Crazy Transit Pitches

[F-Line to Dudley]

While working out something for the God Mode thread over the weekend, I got sidetracked by a realization: If you've been paying attention to some of the permitting activity for some of the various parcels along Route 1A in Revere, you can pick up the scent of two related trends:

1. Massport could be trying to grow Logan in a shadow way, by expanding some airport service activities up there.
2. Logistics developers definitely think there's good money to be made by growing there, since it's as close as you can get to the airport and still do large-footprint industrial buildings. See: the huge warehouses that are slated to replace some of the Irving oil terminals in Revere, and the 2019 proposal that got Jim Aloisi & co. worked into a lather about a disused rail line that has no clear future.

Why not enable this growth and shape it in the least destructive way possible with an automated, short freight railway based around handling air cargo containers? I can't think of any other similar system out there, so maybe this is really God Mode wishful thinking, but the idea would be to keep as many trucks as possible from adding to the horrible traffic in and around the airport. Call it Boston's real answer to The High Line, but for Logan Airport instead of Chelsea (NYC).

If air cargo is going to be a durable part of our economy, despite its climate impacts, thanks to our insatiable demand for travel and things that must be delivered Right Now, and if freight rail seems to have little future in the urban core, let's channel those trends in the least-damaging ways possible.

Brief sketch, starting at the existing air cargo facilities at the base of Runway 33R/4L:

1. Elevated tracks taking some space on Harborside Drive and Transportation Way before slipping over the Pike at this low point here
2. Elevated above Service Road, slipping back over the expressway at another low point around the East Boston library/Excel Academy
3. Dropping down into/taking over the Coughlin Bypass Road before popping back up to elevated next to the CubeSmart building next to the Chelsea Street Bridge before branching:
4. Eastie branch:
   1. Follow that same old, infamous rail line, but at ground level, incorporating flood defenses and maybe a public greenway as outlined in Climate Ready Boston Phase 2.
   2. Offers sidings/direct connections to the ground floor of anything built along 1A and, presumably, opportunities to send elevated spurs across 1A to things built on the soon-to-be-former oil terminal properties.
5. Chelsea branch:
   1. Dodging the MWRA sewage pumping station, blowing through the derelict former MWRA pumping station to cross Chelsea Creek north of the lift bridge, soon to be as obsolete as the tank farms up-river.
   2. Turn to run along Eastern Ave to provide direct connections to the second floor of anything built along the creek.

I think there should be enough room to also build the last Logan people mover design that got floated just before the pandemic alongside this?

View attachment 38610

Logan really doesn't do freight volumes big enough to do air-to-rail/rail-to-air freight. And finally, there's the issue of where this stuff is coming/going on rail. Rail intermodal really only has a clear advantage over trucks at distances of 200 miles or more. Anything less than that can be covered better in a local trucking round-trip, coverable in a single shift before the labor costs of trucking start sharply escalating. Catchment (or lackthereof) is the same reason why Conley Terminal in South Boston, despite being an intermodal container port, projects to having almost no sustainable rail business worth spurring a track to the terminal for...all of the goods being handled there are going in a <200 mile radius around Boston, not being shipped to Buffalo or something like that. 200 miles of air freight around Logan puts you closer into the catchment of the Greater NYC airports, which sharply eats into the potential market for it. Trucks simply do a better job for Logan's market.

As for logistics companies looking to ship by rail...there's not a whole lot of land for plunking something really big down there. A company that had a pressing need for rail wouldn't be locating down there...it would be seeking out (copious) available industrial land along one of the freight mainlines. For the very narrow market of companies that would need to transload cargo to both air AND rail, there's no reason why a truck trip to Readville or Framingham or Lawrence or even Everett Terminal couldn't do the job for the rail transload. And if there's some hyper-urgent need for it close to the Airport, there's a small yard next to Global Petroleum on the out-of-service portion of the East Boston Branch right next to a few air freight vendors could be fixed up and reactivated for the daily BO-1 Everett local to serve...reducing the truck trips to only a mile or two intra-Eastie. But Pan Am has been trying for 30 years to find some customers for the yard, with no takers.

The economics really aren't that good for this. Logan doesn't have particularly huge...and ESPECIALLY doesn't have particularly wide-ranging...market for air freight, there's limited synergies for air and rail freight in the same spot (and if there were an airport with pre-existing onsite rail like Bradley would be the first to target), there isn't a logistics incubator for particularly large carload counts in Eastie, and Greater Boston has a supremely efficient trucking industry for handling all the locally-bound loads.

 

[Stlin]

Beyond the economics of building the thing, you'd be surprised at how little actually goes in each jet. Most air cargo operators already have an "off-site ULD" program, where the canister that boards the plane leaves the airport to be loaded. A 53ft trailer can take about 10 LD3s, while a 767 freighter can board about 45 - in essence, each freighter could be fully supported by less than 5 truck round trips, plus the flexibility of each having the opportunity to go to different distribution centers.

 

[Aprehensive_Words]

Yeah, I think I mostly doodled this as a way to reduce the amount of local truck traffic I see every time I'm on the SL3 or stuck in traffic on 1A -- traffic that's going to go up as those two trends I enumerated ramp up. You can be sure that Chelsea and Revere are going to want to let more of that semi-productive land turn into logistics and other industrial uses. Some of the figures in this BBJ story from this morning are illuminating: https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/...breaks-ground-on-chelsea-industrial-site.html

The average asking rent on a triple net lease for properties in Chelsea and other close-in suburbs north of Boston is more than $25 per square foot, significantly higher than many of the region's other submarkets

To make that work, when an industrial tenant could otherwise head out to Billerica, Milford and beyond, you've got to really value that proximity to the core, and be in a business that lets you charge a premium. Tenants aren't going to be your garden-variety distribution center for Home Goods. That's going to be something that needs to be close to the airplanes, like high-markup manufactured goods, perishables like seafood, just-in-time online shopping orders, and airport services.

 

[RandomWalk]

Talking with an acquaintance recently, it came up that MIT may be quietly inquiring about Blue Line extending past Charles/MGH to the Kendall area. Between MGH and MIT wanting the BL one seat to Logan, could the T simply respond with “put up or shut up”?

 

[737900er]

Talking with an acquaintance recently, it came up that MIT may be quietly inquiring about Blue Line extending past Charles/MGH to the Kendall area. Between MGH and MIT wanting the BL one seat to Logan, could the T simply respond with “put up or shut up”?

If I was the T I would say "why don't you go talk to Harvard and come up a way to make to the northside UR happen if you really want OSR to Logan" instead of getting locked into Blue to Kendall for forever. Red-Blue alone would probably be enough for them though -- Logan is so conveniently located that even with a connection the trip won't take that long. I don't see many possibilities for extension for Blue from Kendall, which makes it a harder sell; from Charles/MGH there are a lot of different options.

That being said, I could see a case for Kendall Logan Express (possibly with a North Station stop too if a routing could be figured out).

 

[Tallguy]

Talking with an acquaintance recently, it came up that MIT may be quietly inquiring about Blue Line extending past Charles/MGH to the Kendall area. Between MGH and MIT wanting the BL one seat to Logan, could the T simply respond with “put up or shut up”?

They need to move quickly to reserve provisions for a row in the Volpe redevelopment

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

If I was the T I would say "why don't you go talk to Harvard and come up a way to make to the northside UR happen if you really want OSR to Logan" instead of getting locked into Blue to Kendall for forever. Red-Blue alone would probably be enough for them though -- Logan is so conveniently located that even with a connection the trip won't take that long. I don't see many possibilities for extension for Blue from Kendall, which makes it a harder sell; from Charles/MGH there are a lot of different options.

That being said, I could see a case for Kendall Logan Express (possibly with a North Station stop too if a routing could be figured out).

Yeah. This hasn't been studied. The UR has been studied in great depth. Nobody has quantified what this does that the UR doesn't do equally well. There's serious questions about exactly where there's room for an underground BL station given the Volpe redevelopment that MIT to-date has not been reserving ROW space for. And Kendall is getting some immediate help with RLT's 3-minute headway target and Red-Blue enabling easier Airport options.

The onus really is on MIT to show how this can be done and put forth serious resources towards making it happen before the T can feel compelled to reshuffle its priority pile based on their whims. If it's little more than just piggybacking on the Red-Blue effort with a nag for free candy, then unfortunately the response is going to have to be "meet us halfway or go pound sand".


But seriously...the complete rapid-transited UR is the #1 ridership studied service extension in the T's whole vast universe of projects. There shouldn't be any stray diversions from making it happen, least of all on the easiest-to-build installments like the Cambridge quadrant. MIT of all places should know that by now.

 

[fattony]

And Kendall is getting some immediate help with RLT's 3-minute headway target and Red-Blue enabling easier Airport options.

Side topic: The words “immediate” and “RLT” don’t seem to belong in the same sentence. When do you realistically think we’ll see 3 minute headways on Red?

 

[stick n move]

But seriously...the complete rapid-transited UR is the #1 ridership studied service extension in the T's whole vast universe of projects.

I thought urban ring was proposed as bus rapid transit?

 

[Teban54]

I thought urban ring was proposed as bus rapid transit?

The original, official plan for Urban Ring was in 3 phases:

• Phase 1: Non-BRT bus routes similar to CT2 and CT3
• Phase 2: BRT on the whole ring with dedicated ROWs
• Phase 3: LRT conversion

This forum largely agrees that Phase 2 doesn't make much sense, especially for the northern half, where it was proposed to convert ROWs like Grand Junction to busways.

I'm not sure which exact phase was F-Line referring to with the "#1 ridership", but I'd guess he was probably talking about Phase 3.

 

[737900er]

Yeah. This hasn't been studied. The UR has been studied in great depth. Nobody has quantified what this does that the UR doesn't do equally well. There's serious questions about exactly where there's room for an underground BL station given the Volpe redevelopment that MIT to-date has not been reserving ROW space for. And Kendall is getting some immediate help with RLT's 3-minute headway target and Red-Blue enabling easier Airport options.

The onus really is on MIT to show how this can be done and put forth serious resources towards making it happen before the T can feel compelled to reshuffle its priority pile based on their whims. If it's little more than just piggybacking on the Red-Blue effort with a nag for free candy, then unfortunately the response is going to have to be "meet us halfway or go pound sand".


But seriously...the complete rapid-transited UR is the #1 ridership studied service extension in the T's whole vast universe of projects. There shouldn't be any stray diversions from making it happen, least of all on the easiest-to-build installments like the Cambridge quadrant. MIT of all places should know that by now.

The one benefit it would have is being about 10-15 minutes faster to Airport and other Blue Line destinations than UR or Red & Blue, but spending upwards of a billion dollars on that seems excessive, especially when UR would provide better connections to Allston, North Station, Chelsea, Malden, Somerville, etc. and largely benefit people who actually live here.

 

[Aprehensive_Words]

Speaking of the Urban Ring, has anyone ever seen a detailed brainstorm of how you'd actually connect an rail-based routing to the Blue Line without eating the Coughlin Bypass Road? If you're ever in and around Day Square when a tractor-trailer driver gets lost and tries to go that way vs. take the bypass, it seems like eliminating the bypass would be a *very* hard sell for locals and for the industrial users in the area.

EDIT: The digitized State Transportation Library stuff only seems to include Phase 2 draft plans.

 

[Koopzilla24]

Speaking of the Urban Ring, has anyone ever seen a detailed brainstorm of how you'd actually connect an rail-based routing to the Blue Line without eating the Coughlin Bypass Road? If you're ever in and around Day Square when a tractor-trailer driver gets lost and tries to go that way vs. take the bypass, it seems like eliminating the bypass would be a *very* hard sell for locals and for the industrial users in the area.

EDIT: The digitized State Transportation Library stuff only seems to include Phase 2 draft plans.

As far as I know the Urban Ring was never intended to include complete LRT. Only the west side from Assembly to Nubian via Cambridge for Phase 3. SL3 was built as the intended UR portion from South Station to Chelsea with the Blue connection.
The best option I can see for a proper UR service is a bus tunnel continuation from the bypass road under Curtis St

that goes under Fort Point to re-emerge-just before the current busway.

The drawbridge delays are not conducive to Urban Ring service so any bridge would need to be avoided and there’s not much space for a rail incline in the area.

The real crazy idea I can think of is a Blue Line branch to Assembly that breaks off when the line dives underneath Frankfort St before Wood Island. It’d then take over the SL3 alignment through Chelsea which would require single track sections or bridge rebuilds all the way to Chelsea Station. Then it could again dive underground to head north to eat some Rt16 ROW to kinda serve Everett as surface stops before one last stop at Encore/Gateway Center and another drop under the Mystic to then squeeze in between Draw Seven Park and the existing Assembly Station.

 

[Riverside]

Speaking of the Urban Ring, has anyone ever seen a detailed brainstorm of how you'd actually connect an rail-based routing to the Blue Line without eating the Coughlin Bypass Road? If you're ever in and around Day Square when a tractor-trailer driver gets lost and tries to go that way vs. take the bypass, it seems like eliminating the bypass would be a *very* hard sell for locals and for the industrial users in the area.

EDIT: The digitized State Transportation Library stuff only seems to include Phase 2 draft plans.

As far as I know the Urban Ring was never intended to include complete LRT. Only the west side from Assembly to Nubian via Cambridge for Phase 3. SL3 was built as the intended UR portion from South Station to Chelsea with the Blue connection.
The best option I can see for a proper UR service is a bus tunnel continuation from the bypass road under Curtis St

@F-Line to Dudley sketched out some ideas for this a couple of years ago.

 

[Aprehensive_Words]

As far as I know the Urban Ring was never intended to include complete LRT. Only the west side from Assembly to Nubian via Cambridge for Phase 3. SL3 was built as the intended UR portion from South Station to Chelsea with the Blue connection.
The best option I can see for a proper UR service is a bus tunnel continuation from the bypass road under Curtis St that goes under Fort Point to re-emerge-just before the current busway. The drawbridge delays are not conducive to Urban Ring service so any bridge would need to be avoided and there’s not much space for a rail incline in the area.

That makes sense with the drawbridge! It already screws up SL3 service as-is, and until recently it was pretty much unthinkable that those oil tanks could ever become obsolete and the area upstream of the bridge might ever be removed from the DPA.

 

[Riverside]

I know next-to-nothing about ferries and water transportation. But when has lack-of-expertise ever gotten in the way of drawing pretty lines on a map, amirite??

Ahem.

We can call this "EZ-Ride, the next generation: EZ-Float".

A Charles Ferry route, with stops at

• North Station
• Kendall
• MIT/Mass Ave
• BU

with optional non-stop runs to reduce travel times.

At North Station, plop a dock/use existing docks behind the MGH building, and add a pedestrian overpass from the far end of the commuter rail platforms so passengers can walk directly without diverting through the station.

At Kendall, see if you fit under the Broad Canal Drawbridge (lol no) to get closer to the heart of the action. If not, look for places to stop just north and/or south of Longfellow:

Ten minute walksheds -- am slightly surprised the western one gets you a "deeper" walkshed, but probably is impacted by the spaghetti at the bridge, the canal, and the tracks themselves:

Plunk another stop somewhere near Mass Ave, and then have fun picking a place to stop near BU:

~~~

Okay, so aside from the aesthetic/romantic appeal of the Charles River becoming more like the Thames (as a piece of geography that knits together the region, rather than split it), what does this proposal actually have going in favor of it?

Well, to start, you have the North Station <> Kendall commute, currently covered by EZ-Ride, which claims to be able to do the journey in 10 minutes. (The Green <> Red journey is timetabled at least 16 minutes.) A ferry could potentially provide greater reliability by bypassing traffic -- if it can be faster.

Can it be faster than a bus? Well, maybe. The Charlestown Ferry is timetabled at 10 minutes to travel one mile, for an average speed at 6 mph. I have zero idea whether conditions on the Charles permit similar speeds, but it's the only number I've got for now, so I'm rolling with it. North Station <> Kendall-ish is also about a mile. So, that suggests that EZ-Float could actually compete with EZ-Ride on travel times, though the ferry gets a penalty due to the 5-10 min walk on the Cambridge side.

EZ-Ride also serves MIT, timetabled at about 20 minutes (depending where on campus). North Station <> Mass Ave via the Charles is 1.6 miles, which non-stop at 6 mph could be cleared in 16 minutes. Again, not a clear winner, but perhaps competitive if there is better reliability.

Finally, there is BU. North Station <> BU Bridge (as an arbitrary choice for a stop location) is 2.7 miles, which non-stop would be 27 minutes. North Station <> BU Central via the Green Line is something like 32 minutes, and requires a transfer or a 10+ minute walk. So, once again, we don't see a clear winner, but it seems like there is a somewhat similar ballpark maybe.

~~~

One outstanding question is frequency and rolling (floating?) stock needs. For comparison, the T uses (I believe) two boats for the Charlestown Ferry service, for 15-minute service during peak. EZ-Ride's frequency varies, but during high peak sees 12-minute headways.

Just to sketch out some numbers, let's look at the "full-build" North Station <> BU service (and we'll assume it's non-stop for the moment. 27 minutes of travel time, plus 3 minutes per stop (probably a little tight) puts a round-trip at 60 minutes. To achieve 12-minute headways, you would need five ferries in operation at once. So a more realistic estimate would be six or seven, depending on how many stops you make and how tight your "layovers" are.

That's... a lot of boats. Even just a North Station <> Kendall service would probably need three boats in order to hit those 12-minute headways.

There's also a literal pinch point under the Craigie Bridge. Again, I know next to nothing here, but that looks pretty narrow and I'm guessing can't handle two boats passing each other in opposite directions. So maybe 12-min headways aren't even possible anyway.

~~~

So, does this work? Ehn, probably not. At least not as a competitive replacement for EZ-Ride. A one-seat North Station <> BU service every 15-20 or 20-30 minutes maybe could be potentially interesting, but hardly a slam dunk.

The outer harbor services (e.g. to Hingham) are (I believe) catamarans that zip along at 20 mph. So maybe there are faster boats out there that could make this trip competitive, I don't know. They'd need to be pretty narrow to fit through the Craigie, which looks to be about 45 feet wide.

So, while it's fun to imagine, the days of commuting under the Longfellow rather than over it are still probably pretty far off.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Harvard Bridge kills the ferry plan dead. Very low clearance ever since the 1990 rehabilitation eliminated the draw span. Even the sailboats on the river can't clear it with their masts up. So you'd be limited to speedboats akin to some of the smaller craft moored at Charles Yacht Club (not even all of those boats will fit), which constricts you to paratransit-sized capacity. Like 5-8 passengers per trip...maybe 10-12 if you came up with some particularly novel design. Far too small for anything load-bearing.

It's too bad the Longfellow underpasses on Memorial Drive are a few inches too short for an MBTA bus. That would've provided a reasonably fast route (esp. if you kept the O'Brien Hwy. bus lanes from the GLX construction diversion, and allowed buses to go straight instead of turning right at the Mass Ave. frontage ramps). Memorial isn't that congested east of BU Bridge, so the only real problem you'd have had to solve traffic-wise was signal re-timing at the BU Bridge rotary (same one the 47 gets stuck in all the time). But alas it's only a 10'6" clearance at the Longfellow, and you need at least 10'9" or 10'10" to fit the Yellow Line through there.

 

[Charlie_mta]

'It's too bad the Longfellow underpasses on Memorial Drive are a few inches too short for an MBTA bus.

Two options there: Deepen the roadways in the underpass a few feet, installing permanent pumps as needed to dewater them. Or, leave them as is, and have the busses use the ramps as a through route with bus-activated traffic lights across Mass Ave.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Two options there: Deepen the roadways in the underpass a few feet, installing permanent pumps as needed to dewater them. Or, leave them as is, and have the busses use the ramps as a through route with bus-activated traffic lights across Mass Ave.

It's the Longfellow underpass, not Mass Ave., that you can't fix for. 10'6" on the westbound side on a road that can't be depressed any further because of the adjacent intersection, and no up-and-over possibility because of the Red Line tracks.

 

[Charlie_mta]

It's the Longfellow underpass, not Mass Ave., that you can't fix for. 10'6" on the westbound side on a road that can't be depressed any further because of the adjacent intersection, and no up-and-over possibility because of the Red Line tracks.

Oops, sorry about that. I was thinking Mass Ave, not Longfellow Bridge.