Again, a harbor tunnel ER with Reg Rail frequencies would obviate the need for all those feeder buses to Wonderland. The increased speed should more than make up for the Airport transfer delay.
While a RT tunnel would have more potential than RR, you would then need the 2nd NSRL tunnel as well. Although, if Airport Station is c&c, you might be able to build a 4 track tunnel, although the routing is farther to the west than would be ideal.
Huh? It geographically wouldn't touch the North Shore buses. The 4xx's all spray
outbound of Lynn; the 30%+ 'waste' duty cycles are entirely on the Lynn-Wonderland traffic snarl and express running via Sumner/Callahan or via Ted sans any Airport exit. Very low percentage of those bus patrons are taking transit for explicit purpose of getting to the Airport. It's majority inter-neighborhood transit, Lynn/North Shore to Revere/Eastie. The coastal-strip population density has been geographically aligned for travel to & from for over 200 years...ever since most of Revere & Eastie were island-hops isolated from the city. Back beyond the days of Eastern Mass Street Railway and the Boston, Revere Beach & Lynn RR. This is why there are no local routes whatsoever spanning Chelsea with Lynn or outer Revere Beach.
A RR harbor crossing wouldn't solve any of the bus problems. The 'waste' cycles are still in effect and still worsening over time in 1A traffic, unable to be redeployed as additional frequencies to the outlying North Shore population. And that represses transfer traffic on
all rail modes...any flavor of RUR included. You can't do an RUR-side augmentation @ Lynn-proper in lieu of BLX because too much of the local bus patronage diffuses down the Blue Line into Revere/Eastie (but
not Logan in a singularity). It won't fire on all cyclinders, and whether the source frequencies come from a Somerville-portaling NSRL or an Airport-portaling NSRL they hit Lynn exactly the same. You can't do an RUR-side augmentation @ a Wonderland superstation, because the buses are too strung out by 1A 'waste' by that point to return fire with enough additional frequencies to matter. That's why Wonderland CR studies out a ridership loser every single time no matter what rail frequencies it's benchmarked against. And you can't draw the buses to an Airport superstation with RUR-side augmentation via Harbor crossing because their schedules are all completely shot by the time they hit the Sumner/Callahan or Ted portals. That simply bakes in the totality of the 'waste' miles forever instead of doing anything whatsoever to heal the breakage.
Again...the core problem is that the bus ops are so wrecked the 'waste' miles halve the achievable outlying frequencies that deliver the motherlode of ridership to
ANY and
ALL rail transfer modes all the way out to Beverly and 128, no matter what trunk mode they're connected to. So the underlying problem is 100% as acute for Regional Rail ridership growth; it's a problem for all modes, because the inability to stimulate meaningful feeder frequencies inhibits transit shares across the entire North Shore. It doesn't matter how many RR or HRT frequencies you throw at the problem from which direction; if you are proportionately perma-capped by this very stiff equipment cycling penalty the entirety of North Shore transit universe runs with one hand behind its back and
underperforms native demand relative to service levels offered to Downtown. Speeding up or augmenting RUR on any trajectory does nothing for that problem. Adding stet Blue Line line frequencies down to minimum 3 min. Wonderland headways does nothing for that problem. Throwing more buses at that problem does little itself for the problem, because it just means more systemwide bodies get trapped in the 1A 'waste' twilight zone not applied with any efficiency to increased feeder service levels.
The one and only way to perma-fix this is to make it so that every incoming bus cycle to the terminal is returned immediately and 1:1 back out as an outgoing frequency...zero waste instead of wasting 33-40% of its total running schedule on passing the kidney stone up/down 1A. BLX does that, because all demand shares get covered at the home terminal freeing those wasted cycles to be returned to the wild as 2x the feeder frequencies for either/both rail mode to gorge on. RUR, even with an Airport trajectory, does not do it. You'd have to balance judicious stop selection with speed meaning likely no intermediates between Logan and Lynn. And that doesn't work when shares of real-world bus utilization diffuse across the whole Wonderland-Maverick swath of stops
non-specific to destination. Again...
specific to/from-Logan shares are not big enough vs. the spread of North Shore patterns to rise above the din with RUR as a killshot. You'd have to add so many intermediate stops to the new alignment it would kill the utilization. This is baked into history. The BRB&L and Eastern RR historically thrived alongside each other via different audiences; the BRB&L scooping up the coastal stops Blue does, the Eastern doing expressing via long-haul. Things really haven't changed much 85 years later in the way Lynn Terminal diffuses its patronage. One killshot is incapable of doing it all.
This doesn't mean you
can't have a cross-Harbor RR bore someday. But practically it's so deep down the bucket list it's beyond practical planning comprehension. It means you can't plausibly pit mission-critical projects of
known urgency against each other winner vs. loser to artifically make room on the priority pile or turn it on its head for some eye-of-beholder pet project. Bus breakage isn't fixed without BLX. So why do we waste so much energy on these threads pitching Regional Rail tactical nuclear strikes
to exclusion of BLX as some proof-of-concept...when none of them actually address the breakage and ALL of them are ridership-hindered by the same breakage. It's irrelevant for not even asking the right questions. BLX has known cost ranges; just fucking build it already, settle this arbitrary either/or debate, and keep arguing till the cows come home about more-perfect NSRL alignments. Why do we keep putting projects in steel cage match competition with each other...that have nothing whatsoever to do with each other? Want crappy North Shore transit forever? Keep throwing shade at BLX with some RUR red herrings and watch RUR never hit its true ridership mark. Is that really winning??? How about just fixing the damn problem at its source.
As for whether an Airport bore has any juice to itself? It's going to be very, very hard to prove that it matters more than completing the missing Ted bore for rapid transit from Southie. A whole many decades of proto-Silver Line transit studies would have to be turned completely on their heads to show a RR > RT priority order. It doesn't matter if you personally have your own napkin-sketch math for that passing some eye test; the burden of proof comes from counterpointing the reams of it archived in the State Transpo Library. It's likewise going to be very hard to prove that it trumps well-studied radial transit links like an LRT-integrated Urban Ring that enhance by first- to
nth- degrees ease of crosstown access between hard-to-reach nodes. Like with BLX these are not projects that head-to-head compete with each other, one victor vs. one loser. The UR is a five-alarm critical project because it enhances
by degrees of difference the radial transit ease across the spider map for such a huge swath of population and multitude of 2+ seat trips. It's not supposed to matter that some micro-target audiences will/won't have to take a shuttle to Logan, because the share of total transit users buoyed up by the extra dynamism of crosstown service is so frigging massive. It's multi-faceted to a point that defies comparison with some Logan-centric target. There's logical fallacy in trying to pit them against each other. You can do both if it's merited. But you're going to be waiting an eon for a funding shot at the Logan target fixation compared to the urgency of something with extremely broader ridership coattails like the UR.
See the logical fallacy here? If these nice-to-haves slot umpteenth down on the priority pile such that they're >50 year beyond practical planning range...you can't change their fortunes by attacking projects in the Top 10 to fish for new oxygen for this. BLX and the Urban Ring defy one-on-one scoring vs. something like this by being as broad-based as they are. So does the NSRL's CBD bore. It doesn't prove anything to goose the topline of [somebody's pet project] and re-stack the priority order by
attacking the consensus builds. How clearer can it be when failing to mend the North Shore bus breakage kneecaps the very Regional Rail ridership such a build would depend on. Goalposts don't rearrange like this in real-world priority. And in purely
intra-NSRL debate, shorting the CBD-feeds-all bore to 2 tracks instead of 4 doesn't create natural headroom for expedited alt bores when that's a wholly arbitrary choice decided on splitting-hairs headhouse placement grounds not strenously tied to to quantified degrees-of-difference in the numbers.
If it's a nice-to-have, it's going to slot behind the exponential-increaser projects. If that means it slots umpteenth in natural resting-state priority, then it's going to take a fucking long time to mount. Incredible feats of goalpost-moving to net a higher-ranking arbitrary priority score by dinging up the chances of higher-ranked projects isn't a useful exercise in seeking better transit. Find a way to make the priority list move faster if we're hot to get nice-to-have's built before we're dead.
