Crazy Transit Pitches

[DominusNovus]

Nothing will ever get built "under" the Boylston Street subway. Except maybe deep bore? Your best hope is a riverfront subway, or maybe we get a clue and learn how to construct Copenhagen-style.

Whats the reason for not building under there? And would there be a potential other way to run the Blue Line alongside that route until a point where it theoretically could be underneath?

 

[George_Apley]

Whats the reason for not building under there? And would there be a potential other way to run the Blue Line alongside that route until a point where it theoretically could be underneath?

Under Boylston Street? It's filled land. Unstable, with old foundations just waiting to be shifted around. There's not a lot of good usable bedrock to bore into down there. The Tremont Street subway has similar issues (less to do with the soil and more to do with burial grounds).

Blue can get to Fenway via a hypothetical (though maligned) Esplanade Subway in the footprint of Storrow Drive. It would hit a connection with Green at the existing GovtCenter, and at Kenmore Square. If you wanted you could have it assume a Green Line brance (Riverside makes the most sense since it's mostly grade separated already, excepting the platforms), but you won't be tunneling underneath the D to Riverside! Its stops are already at or beyond HRT stop distances. Blowing billions to bury a complementary heavy rail subway beneath a light rail corridor in the suburbs makes no sense at all... The D is the last branch of the Green Line that should have complementary HRT (outright conversion makes more sense). Improve the B by burying it to BU West or Packards and then signal priority past there. C and E just need signal priority, and D is already grade separated.

 

[George_Apley]

There was once a trolley service on that median in Newton. I believe it terminated at BC for connecting service. Through-routing it onto the "B" runs into the problem that the "B" is incredibly slow and unreliable. It would just be too long and unwieldy until that problem is fixed.

Would there even be demand for a second Newton branch if the B was fixed? Restoration of the A and the E are easy to judge due to the crazy bus ridership on the 57 and 39. What bus running down CommAve in Newton is loaded with riders looking for a better transit option?

 

[DominusNovus]

Would there even be demand for a second Newton branch if the B was fixed? Restoration of the A and the E are easy to judge due to the crazy bus ridership on the 57 and 39. What bus running down CommAve in Newton is loaded with riders looking for a better transit option?

My logic is entirely based on that giant median strip of grass running down Comm.

 

[novitiate]

Would there even be demand for a second Newton branch if the B was fixed? Restoration of the A and the E are easy to judge due to the crazy bus ridership on the 57 and 39. What bus running down CommAve in Newton is loaded with riders looking for a better transit option?

My understanding is that the bus that replaced the service that ran down the median there was cut for low ridership pretty early in the MBTA's existence... maybe if they reopen Norumbega Park?

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

My understanding is that the bus that replaced the service that ran down the median there was cut for low ridership pretty early in the MBTA's existence... maybe if they reopen Norumbega Park?

...and the trolley that ran on the Comm Ave./Newton median barely made it out of the 1920's before it was cut due to low ridership.

Newton's richest residents live along Comm Ave., and they were amongst the first income bracket in the state to buy cars. There hasn't been a heavy transit constituency past BC in close to a century.

 

[MBTAddict]

The Urban Ring should be a Hyperloop.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

The Urban Ring should be a Hyperloop.

Hyperloop: It's coolor-looking vaporware than Maglev, but with less seating capacity than a bus!

 

[MBTAddict]

Hyperloop: It's coolor-looking vaporware than Maglev, but with less seating capacity than a bus!

It's barely got the seating capacity of a taxi. How many of these things are gonna be hurtling through the tube at a time?

 

[Matthew]

The Hyperloop makes Crazy Transit Pitches look like Reasonable Transit Pitches.

 

[fattony]

It's barely got the seating capacity of a taxi. How many of these things are gonna be hurtling through the tube at a time?

Let me play devil's advocate here and assume everything released yesterday about the Hyperloop is true and would work as described.

One capsule departs every 30 seconds and with a 35 minute trip that means about 70 in the tube at a time. Each way.

I don't see why the seating capacity matters. With 28 person cars they can move >3000 people per hour each way. It might be possible to move that many people between LAX and SFO by plane, but not with a 35 minute trip and not for $20 fare.

 

[bigeman312]

Let me play devil's advocate here and assume everything released yesterday about the Hyperloop is true and would work as described.

One capsule departs every 30 seconds and with a 35 minute trip that means about 70 in the tube at a time. Each way.

I don't see why the seating capacity matters. With 28 person cars they can move >3000 people per hour each way. It might be possible to move that many people between LAX and SFO by plane, but not with a 35 minute trip and not for $20 fare.

Not gonna happen. The Red Line to Brattleboro, Orange Line to Manchester, Blue Line to Portland all have a better chance of being built.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

This is the #1 story on CNN.com?

Yeah...there's nothing suspect whatsoever about repackaging of failed 19th century pneumatic tube transport being surprise-announced to the world by a media darling billionaire and it being breathlessly re-reported and re-tweeted as THAT...WHICH...WILL...CHANGE...EVERYTHING and "Stop construction of California HSR! We have a new champion!!!".


Elon Musk is doing great things with Tesla Motors and SpaceX...but evolutionary steps in electric car technology and commoditization + evolutionary updates to proven 1960's rocket technology aren't nearly the reach this is. Say what you will about the great high-speed Maglev hype, but at least it has been a real thing in test installations for 40 years, a real thing in revenue service for 8 years, and has been peer-reviewed and studied and debated for decades as a Big Deal Thing™ by engineers. Even driverless cars have achieved Big Deal Thing™ status at the research and testing level.


This is one not-large company with a modest contingent of in-house engineers birthing it out of thin air yesterday. If they've got this, then the thousands of engineers for the last century who studied the shit out of vacuum transport and ended up dismissing its viability on a scale from "so expensive it's like building a Space Shuttle to take a trip halfway across state" to "100% Lyle Lanley-esque snake oil salesmen quackery"...were completely and totally wrong all along.

Which would you rather bet on?

 

[Matthew]

Sometimes it amazes me how stupid people are. Then again, it's CNN.

With Musk, I can't imagine the guy is that dumb. He's obviously trying to sandbag HSR in order to promote his cars. Or something like that.

 

[fattony]

The most unrealistic part is the price, not the technology.

As great as today's railroads are, they are barely a step ahead of 19th century technology. If railroad didn't already exist and I wrote a 50 page description of a railroad system, you would laugh at that too. Same for the automobile/highway system, airplanes, and space flight. Transportation is shockingly complicated and expensive. And yet we manage to do it with whatever technologies we invest enough time and money developing.

I think Musk getting out in front of the press with a radical idea is great. At minimum it gets people talking about what they want from their transportation infrastructure. The thing people know they don't want is make-work projects that don't actually improve people's lives.

 

[Matthew]

No, the technology is unrealistic too. It's essentially a vactrain, an old idea. Creating the vacuum would be ridiculously hard. The proposed accelerations would be unreasonable. There's almost no safety plan that can possibly work. The vulnerability of this thing to any sort of fault is astounding. 30 seconds is not sufficient time for emergency braking, much less anything else. And how would passengers evacuate?

Also his plan does not call for bringing passengers into the heart of the cities which is the hardest part.

CAHSR explicitly rejected the I-5 routing for itself because it does not serve intermediate cities. I-5 is in the middle of nowhere. But if they had chosen an I-5 routing then they could have brought trip times down below 2 hours. Using existing rail infrastructure, door-to-door, they would have easily beaten any kind of "hyperloop" even if it was somehow magically feasible. We already have fast travel between inconvenient locations: it's called airplanes.

Railroads do exist and represent one path of the evolution of transportation over time. Because they are based on engineering principles that have been refined for generations. Yet we still suck at running them. We need to learn how to do old things well; not get distracted by shiny, science fiction-like impractical fantasies. In America it seems we're always looking for a magic bullet solution, instead of buckling down and working on improving what we already know how to do. No wonder our infrastructure is crumbling.

 

[fattony]

Also his plan does not call for bringing passengers into the heart of the cities which is the hardest part.

I missed this detail on my first read through. 35 minute trip is worthless if the you get dropped off in the middle of nowhere.

Also, lateral loads up to 0.5g in rapidly alternating direction is a recipe for airsickness (tubesickness?).

 

[Arlington]

I missed this detail on my first read through. 35 minute trip is worthless if the you get dropped off in the middle of nowhere.

I suspect the other modes will come out to meet it, and then development will infill around it, even as happened at O'Hare and Dulles.

Also, lateral loads up to 0.5g in rapidly alternating direction is a recipe for airsickness (tubesickness?).

I'd guess they'll give you a video option that simulates what you'd be seeing "outside". Heck they could put a camera on each tube segment and show you a series of stills from it as each frame in a pretty cool movie.

 

[cbrett]

Hey even if the hyper loop doesnt work out theres now a giant string of solar panels along the median of that highway, not sure what those could possible power.

The biggest issue with the hyperloop is even if you figure out how to actually make it work and build the thing for anywhere near the price tag listed, then what comes next? I know he mentions that branches are possible, but that seems to be REALLY hard especially considering the lack of a guideway/rails.

It brings up an interesting dillema with capacity though, where this thing could barely serve demand, but direct hsr between the cities isn't warranted along this route apparently

 

[DominusNovus]

I was mulling over an idea the other day, and I'm curious if it would work.

The simple description is overlapping rail lines. To use an example, lets take Brockton. Without extending the Red Line itself, what if there were another rail line coming *from* Brockton that extended up to the Quincy stops and down to however far south is needed.

That example may or may not be a good one specifically, but it gives the general idea I have in mind. Commuting from/to Boston itself on rapid transit on one line isn't necessarily practical, and the outlying cities (Brockton, Framingham, etc.) aren't necessarily large enough on their own to merit a completely independent system.

But if there were a combined system, would it be practical?