Crazy Transit Pitches

[F-Line to Dudley]

This isn't really a "crazy transit pitch" as much as "figuring out why a crazy transit pitch won't work", but: there are ferries which carry automobiles. Could there be ferries that carry light rail cars?

Not a new idea. Unless you have any aims at them staying plugged into a 600V DC power source while over the water.

 

[TheRatmeister]

This isn't really a "crazy transit pitch" as much as "figuring out why a crazy transit pitch won't work", but: there are ferries which carry automobiles. Could there be ferries that carry light rail cars?

There could be, sure. You'd either want small batteries for loading/unloading or overhead lines that can be energized when the ferry is docked for power. But ferries are surprisingly expensive to operate (not to mention slow) and so unless you could use a cable or electric ferry, a bridge/tunnel would probably end up paying for itself within 20 years or so. That's why the Faroe Islands built massive tunnels for a couple thousand people. (Although they had the benefit of non-English speaking infrastructure costs.)

 

[Riverside]

Not a new idea. Unless you have any aims at them staying plugged into a 600V DC power source while over the water.

Yeah, I've read the Wikipedia. Most of the examples seemed to be much more "heavyweight", for longer haul journeys across the water. I was thinking about something like this:

Allow passengers to (e.g.) board an LRT at South Station, which rolls on to a ferry in the Seaport (passengers remaining onboard), pops across the harbor, and rolls off before running directly to the airport terminals.

Obviously, the only way this could work is if the "roll on roll off" process is sufficiently speedy. And the point about live power is well-made.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Yeah, I've read the Wikipedia. Most of the examples seemed to be much more "heavyweight", for longer haul journeys across the water. I was thinking about something like this:

View attachment 56565

Allow passengers to (e.g.) board an LRT at South Station, which rolls on to a ferry in the Seaport (passengers remaining onboard), pops across the harbor, and rolls off before running directly to the airport terminals.

Obviously, the only way this could work is if the "roll on roll off" process is sufficiently speedy. And the point about live power is well-made.

With how cumbersome the loading/unloading is, you'd honestly make the trip faster doing a Seaport-Green Line-Urban Ring-Terminals trip the long way around via Everett-Chelsea.


EDIT: Plus the headways. What's the best you could do with a ferry that had to gingerly load/unload cars...like 20 minutes per direction? That's not going to draw ridership.

 

[Riverside]

There could be, sure. You'd either want small batteries for loading/unloading or overhead lines that can be energized when the ferry is docked for power. But ferries are surprisingly expensive to operate (not to mention slow) and so unless you could use a cable or electric ferry, a bridge/tunnel would probably end up paying for itself within 20 years or so. That's why the Faroe Islands built massive tunnels for a couple thousand people. (Although they had the benefit of non-English speaking infrastructure costs.)

Wow, yeah. Consider my mind changed.

(Idk if he's making videos much anymore, but those tunnels sound like prime Tom Scott material.)

 

[ritchiew]

Thanks to everyone commenting on the airport proposal! I got a couple pages of responses here, then no time to respond for a few days, but I'm back

It's not going to connect to NSRL 100 feet below ground. Your junction is north of North Station where the tracks are mid-ascent on a maximally steep 3% grade. You're going to have to go back DOWN...on a curve...to get underneath Charlestown. Assuming it's even feasible to shiv in a junction in the middle of a 3% grade, lest you have to send all of NSRL back into design at untold cost bloat. Yes...it will be a 15-20 MPH slog, for damn sure. You're not considering the third dimension at all with that drawing.

I see, I see. My bad. My drawing was off and I was throwing out NSRL specs from memory, which were wrong.

Ignoring the details of what I drew before, have the airport tunnel branch off just north of the underground North Station. There are a few hundred feet of level track there to do so. Like this:

That's deeper than I said before, closer to 150ft underground. The extra depth is no problem for a gentle ascent up to an airport station. A 0.5% grade on the curve and 1.5% grade on the straightaway brings the tracks up to surface level at central parking at Logan. Assuming the train platforms will be underground, those grades will be slightly less. That eliminates the vertical junctioning and slowdowns.

All that said...

Put it this way...if we're going to be chasing overrated things, shouldn't we be aiming to make them only slightly overrated like Levy says? In that case, the 4-minute longer trip on the existing Eastern Route tracks + a 3000 ft. small slice of SL3 surface ROW + a 2500 ft. under-Creek & highways tunneled segment is much much more slightly overrated than the extremely overrated $2B NSRL appendage with complex vertical junctioning that saves only 4 minutes (but probably not even that) from the same trip.

Yeah, sure y'all have convinced me. This and comments from @TheRatmeister and @ulrichomega all sound good. Going through Chelsea first looks a lot cheaper for a small time impact.

One kind of (not really) problem with that route is all the grade crossings through Chelsea. It seems like there would need to be grade separations there even for existing Regional Rail planed frequencies, let alone adding in trains to the airport. Does anyone know what the plans there might be?

It would probably have to be in the same ridership stratosphere as today's North Station to possibly make fiscal sense, and there's no possible way to extrapolate that much Logan potential from the current middling transit numbers the airport does from this whole region with its not-at-all-bad transit access. The potential is an order of magnitude shy of fiscal sanity.

If the comparison is North Station, then an airport regional rail station would need to take what, like 15-20% modeshare? (There's 85k going to the airport daily, and a mostly different 85k leaving the airport, so it's a different pattern compared to normal commuters into North Station, and I'm just trying to pick rough, round numbers for the sake of a crazy transit pitch). That's not an outlandish expectation for something like I'm proposing (or the cheaper route along the Eastern Route). Those are the kinds of numbers you could expect from a convenient, frequent train that directly goes to multiple downtown stops around hotel clusters. 20% of people take the Canada Line to and from Vancouver's airport. The Heathrow Express was overpriced for sure, but the Piccadilly line apparently carries in the 20s% of people to and from Heathrow (sorry I can't find the exact number). I've seen DCA has the highest transit modeshare of US airports(13% I think, but I've lost my source), mainly because of the subway connections. Those connections are great for getting downtown, but it reaches that modeshare without even being very good at connecting to the suburbs. The airport link I'm proposing is like if DCA was also connected to a half dozen regional rail lines radiating out in the Virginia and Maryland suburbs, as far as Baltimore. In that case, the transit share would obviously be higher.

And there is good reason to think this line to Logan would be among those high performing examples. This would go directly to several major hubs of business and hotels in the city. It also connects lots of the suburbs where local traffic is disproportionately originating from. It offers all kinds of one-seat-rides, which boosts ridership, especially for people carrying luggage. Lots more trips are possible with cross platform transfers. The train station can be right at the airport, without the need for extra connections on busses or people movers, right where we could automatically direct people coming out of arrivals. So in a very hand-wavy way, yes, I think this airport link would be the kind that pulls in a double digit modeshare. And I think that would put it in the ballpark of North Station ridership, if that's the cutoff you want to pick. It would be at least close enough that I don't think it can be dismissed out of hand.

As for trying to extrapolate from current public transit numbers, that doesn't really make sense to me. The Blue and Silver lines to the airport are not great. The Blue Line is the shortest, least connected rapid transit line, and still requires a transfer to a bus to get to the terminals. The Silver Line is a bus that gets stuck in traffic, regularly taking a half hour to get to or from the airport. Personally, I stubbornly take public transit, but even I've started taking rideshare on the odd occasions I'm going to the airport. Or getting someone to pick me up. So it's not surprising to me that those services get middling transit numbers. But I don't know what they can tell us about possible ridership on what I'm proposing, which would be maybe one of the fastest and best connected airport links in the world.

Are you actually expecting that the southside suburbs alone are going to ride to Logan daily at a North Station-ridership level? And if so, where have all those people been hiding all these decades?

They've been driving to the airport.

RE: Terminal station placement. I think it's a given for this project that you need to be tunnelling under the terminal buildings themselves, otherwise none of this works. That said, could we share terminals for E/C and A/B? I make this out to be ~800 ft radius between the two terminal stations, with the curve out of Airport being worse, but I think that one's much more fudgeable.

That's interesting. Thanks to you and @Riverside for all your other pictures of measurements on other airports. Station location(s) definitely isn't something I've found a perfect solution for. I still think the best would be a single central station, looking something like this:

 

[TheRatmeister]

One kind of (not really) problem with that route is all the grade crossings through Chelsea. It seems like there would need to be grade separations there even for existing Regional Rail planed frequencies, let alone adding in trains to the airport. Does anyone know what the plans there might be?

Given that removing those grade crossings would also involve entirely removing the new Chelsea station, I don't think there are any at the moment. Some grade A lack of foresight with that design.

They've been driving to the airport.

Again, just to restate it, 20 THOUSAND. That's how many private vehicles make the trip to Logan each day. If everyone drives back, then the average length of the trip is around 20 miles. That would mean about .5% of all VMT in Massachusetts are people driving to Logan Airport.

 

[ritchiew]

(oh weird, my post got cut off, so, continued....)

@ulrichomega and @Riverside, just a note on that crude drawing for a station, in purple. It's 1050ft long (Amtrak length) and 165ft wide, for a six track terminal station. That's for some extravagant future with 7.5 minute regional rail headways plus intercity trains. The tracks would be just north of the hotel. The platforms would be underground, with escalators/elevators at both ends at least, so people arriving could enter the station anywhere to get down the trains. The distance markers aren't planned paths. They're just to show this could be roughly the same distances of @Riverside 's O'Hare example. I think this isn't bad, but I'm still interesting in the other loop-like proposals.

Also, part of why I was thinking about this in the first place is from looking at old pictures of Logan and seeing how much it's changed over the decades. Whole terminals have been built, torn down, rebuilt, recombined. Highway ramps have been added and arrival and departure lanes changed up. All those changes have been done with the expectation that most people get there by car. If there were a good train station in the middle of Logan, all those incremental changes would get biased in favor of a nicer or shorter walk to the train. The connections would only get better with time.

the Blue Line is again heads and shoulders above any other transit option at present.

Thanks for all those numbers!
But I think this part is wrong. Your last table shows the Blue Line with a 1% mode share, while the Silverline as 2% and the Logan Express buses have over 4%. I think the first table shows higher Blue Line ridership because it's just counting people going through the faregates at Airport Station, which would also include lots of people living in East Boston just going downtown. (I think....)

But it's also not surprising the Logan Express buses are popular. One-seat-rides from the suburbs to the airport terminals. My proposal for this airport link on the Regional Rail would be like adding Logan Express quality service to scores of cities across Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

 

[The EGE]

Given that removing those grade crossings would also involve entirely removing the new Chelsea station, I don't think there are any at the moment. Some grade A lack of foresight with that design.

Since Broadway, Washington, and 1A would make raising the tracks near-impossible, and lowering anything is unlikely so close to the shore, the most likely scenario is bridging over the tracks. 2nd, Everett, and Eastern would all be easy to bridge; Spruce might be a little harder due to 1A but should be doable. 3rd can be closed outright; 6th/Arlington can become right-angle turns. (Both of those might still want bike/ped access.)

The North Shore DEIS called for raising Eastern Avenue. The others would be pretty similar.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100205112124/http://mbta.com/uploadedFiles/Documents/North_Shore_Transit_Improvements/Figure_3_13_EastAveGradeCrossing.pdf

 

[ritchiew]

Again, just to restate it, 20 THOUSAND. That's how many private vehicles make the trip to Logan each day.

Wait, where did you get that number @Stlin 's post has the number at 111K.

 

[TheRatmeister]

Wait, where did you get that number @Stlin 's post has the number at 111K.

This document suggests that of the 42 million annual passengers in 2019, 32% came by private automobile, of which the average occupancy (I'm assuming we're only counting airport passengers in that number since Rideshare apps is only 1.6) was 1.6 people. So 42 million passengers, divided by 365 days, multiplied by 32%, and then divided by an occupancy of 1.6 gets you about 24k personal vehicles per day. A similar proportion used ridesharing, but those trips are presumably much shorter on average. At least, I hope they are. Nobody out here better be paying for an Uber from Worcester to Logan or whatever.

 

[737900er]

And there is good reason to think this line to Logan would be among those high performing examples. This would go directly to several major hubs of business and hotels in the city. It also connects lots of the suburbs where local traffic is disproportionately originating from. It offers all kinds of one-seat-rides, which boosts ridership, especially for people carrying luggage. Lots more trips are possible with cross platform transfers. The train station can be right at the airport, without the need for extra connections on busses or people movers, right where we could automatically direct people coming out of arrivals. So in a very hand-wavy way, yes, I think this airport link would be the kind that pulls in a double digit modeshare. And I think that would put it in the ballpark of North Station ridership, if that's the cutoff you want to pick. It would be at least close enough that I don't think it can be dismissed out of hand.

A big impediment to transit usage at Logan is that the T doesn't run 24 hours a day. 14% of departing seats at Logan are before 7am, and 8% of arriving seats after after 11:30pm. I suspect this is a fairly unique phenomenon to Logan.
The first outbound Blue Line train of the day doesn't get to AIrport Station until 05:40am and the first Silver Line doesn't get to Terminal A until 05:53, which is cutting it too close for many people, especially if they have to connect from another service. Similarly, with those late arrivals you're cutting it really close to be able to get on the T before it closes for the night, especially if you have a checked bag.

 

[Stlin]

This document suggests that of the 42 million annual passengers in 2019, 32% came by private automobile, of which the average occupancy (I'm assuming we're only counting airport passengers in that number since Rideshare apps is only 1.6) was 1.6 people. So 42 million passengers, divided by 365 days, multiplied by 32%, and then divided by an occupancy of 1.6 gets you about 24k personal vehicles per day. A similar proportion used ridesharing, but those trips are presumably much shorter on average. At least, I hope they are. Nobody out here better be paying for an Uber from Worcester to Logan or whatever.

Thanks for all those numbers!
But I think this part is wrong. Your last table shows the Blue Line with a 1% mode share, while the Silverline as 2% and the Logan Express buses have over 4%. I think the first table shows higher Blue Line ridership because it's just counting people going through the faregates at Airport Station, which would also include lots of people living in East Boston just going downtown. (I think....)

But it's also not surprising the Logan Express buses are popular. One-seat-rides from the suburbs to the airport terminals. My proposal for this airport link on the Regional Rail would be like adding Logan Express quality service to scores of cities across Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

For the record, I pulled the tables from the same document; my understanding is that all 3 tables have different data sources so they're not comparable to each other, and that there's likely some data contamination with regards to what portion of the traffic count is actually for Logan vs East Boston. The thing is, the way they counted trips is any activity that reaches a curb, so just dropping someone off at the airport, not picking them up is counted as two trips - one in, one out. Picking up a friend counts a 4, since you visit the airport twice.

Something like 25% of all trips are friends and family drop off, and presumably pickup as well, so that could mean you'd need to multiply the number by 4. I'd call it a data/ interpretation inconsistency. But one of the things that I agree wasn't gotten into with regards to POV occupancy is "are they including the driver?" but if you don't include the driver a portion of POV trips would be have to be counted as zero occupants - that seems unlikely, but deadhead trips explain an average less than 2, especially single occupancy rental cars.

Specific to your point @ritchiew about the differences between my tables 2 & 3 is that table 3 is specifically looking at passenger responses to their survey, while table 2 is automated counters that can't differentiate employees from passengers. Of Logan Express's ~1.7M 2022 riders, 38%/~640k were employees. I think it's safe to assume that BL also sees high employee ridership, the faregate just can't count them.

Additionally, that document had a breakdown of mode choice by distance - I'm including that below, but apparently 3% of travelers from outside of MA do call Ubers.

 

[TheRatmeister]

For the record, I pulled the tables from the same document; my understanding is that all 3 tables have different data sources so they're not comparable to each other, and that there's likely some data contamination with regards to what portion of the traffic count is actually for Logan vs East Boston. The thing is, the way they counted trips is any activity that reaches a curb, so just dropping someone off at the airport, not picking them up is counted as two trips - one in, one out. Picking up a friend counts a 4, since you visit the airport twice.
View attachment 56645
Something like 25% of all trips are friends and family drop off, and presumably pickup as well, so that could mean you'd need to multiply the number by 4. I'd call it a data/ interpretation inconsistency. But one of the things that I agree wasn't gotten into with regards to POV occupancy is "are they including the driver?" but if you don't include the driver a portion of POV trips would be have to be counted as zero occupants - that seems unlikely, but deadhead trips explain an average less than 2, especially single occupancy rental cars.

Specific to your point @ritchiew about the differences between my tables 2 & 3 is that table 3 is specifically looking at passenger responses to their survey, while table 2 is automated counters that can't differentiate employees from passengers. Of Logan Express's ~1.7M 2022 riders, 38%/~640k were employees. I think it's safe to assume that BL also sees high employee ridership, the faregate just can't count them.

Additionally, that document had a breakdown of mode choice by distance - I'm including that below, but apparently 3% of travelers from outside of MA do call Ubers.
View attachment 56644

I mean ultimately we're debating semantics here. It's a lot, like a significant fraction of all VMT in Massachusetts a lot, no matter what number we use, whether it's the low 20,000 trips per day or the high 100k trips per day.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

One kind of (not really) problem with that route is all the grade crossings through Chelsea. It seems like there would need to be grade separations there even for existing Regional Rail planed frequencies, let alone adding in trains to the airport. Does anyone know what the plans there might be?

The 2004 North Shore Transit Improvements study proposed separating Eastern Ave. with a road-over-rail bridge to whack the 30 MPH speed restriction through there. None of the other ones have any plans, but excepting Everett Ave. next to the station eliminating the crossings isn't a big deal. 2nd St. is a fairly easy road-over-rail. 3rd St. can be blocked off entirely as it's superfluous. Spruce St. is road-over-rail. 6th/Arlington can be blocked off with a pedestrian duck-under.

 

[ritchiew]

I mean ultimately we're debating semantics here. It's a lot, like a significant fraction of all VMT in Massachusetts a lot, no matter what number we use, whether it's the low 20,000 trips per day or the high 100k trips per day.

Oh yeah, a heck ton.

But the difference in the these numbers points to something important. Just to really stress what @Stlin is highlighting, the common method of getting friends/family to do airport pickups and dropoffs is basically the worst possible way to move large numbers of people in a out of the city. Because each pickup and dropoff is a roundtrip, this essentially doubles the driving and traffic generation compared to someone driving themselves into the city then driving themselves back out.

That means it's harder to strictly compare airport passenger number compared to simple commuting numbers, because the same number of airport passengers generates more car traffic. It also means shifting airport passengers to public transit can have a greater effect on replacing car trips.

apparently 3% of travelers from outside of MA do call Ubers.

lol
My first though was that these should be the easiest people to convince to get on a much cheaper and more convenient train. But no.... they're doing their own thing. I don't know what's going on there.

 

[EastCambridgeDreamer]

Should we classify the recent Grand Junction study as a crazy transit pitch? I'm very dubious of its implication that Cantabrigians would accept gates coming down across Main St, Mass Ave, Broadway, and Cambridge St, 3-4 trains per hour, all day.

Instead...assuming 1) West Station is already built, 2) the Draw One Bridge reconstruction has been completed and has expanded capacity at North Station, and 3) at least some of the CR system has been electrified, the extended route described in the study becomes interesting, with routes like Lynn - West Station and North Station - Back Bay, with potential infill stations in Everett and Revere Center. But! Only if the Grand Junction segment is tunneled, so as not to disturb the busy Cambridge streets above. And at that point, maybe you are in God Mode territory...

 

[737900er]

What if we ran 2 highways, 4 LRT lines, 1 HRT line, 2 Commuter Rail lines, 1 Intercity line, and a bike path down the throat???

Slightly more seriously though, I do think LRT is better for Newton/Watertown than HRT. Newton is also upzoning along the B&A and we want to run a bunch of Framingham/Worcester/Spingfield trains through Newton too.
LRT lets you get to Watertown without having to tunnel or build any El in Watertown.
The Pike ROW is already ruined, so why not make it actually useful to the people who live there.

 

[Riverside]

I have a vague memory that the Summer Street Concourse actually extends even further southeast beyond the Red Line lobby above the Red Line subway toward South Station. I wonder how far that extends?

My crazy transit thought of the day is to use that concourse to extend an LRT Seaport Silver Line to Downtown Crossing to provide a direct transfer to the Orange Line (and a long transfer to the Green Line). Would need to be LRT to avoid building a turning loop. And probably you’d need to completely redo the South Station lobby in order to interface with the existing Transitway… and it seems hard to imagine doing that without blocking a potential extension via the Essex St “notch”.

But, assuming all of that could be handled, how much real estate under Summer St is still there?

EDIT: I hadn’t even thought about the goddang Dewey Square Tunnel. I think that might just zap this idea altogether.

 

[Charlie_mta]

I have a vague memory that the Summer Street Concourse actually extends even further southeast beyond the Red Line lobby above the Red Line subway toward South Station. I wonder how far that extends?

My crazy transit thought of the day is to use that concourse to extend an LRT Seaport Silver Line to Downtown Crossing to provide a direct transfer to the Orange Line (and a long transfer to the Green Line). Would need to be LRT to avoid building a turning loop. And probably you’d need to completely redo the South Station lobby in order to interface with the existing Transitway… and it seems hard to imagine doing that without blocking a potential extension via the Essex St “notch”.

But, assuming all of that could be handled, how much real estate under Summer St is still there?

EDIT: I hadn’t even thought about the goddang Dewey Square Tunnel. I think that might just zap this idea altogether.

I vaguely recall years ago on here, F-Line or someone saying that BERY originally intended to run a trolley car line in that tunnel you describe that runs above the RL from Washington St to Dewey Square. Of course the SB Central Artery tunnel cuts it off, making use of it for a rapid transit line impossible.