Re: Fairmont Line Upgrade
I'm not saying the weekday ridership shouldn't be poor, I'm just saying that it is and we should focus on improving THAT first before even thinking about weekend service. It seems like we are trying to solve one problem by creating another. It's obviously tough to have commuter rail level service in a corridor where car ownership is much lower than your average commuter rail community and there is a need for dependence on reliable and frequent rapid transit.
OK. We just had another announcement of a service increase. And another announcement in which Fairmount was not mentioned among service increases. Weekend rides to Kingston and frickin' Greenbush are prioritized over adding ANY new trains ANY day of the week. This isn't a weekend-specific problem. It's an everything-Fairmount problem and suburbs de-investing transit from the city problem.
In general, I don't see the allure of expanding weekend commuter rail service (over other service improvements). Perhaps I'm incorrect in my assumption, but I would think most commuter rail riders have a car or access to one. For weekday service, the benefit is avoiding traffic on major highways and avoiding the high cost of parking in the city. This is weighed against the cost of a ticket. On weekend service, highway traffic is much less (though the Expressway can be brutal in the summer) and parking costs are at a 2/3 discount. Add in the flexibility of driving, speed of the trip and the infrequent weekend service and it is difficult to compete, which is why ridership is only 20% of a typical weekday.
Not in Dorchester and Hyde Park they don't. Those are two middle-low income, very transit-dependent neighborhoods with relatively low car ownership. Your assumption about car ownership and commuter rail is totally irrelevant here because this corridor is singularly different from all 13 other commuter rail lines. It never leaves the city of Boston. This
isn't a standard commuter rail corridor. That is the whole point of the upgrades. These places need the frequent-service train because they're stuck with very substandard buses.
The T promised them better train service to the CBD then they were getting from the buses which all run east-west on this corridor and require transfers. People here aren't taking the train because those trips it's supposed to serve to downtown are less frequent on the train than the bus + transfer. The corridor ridership profile and what trips would be diverted off bus to train is well-known. As is what frequency threshold the service has to hit for those trips to change modes. It's not a Greenbush scenario where they built it and the people didn't come and everyone's kerfuzzled as to why.
They haven't built it here. That's why nobody's coming. The stations are done, but the trains don't run. If they can't do better than once every 40 minutes in a peak period that's shorter than every other line's peak, can't do better than once an hour off-peak, and can't run a single outbound from South Station after 9:40pm...there's nothing to ride. It's worse than
every bus into the nearest rapid transit transfer. Not just some buses...
every bus.
This doesn't take miracles. 30 minutes on-peak, 45 off-peak, and something/anything after 10:00pm is a lot better than this. At least that matches the buses and starts to get some genuine ridership growth going. There is zero growth without that. And weekend service goes hand-in-hand with that growth, because inter-neighborhood trips are still car-free and bus-dependent for this audience.
Is this another intentional grounding to suppress ridership so they don't have to increase service? It was their own proposal that scoped out what the service plan had to be to become a draw, and what level of service was and was not going to be adequate for the corridor. Do these stations just lie in wait now until they shower some more suburban money on Bob Kraft for commuter rail service to Foxboro and rename this the Patriot Place Line? 'Cause that proposal has a fatter on-peak schedule than Fairmount has today, makes the Fairmount stops
earlier in the morning than the first proper Fairmount train, departs SS on last run
later than the last proper Fairmount train, and has 8 Saturday round trips and 7 Sunday round trips. Making all stops.
Actually, it's 20 Fairmount weekday round trips today vs. 16 round trips proposed for Foxboro. You could literally just extend the entire schedule to the 'burbs...16 to Foxboro, and either abort the other 4 with a Readville short-turn or parcel them off as extra Forge Park off-peaks. Now that the MassDOT board has voted to buy the Framingham Secondary from CSX that goes to Foxboro, it's almost perfect how well the schedule aligns if they wanted to bait-and-switch it to the 'burbs while still claiming plausible deniability that the new stations were worth it.
I'm not sure I totally believe that, but it's getting to the point where they've kicked this rollout can down the road so many times they've got to start explaining why they
aren't pulling a fast one. And no, "We're buying shiny DMU's!" is not an explanation. Less-awful-than-a-lousy-bus frequencies were achievable 18 months ago. There is absolutely nothing vehicle-related or South Station capacity-related that prevents them from doubling these frequencies yesterday. They're not doing it because they don't want to do it. They want to run empty Sunday trains from Greenbush instead.
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