Downtown Crossing (MBTA Station)

FK4

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I don't think there's a dedicated station thread for this.

There was a flurry of discussion on this board during the Millennium construction about how we all wished part of that project included a rebuild of DTX. The only thing I've seen or heard about this even being considered is a local business sponsored proposal to beautify the Winter St Concourse and add some exits midway up Winter Street - which may actually be happening; I'm not sure exactly what's going on with the construction down there.

However: the station during morning rush hour is an utter disaster, and the new trains arent going to change the fact that a massive crush of people from OL north and RL north collide together on a single stairwell when switching trains. It's often almost scary if youre in the thick of it and consider what would happen in a stampede situation.

Is anyone aware of any long range plans to ever reconstruct the station? I know this would be a superbly expensive undertaking, much more so than the Govt Ctr redo, but it's going to have to happen eventually. Is it even on the T's radar?
 
Would adjusting the location of the paid / unpaid boundary on the Orange Line level to the east of the tracks to get more of the existing staircases inside fare control and thus usable for transfers be superbly expensive?
 
proposal to beautify the Winter St Concourse and add some exits midway up Winter Street - which may actually be happening; I'm not sure exactly what's going on with the construction down there.

Pretty sure that construction is "merely" to continue the rolling build-out of ADA-compliant elevators for the disabled that's been marching down the Red Line--Park Street, DTX--not sure which station next.

Meanwhile, "exits midway up Winter Street" sounds comically insane, real slapstick tragic-comedy (Paging Mr. Magoo? or Mr. Bean?) The most user conflict-prone street in all Boston, with surges of pedestrians, shoppers, loiterers dodging BPD squad cars, construction workers, contractor vans, delivery trucks, bicyclists of all persuasions.

I cannot possibly conceive of a way to inject even more chaos onto Winter Street than with "exits midway up" it.
 
Entrances to subways in very crowded areas don’t usually add much chaos, but i don’t have strong opinions on that particular proposal one way or another, it’s just the only thing that came up when googling station renovation.

It’s not a glamorous project but the morning crush completely slows down trains - some of this will be alleviated by wider doors on the new cars, but the near-danger levels of crowding won’t. I’m just stunned that it sounds like it really isn’t even on the radar at all. It would be hugely expensive, but that’s not a reason to start planning for the future.
 
Connecting the Red and Blue lines should help reduce congestion in DTX, right?
 
Connecting the Red and Blue lines should help reduce congestion in DTX, right?

It would, although I always figured it would help the most at Park (which is also dangerously overcrowded at crush times). They really need to look at both Park and DTX.
 
Red-Blue is mostly to help Park Street but I think it could help DTX some as well. Sometimes I wish DTX and Park Street had been built as a single station originally with the red line platforms being located under winter street bridging the gap between Park and DTX to create a single superstation. At this point it is too late to do that since there isn't space between the buildings on Winter St. but it is a nice what if.
 
This is one of my biggest pet-peeves is the Park-DTX complex. When comparing the MBTA and other long-established systems around the world, it becomes apparent that the MBTA and state government think so limitedly about how transit works/doesn't work. It's all new lines and new trains, but, nothing about modernizing or relieving capacity constraints.

Around the world, munis and metros that care for their transit system rebuild and expand their stations especially transfer stations so that operations don't suffer. I just saw that London just opened an expanded Bank Street station on the Northern Line. Downtown Crossing and Park Street are our Bank-Monument station.

I think I saw either Transit Matters or A Better City recently call for testing platform screen doors at downtown stations, but, it feels like that the platform doors are a tremendously high-cost but low-benefit solution. The high dwells are a function of joint transfer + exit passage ways for RL pax. Especially at Park St. And the RL-OL passenger transfer is fairly constrained, especially by the function of transferring passengers coming out to the RL platform and just congregating at the northern end.

In god or crazy mode, rather than some of the proposals above Red-Blue or changing other lines, I'd pose reconstructing Park St as an RL Ashmont/Braintree only facility and DTX as the RL Alewife only facility. This would mean relocating tracks within the stations, expanding the platforms, and creating bigger passageways to connect the DTX RL to the Winter Street concourse for GL transfers and Park RL to the Winter St concourse for OL transfers. It would be great to create new exits at either Winter Place or Music Hall Place off Winter Street, assuming, as part of future redevelopment or take-over by MBTA.

Are there other wild/crazy/god-mode ideas for dealing with this station complex?
 
Are there other wild/crazy/god-mode ideas for dealing with this station complex?

State-DTX pedestrian tunnel probably qualifies (despite the short distance).

In god or crazy mode, rather than some of the proposals above Red-Blue or changing other lines, I'd pose reconstructing Park St as an RL Ashmont/Braintree only facility and DTX as the RL Alewife only facility. This would mean relocating tracks within the stations, expanding the platforms, and creating bigger passageways to connect the DTX RL to the Winter Street concourse for GL transfers and Park RL to the Winter St concourse for OL transfers. It would be great to create new exits at either Winter Place or Music Hall Place off Winter Street, assuming, as part of future redevelopment or take-over by MBTA.

I'd be curious how this'd be supposed to work (particularly with the reference to re-arranging the platforms). It'd have to be God Mode, because its dead in the water as a Crazy Transit Pitch given the massive downgrade of the transfers. Going from "right upstairs" to "extra block away" (plus additional stairs/ramps/elevators) would be a big annoyance (transfers themselves can be detrimental to ridership, what does deliberately making the transfers longer do for ridership, I wonder).

Both Park and DTX need work, and given the constraints some reimagining isn't a terrible idea. That said, I'm not sure that trying to kludge together a superstation is possible or even desirable. Park RL could easily be retrofitted to turn the emergency exit at the State House end of the center platform into a proper exit, which would help balance the loads on the platform and take some (not a ton) of the strain off the transfer end.
 
The only way that I've thought about it becoming possible to do anything to Park and DTX is even more into god-mode territory -- stacking the RL by digging out underneath the current RL, given the context, it sounds like a billion dollars just to stack the tracks in order to keep the transfers 'short'

I agree that transfers can be dissuading, but, it doesn't seem a wild distance to considering how short the Winter St Concourse is at 400'-450'. It's short given some of the other connections in the city (North Station's CR to OL/GL, South Station's CR to SL/RL, State's BL-OL). It's definitely not on the order of the cross-platform transfer at North Station between OL/GL, but, I don't think we're going to find that an RL/OL or RL/GL are ever going to meet that standard of convenience.

Within some quite challenging surface conditions with the development above, I think even crazy-mode ideas keep the station boxes, more or less, but, works by re-coloring "within the lines" of the station boxes. On a quick sketch of comparing transfer flows today, it seems like transfers do get long for some key connections, but, operations are going to be much better for with more platform space and less dwell.

To-->
From \/
GL CopleyGL Union/MedOL FHOL Oak GroveRL AlewifeRL Ash/Brain
GL Copley----No changeTransfer at NorthWalk via Winter (down)No change
GL Union Med----Transfer at NorthTransfer at NorthWalk via Winter
or OL and transfer at North
No change
OL FHNo changeTransfer at North----No changeWalk via Winter (up)
OL Oak GroveTransfer at NorthTransfer at North----No changeWalk via Winter
RL AlewifeNo changeNo changeWalk via WinterWalk via Winter (down)----
RL Ash/BrainWalk via Winter (up)Walk via Winter (up)
or OL and transfer at North
SameSame----
 
I agree that transfers can be dissuading, but, it doesn't seem a wild distance to considering how short the Winter St Concourse is at 400'-450'. It's short given some of the other connections in the city (North Station's CR to OL/GL, South Station's CR to SL/RL, State's BL-OL). It's definitely not on the order of the cross-platform transfer at North Station between OL/GL, but, I don't think we're going to find that an RL/OL or RL/GL are ever going to meet that standard of convenience.

But we're not talking about new lines here, we're talking about existing (extremely longstanding) service patterns being changed. That the Winter Street Concourse isn't all that long in absolute terms is both true and irrelevant in the face of the fact that a bunch of transfers would go from "right upstairs" to "400+ foot walk". If we're talking viably-useful transit pitches, they have to deliver benefits that don't come at the cost of drawbacks (perceived or real) that would kill the project stone-dead. Somehow kludging the Park and DTX RL platforms to unidirectional (uh...where's the third/passing track that makes this even possible? or are we just halving the platform space?) at the cost of cruddier transfers doesn't seem like a massive service improvement. Dwell times are a problem, but "solving" them by irritating the passengers into going elsewhere doesn't seem like an ideal solution. (This is particularly true in a situation where, as at both Park and DTX, there are less radical modifications that would help with dwell times; i.e. Red entrance/exit on the Common to smooth out the platform utilization and open space for transfers, as well as more-invasive mods to the station walls and staircases to add capacity, without compromising transfers.)
 
The service improvement is going to be found in travel to and from Park and DTX primarily on the RL. Inbound on the RL, trains won't be starting and stopping all the way between South Station and Charles halfway in and out of platforms because of the extended dwells at Park and DTX. It also means that passenger comfort will be much higher with larger connecting passageways.

There's no need for a third track at all in this situation. One would build tracks where platforms are today and cover up old tracks with new platforms. At Park St, by removing the Alewife platform, shaving back part of the Alewife side of the center platform, one gets two tracks on the outbound side and a fairly wide Ashmont/Braintree platform by covering up the old location of the platform. Similarly at DTX, but with the reverse set of platforms -- build out the Alewife platform to the line of columns and then remove the old Ashmont/Braintree platform for space for tracks.

The transfer passage ways that used to connect to the then-closed platforms no longer have a use, so one may be able to eek out even more trackway width from those areas, especially the DTX Ashmont/Braintree side of the RL tunnel.
 
Downtown Crossing really is two stations masquerading as one, to the point where I think it remains illustrative to use the original names for the platforms: Winter (OL southbound), Summer (OL northbound), and Washington (RL). Unlike Park Street, where the Red Line platform is directly underneath the Green Line, Washington's platforms are -- as best I can tell -- a (short) block away from Summer/Winter, starting around Hawley Street. The Amateur Planner colorized an old BTC (?) diagram to visualize the locations of the platforms:

map_1913.png


(As it happens, the original plans for a Post Office Square Subway would've called for a perpendicular light rail subway at the "far" end of the Washington platform. I wrote a bit about that here. So the Park-DTX superstation once upon a time might have been even larger than it is today.)

Sky Q. Rose has a photo of the floorplan of the upper level of the DTX complex, showing the locations of the faregates along with the staircases up and down.

dtx.jpg


@The EGE provides some of the highest level of detail with his underground station layout diagram for Park/DTX:

park-and-dtx-png.4090


(You can also check out a track map of the area directly from the T itself.)

I modified the elevator diagram from Sky Q. Rose to better label where the different (non-accessible) stairs and entrances go, as well as visualize more clearly what is and isn't within fare control.

Downtown Crossing Upper Level.png


Access between the Red Line and Summer (OL northbound) could be expanded relatively easily by rearranging the faregates to bring more of the Summer St concourse into fare control.

Downtown Crossing Upper Level REVISED.png


Access between the Red Line and the Orange Line southbound (Winter) is harder. Because the Red Line platforms are asymmetrical and only present on the Summer side, expanding into the Winter St Concourse (like we could do for Summer) doesn't get us much.

I made a cruder illustration of what's going on at the lower level at Downtown Crossing (definitely only an approximation):

Downtown Crossing Upper Level and Lower Level.png


Access between Orange Line southbound (Summer) and Red Line southbound could potentially be improved while remaining within the station's footprint by extending the underpass south under the Orange Line platform; you'd need to put a staircase somewhere, and I don't know where exactly there's room for one, but the lobby at the southern end of the platform might be feasible (albeit, a long walk and probably too far down to divert much from the existing staircase -- better if we could find something closer to the center of the complex).

Downtown Crossing Upper Level and Lower Level expanded.png


But expansion between Winter and the Alewife platform seems pretty hard to do without expanding the footprint of the station, or tunneling below the Red Line tracks (which still leaves other problems to be solved).

The best I can come up with would be a travelator/moving-sidewalk within the Winter Street Concourse, for Summer passengers to access the Alewife-side of the center platform at Park Street. (Though TIL that the prevailing wisdom is that moving sidewalks don't actually increase travel speed. Still, perhaps passengers could be enticed by being able to stand still while they move.) That said, it's not like there is a lot of spare capacity at Park Street either.

Of course -- big picture -- Winter-Alewife demand at DTX can be reduced with reliable circumferential transit service connecting Cambridge to Sullivan and to Ruggles/LMA. Winter-Ashmont/Braintree demand at DTX would be a bit harder to reduce in this way since the Harbor blocks any "JFK/UMass-Sullivan" service, but "JFK/UMass-Ruggles/LMA" is much more realistic.
 
Of course -- big picture -- Winter-Alewife demand at DTX can be reduced with reliable circumferential transit service connecting Cambridge to Sullivan and to Ruggles/LMA. Winter-Ashmont/Braintree demand at DTX would be a bit harder to reduce in this way since the Harbor blocks any "JFK/UMass-Sullivan" service, but "JFK/UMass-Ruggles/LMA" is much more realistic.

The Urban Ring exists as a high-leverage proposal solely so we don't need to God-mode DTX and/or Park. The clog gets ameliorated through de-emphasizing its very transfer criticality to the whole dang system and redirecting a share of the transfers elsewhere. Improve what you can improve inside the existing constraints, yes, but spread the wealth around a whole lot radially.
 
What about building a new station on the red line in between DTX and Park? It looks to me like, in the current setup, the red line stations are oriented so that the transfers happen at the extreme ends...puts more space between the platforms but in practice doesn't actually separate the stations much. I have no idea about the technical constraints here, and I'm sure someone who knows much more than me can point out why this doesn't work...but it seems to me if you built new platforms between the two existing ones, you could keep the transfers at the ends of the new platforms and effectively combine the two stations? Then the winter street concourse becomes a bit like the current DTX concourse.
 
The Urban Ring exists as a high-leverage proposal solely so we don't need to God-mode DTX and/or Park. The clog gets ameliorated through de-emphasizing its very transfer criticality to the whole dang system and redirecting a share of the transfers elsewhere. Improve what you can improve inside the existing constraints, yes, but spread the wealth around a whole lot radially.
Yep, that’s my point exactly. The infeasibility of modifying the core stations is a key reason we need better circumferential transit.
What about building a new station on the red line in between DTX and Park? It looks to me like, in the current setup, the red line stations are oriented so that the transfers happen at the extreme ends...puts more space between the platforms but in practice doesn't actually separate the stations much. I have no idea about the technical constraints here, and I'm sure someone who knows much more than me can point out why this doesn't work...but it seems to me if you built new platforms between the two existing ones, you could keep the transfers at the ends of the new platforms and effectively combine the two stations? Then the winter street concourse becomes a bit like the current DTX concourse.
A couple challenges. First, I don’t think that there is enough space between the building foundations on Winter St for a new station (new platform/platforms). Second, Park and DTX handle a huge number of transfers. (Check out the 2014 Blue Book, it has a good breakdown.) Combining them into one station would trade one problem for another.
 

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