I'm surprised (but glad) that South Coast Rail will be Zone 8. I expected Zone 9 for East Taunton and Zone 10 for Freetown, Fall River, and both New Bedford stations.
I am also glad that it will be Zone 8. The only Zones 9/10 stations are the ones south of Providence, which seem like special cases to me, given Providence's size. (If the Worcester Line were extended to Palmer or Webster, I'd expect its additional stations to also be in Zones 9 and 10.)
TF Green Airport's Zone 9 station is about 47 miles from Boston, compared to Fall River's 45 and New Bedford's 47. Wickford Junction's Zone 10 station is
58 miles from South Station; there's no way you could justify FR/NB paying that fare.
Wachusett is 43 miles and in Zone 8, which creates precedent for Fall River being in Zone 8, in my opinion. New Bedford is harder to justify based on distance alone, but the way this whole thing has gone down... yeah it seems reasonable enough to cut them a break. FR/NB are anchor cities, akin to Providence, Worcester, Lowell, Haverhill -- they aren't +1 suburbs like Warwick; every other anchor city is in Zone 8 or lower.
So, it seems reasonable enough to me.
but would not say what the daily train schedule would look like and would not guarantee weekend service.
The weekday schedule is something
I raised two years ago. The earlier iterations of the SCR proposal simply extended the then-existing Middleboro/Lakeville runs, alternating between Fall River and New Bedford. That would have meant headways of 70-100 minutes:
Simply extending today's trains would/will result in even 120-minute headways (clockfacing in the AM, a little skewed in the PM):
(Also worth noting that both schedules will provide exactly 1 peak direction train from each city arriving/departing Boston during 7:45am-9am and 4:45pm-6pm.)
The bottom line is that, applying the same logic to the current schedule as was used to create the original "3 trains per peak, 3-3.5 hours off-peak" number now gives us something more like "2-3 trains per peak, 2.5 hours off-peak" or "2 hours peak, 2.5 hours off-peak."
As I've explained previously, this sucks:
The Phase 1 proposal calls for 6 trains to/from the South Coast during each peak period -- 3 from New Bedford, 3 from Fall River. Now, first of all, let's compare how many inbound peak trains cities of similar size had before covid:
- Lowell: 8
- Brockton: 5
- Lynn: 8
- Lawrence: 5
Historically, 5 inbound peak trains has been the minimum on branches going to cities. Greenbush and Kingston usually had 4.
If I were Phil Eng (who apparently earlier "changed" the team managing the SCR project -- I doubt he fired anyone, but sounds like a shakeup), I would have sat the team down, showed them the above numbers and told them this wasn't acceptable, and note that the DSEIR's "just extend the existing schedule" logic was obviously done as a reasonable effort to simplify planning -- refactoring the entire Old Colony system's schedule would have been well out of scope of the DSEIR. "But," he/I would say, "it's not out of scope for us." And directed the team to investigate refactoring the entire Old Colony schedule to create something more reasonable for South Coast Rail. Based on other changes he's made (e.g. single track service at South Attleboro), I am guessing he would have told them to get creative and try to squeeze as much juice out of this goddamn lemon as possible.
The need for creativity is my guess for why they aren't announcing a weekday schedule yet. Getting maximally creative will depend on the eccentricities of the moment, including knowing exactly how many locomotives are being used across the system, exactly how many coaches are available, and potentially even how many conductors and engineers are available. Given, you know [
gestures broadly at everything at the T], planning at that level of detail for a full year from now seems dicey enough that I wouldn't want to announce anything yet.
(I do wonder if the current flirtations with transfers at Readville are an experiment for testing OCR cross-platform transfers at Braintree or something similar. And it would not shock me if Eng is investigating supplementing FR/NB
through-runs with shuttles doing transfers at East Taunton, which would
suck but maybe suck less than do-nothing.)
That all being said, the evasiveness about weekend service is concerning. That seems like it should be more managable to swing.
