Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail
First off that nastiness is totally unwarranted.
It's completely warranted... it's only a reflection of your ridiculous attitude that FR/NB, which are not in the MBTA service region, should get $2 billion while screwing over the bus riders of Lynn, Roxbury and Mattapan.
Because of geography?! Transit is not a service for rocks, rivers and dirt. As wonderful as those things may be, transit is intended to serve people. And there are fewer people in the South Coast, and they are not efficient to serve this way. There are real constraints on resources.
Providence, Worcester and Lowell all have a fundamental advantage over Fall River and New Bedford: those 3 cities are "on the way" to bigger places, and can piggyback on top of those intercity services. The South Coast, by definition, is not on the way to anything but the ocean. It's a dead end. Providence, Worcester and Lowell have also managed to keep up nearly continuous passenger service for centuries. South Coast Rail is starting from nothing but some decrepit freight tracks and praying for people to start riding it, even though they have developed their lives and developments around not having it.
Is it possible to jumpstart such service from nothing? Absolutely. But not within the parameters of South Coast Rail: the trip will take 85 minutes as projected, and the minimum headway will be 40 minutes. More likely the average headway will be on the order of several hours. And that only gets you to South Station/BBY!
Everything we know about transit tells us that such parameters will result in pitiful ridership.
SCR is only expected to gather about
4000-5000 riders. Let's give it the benefit of the doubt and assume that somehow it only costs $1.5 billion and attracts 5000 riders. That equals THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS PER RIDER!
By comparison, the ridiculously expensive Second Avenue Subway is expected to clock in at about
$25,000 per rider! It'll be ten times cheaper than SCR and it will provide frequent service to the most densely populated corridor in the United States. That's why the Second Ave Subway works out, even at the atrocious cost.
On the other hand:
South Coast Rail makes the Big Dig look like a bargain!
Big, bad, expensive transit will destroy all chances of improving the South Coast through any other means. It is a white elephant project and will be a burden on the entire state and your region for perpetuity if it is built. We have already made this mistake with Greenbush commuter rail, and we need to do our best to avoid repeating it, before the MBTA's obsession with commuter rail expansion consumes all our resources.
75 minutes on a train is still better than dealing with traffic on 24/93
It will not be 75 minutes. That requires electrification. Do you see the MBTA operating any other electric trains? Do you really expect the MBTA to purchase and operate a special fleet of electric trains, with associated maintenance facilities and staff, just for SCR?
The run times will be 85 minutes at a minimum as projected for the diesel alternative, and probably worse in practice.