Crazy Transit Pitches

[F-Line to Dudley]

The state's incredible disappeared 2024 fantasy Indigo did no traffic modeling whatsoever on whether the Grand Junction could even handle Indigo-spec frequencies. Based on what the Worcester-North Station peak-direction only study showed, chances of ever attaining 15-20 minute frequencies on the GJ without doing more harm than good to local street traffic look poor at best. Somewhat contrary to conventional wisdom, Broadway fared much worse than Mass Ave. on queue backups...though Mass Ave. was hardly a picnic.

This runs headfirst into the same problems as in many previous fantasy maps:

• The corridor works tremendously better on light rail or BRT because every intersection can have a proportionally shared traffic light cycle. This is the only way to make the grade crossings manageable.
• Mainline rail always has the complete and total right of way at grade crossings. No exceptions, because mainline rail must make no assumptions of different rules for different vehicle types at a crossing. So traffic will always stop dead for the train, at any time there's a train, and obey the default crossing timings. And that is the sum total difference between fouling the heaviest-traffic crossings such that flushing the resulting queues locks up Kendall Sq. and LRT/BRT being able to prevent those backups by obeying the road signaling.
• Time-separation exemptions can't be sought to get around this problem because the service schedules being proposed here intermingle with mainline traffic on the Worcester Line and Fitchburg Line at either end.
• Eliminating the problematic grade crossings is impossible on RR mode. There is not enough run-up space at recommended grades for new construction to eliminate Mass Ave. or Broadway. Main can't be eliminated at all because of the air rights overhang. Tunneling under the Red Line at Main is impossible because of the risk of storm drain effect breaching the Red tunnel at the landfilled shoreline of the ancestral Back Bay, should the Charles Basin suffer a breach from sea level rise in the Harbor. Main St. is Cambridge's pre-1900 ancestral shoreline. It's impossible to run in a cut at Mass Ave. because that's deep in the heart of the 1900-05 landfilling and likewise at risk for becoming a canal in a Charles Basin flood event. The only way you can eliminate Mass Ave. is with an LRT/BRT overpass. Main will never be eliminable. Broadway...*maybe* on trolley. But there are no "Yeah, but. . ." super-Crazy Pitches that get this separation done for a DMU. We've wasted page after page and map after map on prior discussions slamming heads into wall trying to create a boondoggle big enough for mainline rail grade separation on the Grand Junction. It is physically impossible...because the waterproofing considerations for sea level rise and Charles Basin mitigation make it permitting-impossible. As well as patently insane when LRT overpasses are physically possible for every crossing except Main at billions less than DMU grade separation.

Further, reference the Worcester-NS commuter rail study. Schedule times over the Grand Junction are 1:1 equal with an Orange Line transfer @ BBY during all non- crush load hours, and Red transfer @ SS to Kendall is likewise equal when the Red Line isn't suffering under load. It's within the 2-minute schedule padding margin for error. An upgraded Grand Junction's top speed truly is that low because of the extremely sharp curves and grade crossings. This is why the Worcester study proposed zero off-peak or reverse-commute service, and only specced 5 unidirectional A.M. peaks to North Station and 5 unidirectional P.M. peaks from North Station. Directs at any other time including the later peak hours near shift-changes offered no added benefit over Orange or Red transfers. Thus, the only problem they addressed was Orange and Red's fast-decaying reliability under load. A problem that could be fixed for ALL hours of the day, including peak, with the necessary Orange and Red signaling and platform upgrades through downtown and long overdue radial relief builds like Red-Blue. In fact, on the off-peaks keeping stiff Worcester (or Indigo-Riverside) to the southside terminals was better overall at attracting ridership than forking the route in Allston for off-peak directs...simply because frequencies > one-seat.


^^The supposed convenience of a direct gets very overrated if it costs true Riverside Indigo any frequencies into BBY or SS. Frequencies are king. Diluting frequencies is a problem. And, again, doodling with mainline train service on the Grand Junction is not a good use of resources if it defers any effort away from fixing Orange's and Red's attrition under extreme load. This is a solution in search of a question, not an easy answer to a burning need. We only get answers by doing the dirty work on downtown congestion, and the Grand Junction only becomes a scalable solution if the mode gets outright changed to LRT or BRT where steeper-grade crossing eliminations at Mass Ave. and signal management can be shared with the roads at Main + Broadway.



Rest of it isn't as fatally flawed on the RR mode as the Grand Junction, but there are still unsolvable problems at:

Sullivan. . .

• You can't claim the third Orange Line track for a RR capacity expansion at Sullivan station because of the Community College-Sullivan viaduct that carries Orange. It inclines down to level within feet of the southern tip of the Sullivan platform. There's not enough room to turn out and claim Track 3 for Indigo. This means a commuter rail station must occupy the existing highly congested tracks shared by Haverhill/Reading and Newburyport/Rockport. The Western Route is already capacity-pinched by the Eastern Route's bigger capacity appetite, so plunking a mainline station at Sullivan starves Indigo to Reading of slots. That junction on the Somerville side of the river is the #1 capacity limiter.
• You can run 15-min. turnarounds to Reading if certain upgrades were made to that junction (i.e. a 2 x 2 track split for contiguous double-track to the foot of the Mystic bridge next to Assembly, instead of the current 1 Western x 2 Eastern). Plus other basic passing track upgrades further outbound, and punting the North Wilmington-Haverhill thru trains to the more capable Lowell Line + Wildcat. But pinch that junction further with a Sullivan CR station, and headways to Reading top out at much wider and less useful spacing.
• You can't use the outer Yard 10 freight tracks at Sullivan with a DMU to sidestep the Eastern/Western mainline split because of the speed restrictions of passing through Boston Engine Terminal and the freight wye to get there. Passing through Brickbotton would be a hideous schedule drain because those tracks are entirely inside yard limits capped at 5-10 MPH. And, the duck-under tunnel required to hop under the Orange Line to hit the Eastern Route before the bridge would be convoluted, require long inclines, be very speed-restricted by need for a slight curve and lack of running room for climbing the very steep grade of the Mystic Bridge so soon after the portal, and extremely expensive. Those outer tracks are easily claimable by LRT/BRT Urban Ring where the duck-unders to hop sides of the OL tracks can be steeper, simpler, and faster for those more nimble vehicles.

Eastie. . .

• It is possible to snake tracks along the Haul Road on the Eastie side of the river. Only part of the old retaining wall-framed RR cut was excavated for the truck haul road, with much of the latter-era earthen embankment retained. Widening the East Boston ROW out to its full dimensions with full retaining walls creates ample room to squeeze 2 tracks next to the realigned truck + SL Gateway pavement. A light rail Urban Ring would do exactly this. It is also possible to run mainline street-running rail--single-track, at least--over the Chelsea St. bridge without having to build a parallel drawbridge. It would be hideously slow, but street-running (or swallowed-sidewalk running) is allowed on new-construction bridges very similar to Chelsea River.
• However, there is no path into Logan-proper on mainline rail. Never was, never will be. Not with the available bridge underclearances from the Mass Pike for slipping over the Blue Line, not with the clearances on the terminal underhangs, and not with the space available next to the access roads. You definitely can't hang a schedule on street-running mainline rail if it has to go all the way to the terminals; what works for zipping across one movable bridge isn't a solution the rest of the way. If this were an LRT/BRT terminal loop you could build a relatively lightweight and low-profile viaduct to maintain the grade separation. Building a loop for a 263,000 lbs. mainline railroad minimum spec is going to be ghastly expensive, and require massive rebuild of the area around the terminals access roads to attain the clearances.
• Transpo Bloggers' Golden Rule #18: Mainline rail airport connectors are O-V-E-R-R-A-T-E-D. Read Alon Levy & others on this. They are money pits that don't generate the ridership, but conventional wisdom is utterly addicted to them in the face of empirical reality. What's justifiable and works quite well on a relatively low-profile mode like SL1 just doesn't draw ridership on a mainline deviation. Especially one that has as many slow painful zones as this tarted-up DMU ring. Don't take my word for it; read the reams of damning evidence online.

But worst of all, the schedule is going to be unmanageable on a DMU with how many speed restrictions it has to pass through en route. Only the mainline portions of the Worcester Line and Eastern Route are going to allow the vehicles to rev up to track speed between stops. It's 20-30 MPH in the entire middlesection on the Grand Junction + 10 MPH through the terminal district. Then probably not more than 20 MPH with the airport terminal spur if it has to be viaducted or run on an at-grade side reservation through extremely dense thickets of service driveway curb cuts and access road grade crossings. 15 minute turnarounds are going to be impossible with those performance extremes segmenting a single schedule. I think you'll be lucky to make it 25 min. frequencies, which is not useful at all.


There's no permanent solution here except real-deal Urban Ring. That's why none of the UR study options ever made passing mention of a DMU.

 

[DigitalSciGuy]

The TL;DR I'm getting is: no DMU and/or conventional push-pull. Full stop. Thanks for reiterating.

Okay, so what about EMU, LRT, or BRT with TBM under the Eastie Haul Road? I'm familiar with Alon's argument about direct airport connectors, but TBM under airport to effectively allow LRT or EMU-ification/circumvention of Silver Line sounds like it'd be feasible if:

1) we finally enacted some sort of value capture program state-wide to allow for development around redeveloped stations to actually pay for this

2) we actually did upzoning around stations to ensure growth of ridership aligned with the down payment on infrastructure that this would be

I'm not sure if I trust these transportation studies if they stand alone, are only examining a fixed set of transportation variables and projected traffic growth without taking a holistic approach to mobility. I remain skeptical about SL Gateway frequency and trip time until I see it running for a month.

 

[citylover94]

Forget EMU's LRT is really the only option that is truly viable from what F-Line has said in the past.

 

[Shepard]

Could you feasiby get LRT around that route - from the 4-track area by New Balance up to Chelsea on the GJ and around to the Airport?

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

The TL;DR I'm getting is: no DMU and/or conventional push-pull. Full stop. Thanks for reiterating.

EMU's are equally no-go, because you're still playing by all of the FRA's rules all of the time (no time separation exemptions, because this is a single trip that runs thru from the Worcester Line to Fitchburg Line to Eastern Route). Even if the FRA relaxed its regs to allow nice, nimble EMU's in America, you still hit these fatal blockers:

• Grade crossings: RR always has priority, leaving no chance of timing the signal cycles at Broadway for traffic management. Car queues will have to be dumped retroactively after a train passes, not proactively or proportionally.
• Grade separations: RR grades need to be 1-2%, which means you don't have enough running room to get between the Main St. air rights and Mass Ave. to incline up onto an overpass of Mass Ave. Mass Ave. grade crossing is uneliminable on RR.

Those are the two painful blockers that trolley and bus don't have to deal with.

• Light rail and bus can share a signal cycle with cars at Broadway and Main. Well-timed it would be like having a protected-left phase for the transit vehicles at no penalty to car queues. Since Main is an absolutely un-eliminable crossing, and Broadway is an unlikely elimination due to unfavorable proximity to un-eliminable Main...these are the only modes that'll let Kendall traffic function.
• Light rail and bus can climb steeper grades to get over Mass Ave. Enough that an incline coming off the Main air rights and over Mass Ave. has comfortable running room. These are the only modes that will allow Mass Ave. to fully function.

Since the grade crossings are make-or-break for making the GJ at all useful for high-frequency service, choice of mode must do no harm to Main/Broadway signal management and allow an outright Mass Ave. grade separation. Only bus or trolley do that.




The secondary consideration for mode choice is schedule management. The Grand Junction is slow on RR because of the braking profile of RR vehicles vs. those sharp, sharp curves and the grade crossings.

• An EMU may only do +5 MPH better than a DMU in terms of absolute top speeds, and only for negligibly short distances.
• The terminal district is still capped at no more than 10 MPH because of the way yard limits are signaled.

So balancing the 'normal'-speed Worcester Line and Eastern Route legs with that extremely slow midsection makes schedule management difficult, and meaningful headways (i.e. Indigo spec) improbably difficult to maintain.

Bus or trolley have much different braking profile than an EMU, with none of the FRA regs about braking distances.

• They can accelerate faster, decelerate faster, and hit higher absolute speeds between the curves and crossings. A trolley or bus coming off BU Bridge running nonstop to Mass Ave. probably averages 25-30 MPH on the straightaway and briefly hits as high as 35 MPH while an EMU may only average 15 MPH and hit 20 MPH for a few seconds.

So choice of mode ends up the be-all/end-all difference for keeping a consistent end-to-end schedule without the center of the line being the weak link that limits the frequencies.

Okay, so what about EMU, LRT, or BRT with TBM under the Eastie Haul Road? I'm familiar with Alon's argument about direct airport connectors, but TBM under airport to effectively allow LRT or EMU-ification/circumvention of Silver Line sounds like it'd be feasible if:

You wouldn't need to TBM Eastie Haul Road. The ancestral ROW was in a 4-track cut after crossing the river because it fed a freight yard under the footprint of Route 1A. When the freight started dying out and the old retaining walls in the cut needed repair, they simply backfilled the unneeded width with earthen embankments and buried the old retaining walls. The Haul Road only uses a fraction of the old space, so all you need to do is: scoop out the rest of the embankment back to the original ROW width, pour new retaining walls framing the restored cut, and shift the haul road pavement from centered to along the walls. Then there's plenty of space on the opposite wall for a grade-separated 2-track rail ROW. That's exactly how the Urban Ring plans it for any rail mode. Won't be that expensive, because the Haul Road isn't that long to begin with.

Airport? I'm not sure how you'd do that, but viaducting for a bus or trolley requires a far less-overbuilt structure than RR.

• Lower weight limit.
• Steeper grades, significantly reducing the running room needed to elevate.
• Sharper curves at less speed restriction.
• Lower clearances. You need 17'6" in overhead clearance to future-proof for an EMU under 25 kV wires. Trolley+wires are much shorter.

And can be shared by both SL1 buses and Urban Ring trolleys with rails in the pavement, significantly increasing the ROI of the structure. A single-use ROW is where everything starts going awry on cost/benefit for airport connectors. Multi-mode collector/distributors are way better value than something like eBART or AirTrain the transpo bloggers cite as raw deals. It's one of the reasons why SL1 is spared some of the criticism of other single-mode airport connectors; it works well enough glomming off the existing roadway infrastructure to keep its cost footprint modest. If building a dedicated terminal loop it'll be crucial to make sure that multiple transit modes and multiple transit users--Urban Ring, SL1, any pertinent local buses, any pertinent shuttle buses--can use this thing one after the other. Each additional user increases this terminal loop's value that much more to neutralize the well-documented pitfalls of single-use airport spurs. Design of the grade separation around the terminals needs to reflect that.


And if you do need to cross somewhere at grade to get across the access road on-alignment for this transit loop...of course you can share a road signal cycle with trolley or bus without fucking up traffic, while you can't with an xMU. Same modal advantages apply here and when sharing the Chelsea St. bridge as they do with trolley and bus re: 'fixing the glitch' with the Grand Junction's crossings and unfavorable ROW geometry.

 

[Charlie_mta]

Looking at Google maps, it would not be impossible to elevate Main Street over the Grand Junction RR. There are no curb cuts or driveways for a long enough distance on both sides of the RR crossing to allow a ramped roadway up to a bridge crossing over the tracks and Vassar Steet as well. Main Street would then touch down at Albany Street on the west and Ames Street on the east, but raising those intersections a few feet would likely be needed.

So, to get an unobstructed RR ROW, bridge Main Street over the tracks, then ramp up the tracks north of this point to cross over Broadway and Binney. Maybe then dip the RR under Cambridge Street, if water tables and pumps allow; otherwise, up and over Cambridge Street.

 

[BostonUrbEx]

How exactly do you propose to have a commuter rail line running through an active busway, an active haul road, a well-used public park, a gigantic highway interchange, and a hotel?

No busway, no haul road, park????, and under the highway/Blue Line/hotel/garages.

 

[BostonUrbEx]

Grade crossings: RR always has priority, leaving no chance of timing the signal cycles at Broadway for traffic management. Car queues will have to be dumped retroactively after a train passes, not proactively or proportionally.

You keep saying the crossing has to be on a fixed cycle. I'm not buying it that if a segment of track were designated as non-mainline track that it couldn't be put in by special instruction that the trains must follow a traffic signal.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

You keep saying the crossing has to be on a fixed cycle. I'm not buying it that if a segment of track were designated as non-mainline track that it couldn't be put in by special instruction that the trains must follow a traffic signal.

It does. It absolutely does. You can't cherry-pick your own definition of "mainline" / "not-mainline" on a train schedule that shares track on with real no-foolin' mainline trains on a single seat. This one doesn't even fit the mold of a RiverLINE-like time separation exemption, because it shares more co-mingled mainline running miles with other trains on the same schedule than it spends on the Grand Junction: Worcester Line, Fitchburg Line, through the terminal district (and all the criscrossing freight and non-revenue push-pulls in the terminal district), and Eastern Route.

If you intend to engage some of the common-carrier network to run a single service, you engage all of the common-carrier network's rules. These xMU's don't suddenly go radar-dark and opt out of all FRA oversight in anything-goes fashion the second they cross the switch off the Worcester Line, then reappear on the other side of a wormhole when they cross the switch onto the Fitchburg Line. They're still RR vehicles built heavy enough to absorb a collision with a freight train, with a far clumsier braking profile than any trolley or bus around crossings. The difference between an LRV being able to slam brakes at stop safely at a traffic light when somebody on another signal phase blows a red and darts out in front vs. a DMU being able to do the same is ginormous.

Scenes like ↓this↓--divided attention, stutter-step on gas then brakes, then semi-spectacular looking BANG! that everyone walks away from cleanly--are not survivable with an FRA-compliant xMU under the same exact conditions.

Therefore it is as irresponsible as it is physically impossible to relax the rules for a mainline xMU like it's no different than an LRV or one of those RiverLINE-style "DLRV's" just because this 2 miles of the trip isn't on the Worcester/Fitchburg/Eastern like the whole rest of the schedule. The equipment doesn't suddenly morph into something completely different after clearing those Grand Junction switches.

----- ----- ----- ----- -----

The only way to square that huuuuge differential in weight and braking distance between modes is to give the mainline rail vehicle the total right of way at the crossing...and to give up on any notion of shared signal cycles. Even in the countries that aren't saddled with the excess of FRA buff strength bloat, their xMU's are still have to be designed with crashworthiness standards top-down from a collision with a freight train. They're still orders of magnitude less nimble and more deadly in a crossing collision than any trolley, and thus the prevailing right of way at crossings has to reflect that.

That clearly doesn't work for these crossings. And since mainline rail can't have its rulebook cherry-picked, the only allowable options on that mode--any vehicle on that mode--are uselessly limited:

• Seek an NJ Transit RiverLINE time exemption to run Diesel LRV's at trolley crossing rules, but give up any running territory past the Worcester or Fitchburg switches and have a West Station-Twin City Plaza dinky that serves no known demand profile.

• Re-designate the Grand Junction's track class to street-running industrial track from several hundred feet north of the Mass Ave. crossing continuous to several hundred feet east of the Broadway crossing so it can obey road rules. Provided that's even FRA-legal for running passenger trains...which it may not be. That means a 5 MPH max speed, continuous horn sequences for the entire duration of street-running territory, and extra crew members needing to jump off the front of the train and flag the intersections as a crossing guard when the train has a green. Pioneer Valley RR freight trains on the canal district industrial spurs in Holyoke do this every afternoon. It's totally unworkable from a passenger staffing perspective, and the extra speed restriction induced makes it physically impossible to run Indigo headways on this conjoined route.

Not even North America's most famous street-running passenger track--the South Shore Line's EMU's through the streets of Michigan City, IN--bothers with a track class change to full-on street-running industrial track. It treats that street-running sequence as one super-long grade crossing with all signalized intersections on its short street-running segment going by 100% RR right of way. All signalized intersections have regular RR crossing flashers activating the normal 15 seconds out, sending every traffic light to automatic red for the default duration of the crossing protection cycle. They're still restricted to 5 MPH through signalized intersections and 10 MPH on straightaways, but keeping the normal track class with its normal traffic preemption is good enough for maintaining schedule while downgrade to industrial track class and signal sharing wouldn't.
​

I don't know why this notion of force-fitting xMU's at all cost on the Grand Junction keeps reappearing here as some sort of stubborn proof-of-concept belief that MUST be pursued to prove that mainline rail can 1:1 do the job of the Urban Ring. It's like the perennial crack-cocaine of AB Transit Pitches. 2 or 3 times a year we spend two pages in a tug-of-war of double-downs and myth-debunking over outright shitty transit that has no means of accomplishing what it's supposed to because it picks the wrong mode. Mainline rail is too cumbersome to maintain schedules well enough to provide Urban Ring headways. It can't serve the demand. Why double-down on the mode that can't physically run the schedule that serves the ID'd demand...while at the same time making a royal mess of Cambridge traffic management. The crossings are physically impossible to eliminate on that mode, or would cost billions of dollars in boondoggles that NO OTHER MODE would need to equivalently spend on. Everything about this stubborn mode choice makes for shitty transit, shitty transit engineering, and horrible allocation of resources. Why is that so hard to grasp when two other officially proposed and studied modes avoid ALL of those problems.

Also, these recurring proposals seem to always ask the impossible at running the intended service by demanding to have one's cake and eat it too re: partial opt-outs of the FRA rulebook. Maintaining a common-carrier network free from national fragmentation means providing a level playing field for all types of common-carrier traffic: freight, all types of passenger vehicles, intercity service...all of it. That's, like, the whole mission statement of the North American mainline rail network. Why even have a million miles of rail lines usable for any purpose and spanning every nook and cranny of 3 countries on one of the planet's largest contiguous land masses if there's such contempt for baseline standards? Utilizing the common-carrier network for its exploitable upsides means accepting the entirety of its rules and regulations full-stop...even the downsides. This is as true in more-permissive and more-fragmented Europe as it is here. Operate on some country's common-carrier rails, and play by common-carrier rules. This is not a hard concept to grasp.

If you don't like that, don't make it mainline rail. There are 2 officially-proposed modes for the Urban Ring that do exactly that, and meet all project goals while doing exactly that. As well as a fully-enumerated list of relatively minor eat-your-peas commuter rail and freight investments that would wean all other mainline traffic off the Grand Junction, making it wholly expendable for a change in modes.

Good transit picks the right tool for the job. LRT or BRT can effortlessly share traffic cycles with the un-eliminable crossings, eliminate other crossings where max allowable RR grades can't, run at higher absolute speed to maintain effective end-to-end schedules at intended frequencies, and do it at much lower-cost than these Frankenstein mainline builds.


Seriously...it's becoming the definition of insanity to keep going down this wormhole time and again in pursuit of a proof-of-concept when we already have a proposed project with open either/or choice of modes that empirically does all of its stated job at none of the downsides of mainline rail and all the mission creep cost required to make mainline rail only moderately shitty transit instead of irredeemably shitty transit. What am I missing here that keeps bringing us back to this crack-cocaine of intensity of belief in the empirically inferior mode least-suited to task?

 

[BostonUrbEx]

It does. It absolutely does. You can't cherry-pick your own definition of "mainline" / "not-mainline" on a train schedule that shares track on with real no-foolin' mainline trains on a single seat.

Except... that is exactly what is done at North Station, Reading, and Lowell -- albeit not for a crossing.

Plop a station sign east of Mass Ave (call it MIT), west of Mass Ave (call it Cambridgeport), designate MIT to Cambridgeport as Rule 98 Other-Than-Main-Track and add a special instruction to obey the traffic signals. Gates will not operate unless the circuit is occupied.

 

[George_Apley]

^ I'm still on F-Line's last point with this:

Seriously...it's becoming the definition of insanity to keep going down this wormhole time and again in pursuit of a proof-of-concept when we already have a proposed project with open either/or choice of modes that empirically does all of its stated job at none of the downsides of mainline rail and all the mission creep cost required to make mainline rail only moderately shitty transit instead of irredeemably shitty transit. What am I missing here that keeps bringing us back to this crack-cocaine of intensity of belief in the empirically inferior mode least-suited to task?

 

[mass88]

Have express train service from various points outside of the city. Example, from Quincy Adams to South Station. The line would have its own dedicated tracks, make zero stops in between, and run at 55-60 mph. You could add spokes at the Braintree Logan Express stop, Westwood/128, another at the 95/90 interchange in Weston, another up in Burlington.

 

[George_Apley]

Have express train service from various points outside of the city. Example, from Quincy Adams to South Station. The line would have its own dedicated tracks, make zero stops in between, and run at 55-60 mph. You could add spokes at the Braintree Logan Express stop, Westwood/128, another at the 95/90 interchange in Weston, another up in Burlington.

Dedicated express tracks? How?

 

[davem]

You modify the zipper to lay down rails instead of an HOV lane, durrrr

 

[DigitalSciGuy]

Here's an idea - we decide as a region that we can and must make room for faster more frequent transit service because that serves the public more sensibly, take away highway width (talk far enough in the future and we'll need to do that anyway otherwise we just have 2x more lanes of autonomous vehicles using the same road width, not really helping reverse the auto-centric commuting trends that have major externalities).

There - more ROW for high capacity regional rail network.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Except... that is exactly what is done at North Station, Reading, and Lowell -- albeit not for a crossing.

Plop a station sign east of Mass Ave (call it MIT), west of Mass Ave (call it Cambridgeport), designate MIT to Cambridgeport as Rule 98 Other-Than-Main-Track and add a special instruction to obey the traffic signals. Gates will not operate unless the circuit is occupied.

And how do you expect to maintain acceptable schedule and headways from Newton to Logan Airport by splicing together asterisks in the rulebook and cumbersome track circuit shunting games? Go even slower through Cambridge when the speeds were already too slow to run at headways worth a damn? Those cited commuter rail examples don't have any practical relevance here: North Station is yard limits at the end of the line, Lowell is at the end of the line, and Reading is a notorious anvil weighing down the Haverhill schedule long overdue for a fix. Those have no applicability for fixing the too-slow midsection of a schedule that already can't hold its ends together. Are we so wedded to proof-of-concept for proof-of-concept's sake that "Fuck it...we'll go 5 MPH instead of 10, and to hell with the headways!" is an acceptable alternative? This is lunacy.


It's the wrong mode for the task. It's shitty transit. It is neither cheaper nor easier to implement for the service when the service has a headway and schedule target that the proof-of-concept mode cannot physically deliver. There is very good reason why all proposals for mainline rail revenue service on the Grand Junction have been far, far more limited in distance and scope. If we care about spending our resources wisely, it's horribly irresponsible to spend money on a mode incapable of delivering the intended service in lieu of spending it on the mode(s) that can. Especially when mobility in this city is actively and acutely being hurt by the irresponsibility of past arbitrary proof-of-concept transit mode choices made out of stubbornness which couldn't deliver on their intended service goals (see: Silver Line, Phases I & III).

There are TWO officially-studied modal choices that accomplish ALL of the service goals for this Ring route with NONE of the compromises requiring the ugly and futile hacks of the proof-of-concept mode. Two modes that deliver the goods: that's 1 more than we usually get to choose from. Neither officially-studied mode has any obvious fatal flaws for hitting the service goals. Unless the service goals morph far above-and-beyond what we're talking about here, there are no straws to grasp beckoning a Rube Goldberg brainstorming session. At full-build and full-investment, BOTH those officially-studied modes would cost many times less than the extra above-and-beyond lard it would take to prop up the proof-of-concept mode into only slightly-shitty transit instead of uselessly-shitty transit. On either of the officially-studied modes you don't have to cut off your nose to spite your face spelunking through the FRA rulebook for "AHA!'s" to make a too-heavy vehicle too-clumsily shunt a grade crossing orders-of-magnitude too slow to matter. You just have a bus or trolley designed to obey traffic signals share a dead-simple signal phase...like they have in innumerable route configurations for 100+ years. No wishful thinking about opt-outs from the rulebook required to give it a prayer. The two officially-studied modes can/will eliminate the Mass Ave. grade crossing altogether with wholly generic construction; the shitty proof-of-concept mode either physically can't, or requires special exemptions for over-steep grades and 5x the construction cost.


And on and on and on. We're trying to find the most direct path to go from Point A to Point B at C travel time and D frequencies...i.e. usefully delivering a transit service that meets its intended goals. Philosophically pondering the outer technical limits of how heavy a stone some deity is capable of carrying on its back isn't relevant when that sidebar has no bearing on the most direct path for delivering a transit service that meets its goals. The two-thirds of this thread's title that say "Transit Pitches" still outrank the third of it that says "Crazy".

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Here's an idea - we decide as a region that we can and must make room for faster more frequent transit service because that serves the public more sensibly, take away highway width (talk far enough in the future and we'll need to do that anyway otherwise we just have 2x more lanes of autonomous vehicles using the same road width, not really helping reverse the auto-centric commuting trends that have major externalities).

There - more ROW for high capacity regional rail network.

We don't really need more mainline track capacity anywhere except for the Old Colony single-tracking in Dorchester and Quincy that cripples South Shore commuter rail capacity.

The rapid transit system--particularly the heavy rail trio--works and supports linear expansion out to Route 128 if downtown congestion gets addressed with load-reliever radial transit and mitigation for the decaying dwell times at the transfer stations (i.e. modern 'self-healing' signaling to counteract bunching, and platform + egress upgrades at the most constipated platforms like Park St.-Red). They were designed to support that from the start. The decay is all modern stressors, and we already know what the unfunded mandates are that roll back the decay.

Green Line needs a little more reimagining since its role has shifted into similar end-to-end trunk role as the HRT lines, well different from its original intent. But we pretty much know what those corrective steps are too: signaling improvements to address bunching, addressing longstanding Central Subway structural bottlenecks like Copley Jct., increasing cars-per-train, taking better advantage of the under-capacity north end for radial circulation, de-clogging the downtown dwells symbiotically with the HRT-reliever radial builds, more line interconnections for better redundancy, and better traffic throttles like short-turns and alt routings.

Nothing magic there. It's a big bucket list, but the only real debates are about prioritization. We know with virtual certainty what all the bucket list items are.


Commuter rail is different. It's not like the old early-20th century days where every mainline needed 4 tracks. That was back in the era of unidirectional signaling when technology was too inflexible to let expresses overtake locals by hopscotching through crossovers. 2 tracks today with ample supply of properly-spaced crossovers provides equal capacity to 4 tracks of old. In our wildest, highest-demand, most frequent-service dreams Greater Boston will simply never generate the kind of demand that saturates all 4 tracks of the New Haven Line in the Tri-State area at service densities setting new all-time historic highs each year. There simply aren't enough people in Eastern MA for any one line on our radiating spider map to hit the kind of dizzying heights the singular, linear NEC does through the SW Connecticut shoreline.

Where extra tracks matter is only on the lines that have very stark speed differentials between types of traffic. The NEC, obviously. The Providence Line will need 3 tracks for 2030 and 4 for NEC FUTURE because it's the only way to juggle spiraling numbers of 165 MPH Acelas, 125 MPH Northeast Regionals, and commuter rail trains that even on the nimblest EMU's are only going to top out at 90 MPH with the default stop spacing. You need true express and local tracks to manage heavy-density service overlap where each tier runs a whopping +/- 40 MPH different from the next tier. You won't ever have to worry about that on the Eastern Route where an all-stops local and a skip-stop express keeps average speeds 40-60 MPH and maximum speeds no higher than 80 through the probable stop spacing for each service layer. It's a small enough difference that the game of crossover hopscotch on 2 tracks does the trick right up to the most trains you can possibly cram onto the line's native capacity (yes, including Indigo trains bouncing around inside-128). The only non-NEC place where 3 tracks may be needed is the Worcester Line in an era where we've got 90 MPH Inland Regionals and Worcester super-expresses running with decent density overlaid with regular locals that do 40-60 MPH between stops no more than couple miles apart, overlaid with 25-35 MPH Indigo-Riverside hyper-locals with stops no more than 1/2 to 1 mile apart. And in that case you probably are fine with short lengths of widely-spaced #3 passing tracks between Back Bay and Worcester. Maybe a passer spanning West Station and New Balance where the old Beacon Park slack space allows; a Riverside Jct.-Wellesley Farms passer for setting the pecking order after the Indigos peel out; Natick station, whose new ADA makeover explicitly provisions for a future 3rd track; Framingham station through the existing #3 track in the west freight yard; and maybe another one out in the Grafton-Millbury stretch where the bridges are pre-built with vacant #3 slots. That's it for handling the speed differential that's a lot narrower than the NEC but wider than on any other line. You'll never saturate absolute traffic levels on the B&A worse than 2 tracks with a widely-spaced thousand-foot #3 passers every 8-10 miles. Outer Allston, Newton, MetroWest, Worcester, and Springfield aren't within orders of magnitude big enough now or ever to flood the corridor with New Haven Line quantities of motile tincans stuffed full of human flesh.

 

[mass88]

Dedicated express tracks? How?

This is crazy transit pitches, so you add them in. Really every other town along the 128 belt should have high speed transit service right into Boston. Non-stop and fast. It especially should be in use along the Southeast Expressway to help alleviate stress. We're never going to get that stretch widened and brought up to modern standards, so why not make transit options better to provide a solid alternative for people who otherwise drive?

The only good thing about the red line going into Boston from Braintree and Quincy Adams is the fact that it runs frequently. Beyond that, the ride takes far too long.

 

[George_Apley]

This is crazy transit pitches, so you add them in. Really every other town along the 128 belt should have high speed transit service right into Boston. Non-stop and fast. It especially should be in use along the Southeast Expressway to help alleviate stress. We're never going to get that stretch widened and brought up to modern standards, so why not make transit options better to provide a solid alternative for people who otherwise drive?

The only good thing about the red line going into Boston from Braintree and Quincy Adams is the fact that it runs frequently. Beyond that, the ride takes far too long.

Even in Crazy Transit Pitches we try to explain HOW. In the same beat, you say that we will never get the SEXpressway modernized.

If a ROW is too narrow for express tracks that just is what it is. Even in CTP-world.

 

[citylover94]

The idea of crazy transit pitches is that they are actual workable proposals or solutions or at least potentially workable, but are projects that are not on the radar or are incredibly unlikely to be built.