Crazy Transit Pitches

[F-Line to Dudley]

My point was that Washington from Egleston south is still walking distance to the orange line. Nubian certainly got shafted, but Egleston is a 10min walk from Stony Brook.

Believe it or not, I always thought the old El ended at Nubian. Didn’t know it continued down through Egleston. So when people talk about Washington LRT, is the assumption that the LRT would go to Egleston?

1901-10 it terminated at Dudley. 1910 was the Forest Hills extension. The debate about El teardown and "equal or better" was all about Nubian-inbound.

See last post re: Egleston. It was not thought that Egleston transit would be more than moderately inconvenienced by the loss of the El so long as stop selection on the SW Corridor was mindful about picking the right street-grid pairings. Distance-wise, Egleston-NEC via Atherton St. was within rounding error's sameness of the difference between Thompson Sq. and Community College stations on the old vs. new Charlestown alignments, where the 1975 service relocation went off without a hitch and did not unduly punish the 92 which didn't make the trip down the street from Thompson. Egleston had more bus routes and thus somewhat higher stakes, but it was thought that with some already originating from Jackson Sq. that filet options could equitably cover the non-Jackson routes with quick shoot down the street.

SW Corridor planners didn't listen to the neighborhood on station siting. They went with the rote RR-era Stony Brook station site that served a completely alien audience (i.e. dense 1950's & prior Dedham/Needham 'circuit' service) than what the El used on grounds that moving it 2 blocks to center on street grid access would mess up stop spacing to Jackson. Debate cut off cold...no alternative sitings considered. Egleston was thus hard-cut off from the walkshed which now involves getting dragged minimum 2 blocks off-center from either the Square or SB station on one end, and is hard wayfinding because of the multiple turns required and multitude of different street choices for making the turns. SB ended up hosting zero buses...which cratered its ridership. And the adherence to traditional NEC RR station siting applied to an El replacement era ended up backfiring, as for all the overblown concerns about excessive closeness to Jackson Sq. it was Green St. that Stony Brook ended up partially cannibalizing...making the pair of them the lowest-utilized Orange Line stations by far.


Well-executed by listening to the damn neighborhood, Egleston transit didn't have to become a wipeout. But that's exactly what happened. Sure, it's more easily fixable than the breakage at Nubian which is why the "equal or better" debate today hasn't really expanded upon its base. But do you ever hear anything but crickets about improving Egleston transit? Or troubleshooting the ridership wipeout at Stony Brook by studying repositioning of the station closer to a known walkshed? No. Once fucked up thou shalt never be unfucked by the Planning Gods. So we get useless peans like "oh, suck it up it's close on a map" when map ≠ functional walkshed, and writ-large accessibility is a sliding scale vs. a healthy individual's walkshed. It could be different at modest cost, but there's no signs anyone on the outside cares enough to listen. And that in turn rolls up into the whole world-of-hurt suspicion that underlies "equal or better" politics.

Boston’s lack of cross-town transit and it’s lack of connectivity between downtown and the southern neighborhoods are two different problems, imo.

You'll get no argument from this thread on that point. So why, then, is there such persistent apparent animus that downtown pipe vs. the radial bucket list are at odds with each other? Was it not duly explained that if you study the neighborhood for what its priorities are, you can establish strength-of-signal for whether a downtown pipe is significant enough plurality demand to line up the megabucks resources for? And maybe it IS a consensus win-win??? Why, then, is so much shade getting cast at the neighborhood at the possibility that they wouldn't see as strong a majority/plurality demand as you might and thus it must be forced on them outside-in?

It belies a sense that a neighborhood expressing its own self-determination to name its priorities is only useful when those priorities just so happen to line up with outside Planning God's. Maybe Planning God is being utterly benevolent and attempted-helpful here, but when that same exact set of circumstances smote their transit with generations of ruination when it broke in a most very malevolent way is exactly why they have PTSD about trusting outside voices. If you'd rather not be bothered with saddling up and dialogue around those PTSD triggers, perhaps a change in approach to that dialogue is first order of business.

I just feel like running through Nubian shouldn't be leagues harder than running to and from Nubian. Why hasn't the city been able to do BRT successfully on Washington north of Nubian?

This was explained over and over in the history Cliffs Notes. The Silver Line is not BRT. Lack of any enforced protection for its so-called bus lanes makes it bullshit on its face as branded BRT. They knew it was an expensively restickered 49 bus all along and that the only goal was to get SL Phase III and the Seaport pipe funded through shotgun marriage. The earliest proposals for it had better traffic lane separation than what actually got built. Even straight-on benchmarked LRT vs. TT modes. Once the shotgun marriage for Seaport juvenation became the all-encompassing focus, they started kicking planks out from under Washington St.'s basic functioning. They knew years before it was ever formally announced as such that it would never be a run-thru transit line to South Station with the Orange & Red transfers because of the shit-sandwich ops....that Washington would be a forced-loop transfer in a cavern under Boylston with just a Green Line transfer, nothing else. Once that was settled there was no point to even trying to enforce the sanctity of bus lanes via parking reconfigs or pay more than lip service to transit signal priority. It was broken by design to shit all over what was left of the "equal or better" commitment because everybody was green with envy over the Seaport.

It doesn't need to be *the one* destination. If Nubian really is such a destination, then a connection to downtown should exist.

Which...would exactly be the case if they *honestly* built the Silver Line with real traffic separation instead of using it as a set-up to shovel money at the Seaport. But this was a wholly planned breakage of transit. And that's why the neighborhood is so suspicious of being told by outsiders what's good for them. They got shit on again and again and again to further someone else's pet projects.

This is why we keep imploring on this thread to read up on the history. Planning God isn't going to be listened to telling them from on-high what they should be doing. It's got to be embedded from a springboard within the neighborhood's priorities to get anywhere. Exactly how Take Two of the 28X hit paydirt with this new proposal slow-cooked through a decade of careful City-cum-neighborhood workshopping instead of 2009 where--as many posters have attested from personal memory--the state just showed up one day and started dictating at them how things would be (again!) without making any honest effort at dialogue.

I can say it till I'm blue in the face...you *might* find real juice for a stronger downtown pipe that's very much in agreement with what you propose. It hasn't been studied so we of course don't know. There are an awful lot of wavelengths to explore in their transit priority bucket list. But it has zero chance of gaining traction is it isn't going to be a full-on mind meld born within those neighborhood priorities and workshopped to the nines with the neighborhood. The second there's a glint of "I know what's better for you than you think you do" it's...fucking...over, because that's an immediate trigger for Roxbury's PTSD.

This inquiry ain't getting anywhere if first act is anything other than immersing with interest in the history to refine the approach. Asking again and again why things just can't be so doesn't advance it to a point of usefulness. The reply (not just from me...we've got a whole chorus now) is going to be "because the history...read up."

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

I'm enjoying this back and forth, so thank you all. I find this topic of what to do with the Needham Line interesting. I agree with the general framework: Green Line branch in Needham and Orange Line extension through Roslindale and West Roxbury. I've always wondered a few things:

1. Phasing. How would this realistically be built? Both lines at the same time in one clean swoop ($$$)? Needham Branch Green Line first and then and Orange Line extension later (since presumably CR service could still be provided through WR/Roslindale)? Cut off Needham entirely for some period of time by extending the Orange Line first?

If the RUR traffic noose is the driver, then they have to be planned in-tandem. Now...for phasing, GLX from Newton Highlands to New England Business Ctr. and/or TV Place on the other side of 128 is the ideal down payment because that's the all-new transit portion that doesn't impact any existing ops. Indeed, City of Newton is advocating for just that as a down-payment build before the rest for sole purposes of value capture on those $billions$ in TOD they're constructing along Needham St. The City of Newton presentation is linkied in the Dev Forum thread on Needham/Newton, specifically how through-the-moon YUUUUUGE the economic impact of a fully built-out NEBC is.

I suppose then finishing the job to Needham Jct. is the easiest Step 2. The new Green Line station & yard would live inside the footprint of the Needham Jct. wye and not wrap around to the historic train station on the Needham Cutoff...i.e. a flip across the street. So you could triage by running CR schedules to Junction with shuttle buses to Heights + GLX @ TV Place in the interim while the 1.5 miles of track downtown is out-of-service for quick conversion. The Millis tail storage to High Rock St. and an ad-hoc siding extension can easily serve as homeless-man's layover for what crap passes as the weekday schedule here. Since none of the grade crossings really need to go and the stations are all open-access/at-grade like the D's and not prepayment in a pit like Somerville you're not talking an enormous construction period for doing the conversion. Possibly could even get some starter chores done like re-grading/fencing the ROW and pouring trolley pole abutments while CR is still running normally to Heights. If CR is still taking the weekends off here the work windows for useful prep will be wiiiiiiide open.

After GLX initiates to Junction then you obviously pull back CR across the river immediately. Presumably the same work windows are in effect bookending full CR schedules for prepping the Boston corridor for conversion to shorten the outage as much as possible. If they aren't ready to pull the immediate plug and start blitzing away, then I guess there'd be an interregnum of W. Rox CR short-turns and the VFW Pkwy. double-track used as makeshift layover (in the meantime they'd be pulling up the rails through Cutler & Hersey for the rail trail linking Medfield with Boston). The bigger proliferation of buses out here makes propping up transit levels during the conversion shutdown quite a bit easier than in Needham where only the 59 runs.

1. Bus Terminal. I've always read that the ability to terminate some or all bus routes from the south heading toward Forest Hills at some other place is a big benefit of an Orange Line extension. After all, why have so many buses running along Washington Street to the Forest Hills upper busway if they parallel the Orange Line and could stop at Roslindale Village? In the abstract, I get it--I'm sure most bus riders are trying to get the Orange Line, not necessarily Forest Hills, and shorter routes means you could reinvest that saved time back into the routes to improve frequencies (or reinvest operational funds on other routes). But is that really a wise move, even with an Orange Line extension? A mega-transfer station like Forest Hills allows a rider to transfer once for a lot of route flexibility. Truncating routes elsewhere breaks that relationship and rider convenience, unless the other routes coming from the north (or Hyde Park Ave...?) are extended or rerouted to the new terminal to compensate. Breaking the link between all these routes and the 39 would be a bad move, I think.

It's a sliding scale of practicality. Mega terminals are nice...but Forest Hills is cosmically overloaded today as a mega-terminal and that limits the useful improvements you could make to frequencies of any route that touches it because the core terminal is so far over-capacity. So thinning the herd on Lower Washington's route-duplication by sending some routes to Rozzie Sq. isn't just about emptying FH in lateral trade. It's about diverting surplus from FH so you can re-fill it back up with service enhancements elsewhere. So big-picture wise it's not a lateral at all...it is BIGTIME service expansion to the mega-terminal itself.

Which routes you choose to cull @ Rozzie is also going to be subject to further study. Right now there's 9 that dupe each other down Lower Washington. Clearly about 2x too many, where Washington would flow a lot better if there were only like 4 routes instead. All of them, including the ones that stay on Washington after the Belgrade split, are able to loop at Rozzie Station busway. So it'll take some deep-diving of numbers to determine which ones have unique thru-to-FH catchments vs. there being no functional difference whether they dump @ Rozzie or FH. In-the-weeds stuff like staffers with counters on each route surveying who's getting off on Washington between the two Squares on which route vs. who isn't. All you can say is that in the universe of surveyed routes...there's probably clear enough decisions to whittle the Lower Washington route duplication down to a more manageable 3-4 routes or so that allow FH terminal to re-load for more. Similarly there'd be a lot of surveying on who's transferring to the 39 or 31; it's going to be a different slice of the pie on any given route.

The good news is by forcing a fresh set of comprehensive data collection for FH terminal the first time...ever?...some of the improvements for re-backfilling FH Terminal will become screamingly obvious and immediately actionable where today they're either lost in uncounted statistical noise or guesstimates that haven't been means-tested.

1. Bus Routing. The most interesting piece, I think, is how the MBTA would modify bus routes should the Orange Line extension pan out. Do they all still survive? In particular, what happens to the 35, 36, 37? Are the 30 and 51 combined into a cross-town-through-Roslindale-Village route? Are there feeder corridors in West Roxbury and Roslindale begging for new bus routes in a post-Orange Line extension world?

As with GLX and the whole North-region bus route reboot that's to come after College Ave. and/or Route 16 is substantially complete...you're going to see a major route map re-draw out west anyway. 35/36/37 all doubling-up each other across the OL extension corridors means 3 routes are easily going to collapse to 1 on the overlap portion and where those get re-drawn instead (from a W. Rox or Rozzie terminus) is going to be way different than today. Golden opportunity to infill the Dedham bus desert at long last with generous extension of those routes from a W. Rox base if the Dedham NIMBY's are ever willing. Possibly also some love thrown at the homeless-man's radial 52 pinging between the D Line @ Newton Centre and OL @ W. Rox; whole new level of demand uncorked there. Ditto the meandering 51 out of Reservoir. This portion of the fold-out system map is largely unchanged from its BERy streetcar days, so some of these routings are very long-in-tooth and have not evolved nearly enough with the times. As blank-ish canvases go there is a LOT to do out here.

Also...because the OL storage yard would be out by Millennium Park where land is plentiful and huge power grid facility is there for plugging in an end-of-line 600V DC substation, tail tracks will be crossing over VFW Parkway any which way. That serves up ready opportunity for an "excuse-me" final infill station @ VFW that can offer a little bit of non-overkill parking via the Home Depot lot. As long as it's a cheapie add seems like a no-brainer if the trains are going to be deadheading-to-yard there anyway. So VFW is also fair-game as a bus corridor unto itself, which it really doesn't do very much of now except for the short Dedham-terminating rump end of 52. Maybe 51/52 or augmentation therein become parkway-goer radials spanning OL with D & D/C to the north and Dedham Mall + :15 Urban Rail-ified Dedham Corporate to the south?

 

[Riverside]

The other thing to bear in mind is that I can't see any Orange Line extension beyond Roslindale Village happening until and unless a proper Orange Line Transformation project is well under way. Full replacement and expansion of the fleet, infrastructure improvements to improve reliability and headways... I think all of that needs to be well underway before an extension to West Roxbury will be taken seriously. And, if I had to bet, I'd say that things will be ready to go on the Green Line significantly before the Orange. So, yes, Green will almost certainly happen first, Orange might take a lot longer.

(@nick, if nothing else, the current Orange Line fleet doesn't have enough trains to support an effective extension to West Roxbury -- in theory, they currently have enough trainsets to support ~6-minute headways during rush hour, but the reality is that those headways often stretch to 10-minutes, and that problem would just get worse if you added another 3 miles to the running distance -- an increase of over 27%.)

As I think I alluded to in my post a few weeks back, honestly I think what will actually prompt the Orange Line extension is if/when the commuter rail ops team announces that Needham Commuter Rail trains will start terminating at Roslindale Village/Forest Hills, due to a need for expanded capacity on the NEC to support South Coast Rail, or Amtrak expansion, or what have you. That would be my bet as to when push will come to shove, as it were.

 

[JeffDowntown]

The other thing to bear in mind is that I can't see any Orange Line extension beyond Roslindale Village happening until and unless a proper Orange Line Transformation project is well under way. Full replacement and expansion of the fleet, infrastructure improvements to improve reliability and headways... I think all of that needs to be well underway before an extension to West Roxbury will be taken seriously. And, if I had to bet, I'd say that things will be ready to go on the Green Line significantly before the Orange. So, yes, Green will almost certainly happen first, Orange might take a lot longer.

(@nick, if nothing else, the current Orange Line fleet doesn't have enough trains to support an effective extension to West Roxbury -- in theory, they currently have enough trainsets to support ~6-minute headways during rush hour, but the reality is that those headways often stretch to 10-minutes, and that problem would just get worse if you added another 3 miles to the running distance -- an increase of over 27%.)

As I think I alluded to in my post a few weeks back, honestly I think what will actually prompt the Orange Line extension is if/when the commuter rail ops team announces that Needham Commuter Rail trains will start terminating at Roslindale Village/Forest Hills, due to a need for expanded capacity on the NEC to support South Coast Rail, or Amtrak expansion, or what have you. That would be my bet as to when push will come to shove, as it were.

I think you are overly optimistic about Green Line Transformation timing, and underestimating the changes the current scheduled work on the Orange Line will bring about.

The CRRC fleet replacement for the Orange Line will be accompanied with the complete signal overhaul of the line. That signal overhaul will be completed by the time the final CRRC train sets enter service (no reason to do it before, because only the new train sets can use the new signals). That is all going to be completed well before Green Line Transformation has any real impact on service. And it would be easy to add more CRRC train sets, if that were a priority.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

I think you are overly optimistic about Green Line Transformation timing, and underestimating the changes the current scheduled work on the Orange Line will bring about.

The CRRC fleet replacement for the Orange Line will be accompanied with the complete signal overhaul of the line. That signal overhaul will be completed by the time the final CRRC train sets enter service (no reason to do it before, because only the new train sets can use the new signals). That is all going to be completed well before Green Line Transformation has any real impact on service. And it would be easy to add more CRRC train sets, if that were a priority.

Kind of doesn't matter. For what we're talking about here with the OL/GL swallow of Needham you still need to put the project through design-build no matter how immaculately-studied it is and how set-it/forget-it the station sitings may be. If the Rail Vision commitment pulls the ripcord on Purple-Needham replacement, you're still looking at 10 years at hurry-up pace to enact the conversion. The _LT projects will be well finished by then. The respective timeframes are in no way conflicting.

 

[roy_mustang76]

My point was that Washington from Egleston south is still walking distance to the orange line. Nubian certainly got shafted, but Egleston is a 10min walk from Stony Brook.

This is one of the statements that bugs me and outs you as someone unfamiliar with the area we're trying to plan for. Which is fine, we aren't all familiar with every area of the city. But it's the sort of statement that gets dander up in the community, which is the main point F-Line and I are trying to get across. It's easy to Google Maps and say "yeah Egleston is 10 min from the Orange Line, that ought to be fine", whereas it's really just advisable to go to Stony Brook (if you are game) and try to make your way to Egleston on foot. It's doable, but the issue of the station siting vs what it looks like on a map becomes immediately apparent. For bonus points, keep walking to White Stadium (which would have been part of the El's walkshed), and you'll see that although it's not a terrible walk for a young able-bodied person, it starts getting a lot tougher for lower mobility passengers (the sort that could probably hack a quarter mile, but not 3 times that).

I've never seen F-Line's proposal of moving the station siting to Atherton before, that would help simplify matters quite a bit for wayfinding and is a good idea. It would also slightly shorten the route, and if you had some routes terminate there, you'd strengthen the buses that can cover the lost portion of the walkshed. Do you see the difference between that and some of the proposals over in the Gondola thread of "make improvements to pedestrian and bike infrastructure", whatever that is supposed to mean on those streets?

Believe it or not, I always thought the old El ended at Nubian. Didn’t know it continued down through Egleston. So when people talk about Washington LRT, is the assumption that the LRT would go to Egleston?

The old El ran all the way to Forest Hills along Washington Street. Phase I of the El ran to Nubian (nee Dudley), and is arguably the more impactful of the two segments. You could run LRT to Egleston, but if you're going past Nubian, Warren is a better corridor because it is further from the Orange Line, and you can then use buses to strengthen the overall network in the area. (At a guess, it's probably the direction out of Nubian with the most straight line demand too, but you'd need a study for that.) A radial bus linking Orange at Jackson/Stony Brook, Green at Grove Hall (Warren, BHA, and other Washington), and Red at Fields Corner via Geneva, for example, would allow for more convenient crosstown trips to/from Grove Hall (which is one of those sprinkler head O/D pairs from Nubian right now)

Boston’s lack of cross-town transit and it’s lack of connectivity between downtown and the southern neighborhoods are two different problems, imo.

No argument there, but given that there's only one funding pot, the community tends to prioritize cross-town transit over a killshot to downtown.

I just feel like running through Nubian shouldn't be leagues harder than running to and from Nubian. Why hasn't the city been able to do BRT successfully on Washington north of Nubian?

Again, a trip to the area if you can swing it successfully will prove extremely instructive. SL-Washington isn't really BRT, it's got pretty red bus lanes with zero enforcement. Cars impinge upon the bus lanes at will, double park, use the lanes for turn lanes and generally make it no better than any other bus other than some bells and whistles at the stops themselves. On top of that, it has no infrastructure at the critical terminal ends Downtown or Nubian, which is of course where the worst traffic of any given trip is.

It doesn't need to be *the one* destination. If Nubian really is such a destination, then a connection to downtown should exist.

Agreed! That connection does not inherently need to extend past Nubian, however, if you think carefully about Nubian's role as a collecting and distributing node. There might not be adequate demand to extend LRT past Nubian, maybe there are other touches you can use to ameliorate the rest of the Washington corridor (like F-Line's Stony Brook relocation). It does need to be something other than the Silver Line though, as we've discussed that's not an adequate Downtown pipe for Nubian as it stands.

 

[jbray]

This is one of the statements that bugs me and outs you as someone unfamiliar with the area we're trying to plan for. Which is fine, we aren't all familiar with every area of the city. But it's the sort of statement that gets dander up in the community, which is the main point F-Line and I are trying to get across.

You and F-Line are doing the same thing in reverse. This is a total pot kettle black scenario. Because Arborway is gone and is not coming back, Stony Brook is a compromise pick that lines up well enough with BOTH sides that lost their direct transit. Emphasis on the well enough. Your arguments for change are so central Egelston specific that it overlooks everything else to favor your view. I lived off of Lamartine street for years, the Atherton move would have messed up transit connections for the other side of the walkshed (which lines up well enough) to move Stony Brook too close to Jackson Square station just for Egelston Square proper. You don't seem to care that Boylston is the tributary road for that side and that ridership can't just easily move to Green Street due to the road network and elevation. You're not even talking about south Egelston which is what they were pointing out that "outed" them. Maybe you haven't noticed that Egelston proper stayed stagnant and the Boylston section of Washington has redeveloped given the new proximity to the station. "Outed' indeed.

In a future world, the E Line will/could go to the end of South Huntington and make this more moot. In the current day in age, Stony Brook is a compromise station that had the space to be there where the geography of the park space doesn't exist for Atherton (due to the historic station on the same spot).

Apologies for being riled up here, genuinely. I was just going to comment on the lack of looking at the holistic picture before, then I read the commentary about insider knowledge vs outsider knowledge and it was too rich in irony.

 

[roy_mustang76]

You and F-Line are doing the same thing in reverse. This is a total pot kettle black scenario. Because Arborway is gone and is not coming back, Stony Brook is a compromise pick that lines up well enough with BOTH sides that lost their direct transit. Emphasis on the well enough. Your arguments for change are so central Egelston specific that it overlooks everything else to favor your view. I lived off of Lamartine street for years, the Atherton move would have messed up transit connections for the other side of the walkshed (which lines up well enough) to move Stony Brook too close to Jackson Square station just for Egelston Square proper. You don't seem to care that Boylston is the tributary road for that side and that ridership can't just easily move to Green Street due to the road network and elevation. You're not even talking about south Egelston which is what they were pointing out that "outed" them. Maybe you haven't noticed that Egelston proper stayed stagnant and the Boylston section of Washington has redeveloped given the new proximity to the station. "Outed' indeed.

In a future world, the E Line will/could go to the end of South Huntington and make this more moot. In the current day in age, Stony Brook is a compromise station that had the space to be there where the geography of the park space doesn't exist for Atherton (due to the historic station on the same spot).

Apologies for being riled up here, genuinely. I was just going to comment on the lack of looking at the holistic picture before, then I read the commentary about insider knowledge vs outsider knowledge and it was too rich in irony.

I'd argue in response that the other side of the walkshed was harmed most by the temporary-to-permanent suspension of Arborway service. In fact my entire stance is that putting the OL in the cut and taking away the two flanking transit modes (Arborway and the El) put the transit in a shitty spot for both Centre and Washington corridors. There's room for everyone to be annoyed with station placement here. The E going to the end of South Huntington is asking a lot less than building a new RT line from Downtown to Nubian to Egleston/Grove Hall/Mattapan (take your pick), and doing that plus flipping Stony Brook to Atherton (you and F-Line can duke it out as to whether that's spatially feasible) helps BOTH sides of the walkshed. And even if that's a non-starter, it's something concrete that can be debated. A handwaving "well it's not that far, we can make some improvements to make the walk nicer" isn't even that.

I have a really hard time buying that they couldn't have figured out a way to squeeze in a station at Atherton instead of Boylston at the time though. The whole point was that they were reusing a highway corridor! Might not be feasible here in 2020 though, and that is a fair objection.

I have noticed where the development has happened, and that's great! But I've also noticed where the stagnation has happened, and there's a pretty bright line correlation to proximity to transit there.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

You and F-Line are doing the same thing in reverse. This is a total pot kettle black scenario. Because Arborway is gone and is not coming back, Stony Brook is a compromise pick that lines up well enough with BOTH sides that lost their direct transit.

Who's bringing up Arborway? ^This post^ is the first anyone has spoken of that. Don't get all pissy at an ongoing discussion that never once cast any aspersions there.


Second...I don't know how much more succinct an explainer is necessary for why Stony Brook sputters and misfires as the arse-end misfit of the entire line. The walkshed is overlong and very obtuse because of the street grid orientation going all slanted at that one and only spot. When the stop was proposed the neighborhood was given NO choice in the matter. The state said "Either take the rote-retread RR station placement, or we skip straight from Jackson to Green." All the neighborhood said was that the RR stop...being a former complement of the El when it was a faceless spacer on the Dedham/Needham 'circuit' patterns...needed a placement tweak vs. the grid to shape-shift to the role of replacement. Atherton (save for a slight curve and some trees) is almost in eyeshot of Egleston...the same walkshed distance as replacement CC is to old Thompson Square. They got told to pound sand. Stony Brook today is a ridership crater that goofed in the wrong direction on the state's pound-sand stance that moving it would cannibalize Jackson Sq. ridership. The rote RR station placement in a non-adjusted El-replacement universe meant Green St. was the one that got its ridership cannibalized from being too close. They're both off-scale loss leaders because the state didn't want to listen. Thanks to Nubian transit still being broken 16 years into troubleshooting the Silver Line and the neighborhood perennially being bent back in a defensive posture over there...there have been no viable opportunities to expand the transit fixes map to pitch any practical fixes for what ails Egleston.

But sure...can't be arsed to pay attention to the discussion of the history and mechanics at work here, and it's all a brush-off "compromise pick that lines up well enough with BOTH sides that lost their transit" because you said so. Way to prove a point about outside-in attitudes not giving a crap except for their pet causes. If this discussion bores you, nobody's putting a gun to your head to partake in it much less shit all over the participants. Jesus Christ.

Emphasis on the well enough. Your arguments for change are so central Egelston specific that it overlooks everything else to favor your view. I lived off of Lamartine street for years, the Atherton move would have messed up transit connections for the other side of the walkshed (which lines up well enough) to move Stony Brook too close to Jackson Square station just for Egelston Square proper. You don't seem to care that Boylston is the tributary road for that side and that ridership can't just easily move to Green Street due to the road network and elevation. You're not even talking about south Egelston which is what they were pointing out that "outed" them. Maybe you haven't noticed that Egelston proper stayed stagnant and the Boylston section of Washington has redeveloped given the new proximity to the station. "Outed' indeed.

How? You have one contrary opinion about personal-experience transit orientation so the whole weight of the actual 4 decade debate is meaningless and anyone who cites it is moving goalposts? Nobody's pulling this shit out of their own asses. This was the debate in the 70's and 80's about stop spacing. Jackson over-spacing was a concern, yes. The state also said "take our station siting as it is or we don't build shit at all here and skip straight-on Jackson-Green" to shut down the discussion. How's that for messing up people's transit connections? Toe the line or hoof it to Green all the same WHILE suffering the same Square-centered breakage? What a bargain! The go-pound-sand mandate was no more than antagonism for antagonism's sake.

And...really...comparing the Boylston block to an established square like Egleston??? There's 5000 Census residents living on the single block-radius defined by the Square. How many live on the Boylston block fronting Amory St.? Did the standard of living increase for a similar population density in the not-square-with-no-name fronting Stony Brook as much as it declined from broken transit in populous Egleston in the years since the breakage? Don't lob the cherry-picking accusation if that's the weak-sauce being held up as proof of rigged discussion.

In a future world, the E Line will/could go to the end of South Huntington and make this more moot. In the current day in age, Stony Brook is a compromise station that had the space to be there where the geography of the park space doesn't exist for Atherton (due to the historic station on the same spot).

1) Who's having the imaginary Arborway shouting match again here?

2) Stony Brook of same 2D coordinates of old RR station is not the old RR station site. Cue Historic Aerials 1978 view, please. The NEC used to run on a gigantic viaduct OVER the street grid. It's now 50 feet deeper in the cut, the street grid re-aligned, and SW Corridor Park at the top of the wall + the air rights cover over more than doubling the amount of park acreage between '79 and '87. The old 30-years-abandoned SB platform is readily visible on the '78 HA view abutting the claustrophobic Boylston overpass. Lamartine Gardens park on the west was covered in shadows from the adjacent viaduct, and there was industrial crapola flotsam abutting the whole east side.

Apologies for being riled up here, genuinely. I was just going to comment on the lack of looking at the holistic picture before, then I read the commentary about insider knowledge vs outsider knowledge and it was too rich in irony.

Irony...yeah, we're dripping in it alright. The sidebar didn't take an antagonistic tone because somebody threw the first mud wad; it was always that way. Strawmen? Look at this house of straw these guys are building, says the first person to fling Arborway as an epithet. And so on and so on.

This was (hopefully still is) an engrossing, civil discussion. Get your aggro out somewhere else if you're in a filthy mood today. There is no need for this behavior.

 

[Blackbird]

This is why we keep imploring on this thread to read up on the history. Planning God isn't going to be listened to telling them from on-high what they should be doing. It's got to be embedded from a springboard within the neighborhood's priorities to get anywhere. Exactly how Take Two of the 28X hit paydirt with this new proposal slow-cooked through a decade of careful City-cum-neighborhood workshopping instead of 2009 where--as many posters have attested from personal memory--the state just showed up one day and started dictating at them how things would be (again!) without making any honest effort at dialogue.

I can say it till I'm blue in the face...you *might* find real juice for a stronger downtown pipe that's very much in agreement with what you propose. It hasn't been studied so we of course don't know. There are an awful lot of wavelengths to explore in their transit priority bucket list. But it has zero chance of gaining traction is it isn't going to be a full-on mind meld born within those neighborhood priorities and workshopped to the nines with the neighborhood.

So every transit project from now on will need 11 years of workshopping before logistics can be planned? Both the needs of the neighborhood and the available technology can change a ton in the span of 11 years!

This is one of the statements that bugs me and outs you as someone unfamiliar with the area we're trying to plan for. Which is fine, we aren't all familiar with every area of the city. But it's the sort of statement that gets dander up in the community, which is the main point F-Line and I are trying to get across. It's easy to Google Maps and say "yeah Egleston is 10 min from the Orange Line, that ought to be fine", whereas it's really just advisable to go to Stony Brook (if you are game) and try to make your way to Egleston on foot. It's doable, but the issue of the station siting vs what it looks like on a map becomes immediately apparent. For bonus points, keep walking to White Stadium (which would have been part of the El's walkshed), and you'll see that although it's not a terrible walk for a young able-bodied person, it starts getting a lot tougher for lower mobility passengers (the sort that could probably hack a quarter mile, but not 3 times that).

Again, a trip to the area if you can swing it successfully will prove extremely instructive.

You and F-Line could both cool it with the condescension, Colonel.

I'll admit that Roxbury and Mattapan aren't exactly my stomping grounds. However, my best friend from high school lives in Fields Corner near Savin Hill, and the drive from Rozzi would bring me down American Legion to BHA to Columbia Road. From my place on Fort Hill, I'd go Circuit to Warren, cross BHA, then take Dudley down through Uphams. I worked in JP, and the drive home to Fort Hill could take me down Amory to Columbus to Washington in order to avoid traffic on Center to Jackson. Had a co-worker who lived on BHA near Seaver, and I drove him home a few times. I'm not some ignoramus in Saugus, whose only familiarity with the area is Google Maps. I don't know the bus networks that well, but I know the streets enough to navigate them.

I'll admit though that in high school, when I had to get to White Stadium for a football game, I'd take the orange line to Green then walk up Glen and through the park. If the walk from Stony was faster, no one ever bothered to tell me.

The old El ran all the way to Forest Hills along Washington Street. Phase I of the El ran to Nubian (nee Dudley), and is arguably the more impactful of the two segments. You could run LRT to Egleston, but if you're going past Nubian, Warren is a better corridor because it is further from the Orange Line, and you can then use buses to strengthen the overall network in the area. (At a guess, it's probably the direction out of Nubian with the most straight line demand too, but you'd need a study for that.) A radial bus linking Orange at Jackson/Stony Brook, Green at Grove Hall (Warren, BHA, and other Washington), and Red at Fields Corner via Geneva, for example, would allow for more convenient crosstown trips to/from Grove Hall (which is one of those sprinkler head O/D pairs from Nubian right now)

Yes.

SL-Washington isn't really BRT, it's got pretty red bus lanes with zero enforcement. Cars impinge upon the bus lanes at will, double park, use the lanes for turn lanes and generally make it no better than any other bus other than some bells and whistles at the stops themselves.

Nubian and DT aside, what's stopping the city from putting up barriers and banning on-street parking on Washington in the South End tomorrow? Just political will?

That connection does not inherently need to extend past Nubian, however, if you think carefully about Nubian's role as a collecting and distributing node. There might not be adequate demand to extend LRT past Nubian

Some more about my background: before I moved to Rozzi, I lived in Brighton, walking distance from the B-line. While the B-line is unacceptably slow, it was great because I could get on and doze off, or listen to music, or read a book. Then, bam!, I was downtown and I could go to the movies, walk around the common, get a cannoli, go to a food court. It was great!

When I moved to Rozzi, going downtown became way more of a chore, because my one seat ride got turned into a 2 seat ride. My go-to buses were the 34 and the 51. They only came ever so often, then I'd have to sit through the Washington Street bottleneck north of Rozzi Square, and then transfer at Forest Hills.

The trip downtown from much of Mattapan and Roxbury seems even worse than mine from Roslindale. What: you're going to take a bus to Mattapan Square, then the Mattapan High Speed to Ashmont, then Ashmont to the city center? That's way more trouble than it's worth and way more difficult than it should be!

 

[roy_mustang76]

You and F-Line could both cool it with the condescension, Colonel.

I'll admit that Roxbury and Mattapan aren't exactly my stomping grounds. -snip-

I'm truly not trying to be condescending, and apologize if I've come off that way. But, at the risk of stating the obvious, being familiar with the streets as a driver isn't the same as being familiar with the travel flows of an area as a pedestrian or transit rider. This is why I truly do recommend a short field trip if you're so inclined - both areas feel a lot different on transit than as a driver, esp Egleston which you could be forgiven for seeing as a high-speed passthrough going from Columbus to Seaver (because damn, Columbus really is a drag strip)

Nubian and DT aside, what's stopping the city from putting up barriers and banning on-street parking on Washington in the South End tomorrow? Just political will?

It is political will, but it will be stiff opposition. If memory serves, there would have been a loss of something like 11 spots to extend the bus lanes to Nubian in the first place, and they didn't get that done. I'd be shocked if that happened without an all-out revolt from the South End, though a shiny new service might make that loss of parking easier to swallow.

The trip downtown from much of Mattapan and Roxbury seems even worse than mine from Roslindale. What: you're going to take a bus to Mattapan Square, then the Mattapan High Speed to Ashmont, then Ashmont to the city center? That's way more trouble than it's worth and way more difficult than it should be!

From below Morton St, you take the 31 to Forest Hills and then Orange from there. From River St and adjacent streets, yes, either the 27 or MHSL to Ashmont, and then Red from there. It's about 30 minutes in each case of vehicles actually moving, factoring in waits at the transfer points both are comparable to the one-seat ride from BC to Park. It would help immensely to extend Red-proper to Mattapan because the ROW is already there, but Milton has other ideas about that. There's also the Morton St and BHA stations on the Fairmount line, providing an easy one-seat ride to SS if show-and-go isn't a must for your commute. RUR should enhance those frequencies as well.

A one-seat LRT ride on that corridor is going to be BC-esque, which definitely has value in a budgetless world, but the southern part of the corridor already has respectable flanking options to downtown. A fourth option to get downtown isn't what is being hankered for, but being able to move crosstown. Make it less of a pain to get to Brookline, make the 30 bus not suck if I am trying to get to Rozzie so it's not literally easier for me to do a two-seat trip via FH from Blue Hill Ave... Rejigger the 28 so it can terminate properly at Nubian and be less likely to bunch, making it easier for me to scoot up to Grove Hall. I'd be looking for all of those things before another B branch running the length of Blue Hill, even though the one-seat would be nice to have.

EDIT after sleeping on it: Your two-seat ride from Rozzie immediately gets much MUCH better if you're not sitting in that infernal hell that is Lower Washington, and I feel your pain on that. The 31 and 27 don't face quite the same traffic conundrum, and neither is lashed to a much longer route (the 34E probably should be it's own standalone route from a relocated W. Rox/VFW OL terminus, with regular 34 frequencies backfilled from Rozzie Square to the Mall to fortify headways).

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

So every transit project from now on will need 11 years of workshopping before logistics can be planned? Both the needs of the neighborhood and the available technology can change a ton in the span of 11 years!

Where, oh where, did the requirement of an over-long gestation period come from in order to have a productive dialogue about the transit needs of the neighborhood? Point exactly to where it was stated that understanding the neighborhood required chewing torturous clock cycles to state their case.

You and F-Line could both cool it with the condescension, Colonel.

And the other pair here can cool it already with the shoving mudpies into other people's mouths with this dishonest turfing of the discussion. If it is too tedious an expenditure of energy to engage a still-living history of neighborhood transit engagement documented through decades of independent sourcing, it does not mean Bizarro World automatically reigns and any whole-cloth made-up shit is fair game to tar the messengers with. You aren't binary-choice forced to take anyone's word for it in this thread; the sourcing is there to the nines if you want to explore it and you think somebody here is fulla crap. But it doesn't follow that because you personally find it tedious to discuss these issues, the issues themselves are illegitimate and a waste of valuable SimCity'ing time. We're still Transit Pitching here, right? This a factor that's real, big, and multi-generational...and nothing gets pitched without engaging it. It's still going to be there as the giant-weighted prevailing factor long after one has run out of aB'ers to satisfactorily ad hominem for pointing it out.

I'll admit though that in high school, when I had to get to White Stadium for a football game, I'd take the orange line to Green then walk up Glen and through the park. If the walk from Stony was faster, no one ever bothered to tell me.

This is basically the story that's been told a million times: "No one ever told me the walkshed was ____." That's exactly what you get when the station placement is askew from the grid and wayfinding is forced to become this secret cottage industry of which selection of side streets to cut-n'-turn on to save a minute's footsteps. See the Street View linky from my previous post on the difference between Community College and Thompson Square when the Charlestown El was replaced: eyeshot visibility. That's basically what you'd have if Stony Brook were placed anywhere that acknowledged what the street grid was. Atherton is visually obstructed by trees such that you couldn't see the respective "T" signs from either end of the block like you could with CC/Thompson in 1975...but it's within ~100 ft. of the same walk you see clear-as-bell on that Street View linky from Charlestown. Instead you've got the grid that goes from fairly straightforward E-W orientation...but very suddenly corkscrews to 45-degree angle for a 6-block span between Porter St. and Bragdon St. before E-W order is restored at Dimock. That 6-block span is the entirety of the spanning to the Egleston vicinity, but Stony Brook opted to reshape Boylston St. from a diagonal to an E-W orientation when the NEC was sunk making an already confusing walkshed all the moreso. Now it's an isoceles-triangle shaped 2600 ft. to get between the SB headhouse and Egleston at "easiest" wayfinding. But the cottage-industry of directions-giving will tell you that you can pare that to 2350 ft. by going 1 block up Amory, 2 blocks down School, 2 blocks up Arcadia, and 2 blocks down Atherton to the Square. Or...psst!...cut through the Darlymple/Mendell Way alleyway a block down Boylston or the school parking lot and you'll save yourself another 100 ft.

Who's going to mount that kind of wayfinding? Hardly anyone...which is why SB is a ridership crater whose positioning 2 crosswalks down the SW Corridor grade separated path to Green ends up eating into Green's ridership rather than carving out any bandwidth of its own. If it was going to seek any bandwidth of its own it would've treated the heart of the grid disruption where the cross streets all angle 45-degrees. It could get away being agnostic to that back in the old days as a RR when it was a faceless spacer station on completely/totally different travel patterns and the old elevated NEC was a much more imposing Chinese wall dividing the Centre-oriented west from the Washington-oriented east. In that role it didn't infringe on Green's catchment because RR Green and El Green were sipping from totally different cups.

Something had to bend, however, when they brought back that siting on El replacement grounds. Not only did they guess wrong...cannibalizing Jackson wasn't half the risk the state assumed because their respectively mis-aligned street grids as Green was the one that ended up functionally being undercut. But there was no "debate" presented. It was no choice at all: "It goes on the map coordinates of the old RR station or go pound sand we'll skip straight from Jackson to Green." Not "upon careful consideration we think the walksheds are adequately-accommodated"....straight to "Fuck you, that's why" and blinders welded shut. It was very much the same attitude that led to the intentional slew-footing of the Silver Line from its early design 70's-80's concepts that had way more stringently enforced bus lanes (not to mention real electricity propelling the buses) to the sick joke it became after everyone stopped pretending there was anything to it but a Seaport empire-building scheme.

History's tended to repeat itself in spades here. If "Fuck your walkshed, either take this station or get nothing at all" mentality draws a dashed line straight to how did the Silver Line become so watered down and where do we begin at fixing it...understanding WTF went awry is verily key to figuring out any sane way forward. That's it in a nutshell. It traces back to everyone trying to game the walkshed with the latest insidery crazy-quilt of cross-street hop/skip tricks that only the directionally superior can master...then that same story of trying to game the walkshed ending with an exasperated "Jeez! Why did this have to be so nonsensically hard?!?!" and getting curious about the backstory.

Nubian and DT aside, what's stopping the city from putting up barriers and banning on-street parking on Washington in the South End tomorrow? Just political will?

Yep. And BTD being the multi-generational unanswerable fiefdom that wags the Mayor. Why does the city enforcement agency not enforce double-parkers on some thoroughfares in some neighborhoods? Same reason why it's ensconded in the Constitution of Southie's wild imagination that space savers are a gift from God Himself's spare attic furniture stash. BTD district patrols are 'of' their neighborhoods...they bow to the mob. Why no one thought to put a bunch of Allston-born meter maids on-duty in JP Center when the delivery trucks are blocking the 39 all fucking day long or why Lower Dot patrols aren't swapped with South Enders who think those red-paint Silver Line lanes are an adorable optional suggestion is beyond me. Neither White nor Flynn nor Menino nor Walsh ever dared raise that possibility, so I guess they've all decided in 5 consecutive decades who really butters City Hall's bread.

In the absence of any multi-generational hint of change there it's probably safe to assume that bus lane layout is an easier change order than the enforcement politics around an anything-goes curb. Look to the 28X...center-median bus lanes, not curbside. Look to the Hyde Sq. E extension proposals which treat South Huntington with dual-mode center stops and are rumored to be doing the same for the past-Brigham E+39 stops on Huntington-proper. Look at the "San Fran-style" transit platforming that's been oft-namechecked here...rote center-running transit with no turning out (in the case of SF Market St. triple-mode streetcar + TT + diesel bus), and when the center is occupied by a station-stopping transit vehicle traffic bears right around the platform in traffic-calmed fashion. Just get the hell off the mob-ruled curbside entirely and jurisdictions are clear-cut enough to be BTD proof.

Boston probably has to do this as a matter of survival on any thoroughfare design-amenable enough to take transit to the left lane instead of the curb. It's enormously better-performing on a schedule anyway because the lack of turnouts, but instead of wishing that the mob didn't exist as it rules the curbside anarchy for another decade changing the sets of questions looks like the better deal. Just sidestep the curb mob entirely by cutting out the middleman, let design truths like "ADA sez platform must be minimum X ft. wide, universal fleet compatibility sez they have to be right-hand boarding for an any-bus, and there's no such thing as a quantum superposition where you get to hold 4 precious corner parking spaces hostage on both sides of the intersection so fork 'em over on the offset-platform sides." Seems to result in way less tortured sausage-making in cities that have adopted that standard of transit prioritization on their premier (any-mode) corridors. And...look at those 28X renders that are locked/loaded/red-to-go doing exactly this. Can you really say whatever workshopping time--short-duration, long-duration, excess-duration--they did was poorly spent when that's very much the template that might be able to fish the Silver Line out of the gutter and get Washington transit carrying its weight at long last?

I'd call that a learning moment for sure in the still-evolving history here. So how can we not continue to pay very close attention to the neighborhood's pulse?

 

[Vagabond]

Question for the transit nerds - how do we use "rule of thumb" density thresholds for BRT vs LRT vs HRT?

5-Second google says "according to our model, average-cost, average-performance heavy-rail investments need surrounding densities of approximately 45 residents per gross acre within a half mile of stations to meet the cost-effectiveness threshold. Light rail needs about 30 residents per gross acre."

Transit and the “D” Word – ACCESS Magazine

www.accessmagazine.org

A quick density review shows that the corridors for expansion without service are:
1. Lynn
2. Nubian/Dudley
3. Chelsea
4. Mattapan
5. Watertown-Waltham
6. Roslindale/Dedham

Using purely that logic, and NOT EXISTING ROWs, (because when you're spending billions, who cares?), what are the recommended modes for these corridors?

(PS- this census will show some interesting population and demographic shifts - I wish it was in 2 years because there is a LOT of large scale new residential construction going on right now)

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

And we're back to destroying the concept of a Crazy Transit Pitch insisting it be shovel ready...

Question for the transit nerds - how do we use "rule of thumb" density thresholds for BRT vs LRT vs HRT?

5-Second google says "according to our model, average-cost, average-performance heavy-rail investments need surrounding densities of approximately 45 residents per gross acre within a half mile of stations to meet the cost-effectiveness threshold. Light rail needs about 30 residents per gross acre."

Transit and the “D” Word – ACCESS Magazine

www.accessmagazine.org

A quick density review shows that the corridors for expansion without service are:

Using purely that logic, and NOT EXISTING ROWs, (because when you're spending billions, who cares?), what are the recommended modes for these corridors?

(PS- this census will show some interesting population and demographic shifts - I wish it was in 2 years because there is a LOT of large scale new residential construction going on right now)

Unfortunately there's not much challenge here because they all do have ROW's.

1. Lynn -- HRT (BL) + RUR
2. Nubian/Dudley -- LRT (GL) + BRT (UR SW/SE+JFK) + BRT (28X)
3. Chelsea -- LRT (UR NE) + BRT (TBD from other direction) + RUR
4. Mattapan -- HRT (RL) + BRT (28X) + BRT (30X/31X) + RUR (offset)
5. Watertown-Waltham -- Watertown: LRT (GL) + BRT (71X) / Waltham: RUR (now) + BRT (TBD) + (LRT later)
6. Roslindale/Dedham -- HRT (OL) + fuck whoever decided 12 years ago to build single-family houses over the HRT ROW so I guess it's RUR + BRT (TBD) @ Dedham Corporate

 

[HenryAlan]

EDIT after sleeping on it: Your two-seat ride from Rozzie immediately gets much MUCH better if you're not sitting in that infernal hell that is Lower Washington, and I feel your pain on that. The 31 and 27 don't face quite the same traffic conundrum, and neither is lashed to a much longer route (the 34E probably should be it's own standalone route from a relocated W. Rox/VFW OL terminus, with regular 34 frequencies backfilled from Rozzie Square to the Mall to fortify headways).

I think this has become much better since the morning inbound bus lane was created. It's still insufficient due to ridership numbers and the easily convertible to HRT parallel train tracks. But still, much better than a couple of years ago.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

I think this has become much better since the morning inbound bus lane was created. It's still insufficient due to ridership numbers and the easily convertible to HRT parallel train tracks. But still, much better than a couple of years ago.

But think how much better it'll be still if those bus lanes are carrying only 3-4 most-wanted routes thru to FH for spiked-% radial-transfer shares while the other 5 are culled at Rozzie? That's where extension as far as Rozzie as reliever for FH bus terminal ends up the exponential service increaser for FH bus terminal. In addition to being able to surge more frequencies in any other direction from the load relief, the long overdue Lower Washington route re-draw can prioritize via taking out the excess any surge frequencies @ precision OTP on the load-bearing routes who are taking outside dumps to the 39, 31, etc. @ FH vs. rapid transiting straight into Downtown. And/or lead the region's route-redraw by the nose to 'spine' some stiff thru-Washington options in specific enablement of easier radial transfer while a bunch of the pure-local routes diffuse to Rozzie, W. Rox, and/or the VFW 'extra' OL stop.

No way no how once the OL extension opens do you say "Well, that's enough bus laneage...tar the paint over so it goes back to cars & parking." Hell no. Those Lower Washington lanes become ever-more valuable once you can plan direct-targeted transit that stands on its own two feet playing pure offense instead of being backed onto its heels playing defense like the 9-route-overlap congestion conditions that got the lanes striped in the first place. They've very much a permanent cog in the works.

 

[Riverside]

Shifting gears for a moment: all other things (cost, political will) being equal, what is the better route for an LRT extension from Porter to Waltham -- via Belmont or via Watertown?

Belmont:

• Pros
  • More direct route -- shorter by .75 miles and more straightaways for higher speed
  • Extant ROW
  • Largely grade-separated
• Cons
  • Avoids higher density in Watertown
  • Needs to share ROW with mainline rail, a bit tight in places

Watertown:

• Pros
  • Denser community
  • Comes close to (though doesn't quite hit) future transit node at Newton Corner
  • ROW runs along major roads (Arsenal, River)
  • ROW largely extant along eastern half
• Cons
  • More roundabout route
  • Longer route, through denser neighborhoods
  • Lots and lots of grade-crossing, massive cost to grade separate
  • ROW has major encroachments in western half, and would almost certainly need to be mixed-traffic street-running in places

 

[Charlie_mta]

Shifting gears for a moment: all other things (cost, political will) being equal, what is the better route for an LRT extension from Porter to Waltham -- via Belmont or via Watertown?

Belmont would not want the "undesirables" sneaking into their pristine little hamlet on an LRT "crime train". Watertown would be much more welcoming of an LRT line. Also, way more TOD potential in Watertown.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Shifting gears for a moment: all other things (cost, political will) being equal, what is the better route for an LRT extension from Porter to Waltham -- via Belmont or via Watertown?

Belmont:

• Pros
  • More direct route -- shorter by .75 miles and more straightaways for higher speed
  • Extant ROW
  • Largely grade-separated
• Cons
  • Avoids higher density in Watertown
  • Needs to share ROW with mainline rail, a bit tight in places

Watertown:

• Pros
  • Denser community
  • Comes close to (though doesn't quite hit) future transit node at Newton Corner
  • ROW runs along major roads (Arsenal, River)
  • ROW largely extant along eastern half
• Cons
  • More roundabout route
  • Longer route, through denser neighborhoods
  • Lots and lots of grade-crossing, massive cost to grade separate
  • ROW has major encroachments in western half, and would almost certainly need to be mixed-traffic street-running in places

Bemis Branch (west half of H2O Branch) also isn't landbanked at all, with completely reverted property lines. It lasted at half-mile rump length to the second Charles crossing for customers on River St. in the 80's, but everything on the 1.3 miles east of there to Main St./US 20 was expunged ~4 decades ago before landbanking came about. The 1960 abandonment mid-Square between Main and Patten St. oddly got better attempted preservation than the next wave. So other than couple discrete block-length chunks property reversions have made it functionally impossible to fashion any additional path segments despite about 80% of it being intact in the form of telltale linear parking lots. They've never ever been able to get enough consecutive property owners willing to play ball with trail easements, so DCR long ago gave up and went all-in on the Charles paths instead. Because of the functional impossibility of stitching it all back landbanking was not pursued when the last rump was abandoned second Charles crossing early-90's, first Charles crossing mid-00's.

Take a look at this bad boy now utterly nuking the ROW on Elm immediately across the first Charles crossing in literal eyeshot of Waltham Ctr. Yeah...ain't ever happening. Add the other encroachment going up elsewhere and you're in the God-mode Transit Pitches thread long ago having left Crazy. Though I hesitate to say there was any missed opportunity here not going for toothier preservation. The odds of successfully nailing down enough easements for full corridor preservation is too many decimal places out rounded to zero, and the path connectivity is duplicated by the Charles paths so pursuit of hacked-to-pieces rail trail that's a block-to-block wayfinding nightmare would've been outright transit-counterproductive. The ROW, for all the reasons you cite, was of such lousy historical design to begin with due to formless meander and grade crossing hell that passenger service was deep-sixed in 1938 despite being the HEAVIER-patronage line than the less-dense main through Belmont. Full-on double-tracking, kind of Urban Rail-ish schedule density, and insane Wartime freight volumes to boot for the Arsenal (in other words not your prototypical Depression-era service cutback). It was too much of an OTP and crossing safety freakshow for B&M's insurance rates and late-tix discounts; they just threw up their hands and said "take the frickin' trolley; we're done."


So any rapid transit here must be a forked-branch out of Porter splitting @ Danehy Park running separate to Watertown on the '96+'08 landbanked branch, and Waltham via Fitchburg Main glom-on. You can safely call a time-of-death on the H2O Branch being any sort of contiguous corridor because of the impossible property reversion situation on the Bemis end. And, much like when B&M said "nuts to this!"...that end would've been an absolute traffic/schedule mgt. horror show on its own merits so was always a mirage as a transit corridor. Put it this way...all the Crazy Saugus Branch Pitches with the offset grade crossing hell in Malden are comparably sane compared to the Bemis Branch because Saugus at least traces a straight-line corridor out to US 1. Bemis is a total drunk's-walk of an anti-efficient meander.

We've discussed at length feasibility before for twin-fork H2O v. Waltham. Straightforward stuff o' builds, nothing of any average-or-higher difficulty. For the H2O Sq. branch, Cambridge DPW has swapped easements along Fresh Pond Pkwy. with the DCR bike path for the new reservoir-protecting earthen berms. That's all properly I.O.U.'d in the land-swap legalese with MassDOT that any 99-year reactivation considerations take the parkway path and shift the bikeway to the (functionally better) reservoir path...no issue there. Obviously assume a duck-under of the parkway grade crossing. Waterworks driveway to School St. on the Greenway extension is all cookie-cutter landbank...and you'll see from the path work and completed section how enormously wide it all is compared to the tree-choked single track that used to be there. Property line-wise this is all rail-with-trailable easy. School to Irving is 1980-ish abandonment caught in the pre-landbank era...shredded property lines and new encroachment. So last half-mile is:

• (A) streetscaping Arsenal for a reservation to a Cleveland Circle-esque transit platform remake of the Arsenal/N. Beacon traffic island that can take in-situ short-turns or run-thrus across the river to the Carhouse. At most 1 street-platforming spacer stop before the spacious terminal median.
• (B) flipping the lone Lexus of Watertown property to extend the ROW 1750 more feet to Gables Arsenal (Beechwood Ave. intersection) for an extra off-street intermediate then a shorter sub-1/3 mile of reservation'd Arsenal to same traffic island terminal and no in-street intermediates
• (C...let's get Crazy!)...something way high-concept like plowing a hole + indoor transit station straight through the glass facade of Arsenal across the School intersection and running via disconnected south end of School and more weapons-grade reservation separation on N. Beacon to the Square. Does this buy you any bona fides over boring street-running on Arsenal? No idea, but it's kewl as fuck in concept to work in an office building that's got a full weather-protected train station through the ground floor so I'm gonna daydream!
• Or...("+" suffixed to any of the above)...run-thru to Newton Corner RUR station loop if Galen can be transit-laned. That would be more traffic-amenable if you had a new set of Pike WB on/offramps @ Birmingham Pkwy. to direct thru-to-Watertown traffic along underutilized Nonantum instead of slamming Exit 17 into oblivion. Galen clears out nicely if it only has to be load-bearing for Pike EB travelers. YMMV.

Any which way it's doable, there's latent advocacy in Watertown, and it's probably something that'll become a front-page debate sooner or later that formally graduates off the "Crazy" page one day when a formal study (cursory or otherwise) spends a few bucks of real appropriated budget to give it a look.


For Waltham the Fitchburg Line was quad-track width through Belmont Ctr. for the West Cambridge Yard leads, tri-track to Beaver St. because competing Boston & Lowell payola'd itself a separate mainline track from the Fitchburg RR for running the Central Mass mainline out of Somerville Jct. + Fitchburg Cutoff when it leased that road. Only the 1955 B&M grade separation of Waverley pinches the dimensions inside the modern cut...so Waverley is the only place you have to sculpt a little extra width (and let's assume the LRT station just eats the CR station there). After Beaver St. split the Fitchburg ROW through Brandeis is only 2-track. Therefore you must reactivate the 1988-abandonment/T-landbanked Central Mass to 128 as the Fitchburg Line's re-route so LRT can take up the denser environs in Waltham Ctr. They meet back up at the 128 superstation next to New York Life HQ in Weston nice-n'-easy. Rail trail on the CM must go. However...the LRT ROW can trade on/off the Charles River and Riverview Cemetery paths between Center and Brandeis, easily rail-with-trail it Center-Beaver St. + Brandis-128. So the trail flippage is probably higher-utilization to begin with. Relocated Fitchburg Main (let's assume stationless--or at most one North Waltham spacer--since there's little transferrage you can accomplish here that can't be done at much higher frequency from a 128 superstation backtrack) will need some non-trivial $$$ sunk into grade separation because the Central Mass had 8 crossings between private Middlesex Circle and 117, some with very poor sightlines. And the NIMBY's will be bellyaching a bit about soundwall provision because it is snugly-fitting around abutters.

Belmont...yeah, NIMBY-town. But they have fuckall to complain about with how overbuilt/overbuffered the ROW is, so I honestly don't think if push comes to shove that they have the juice to turf it by their lonesome. I'm honestly a little more worried about the Central Mass abutters and what cost bloat comes there in all the concessions over crossing elimination and sound-proofing, though if City of Waltham at-large is gung-ho the citywide municipal support should override. Just make sure you're properly rating this one as one of the last of the linear-to-128 extension priorities, because :15 Urban Rail to 128 should be worth >25 years of rejuvenation at minimum before demand grows big enough to risk serious overtop of what new utility the RR can provide. Think of Waltham as a moving target with a high-speed overtake staged far down the line.

 

[HenryAlan]

But think how much better it'll be still if those bus lanes are carrying only 3-4 most-wanted routes thru to FH for spiked-% radial-transfer shares while the other 5 are culled at Rozzie? That's where extension as far as Rozzie as reliever for FH bus terminal ends up the exponential service increaser for FH bus terminal. In addition to being able to surge more frequencies in any other direction from the load relief, the long overdue Lower Washington route re-draw can prioritize via taking out the excess any surge frequencies @ precision OTP on the load-bearing routes who are taking outside dumps to the 39, 31, etc. @ FH vs. rapid transiting straight into Downtown. And/or lead the region's route-redraw by the nose to 'spine' some stiff thru-Washington options in specific enablement of easier radial transfer while a bunch of the pure-local routes diffuse to Rozzie, W. Rox, and/or the VFW 'extra' OL stop.

No way no how once the OL extension opens do you say "Well, that's enough bus laneage...tar the paint over so it goes back to cars & parking." Hell no. Those Lower Washington lanes become ever-more valuable once you can plan direct-targeted transit that stands on its own two feet playing pure offense instead of being backed onto its heels playing defense like the 9-route-overlap congestion conditions that got the lanes striped in the first place. They've very much a permanent cog in the works.

No argument from me on any of this. I was simply pointing out that the bus lane had helped, compared to the total disaster that preceded it.