Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail
First of all, I don't see much value in placing a snarky nickname on the first Governor in thirty years to even consider making rational and well-funded transit investments. He may be "Cadillac Deval" as compared to your hyper-pragmatic bare-bones aesthetics-be-damned approach, but I doubt any politician will ever see it differently. Also, it isn't totally false that building nice stations and comfortable waiting areas and making a transit line seem permanent DOES gain you ridership. It may not be enough to justify the cost, but it's not nothing.
Yes. It does do nothing when the service is too poor to serve the stations. It does absolutely nothing to have a pretty place to wait for the train. The Governor is not addressing the region's best interests by handing them a ten-layers-of-bullshit covered $2B train that doesn't do what it's promised to.
Furthermore, I stated explicitly that the station aesthetics had more varied funding sources. It's still a waste of money, but the T isn't floating as much of that bill. My main concern with the station cost bloat is the parking metrics that are so flawed the capacity exceeds projected ridership and assumes lot utilization that no other commuter rail line achieves. And these have not been adjusted down while the ridership has. Why do we have to assume "well, it's something" that the parking over-capacity is costing hundreds of millions more than the parking demand. Isn't that an easy fix.
Middleboro station: it was built with a small lot. Then expanded 3 times as the demand increased and TOD buildings started sprouting up around the station. And stuck a traffic light and turn lanes for the access road only when volumes hit the point where they needed it. It worked great and helped control the costs to only build on the parcel in small pieces as demand merited and revenue intake could pay off. Why is that not on the table here? Why is building it all an emotional argument?
The rational argument against phasing is one we hear all the time on this site, F-Line: the first phase of a project is the only one they're committed to build. It's a little different for something like GLX which is committed in its entirety and phased only in terms of scope, but can you think of a single successful transit project in Boston that actually primed a route with buses, proved the ridership, then made the leap and built a train? The MBTA are experts at breaking promises, in JP, Watertown, etc.
Except...the service does not work at all built in one fell swoop. This is not GLX; building it without phasing means this awful skip-stop service at fewest trains per day of any commuter rail service, and peak hour service that must sit at a dead stop for more than 10 minutes every trip to allow the other branch to pass on the crippled mainline.
You know how else this state works? When a service fails they forget about it. With this projected ridership and all the problems keeping it on-time they are not going to second-phase the double tracking of the mainline to de-cripple it. They will let it become forgotten Plymouth, and it'll be first in line for further service cuts along with Needham and Greenbush in any budget crisis or when they need to save face on system-wide OTP by gutting headways on the lines with the habitual worst OTP.
What exactly is being fought for here to get "something". There is compelling evidence this hurts South Coast's growth ceiling to get stuck with Big Dig ignominy for a service that doesn't work well enough to bring enough coattails to any of the towns.
It's all well and good to you if the project dies after Taunton, because that's all you think is a good idea anyway. It's little consolation to the people driving 90 minutes from NB to Boston each day, however, that the state dodged the money sink of getting them to work 30% faster...
Did you even read the quotes from the DEIR about travel times on this? It's 78 minutes to Fall River and 76 to New Bedford. Assuming it can run on time with the track capacity. You're right. A tippy-top 14 minutes of savings at a Zone 9 fare, inability to for either branch to get to/from half the intermediate stations at peak, inability to get to Route 128 shuttles at all, inability to get an off-peak or weekend headway shorter than 3 hours, and inability to get a direct bus from half the city of Fall River from one of these stations because the RTA's got shafted is a very small consolation indeed.
And the state did not dodge a money sink by not double-tracking. The state is spending $1B more than it would cost to double track for the electrification ferry to cover the fatal flaw of impossibly tight margins for train meets. 20 seconds longer dwell at each station ends up forcing extra multi-minute dead stops that land you at a 90 minute commute all the same and require more trains cut from the schedule such that FR and NB will have fewer than 10 trains per day. Do you get it? The service plan is an elaborate lie by the Army Corps predicated on OTP margins so microscopic the T can never commit to it. The schedule will get revised down in the final engineering plan. It will.
The only reason there is no double-tracking is because that had to be bartered away for at least 10 years at the onset to appease the NIMBY's. It has nothing to do with cost cuts. The electrification cost bloat is the ass-covering when they realized the single-tracking concession destroyed the entire service.
And like I said...there will be no hurry-up to infill the double-tracking if the ridership gets adjusted down again. 50 miles of Cordage Parks.
How is this salvaging something from nothing? Phasing it is salvaging something from nothing, because the service won't work and won't get fixed if it doesn't work.
I am not hearing any logical arguments for why this suicidal build must be so. Every proponent argument is hyper-emotional about being "owed"...your post the most hyper-emotional yet. OK? Where's the beef. There's a mountain of numbers and real substantiated facts on these last few pages about the grave concerns about this project doing more harm than good to everyone including the people it ostensibly serves. Can we get some...any...reciprocal substantiation from the pro side that isn't an aggrieved gut feeling?
