Yup, it's a
Crazy Transit Pitch alright. Maybe it's me, but as a "solution" it's so ham-fisted and overcomplicated that it almost strikes me as exactly the kind of logic Baker & Company would come up with.
Riverside, have you been moonlighting as MassDOT's sandbagging consultant without telling us? /s
Hahaha, you caught me! This has been all a ruse to finish the 40-year project of killing the old Orange Line, one segment at a time!
(To be clear for anyone reading who -- like me -- sometimes misses sarcasm, I am completely joking about working for Baker and about wanting to kill the old Orange Line.)
...all to free up the Washington Street Tunnel for potential subway service expansion of questionable feasibility (Chelsea/Everett) and/or excessive difficulty (i.e. Nubian via OL versus the easier GL option)... All humor aside, it's actually a fairly-reasonable proposal for if there was some reason that it actually made sense to take the Orange Line out of the Washington Street Tunnel.
Yes, this is the crux of it. This is a Crazy Transit "Pitch" of questionable merit in order to enable a Crazier Transit Pitch of strong merit but questionable feasibility and cost. Because I
will say: there
should be a full rapid transit spine going down to Nubian, and likewise there
should be a radial full rapid transit spine going to Chelsea & Everett. The El was a mistake and needed to come down, but the gap between the SW Corridor and the Fairmount Line is too wide (especially in the northern half of Dorchester). There
should be spines on the Fairmount Line, on Washington/Shawmut, on Huntington, and on Boylston. Green Line to Nubian is by far the best option when balancing benefit, feasibility, and cost, but I would argue that we should still remember that it is a compromise, not an ideal.
I was actually prompted to think about this by a fantasy map that was shared on Twitter the other day:
Which is mostly reasonable, except for branching the Orange Line at Tufts and Sullivan. But there's a reason this person thought that was a good idea.
Furthermore, because of the way this map promotes the regional rail lines, it highlights how much the "new" (current) Orange Line parallels the mainline routes. In some alternate history out there, the SW Corridor, Fairmount, and Reading Lines were
all Indigo-ified. If the New Haven railroad had electrified the SW Corridor in its early days and tried to replicate the success of the Boston, Revere Beach & Lynn, that could have been what happened all along.
Because it parallels the mainline railroads, the Orange Line's corridors are in some ways the
most suited to being served Urban Rail-style by high-frequency (<6 min headways) layered branching services. Since we're gonna be doing that already (in this hypothetical future) to provide rapid transit service along Fairmount and potentially other corridors, why not consolidate like-with-like to maxmize flexibility and efficiency? And at the same time, remake the Orange Line (and its use of the Washington Street Tunnel) into something more like the Red Line or Blue Line.
So, maybe I'm missing something (I'll concede not really parsing the TPH numbers), but it sounds like putting a ceiling on NSRL-enabled CR/RER frequency increases (in the form of forcing a disproportionate number of tunnel slots onto the former outlier Reading), or at the very least "mis-allocating" NSRL slots to lower-value services
You're not missing something, that's basically what this is. But... two wrinkles for us to consider (in this hyper-hypothetical scenario):
First, it's possible we could get away with reducing slots to Reading depending on where the "new" Orange Line goes to the north. Malden is the major bus hub at that end of the line, but a route via Everett & Chelsea could still reach Malden and provide the RT frequencies needed there. Sullivan is the other hub, but you provide sufficient frequencies there by combining Reading and North Shore services. Vague examples below:
Second: it is true that this idea would cap capacity on the NSRL.
But... one thing that stood out to me doing this was that... well, the cap is a problem but it's not actually
that big of a problem. This comes back to something I
wrote about a few months ago: the number of routes that should run through the NSRL is modest, not large. I admit this calculus changes if partial electrification becomes viable (eg batteries, dual-modes, etc), but I think it doesn't actually changes radically.
Assuming Orange eats Reading & West Roxbury, the North and South Sides both have ~3 within-128ish corridors that merit rapid transit-like service (what I called "Metro service"):
- North
- Waltham
- Woburn/Lowell
- North Shore
- South
- Newton/Framingham
- Fairmount/Dedham
- Brockton/Old Colony
- Providence (ish)
It's "~3" because the divisions aren't perfectly clean... the B&A probably will not see as high frequencies as Fairmount because (imo) there need to be some expresses to service Worcester... Providence is distant but also Canton-and-inward will be doubled up by SCR... and Brockton could use through-run Metro service but will need to compete with other OCR routes, etc etc etc
But the exact numbers don't really matter. If we take the 20 tph capacity, reserve 2 slots for Amtrak (or whatever), then you have 18 tph. Divide that by ~3, and you get 6 tph on each of the corridors above, which is a through-run train every 10 minutes. And then on
top of that, you'll continue to have services that run into the surface terminals, increasing frequencies on those corridors further.
And in fact, even if we bring Reading back into scope, then you have four corridors on each side: you could give each corridor 15-min through-running headways, double those up with surface-short-turns to provide 7.5-min headways on the inner segments (hello RT freqs), and
still have 4 slots available for "Amtrak (or whatever)".
My point (at long last): yes, I've introduced a cap, but I don't think it's actually
that far off from being manageable.
(at least, lower value in that they already have an existing transit route, and one with superior connections to the other RT lines given that OL-North would lose its cross-platform GL connection and get a probably-lower-quality RL connection, and OL-South would similarly lose its easy GL connection and get probably-lower-quality RL and BL connections)
Yes, these are key shortcomings, and they are probably the biggest flaws (and arguably fatal ones). The key question would be whether the "new" rerouted Orange Line would be able to mop up enough of the Orange Line's current riders to justify the impact.
while pointedly avoiding any discussion of Congress Street's potential availability for future subway tunneling through the core if needed?
Hey, I was already making two Crazy Transit Pitches, I didn't want to push it with a third
But yes -- in the event that the Orange Line
needed to be rerouted out of Washington, Congress would
probably be the stronger alternative compared to mainline conversion. That being said, the "like-with-like" element still holds some appeal to me. If I were going to build a new rapid transit subway in downtown, I'd want to devote it to sending service where I can't use mainline services. So, maybe like...
- Orange: Nubian to Everett via Washington
- Red: Ashmont/Mattapan & South Shore to Chelsea via Congress
- Indigo: West Roxbury & Fairmount to Reading & North Shore via NSRL
Anyway, I think for me the value in this exercise isn't necessarily about actually proposing resurrecting BERy's plans for the Orange Line and using the NSRL to clean up the rest -- rather it's about the insights picked up along the way: the Orange Line's corridors are a lot like the Indigo Lines', the relatively high available capacity on the NSRL upon closer inspection, the continued absence of rapid transit spines to dense neighborhoods (that old adage about "building transit where convenient rather than where needed" comes to mind) and so on.
