Crazy Transit Pitches

This is a pretty broad level question, not so much a pitch, but does anyone have any particular insight on tunneling under ‘main drags’ sorts of roads? Like rt 1, 3a, 138, etc. Your usual 4-lane divided routes, filled with strip malls, auto dealerships, and shopping plazas.

At a cursory glance, setting aside whether or not the density itself merits this sort of mass transit, it seems that with the road being so wide and the land next to the roud so often large parking lots, that it would be relatively well-suited to such projects.
 
^ Those sort of landscapes would be better suited to grade-level light rail, with dense infill TOD? Usually by narrowing lanes, medians, shoulders, and street parking... you can maintain an approximately comparable LOS for traffic while adding transit at lower cost than for tunneling (especially given station costs).
 
CSTH said:
^ Those sort of landscapes would be better suited to grade-level light rail, with dense infill TOD? Usually by narrowing lanes, medians, shoulders, and street parking... you can maintain an approximately comparable LOS for traffic while adding transit at lower cost than for tunneling (especially given station costs).
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Forum ate my reply. Anyway, would this really be much of an improvement over buses given the current density? Grade-level service has to deal with traffic more than I’d like.
 
DominusNovus said:
Forum ate my reply. Anyway, would this really be much of an improvement over buses given the current density? Grade-level service has to deal with traffic more than I’d like.
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I see. Maybe tell us more about the problem you were trying to solve in your original posted questions and we can work from there?
 
CSTH said:
I see. Maybe tell us more about the problem you were trying to solve in your original posted questions and we can work from there?
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Problems are for the reasonable transit pitch thread.

Slightly less flippantly, I’m looking at this from the perspective of an area that is highly developed, yet also under developed, and is easy to build out more robust infrastructure.
 
DominusNovus said:
Forum ate my reply. Anyway, would this really be much of an improvement over buses given the current density? Grade-level service has to deal with traffic more than I’d like.
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I think "Grade-level" in this case would be a reservation for the tracks separated from the roadway, such as Comm Ave, in which case it would provide better service than buses in mixed traffic.
 
Charlie_mta said:
I had read the report and saw the typical sections. Then on another page it showed only one track fitting under Memorial Drive. I doubt if a two-track line will fit along the entire corridor with the proposed path using up the scarce existing space, despite what their typical sections show.
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I don't see any reason why it would be terribly difficult to rebuild that Memorial Drive bridge with more space underneath it.

However, there's also the question of what frequency we want for Green Line service there. If we wanted to start with a train every 6 minutes in each direction and the Memorial Drive underpass was going to be the only single track bottleneck, that single track bottleneck probably wouldn't be a big enough deal to justify spending the tens of millions of dollars redoing the bridge. (See also how the Chelsea busway has a one lane for both directions bottleneck under a bridge for similar reasons.)

How wide could we make the Grand Junction bridge across the Charles? I'm wondering if we could have two Green Line tracks plus a bike path plus an I-90 on ramp (if we get rid of Storrow Drive / Soldiers Field Road under the BU bridge such that there'd be a relatively direct path to I-90 westbound once the Grand Junction bridge gets to the south side of the river). It's not clear if it would be better to put the start of the on ramp at the rotary, with the on ramp then being on the west side of the Grand Junction bridge, or if it would be better to have it start a bit to the north of Memorial Drive on the east side of the tracks with a connection to Vassar St somewhere.
 
Run a line along Blue Hill Ave, from Mattapan, following 28 as it becomes Seaver and then Columbus, meeting up with the Orange Line at Jackson Square or Roxbury Crossing. Then, run another branch that breaks off at Columbia, following that up to meet with the Red Line at JFK/UMass.

If we want single seat to Downtown, have this new line be a branch of the Orange Line (Seaver branch) and Red Line (Columbia branch).
 
Does anyone have any idea what happened to the loop tracks underneath South Station? Wikipedia says that they were only used for a bowling alley and parking lot for employees.

I have a sinking suspicion that they may have been eaten up by the transitway tunnel, but if not they might be an excellent terminal for a transit-ized Fairmount service.
 
Wash said:
Does anyone have any idea what happened to the loop tracks underneath South Station? Wikipedia says that they were only used for a bowling alley and parking lot for employees.

I have a sinking suspicion that they may have been eaten up by the transitway tunnel, but if not they might be an excellent terminal for a transit-ized Fairmount service.
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Not sure if we're allowed to link to other forums, but the first result from googling "loop tracks South Station" brings up a relevant thread. It sounds like they were intended to be used by the New Haven for electric commuter service which never ended up happening. According to that thread the loop and last section of it's tunnel were destroyed/removed during highway construction under SS

Either way, I think "U-Bahning"/"Rapid Transiting" the Fairmount looks much more attractive when the line continues on to serve somewhere beyond just ending/looping at South Station.
 
It would definitely work to have a rapid transit line from Fairmount to Salem or Beverly. That would basically eliminate the need for a blue line extension.
 
tysmith95 said:
It would definitely work to have a rapid transit line from Fairmount to Salem or Beverly. That would basically eliminate the need for a blue line extension.
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I'm not seeing how you could do that without NSRL/Indigo. Maybe converting it to a Red Line branch is possible.
 
If the Summer Street Gondola gets built and is popular enough to warrant expansion, where would be some worthwhile places to expand it to?

- Up along the Greenway to North Station
- Across the Charles, perhaps to the USS Constitution
- Down to Southie, ending... I got no clue for a good end point, but lets go nuts and say... UMass.
- Across the Harbor to Eastie, maybe ending at Maverick (just to get a Blue Line end point)

The last two would be pretty mutually exclusive, unless its not all one line. I'm looking at the Harbor and thinking how nice it would be to have another ride to the airport, but I really doubt these sorts of gondolas would be a good fit. A higher capacity gondola, maybe.
 
These extensions of the gondola would change the look of Boston irrevocably. This would look pretty much like a network of high power transmission lines criss-crossing the city.
 
Charlie_mta said:
These extensions of the gondola would change the look of Boston irrevocably. This would look pretty much like a network of high power transmission lines criss-crossing the city.
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I wouldn't consider it that bad, high tension lines are a lot bigger. Also, irrevocable is hardly the word to apply to this sort of thing. If we hated them, it’d be very easy to tear them down.

EDIT: one place it really would work would be between Wynn and Assembly Row. That route is already still mostly in an industrial area, and it crosses water, something that aerial gondolas are perfect for.
 
And yet if you want to do something about service to the casino, how would a casino to Assembly Orange Line gondola compare to a new Green Line branch serving Sullivan, the casino, and the Chelsea busway?
 
Joel N. Weber II said:
And yet if you want to do something about service to the casino, how would a casino to Assembly Orange Line gondola compare to a new Green Line branch serving Sullivan, the casino, and the Chelsea busway?
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I think that a green line extension would be perfect! Especially because the gondola would likely need some renovations due to age by the time the extension got built.
 
From here:

The EGE said:
Not to get off-topic, but those actually were never designed to be part of a future extension, and for good reason. There's nowhere useful to go from there - west and you're just duplicating the Red Line into East Cambridge (much cheaper to go down the Grand Junction from the GLX, if you want the North Station - Kendall connection), south and you're running into the much-better-positioned Blue Line.
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Continuing the off-topic line of thought, but theoretically, those pocket tracks could be used to swing over to Charlestown and head along the Navy Yard. Getting really crazy would be somehow getting it over to Chelsea...
 
BussesAin'tTrains said:
From here:



Continuing the off-topic line of thought, but theoretically, those pocket tracks could be used to swing over to Charlestown and head along the Navy Yard. Getting really crazy would be somehow getting it over to Chelsea...
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I've thought of the same thing: Green Line branch off those stub tracks in a new tunnel to the Navy Yard, and then to Chelsea via a new low-level draw-bridge over the Mystic River parallel to the Tobin. Or, a totally new Tobin Bridge carrying the light-rail line along with pedestrians and vehicular traffic.
 
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