Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail (South Coast Rail)

[Arlington]

Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

I believe that most of the small towns the line runs through have made it clear that they don't want major development.

They just want $2b worth of infrastructure that they can share intimately with their existing neighbors, ride into Boston for the occasional show or event, and not otherwise see their life changed. And they want us to build it with bond capacity that we could have used to double service to Middleboro, or extend the Green Line to Rt 16, or build the Red-Blue connector.

"We" have got to impose the rule that we don't build things unless they are both *wanted* and *catalyzing*

The message from the state has *got* to be:

1) WANTED: Everybody along the way has to want it. We don't pay off towns along the way. FR/NB, it is not the state's "fault" if a project gets taken hostage by NIMBYs in (say) Easton. We're only going to build where there are YIMBYs.

2) CATALYZING: Everybody along the way has to *use* it...which is to say, be willing to put everything within .5mi of a station into a special TOD zone. Give back to "the economy" the housing supply we need, and the low-footprint commuting we demand.

None of this idea that somehow getting rail is like everyone is getting a third-car-garage that they *might* use.

There are enough Somervilles in the state that are willing to take new infrastructure without odius preconditions, lower parking minimums, increase density, and willing to "give us" new housing as a "payback" such that we never, never, never build any more Greenbushes again.

 

[GP40MC]

Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

The only towns that are whining about this are the
usual suspects in Easton, Raynham and Stoughton.
Isolated pockets elsewhere.

And again, Greenbush's problem was the NIMBY element
in Hingham that delayed the project (which should have gone
in with the rest of the Old Colony) and ramped up the cost.

D

 

[Matthew]

Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

The cost is currently $2.4 billion. At a cost of $500,000 per projected rider, that's already ramped up about as far as imaginable.

There is no world in which South Coast Rail is a cost effective project at $2.4 billion. There is no world in which South Coast Rail is even nearly a cost effective project at this price. The cost is outrageously out of proportion with the benefit.

 

[Arlington]

Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

The only towns that are whining about this are the usual suspects in Easton, Raynham and Stoughton. Isolated pockets elsewhere.

And again, Greenbush's problem was the NIMBY element in Hingham that delayed the project (which should have gonein with the rest of the Old Colony) and ramped up the cost.

D

"only"? Only Easton, Raynham, and Stoughton? I've seen this movie before, except in the remake, the part of the Hingham NIMBY is being played by Easton, Raynham and Stoughton NIMBYs, with a cameo by the Army Corps of Engineers demanding electrification.

We have to learn either ignore the NIMBYs or let the NIMBYs kill things, because in-between we pay waaaay to much (for tunnels through Hingham) and get waaay too few riders (Greenbush does not sufficiently outperform the Hingham ferry to ever have been worth building and barely enough to be worth using platforms, and trainsets that Middleboro would better use)

 

[Arlington]

Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

The cost is currently $2.4 billion. At a cost of $500,000 per projected rider, that's already ramped up about as far as imaginable.

Yes, for that kind of money, we can add twice the number of riders to the system by giving away (for free) $250,000 condos built on the Greenbush parking lots.

Or you can get 5x the carbon-reduction by giving away Prius Plug-ins and Chevy Volts (endow the lease costs in perpetuity) to something like 10x the SCR's ridership--and you save the labor/pension costs of the T workers too.

Or just write a check for $3000 to every man, woman, and child down there and get immediate stimulus.

Building a railroad that'll be underused is just about the worst way to achieve any public policy goal down there.

 

[bigeman312]

Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

Or build the North-South Rail Link with that money!

 

[SeamusMcFly]

Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

"only"? Only Easton, Raynham, and Stoughton? I've seen this movie before, except in the remake, the part of the Hingham NIMBY is being played by Easton, Raynham and Stoughton NIMBYs, with a cameo by the Army Corps of Engineers demanding electrification.

We have to learn either ignore the NIMBYs or let the NIMBYs kill things, because in-between we pay waaaay to much (for tunnels through Hingham) and get waaay too few riders (Greenbush does not sufficiently outperform the Hingham ferry to ever have been worth building and barely enough to be worth using platforms, and trainsets that Middleboro would better use)

I have no soft spot for hingham (growing up in blue collar Rockland next door it's in your blood to not like them), but the CR should not have cut thru the center as originally planned. Did they need a subway? No. The demand isn't really there for rail as mentioned above. But they were a 100% right to demand it be buried..

Easton on the other hand does not have the same support from me. They have existing right of ways through the town. The station in North Easton is testament to the previous train through here. Their complaints are strictly of the selfish variety, and they Get no sympathy from me.

 

[Commuting Boston Student]

Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

I want to address points made by Matthew and Arlington.

Electrification is a valid goal in and of itself, and absolutely should be demanded at every opportunity. Lest we forget, with the majority of this being built as a tortured single track, electrification is the last gasp hope to even approach the kinds of headways being promised for South Coast FAIL. It will never achieve any of the promises the state's cheerleaders are making if it doesn't have one (preferably both) of a second track for the majority of its route or full electrification.

That having been said, while I am fundamentally opposed to this project - while I absolutely would cancel it tomorrow if it was my choice - if this thing must go forward, I want it electrified. Unlike most NIMBY demands, extorting electrification out of the MBTA benefits everybody.

Electrifying South Coast forces the MBTA to procure electric locomotives, which can be used tomorrow morning beneath the wires on the Providence Line. It opens the door for electrifying Fairmount in conjunction with (or immediately after) electrifying South Coast, for canceling DMU procurement and going directly to EMUs instead, completes one of the fundamental prerequisites of the Rail Link (the groundwork for an electric district), and probably gets the ball rolling on wiring Worcester (at least to Framingham) in the next two decades instead of the next half-century. There would be significantly less objections to future electric push-pull/dual-mode/EMU acquisitions once the MBTA is forced to operate at least one line as fully electric. In fact, their "unicorn fleet" objections to electrics provides a strong impetus for them to immediately begin using electrics on Providence as well as South Coast and to speed up the time table on electrification elsewhere, feeding back into the aforementioned electric district.

If $2.4b shoveled into a roaring bonfire for Greenbush 2: Electric Boogaloo is the cost of getting electrification from "maybe around 2065" to "definitely by 2025," then - as unhappy as I am about this project on general principle - I'll throw my support behind it.

 

[George_Apley]

Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

^ The DMU procurement will be done, paid for and delivered before SCR is done. While I agree with your overall point, cancelling the DMU order is not going to be one of the benefits to electrification.

 

[underground]

Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

There's no reason (outside of money) it couldn't be EMU despite the incoming DMU order. At some point we have to go electrification, and while that project's going on we'll have to be running both anyway, right? And all told, that project might take decades, so might as well get used to it and start here. We might even end up running both modes in perpetuity. Like CBS said, at least we could use this cluster of a project as the impetus to get started on something we need to do eventually.

 

[George_Apley]

Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

There's no reason (outside of money) it couldn't be EMU despite the incoming DMU order. At some point we have to go electrification, and while that project's going on we'll have to be running both anyway, right? And all told, that project might take decades, so might as well get used to it and start here. We might even end up running both modes in perpetuity. Like CBS said, at least we could use this cluster of a project as the impetus to get started on something we need to do eventually.

I agree with that. Just commenting on CBS's claim that we might be able to cancel DMUs if we electrify.

 

[Matthew]

Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

Re: electrification, I've thought of that scenario but I don't believe it. Why? Because there's a cheesy way out.

They can keep dumping money into this pit while promising electric unicorns to everyone. Eventually, after a billion dollars or so, the MBTA will firmly say: no, we aren't doing electric, no matter what the Army Corps of foolish idiots says, it can't happen.

So they'll suddenly fall back to diesel mode, because they already dumped a billion dollars into it, and they "can't quit now!" What happens next? Well, prospective train schedules get adjusted, proposed service worsens, and the project continues to suck money and move forward. Probably costs the same or more, even without electrification, just because.

Even fewer people ride the white elephant because now it can't do better than a 90 minute trip, and getting stuck in traffic is still faster on most days.

 

[Commuting Boston Student]

Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

I'm fine with DMUs as a stopgap.

I don't think there's any reason to be running them in conjunction with EMUs is my only real objection to keeping an active DMU fleet post-electrification. (Dual-mode locomotives solve the "only part of this line merits electrification" problem for e.g. the North Shore lines.) If we can't get everything in place for EMU until after the first DMU procurement, I'm fine with it - I just don't think there's a real compelling argument to keep DMUs around in addition to EMUs.

Re: electrification, I've thought of that scenario but I don't believe it. Why? Because there's a cheesy way out.

They can keep dumping money into this pit while promising electric unicorns to everyone. Eventually, after a billion dollars or so, the MBTA will firmly say: no, we aren't doing electric, no matter what the Army Corps of foolish idiots says, it can't happen.

So they'll suddenly fall back to diesel mode, because they already dumped a billion dollars into it, and they "can't quit now!" What happens next? Well, prospective train schedules get adjusted, proposed service worsens, and the project continues to suck money and move forward. Probably costs the same or more, even without electrification, just because.

Even fewer people ride the white elephant because now it can't do better than a 90 minute trip, and getting stuck in traffic is still faster on most days.

There are two easy counter-arguments here:

Option A) Feds say "so you've been taking a bunch of money for a promise you can't deliver on, and we would like our money back."

Option B) It is never, ever too late to cancel a project no matter how much time and money has been invested into it.

 

[underground]

Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

If we can't get everything in place for EMU until after the first DMU procurement, I'm fine with it - I just don't think there's a real compelling argument to keep DMUs around in addition to EMUs.

A) DMUs will be here in ~5 years (2020 goal) if everything goes as currently planned, so there's no way in hell we'd be able to get everything in place for EMUs before hand. That would entail not just purchasing new rolling stock, and not just electrifying miles of track, but also either raising a ton of bridges or sinking a ton of tracks to accommodate train plus pantograph plus wire infrastructure. That's a massive project all told, which wraps into...

B) There is a compelling argument to keeping DMUs around while running EMUs. It's the amount of time, money, effort, and headache it would take to fix aforementioned low bridges and other clearance related issues. In a world with unlimited money, of course EMU is preferred, but in the real world, we'll probably be running both together for a long time.

 

[Commuting Boston Student]

Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

A) DMUs will be here in ~5 years (2020 goal) if everything goes as currently planned, so there's no way in hell we'd be able to get everything in place for EMUs before hand. That would entail not just purchasing new rolling stock, and not just electrifying miles of track, but also either raising a ton of bridges or sinking a ton of tracks to accommodate train plus pantograph plus wire infrastructure. That's a massive project all told, which wraps into...

B) There is a compelling argument to keeping DMUs around while running EMUs. It's the amount of time, money, effort, and headache it would take to fix aforementioned low bridges and other clearance related issues. In a world with unlimited money, of course EMU is preferred, but in the real world, we'll probably be running both together for a long time.

Fair point on A, but doesn't B wrap right back around? Fixing all the bridges and clearance issues has to happen as part of wiring up the core, doesn't it? And if that's the case, then we're back where we started with regards to DMU versus EMU.

Essentially what I'm suggesting is that as we bring electrification online starting with Fairmount, we should phase DMUs out to lines lacking electrification as we procure EMUs and bring them online to replace them. (E.g., Fairmount goes 100% electric and now all of the DMUs are exiled to operation on the North Shore and Worcester and Lowell Lines because the Fairmount Line now exclusively uses EMUs and dual-modes coming up from Franklin. Lowell goes electric and EMUs replace the DMUs there, which then get shunted off to Riverside and Salem, etc.) The eventual goal would be, once electrification is complete, that all of the DMUs have been phased out and EMUs brought in instead.

 

[Matthew]

Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

There are two easy counter-arguments here:

Option A) Feds say "so you've been taking a bunch of money for a promise you can't deliver on, and we would like our money back."

Option B) It is never, ever too late to cancel a project no matter how much time and money has been invested into it.

A) Yep, and guess who pays that debt? You, me, and everyone else who rides the T. Just like the Big Dig all over again! Wouldn't be the first time that politicians had engineers make false projections for political reasons, won't be the last.

B) Haha. I mean, technically you are correct. Because you are smart and you understand the concept of sunk cost. Politicians don't. As Robert Moses always said, once you sink the first stake, the politicians will never ask you to pull it back up. Because that would make them lose face, and they hate that more than anything.

 

[Commuting Boston Student]

Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

A) Yep, and guess who pays that debt? You, me, and everyone else who rides the T. Just like the Big Dig all over again! Wouldn't be the first time that politicians had engineers make false projections for political reasons, won't be the last.

B) Haha. I mean, technically you are correct. Because you are smart and you understand the concept of sunk cost. Politicians don't. As Robert Moses always said, once you sink the first stake, the politicians will never ask you to pull it back up. Because that would make them lose face, and they hate that more than anything.

Sure, but the point was that you get A or B (or "Yes") if and only if you pull the "no, we aren't doing electric, no matter what the Army Corps of foolish idiots says, it can't happen, and by the way thanks for the $1b that we've already spent" trick. I don't think that the MBTA is likely to risk crossing the Feds even if it can just offload all of its debt from a half-finished and then canceled bad project onto riders, because crossing the Feds tends to have nasty repercussions beyond what simply pissing all over your local ridership does.

If they aren't going to electrify, then they're going to say it now, when the Feds will merely be annoyed and force them to restart the whole process, rather than later, after fleecing the Feds of $1b or so and almost certainly guaranteeing some... shall we say, "retribution."

 

[Arlington]

Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

I've lost track whether the current CBS-Matthew conversation is about DMUs, Electrification,Fairmont, or FR/NB CR I get that there are a lot of related topics:

1)Electric is crazy-expensive --textbook insane--for a rarely-used line. I keep forgetting that it is operational because that's just too insane for my brain to hold (its easier to imagine it being good for the environment than being operationally worth it).

2)Fleet commonality is important for costs and reliablity. It must be diesel and the whole MBTA is going to be diesel until there's a FFGA to build the NS Rail Link. Period.

3)Electric of some sort would be needed if there's a N-S Rail link (but likely dual mode)

4)DMUs and Fairmont are what half measures and compromises look like. So's a terminus in Taunton.

But *Somebody* who both loves mobility, believes in the power of infrastructure investment, and budgetary sanity (and the need to build other stuff, too) is going to need to re-invent and re-define what "South Coast Rail" means before we can afford to build that, and *everyone* knows it but aren't all politically or emotionally free to admit it.

And we mostly all want to do *something* to improve transit access to that quadrant of the state, and indeed, we mostly like the idea of revitalizing cities of all kinds and sizes, like FR and NB.

If you actually believe in all the stuff that progressive, civic-life-oriented government promises, you hate the overpriced, underscheduled, piss-into-roadbed, gold-plated, empty-cored, monstrosity that SCR has become. I'm just going to start posting a collection of unused, ruined Olympic venues *here* because SCR is more like them than Boston 2024 could ever be.

If we have to incur whatever costs to reactivate a line through the swamps to Taunton, it ONLY makes sense to do it as:

1) A two-track railroad for capacity & frequency (Stoughton should be bought off with a promise of more service, nothing less, nothing more)

2) An unelectrified railroad for cost, speed of construction, and operational commonality.

3) A "Phase 1" Terminus in Taunton with an Alewife/Wickford style park-and-ride w/bus loop. ANY of US44, MA24, MA140, I-495 can be connected to it.

And then see how it goes.

To me, this kind of fresh look has "Charlie Baker" written all over it, where he can claim credit for half-a-loaf of transit (progress! Suburban-swing-voter park-and-ride heaven!) and a whole bakery full of budgetary common sense, and FR and NB city-center democrats will be free to inveigh against him (but its still a net political win for Baker).

 

[George_Apley]

Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

To me, this kind of fresh look has "Charlie Baker" written all over it, where he can claim credit for half-a-loaf of transit (progress! Suburban-swing-voter park-and-ride heaven!) and a whole bakery full of budgetary common sense, and FR and NB city-center democrats will be free to inveigh against him (but its still a net political win for Baker).

Agreed. Baker is the best hope to pare this plan back. I guarantee you that Patrick knew it was a boondoggle too, but he needed FR/NB pols on his side for this bill or that bill, so he offered his full-throated support. Baker probably won't feel the need to suck up to the South Coast democrats.

 

[Arlington]

Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

Agreed. Baker is the best hope to pare this plan back. I guarantee you that Patrick knew it was a boondoggle too, but he needed FR/NB pols on his side for this bill or that bill, so he offered his full-throated support. Baker probably won't feel the need to suck up to the South Coast democrats.

Much--and perhaps all--of the Democratic establishment knows it is a boondoggle too, but until it becomes an outright scandal or bankruptcy threat, I think they' prefer to nudge it along, ensuring it always remains a low-grade fever, rather than become a matter of cure or kill and hand a non-incumbent somewhere a winning issue.