-Sea's economy is more reliant on the revenue that cove pumps in than it is the Rockport Line and whatever schedule ceiling the Rockport Line can handle.
Understand, though, that marine priority ≠ schedule priority. Marine priority means the bridge stays open for at-will marine moves whenever there's not a train. The trains do get allotted schedule closings when they are in range. A yacht owner can't override that and demand instant gratification. So who frickin' cares when it doesn't constrain even the largest schedule Rockport can handle? And who cares when a replacement bascule with quicker movable spans for each track can open/close faster than a moving train departing Beverly Farms would ever reach it?
And we're 15 minutes from that point today. So fix the speed restrictions, the reliability concerns with the two mainline draw spans, and make train meets stageable through the tunnel with double-track platforms on each end and you are at 45 minute headways without blowing up anything.
If that's your goal why are you fixating on billion-dollar solutions that displace neighborhoods and cause economic harm to vital marine traffic? You're there. Why the tactical nuclear strikes when you're already there? You don't gain anything more except Transit OCD indulgence and power to push people around. If you're arguing that the ends justify the means, then your ends are quite different than 45 minute headways.
Because I don't think we're there yet, first of all. And even if we are there, NH Intercity is still out there and the Portland HSR question still hasn't been decisively answered. There's still a lot of Big Deal changes that may or may not be coming to the amount of traffic we can expect on any part of the Eastern Route.
You call it Transit OCD indulgence, I call it future-proofing.
Does blowing up the Tobin count as something we can do before 2050? If you're going to hold rapid transit to a timeline, then sort out some coherence in the timeline for all this other billions in frills beyond "45 minute headways".
If 2040 counts for the purposes of answering this question, then yes. Once you decide on replacing rather than rehabbing a bridge, there's no real reason for you to run it out right to the very last day of its scheduled lifespan. File "took down the bridge five to ten years before it's design life expectancy clocked out" under "things that aren't that big of a deal."
A lot of the things I complain about are long-game issues. I'm looking at 2050, not 2015.
And it's attitudes like that that allowed history to happen, and history to repeat itself. Once you throw out the obligation to "do no harm" in a representative democracy you're on the path to absolute power that corrupts. You're not clarifying that stance, you're doubling-down on it. That's horrifying.
I'll accept that it's horrifying, if it'll make you feel better that I come right out and admit that I am a horrible person.
I'm not going to change my attitudes, though. Nor am I going to suddenly stop advocating to just take the land and do the harm if the "no harm" alternative as I understand it is so much worse and stands to harm through inaction so many more people than the few we would've had to go through to begin with.
A representative democracy means everybody has a voice, even the people who stand to benefit as others suffer. That's tragic, but there's nothing in the Constitution nor any other part of US Law that says "The Government Shall Do No Harm To The People." Try and minimize the harm? Yes, of course. But utopia isn't attainable in reality. It never has been, and it never will be.
Call it doubling-down on a horrifying position, but you know what? Knocking over a few homes or seizing some quantity of land through eminent domain or causing a lot of people's lives to be disrupted by construction projects isn't going to instantly catapult us into a tyrannical dictatorship. There's a long, long, long chasm between this and that.
Just a quick note: "every 45 minutes" isn't a clock-face schedule (German: taktverkehr). The headways need to be a factor of 60 minutes for that to be possible. For example, if a service arrives at :12 and :42 after the hour, every hour, that's clock-facing. If 45 minutes is the minimum then you'll need to round up to hourly to achieve clock-facing times.
And F-line is completely right about the need to avoid harm.
I don't think there's anything particularly special about the number 60, but I'll concede if the point rather than degenerate into a semantics argument over what is and isn't clock-facing.
Here's my idea for a rapid transit line to Watertown that ties into the Central Subway at Kenmore. It would be LRV, unless the Central Subway were to be converted to Blue Line type cars, in which case it would be Blue Line type heavy rail.
The wide shaded lines indicate elevated sections. From Cambridge Street to west of Everett Street, the line would be ground level, using two tracks of the 4 tracks existing in that location. West of Everett Street, the line would be elevated to cross over the Mass Pike and the Charles River. It would be elevated all the way to Watertown, utilizing the old Watertown Branch Railroad R.O.W. It would continue on to Waltham on the old Watertown Branch Railroad R.O.W. on an elevated structure.
This is also on my MBTA Expansion Google map at
https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msi...ll=42.358354,-71.125832&spn=0.038816,0.084543
Something tells me your proposal is just as DOA as all the other proposals to build a new El anywhere in Greater Boston would be, which is a damn shame because my only real objection to this is that you completely missed Union Square and Oak Square.
Geez... that's a lot of words. I hope I didn't miss anyone.
