Crazy Transit Pitches
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Matthew,
Good eye on the Chestnut Hill thing. I need to learn more about what the situation to Arlington would be like - Never considered it before, but I would like to check into it (any ideas?), Lynn would most def be a good idea, but for whatever reason I didn't incorporate it into this plan (thus far). I think the A-Line would be good for Brighton Center and nearby environs.
I like the ideas I saw a few posts back regarding the Green Line Arlington>>South Sta via Chinatown and also the Blue Line taking over a heavy rail D-Line and connected past MGH and the Back Bay. So I can't take credit for the overall design/ideas. F-Line to Dudley would be great to see too.
Interesting! I did not know that the Red Line was to go to Arlington originally. I wonder what the consensus is now among Arlington residents about if the Red Line was to reach them. Less people off the road is the goal, I think.
Oops, I sure did misspell those. I was thinking the restored Arborway E-Line would terminate at the roundabout where 203 and Centre St. meet. Seeing that there is a roundabout, I figured a Light Rail could "round-a-bout"!
bobthebuilder
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Very nice map, I love the idea of running the blue line the way you did all the way to riverside.
As far as the other green line extensions, F-line to dudley would be great, I would think that's the most feasible of the options you have laid out, and the routing of the greenline through south station to the seaport the way you have it is the way I would love to see it play out. Unfortunately, there is good reason this sits in the crazy transit pitches section. sigh.
Also, good work on the geographical map, always nice to see how the lines actually relate to each other.
As far as the other green line extensions, F-line to dudley would be great, I would think that's the most feasible of the options you have laid out, and the routing of the greenline through south station to the seaport the way you have it is the way I would love to see it play out. Unfortunately, there is good reason this sits in the crazy transit pitches section. sigh.
Also, good work on the geographical map, always nice to see how the lines actually relate to each other.
fattony
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This is a great concept map. Nice style and naming/numbering convention.
I'd love to see you incorporate some of the "indigo" ideas from the MBTA 2024 map. Not the full commuter rail, but the DMU services. With the assumption of 15 minute headways, they will be about as convenient as the outlying green branches.
I really like the distinction between grade separated and street running, but it is hard to see. Maybe try dotted lines or something to see if you can get better visual contrast? It's not all that important, just something to play with and see if it is an improvement.
Also, Dudley to seaport is 2 transfers. Since this is "crazy" territory, do you see a way to make it just 1? Boylston/Chinatown combined station? We know that is infeasible, but so are the green line routings you already have.
I'd love to see you incorporate some of the "indigo" ideas from the MBTA 2024 map. Not the full commuter rail, but the DMU services. With the assumption of 15 minute headways, they will be about as convenient as the outlying green branches.
I really like the distinction between grade separated and street running, but it is hard to see. Maybe try dotted lines or something to see if you can get better visual contrast? It's not all that important, just something to play with and see if it is an improvement.
Also, Dudley to seaport is 2 transfers. Since this is "crazy" territory, do you see a way to make it just 1? Boylston/Chinatown combined station? We know that is infeasible, but so are the green line routings you already have.
You think it may be because of labor union costs?
bigeman312
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Actually a pedestrian tunnel between Boylston and Chinatown is feasible. There were once underground passages in both stations, connecting inbound and outbound platforms to each other. They are still there, but sealed now. These passageways could, feasibly, be reopened and connected via a not-so-long (a la DTX-Park pedestrian tunnel) tunnel. Feasible, yes. Justifiable, not until The Green Line is extended to South Station and that is less feasible than the aforementioned pedestrian tunnel.
Thanks for the feedback, It's very appreciated. I will most definitely be considering these things. Any collaboration would be awesome. I like to bounce ideas off anyone interested in this kinda stuff!
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Ain't tunneling under Essex to get from Boylston to South Station unless you want to deal with disgusting amounts of debris, mitigation and cost overruns. You can probably do it much more economically (if a bit more detour-ie) by swinging south to Tufts Med Center and then back up via Marginal and Curve to meet the Transitway.
Something like this:
As far as 40-50 year builds go, this is what I would envision as a max build in that given time frame. Unless street-running makes a comeback in this state I don't see A-Line to Oak Square coming back. I brought the E down to Hyde Square area, mostly because the neighborhood has started discussing it. Red to Arlington and HRT eating the trolleys to Mattapan. Blue to Charles/MGH and Lynn. Orange to West Rox, paired with GLX to Needham Junction wipes out the Needham Line. GLX to Porter and West Medford to the north, Dudley via Tufts Med to the south, Seaport via Tufts Med/South Station to the east. GL Back Bay connection via Tufts Med under Marginal Road. Maybe start burying the B to BU West/Packards, and the E to Brigham Circle. Either surface or subway'd D-to-E connection at Brookline Village. Indigo to Westwood and Riverside via South Station, and to Reading and Waltham/128 via North Station. No Urban Ring yet because the N-S Link isn't done, so the Grand Junction is still needed for Commuter Rail movement ops.
Of course, this is all pie-in-the-sky 40 year build. Yay!
Something like this:
As far as 40-50 year builds go, this is what I would envision as a max build in that given time frame. Unless street-running makes a comeback in this state I don't see A-Line to Oak Square coming back. I brought the E down to Hyde Square area, mostly because the neighborhood has started discussing it. Red to Arlington and HRT eating the trolleys to Mattapan. Blue to Charles/MGH and Lynn. Orange to West Rox, paired with GLX to Needham Junction wipes out the Needham Line. GLX to Porter and West Medford to the north, Dudley via Tufts Med to the south, Seaport via Tufts Med/South Station to the east. GL Back Bay connection via Tufts Med under Marginal Road. Maybe start burying the B to BU West/Packards, and the E to Brigham Circle. Either surface or subway'd D-to-E connection at Brookline Village. Indigo to Westwood and Riverside via South Station, and to Reading and Waltham/128 via North Station. No Urban Ring yet because the N-S Link isn't done, so the Grand Junction is still needed for Commuter Rail movement ops.
Of course, this is all pie-in-the-sky 40 year build. Yay!
Always interesting to me which routes people choose for Indigoification. What was your logic in sticking DMU's on the Western Route as opposed to the Main Line?
Proposition Joe
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If Riverside is going to get transit is there a point in keeping Woodland/Eliot/Waban around instead of getting rid of them and making Needham the D branch destination?
It's a little less of an issue with Eliot and Woodland, but you have to remember that a lot of Newton's villages formed around those stations, and not vice-versa. The Waban station is literally the center of the village of Waban.
And as a decentralized city formed from a collection of villages, Newton is unusually reliant on the Highland Branch to string its community together.
Newton is actually kinda awesome in that way; between its village orientation and all those Green Line stations, it's surprisingly walkable.
Of course, there's just as much of the city that's not really accessible by public transit right now, so not having a car can be a hard sell. But what they have is pretty great at the moment, and you'd have to work pretty hard to convince me that any stations should be closed in Newton.
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My thinking is that the New Hampshire Main will get doubled-up service by kicking the Haverhill trains off the Western Route, so Indigo would be the only service from Reading-south. Winston has mentioned issues with the single tracking from Oak Grove to Sullivan crimping the headways of a DMU service though, not sure if that changes if we get rid of Haverhill trains on that line.
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Well, Riverside is getting quasi-rapid-transit-frequency service at the peak. Not the sort of frequencies that could replace the Green Line outright. Needham will have to have new letter.
F-Line to Dudley
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The helper for the single-track pinch is this surface freight track at Wellington for access to the Medford Branch and some long-gone Malden customers. Starts starts at Cabot Rd. just past the Route 16 overpass, stays on the surface when the other 3 OL and commuter rail tracks go through the tunnel, and has a crossover back to the mainline about 1/2 mile up. Track then continues for 1/4 mile further over the Medford St. bridge before starting down a fenced-off incline to an abandoned freight siding that used to cross Commercial St.
The crossover past the tunnel is out-of-service because that's Pan Am's maintenance responsibility and hasn't been used in years. But at minimum a refresh of the track around the tunnel with automatic switches installed on each end gets you a much-needed passing siding for not a lot of money. Going the full 3/4 mile to Medford St. would require shoring up the first 100 ft. of embankment where the ex- freight siding's incline down starts right after the bridge, but also wouldn't be a lot of money.
Now...would this get you 15 min. DMU headways to Reading? I don't know. A traffic engineer would have to model the max capacity and train meets with one of those stat plots you find in those 50 pages of official study appendixes. Not a question we can speculate about with unless somebody here is a wiz with Minitab and wants to spend all day plugging data. My guess is that you can get close enough to 22 +/- 3 mins. clock-facing that it's full game for the Indigo spider map if all Haverhills were moved permanently to the Lowell Line and North Wilmington got swapped out for a reopened Salem St. on the Wildcat Branch (the stop N. Will ultimately replaced, with station site still owned by the T). The only major consideration is that Eastern Route must still get full priority at the single-track pinch @ Sullivan Sq. used by all non-Lowell/Fitchburg trains, so Reading inbounds may have to pause frequently for schedule adjustment on the little piece of double track next to Assembly Sq. to let an Eastern Route or Reading outbound pass. On a very short line with no thru-running Haverhills, that's not a big deal and the fudge factor can be built into the schedule. All of the Indigos are going to have to bank a couple minutes' fudge factor into their schedules to let long-haul trains with priority pass.
This is specifically mentioned in some MPO report with a diagram (current ed. of LRTP?), but I can't for the life of me find it on Google today. I do not think the T has studied it in any published report, so if it's on the front-burner that's internal info. It would not have been studied by anyone yet in a Reading short-turn context, as any recent needs assessments for the line are centered around the full Haverhill schedule. And the full Haverhill schedule can't have any increases (not even on the new upstream double-track, which is mostly there to solve the line's wretched on-time performance) until they relocate out of tiny Bradford layover yard to more spacious digs. And even then the Lowell Line is where the most slots can be gained without spending a penny more. So nothing about this passing track truly matters until they seal the deal on a new layover parcel.
There's no question it's feasible and would eliminate some meets since that out-of-service crossover at the 1/2 mile mark is already there. The main question is whether the extra running space to just shy of Malden Ctr. reduces more meets and is straightforward enough on embankment + retaining wall work to go for, and looking at what it means for density of Reading turns vs. end-to-enders.
BTW...the other piece that has to be done is Reading station itself, extending the double-track 1/3 mile from Ash St. through the platform. But that has to be done for any/all service because the single platform is a bottleneck today. You can make a reliable assumption that some small sum of found money will appear fix this small detail in the next 3-5 years because it's consequential to on-time performance as well as service increases. So pay it no mind when pondering DMU's because it's the universal constant for anything/everything.
How much would it cost to extend the Orange line out there as originally planned? The bottlenecks are there because the OL takes up 3 tracks, and if existing service is going to go through the Lowell line then why not? With Lowell turned to OL then the Eastern Route is the only thing going through the Sullivan bottleneck and frequent dmu Lynn/Salem would be much easier.
What would the T have to do to switch over the Lowell line to heavy rail? If they're worried about cars then they can put an option on the orders they're already making for the orange/red and buy more when the time comes. Could they re-use most of the cr trackage and row, or would this be more complicated then that?
What would the T have to do to switch over the Lowell line to heavy rail? If they're worried about cars then they can put an option on the orders they're already making for the orange/red and buy more when the time comes. Could they re-use most of the cr trackage and row, or would this be more complicated then that?