- Joined
- Jan 22, 2012
- Messages
- 5,078
- Reaction score
- 1,656
I'm betting that an Essex St. Subway could be built. Get rid of the MBTA unions. Period. Everything could happen.... without the unions.....
Wow...
I'm betting that an Essex St. Subway could be built. Get rid of the MBTA unions. Period. Everything could happen.... without the unions.....
It does look the cleanest, but after the fact that I thought it would be best allocated to that route, this map sort of came about naturally. If there is a reason to reallocate the C-line to another place I would like some feedback.
I haven't seen any TransitMaps from Tumblr. I used Adobe Illustrator and basically traced over the existing map but made my own alterations. Is there a link Cameron Booth's stuff I could check out?
The biggest trouble with an Essex tunnel is the engineering, not the labor.
Somewhat updated..
I'm betting that an Essex St. Subway could be built. Get rid of the MBTA unions. Period. Everything could happen.... without the unions.....
-- I don't know if you intended the Silver Line Washington replacement as a surface line or subway, but Washington can never be a subway for "infeasible dig" reasons so you're locked into surface. No biggie...short enough to manage street-running.
What if longterm the plan wasn't to keep it short to Dudley, but extend it (perhaps down Warren, then Blue Hill Ave.) meeting up with the Fairmount Blue Hill Ave. Station. Is this hypothetical extension going to be doable with street running green, or is it too long?
I've kicked around an idea of extending Silver (or green) down to Fairmount's Blue Hill ave station, and also extending Red from Mattapan to meet at this station as well.
-- You can conceivably hit Back Bay station by forking off Tufts and hugging Marginal St. in the opposite direction, then join the E at Prudential. That's a quasi-replacement for the Essex subway that would allow you to free up all the congestion at Copley Jct. by tapping the 4-track capacity of the abandoned Tremont tunnel. And potentially allow you to thru-route the E to the Seaport and Washington St. if you build a wedge-shaped Tufts station under Eliot Norton Park with a wye track. I forget which thread I posted it in (Seaport Transportation?), but I did a crude MS Paint diagram of how that junction could work.
-- You can conceivably do the above, then bury the E to Brookline Village, and end up with an entire parallel downtown subway to thru-route the D to the Seaport and free up a ton of Central Subway capacity to Kenmore. Again, if you nix the Essex subway for easier-dig paths of lesser resistance you can accomplish similar goals.
What if longterm the plan wasn't to keep it short to Dudley, but extend it (perhaps down Warren, then Blue Hill Ave.) meeting up with the Fairmount Blue Hill Ave. Station. Is this hypothetical extension going to be doable with street running green, or is it too long?
I've kicked around an idea of extending Silver (or green) down to Fairmount's Blue Hill ave station, and also extending Red from Mattapan to meet at this station as well.
That's a really stunning visualization!
FWIW, here's my view on these things, much evolved with the help and patience of the more knowledgeable forum members...
A Line - With full restoration unlikely, I've been thinking through the idea of a branch from the existing B line onto Warren Street (a wide road with few abutting residences and little needed parking) and then a short Cambridge/Washington Street reservation to bring you to a terminus in the current Wirt Street parking lot in Brighton Center. This short branch also doubles as a B-line short turn, which is operationally very useful.
Too ham-fisted. Tremont St. tunnel points the wrong way from Boylston, any tunneling to make it multi-directional is out of the question, and any looping or pingbacks elsewhere are out of the question. You can get to the Seaport from Reservoir if that D-to-E subway and Prudential-to-South End subway is built. Brookline's well-served here, so have to consider the diminishing returns of trying to force-fit too much unnatural and infeasible construction around this routing. It's not mission-critical.C Line - I definitely agree with the idea of this line going to the Seaport. much as I hate to believe it, the Essex Street alignment is not doable, even as a surface route because the portals would be too difficult. Using the Tremont Street Tunnel and looping around by the Pike back up to the South Station would be the better alternative. On your map, that means curving the C down to Tufts Medical and then looping back up to South Station and beyond.
No. The Central Subway really is too dense for signaling to substantially improve. That's a badly needed safety feature and a maintenance simplifier, but the characteristics of the Central Subway are way different than Red/Orange/Blue where a CBTC installation is a known-known capacity enhancer. Or CBTC on GLX or the D where the frequencies are lower. They may be able to design a system surgically enough to preserve Central Subway headways while bringing all the safety improvements and reducing the required human dispatcher labor, but it'll never be a service enhancer.D Line / BL - Personally, I think BL through Newton is a bit of a waste, and I am not sure that passenger numbers on most of the line justify it. It also precludes the Needham branch extension, which could be a very useful transit corridor especially if OL eats the Needham CR Line to West Roxbury (something that I think should also definitely be on these near-future fantasy maps.) I wouldn't complain if the BL was extended to as the riverbank subway Kenmore, but is it really necessary? The parallel central subway of the GL can be made a lot more efficient with more simple interventions like signaling upgrades.
Oh, hell yes Forest Hills. Hyde Sq. is 1.2 miles of street-running past Brigham Circle. Forest Hills is 1.2 miles additional. You're halfway home. And Hyde doesn't have any room whatsoever for storage, so that's a problem. I'm not sure you can build to Hyde without also building the D-to-E surface connector so Reservoir and Brickbottom can artfully thread the needle feeding it. I get doing Hyde as a first phase and wholly support it, since getting ANY street-running extension through JP approved by broad consensus its a breakthrough nobody has been able to achieve in 29 years. But it's not going to be the permanent end of the line because the service levels can't grow without a layover yard. And it doesn't tap the corridor's full ridership which needs to get through to FH.E Line - I think an extension to Hyde Square is more than reasonable, but I'm not at all bullish about Arborway. If you restore GL D service, then a likely future is to see the E tied in with the D between Brookline Village and Riverway, allowing new and different service patterns.
I was going to ask about exactly this if you hadn't addressed it. My only issue with that would be routing - D or E to the Seaport is fine but D or E to Dudley is kind of a hairpin. Is the tunnel from Boylston still feasible with the Back Bay extension, so you could do something like:
A: Oak Square to Logan Airport via Sullivan
B: Boston College to West Medford via GLX
C: Cleveland Circle to Porter via Union
D: Riverside to Seaport via Back Bay and South Station
E: Needham Junction to North Station via Boylston
F: Dudley to Logan Airport via Sullivan (or, in a crazier world, Charlestown via Haymarket Portal)
That seems like a reasonable avoidance of redundancy and it minimizes overlap. I know B and C shouldn't through-route, so maybe Dudley to West Medford and Boston College to North Station. I feel like nothing should stop before North Station from the South and West, and I sent the Needham trains there so that the 2 Newton/Brookline/Huntington branches would have different destination sets.
Very unlikely because the expansion wing of BPL was built on top of the Huntington tunnel where it forks off Copley. That is most likely structurally impossible.Also, even if train tunnels in fill suck, could a pedestrian tunnel be built between Copley and Back Bay? If possible, could there be a full underground concourse beneath Dartmouth, with a Copley Square entrance to Back Bay Station?
Are they allowed to build new subway track grade crossings for pedestrians like that?
I know it's overhead wire and feasible (like Park) but it sounds like one of those issues where overly paranoid "safety" concern trolls come into play (never mind that we force our children to mix it up with trucks just to walk to school...)?
Who do I have to pay off to make the 66 go straight on Harvard Ave and turn right on to Cambridge Street and the reverse when coming in the other direction?
-- Urban renewal zones. The blocks that were nuked and streets that were widened in the 1960's where the under-street innards are well-documented and better-consolidated than the spaghetti utilities under 19th century development. Think the South End on the first block-plus around the Pike canyon.
That's it. Pick your spots very carefully and weigh whether a "good enough" result sticking to these few easy-dig corridors accomplishes the same goals as "mapmaker's perfection" on an infeasible-dig corridor. Simple common sense and the lessons of Silver Line Phase III say you can never justify spending billions more for mapmaker's perfection when the less-perfect path of least resistance achieves near-same service goals.
With that in mind...
-- Essex subway is out. Seaport has to fork off the same tunnel as Washington St. and probably hug the urban renewal Marginal St. side of the Pike canyon to get to the Transitway. Plenty of capacity here, it just isn't universally accessible from the western branches and has to route from one of the Lechmere branches.
-- I don't know if you intended the Silver Line Washington replacement as a surface line or subway, but Washington can never be a subway for "infeasible dig" reasons so you're locked into surface. No biggie...short enough to manage street-running.