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Wow...
Crazy Transit Pitches
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Wow...
bigeman312
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I certainly love the visual representation. In terms of feedback, it's notable to remember that with all else equal (it never is) you want the longer, more technically difficult (dispatching-wise) branches to have the shorter turns. So, for example, the MBTA wouldn't have ever considered the "B" branch to be extended on one of the GLX branches because dispatching it the length of Comm Ave with a lack of signal priority, and unpredictable bunching owing to front door boarding crowding, is already a headache. The "B" branch, as currently constituted, should always be the shortest turn of the branches to keep things relatively sane dispatch-wise. So, having the "E" and "A" short-turn in your map makes a lot of sense to me, as those would be VERY challenging to dispatch. Although I echo others' sentiments that the reintroduced "A" seems like an easy candidate for the Seaport run so as to avoid cutting off, even if it is in a very minor fashion, current commuting patterns on the "C."
I'm curious as to your choice of "B" to Porter and "F" to West Medford. If it were me, I would flip them due to their geographical orientation. Do you have a reason for this that I'm overlooking - that's quite possible. The "B" traveling from BC to Porter Square, nearly curling in on itself like that, diminishes its usefulness, as traveling between most pairs of stations can be done more quickly on some combination of the 66, 1, Red Line or something else.
Also, I'd zap one of those stops along Comm Ave on your "B subway. I noticed you removed three stations, and that's a good start. If the time and money were invested in a subway there, with rebuilt stations, it would be prudent to have better station spacing. Honestly, I'd recommend zapping one more station of your choice between Packards Corner and Kenmore. That would still give you a station every 0.4 miles (closer than Copley and Hynes Convention Center).
Keep in mind this is crazy transit pitch material. The unions disappear and there would still be many obstacles preventing the T from tunneling under Essex St, not the least of which is the fact that T owes $billions in Big Dig Debt. Awesome map overall.
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The biggest trouble with an Essex tunnel is the engineering, not the labor.
The EGE
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Bingo. It doesn't matter who's designing and building and operating a tunnel; There are narrow streets and hundreds of unmapped utilities and poor soil conditions, and labor unions don't hold a bit of sway over any of those.
underground
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Unions are a convenient scape goat, but the issue for the T is rising healthcare and retirement fund costs. That's a problem for the majority of the private sector too, so unless you hire a contractor who manages to make working at the T like working at McDonalds, you've replaced a problem with the exact same problem. And you still haven't addressed the funding or engineering issue, which are comparatively bigger roadblocks, but with solutions that are at least known.
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F-Line to Dudley
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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.....
For other reasons detailed Essex St. is never happening. Silver Line Phase III belly-flopping on cost and the whole Copley elevator saga destabilizing the adjacent church were the wake-up calls that downtown under-street tunneling is too difficult and fraught with unseen complications to pull off. The only ROW's that are game for it are:
-- Underneath existing rail infrastructure in long-enough continuous use that the ground underneath hasn't been clogged up with too many utilities or old buried structures of "WTF???" variety. Think B and E reservations, N-S Link lead tunnels under the NEC and train yards.
-- 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.
-- Big Dig land. Which pretty much is limited to just the N-S Link and the pre-provisioned space left for it.
-- Short digs where the painful construction is very self-contained and the reasons for ripping up the street slam-dunk critical and unavoidable. Think Red-Blue where the tunneling is only 1300 ft. under wide Cambridge St. where one side of the street is 60's urban renewal and there's some bedrock supporting the side of Beacon Hill instead of silt mush. Or, if you bury the E to Brigham Circle, ripping the proverbial band-aid off Huntington the 3000 ft. the rest of the way to Brookline Village to join the D and E under full grade separation. Few buildings > 4 story apartments immediately abutting the road, and the neighborhood and traffic can swallow the mass disruption it if it's packed into an all-out construction blitz lasting only a couple years.
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.
-- 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.
-- You may not be able to convert the D to the Blue Line if you need either of these in the future: 1) A branch off Newton Highlands to Needham Jct., because of the grade crossings; 2) Urban Ring light rail, because the cross-Brookline tunnel is probably unbuildable and you may have to substitute with a BU Bridge->Kenmore->Brookline Village "boomerang" on the Green Line (w/subway extension to BU Bridge) to approximate the plan. So be careful about the long-term consequences of your decision to convert the D. Riverbank subway terminating at Kenmore is plenty good if you can't go further...takes massive loads off the Central Subway to a super transfer station @ Kenmore almost as big as the Big 4 downtown transfers. It's all good if that's as far as you go or if you defer a decision on going further to later.
Otherwise, all pretty logical. And I love the cleanliness of the map style. That's way more readable than the T's last few official spider maps.
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.
Shepard
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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.
B Line - I think others have commented on the stop consolidation issue
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.
I also like the idea of continuing C trains outbound to BC, but wonder if there's the capacity there to turn that many trains.
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.
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.
SL - don't forget the Chelsea extension in the works.
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It think if you have Red to Mattapan and Indigo through Dorchester and Mattapan, street-running Green from Dudley to Mattapan is redundant. The furthest I would bring Green past Dudley is the Franklin Park/Columbia Road area.
Apart from the redundancy, I also think that dispatching a line that street-runs from the Mass Pike trench to Mattapan would be hell to dispatch, probably worse than the B. It's a shame, because Blue Hill Ave was designed for trolleys and is easily wide enough.
Equilibria
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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.
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?
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Once you get the level of parallel ops the D to E connector, buried Huntington and Marginal subway would provide you could route trains any number of ways. I agree that the Dudley line is probably best served by a Lechmere-origin train, rather than a hairpin turn from Huntington-origin.
Maybe someone could clarify, inbound trains from the Boylston Street subway wouldn't be able to turn south into the Tremont Street tunnel, right?
Maybe someone could clarify, inbound trains from the Boylston Street subway wouldn't be able to turn south into the Tremont Street tunnel, right?
F-Line to Dudley
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Taking the Washington street-running, sending it down Warren street-running, then down Blue Hill on a reservation is 6 miles. The B line is hard enough to dispatch at 4 miles and reservation-only. That's way too far for a branch. You have to terminate at Dudley and keep it nice and taut. Let a proper Red Line extension to Mattapan, the 4 nearby Fairmount Line stops, and a thicker net of buses handle this corridor.
Warren's nowhere near wide enough. None of the non-Harvard Ave. cross streets between the two corridors are. A-line restoration has to follow the old route.
Now, because Brighton Ave. is wide you could reconfigure that street and median so the trolleys stay to the left of the yellow paint in full traffic separation. Then shift your protected left-turn lanes right by taking parking at the intersections so the median stays unbroken. They bowed to the status quo when they redid the road and left every space untouched while simply expanding the asphalt footprint. Solution for platforms at Harvard Ave. and Cambridge St. can either be getting their PoP house in order and doing left-door boarding on the median or doing something like the miniature platforms MUNI has in the middle of Market St. splitting the traffic lanes.
That reduces some of your mixed-traffic running and makes terminating at Oak Sq. less daunting at today's traffic loads. Also...if you're ever building the subway out to BU Bridge as an Urban Ring hook-in that halves the Comm Ave. running distance.
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.
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.
You need parallel flanks so the Central Subway is not carrying the weight of the world on its 19th century back. If you want real Urban Ring tie-ins that's what the BU-Grand Junction-Lechmere flank is for and the D-to-E-to-South End-to-Seaport flank. But it's also where Blue and the Riverbank can help, especially if all Ring LRT service boomerangs through Kenmore to/from Brookline Village, there's additional westbound branches to Needham, to Oak, to Harvard via Allston, and Worcester Line DMU service draws heavy ridership to Yawkey. It turns Kenmore into a superduper node of comparable heft to the Big 4 downtown transfers. That could absolutely be enough to merit a 6-car express HRT route to downtown. I think Riverbank's motivations are more as a transit commitment required for 1:1 trade-in of Storrow than place on the subway priority pile, but I have little doubt that it would fetch the ridership.
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.
It's the set-up for eventually completing the job, not an end unto itself. And thankfully breaking down that barrier to restoring any piece of the E more or less makes the full restoration inevitable, so it accomplishes the job of teeing up Phase II. Sort of like the Porter extension from Union, only here the storage problem gets acute enough after 10 years of ridership growth that there's some considerable ops urgency to get it back to Arborway Yard before too much time has passed.
Yeah. You can't get everywhere to everywhere in totally universal directions, so there are some limitations. That is the price of path-of-least-resistance tunneling. If you want it built at all, you have to accept that. It still allows every destination to converge downtown. It's not like Boylston is such a tough place to cross the tracks for a free transfer off a B or C to a Dudley/Seaport if they reinstated the old platform-connecting underpass like Park St.'s and ADA'd it. It's already old habit for going B/C/D to E or vice versa.
A triangle-shaped Tufts with a platform on a wye track would be alright for sending D's or E's to Dudley. Your tunnel along Marginal Rd. from BBY would shoot up Tremont 1 block to Eliot Norton Park for the sation. Your tunnel to South Station and the Washington St. portal would shoot down Shawmut on the next block from the station. That's not very much of a detour...~1100 ft. of tunnel vs. 600+ ft. if you stayed on Marginal straight (and missed Tufts in the process). Stick to the one that gets you the transfer stop configured to fling everything in every possible direction and maximizes the infrastructure. 500 ft.'s difference is nothing to fret over.
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.
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F-Line to Dudley
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BTW...found my crude renderings of these South End tunnels from the other threads to repost here:
Green Line to Transitway connection w/ Washington St. portal:
Huntington to South End connector via Back Bay (w/current location of Copley Jct. tunnel):
In both cases you can see the general configuration of Tufts as an all-direction wedge. 4 tracks feed out of the abandoned tunnel in Southbound-Northbound-Southbound-Northbound configuration. Sort of like JFK/UMass on the Red Line is set up.
Making it all-direction with thru-running from BBY to Seaport means spreading those 4 tracks out in a wedge along the ends of the park, then adding a wye track under Tremont St. along the south end of the park. The massive center area can be one great big wedge platform like Government Center serving BBY-to-Downtown (west side of wedge), Downtown-to-Seaport/Dudley (east side of wedge), and Seaport/Dudley-to-BBY (south side of wedge). Then there would be small side platforms on each side of the triangle accessed by track grade crossings serving the opposite directions: Downtown-to-BBY (west wall), Seaport/Dudley-to-Downtown (east wall), BBY-to-Seaport/Dudley (south wall).
Green Line to Transitway connection w/ Washington St. portal:
Huntington to South End connector via Back Bay (w/current location of Copley Jct. tunnel):
In both cases you can see the general configuration of Tufts as an all-direction wedge. 4 tracks feed out of the abandoned tunnel in Southbound-Northbound-Southbound-Northbound configuration. Sort of like JFK/UMass on the Red Line is set up.
Making it all-direction with thru-running from BBY to Seaport means spreading those 4 tracks out in a wedge along the ends of the park, then adding a wye track under Tremont St. along the south end of the park. The massive center area can be one great big wedge platform like Government Center serving BBY-to-Downtown (west side of wedge), Downtown-to-Seaport/Dudley (east side of wedge), and Seaport/Dudley-to-BBY (south side of wedge). Then there would be small side platforms on each side of the triangle accessed by track grade crossings serving the opposite directions: Downtown-to-BBY (west wall), Seaport/Dudley-to-Downtown (east wall), BBY-to-Seaport/Dudley (south wall).
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...)?
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...)?
F-Line to Dudley
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Not really. The track is open-access because of the low platforms. As a passenger you have the accepted responsibility to watch out, because nobody else is going to watch for you if your foot is sliding past the yellow line. EVERYBODY is going to notice if you run afoul of a 48 inch platform, because usually that means you're going to fall into the track pit. So right there there's no assumption of full grade separation on a trolley. Anywhere.
The other thing is simply that the LRT mode's #1 advantage is that it isn't bound to full enclosures like HRT. It can roam to full-enclosed, semi-enclosed, or fully-open stations all on the same run. The fact that all GLX stations are being built enclosed is more engineering reality than the nanny state. Nearly all of them are deep in a RR cut or up on an embankment where the station must go vertical to get anyone in and out. And where single island platforms are the only thing they can fit. Not a lot of options there. But you won't need to do that on some of the grade separated branches like the Grand Junction or Chelsea Urban Ring where some stops will be at un-eliminable grade crossings and many/most others will have easy side access that would be counterproductive to fence off.
As for Tufts specifically...there's no blockers because I assume they'll do a Park-style underpass with elevators for ADA. So, yeah, they could just make everyone dip up/down, up/down to get between the center wedge and any one outer platform. But there's not a real compelling traffic reason to nanny-state it like that. Total volumes through Tufts are way lower than what you'd get at Park St. inbound (which somehow manages to get by not scraping people off the front of a trolley every day). Not only lower overall as the secondary fork off the Central Subway...but the to/from Downtown traffic gets split into 4 tracks and 2 sides of the triangle, with frequencies on the wye track just being flat-out low because that's the tertiary service pattern. It's all spread out and around the tracks on the triangle. If each side of the center wedge has 2-3 cuts in the fence with controlled crosswalks it's fine for the volumes, a lot less a PITA to navigate than going up/downstairs, and quite a bit safer than the Park free-for-all.
No other LRT system in the land would throw that kind of straightjacket on itself, so assuming that any/all future builds have to have a total nanny-state grade separation lockdown pretty much ensures none of it will get built. If the planners don't understand that it's a feature not a bug that low-platform BRT/LRT boarding puts people one step from the active ROW at all times...they can't exactly be trusted to plan such a system. It's not heavy rail...and Green and Silver and all the frickin' DMU's are not the Red Line by any other name. That's the whole damn point of radial/distributing links in the system. So...solving their obtuseness about traffic distribution and what mode is supposed to do what kind of involves them "getting it" on these features-not-bugs of LRT. Or...help us all, they're never going to get their heads out of their asses and attempt anything that saves downtown from suffocating on its own congestion before it's too late.
I was feeling the same way last night.
JeffDowntown
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F-Line, I am sure that you have explained your idea before, but how do you connect the Tremont former Green Line tunnel to the surface running Washington Street line through the South End to Dudley? Where do you surface, and where do you cross the Pike canyon/Orange Line?