Fastest Proposal-to-build in MBTA History?

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Hubman

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Looking at the the Red-Blue connector and Transit Pitch threads, I got to wondering- what was the fastest time between a MBTA rail expansion was proposed, and when it was actually built? I would not include the days of BERy, because that was a different agency with a different way of doing things. I think the South Shore Red Line was at least partially in service 9 years after its first proposal, which seems pretty good considering the timeline on GLX. I know the D Line went into service only about a year or two after Commuter Rail was suspended, but I don't know for how long that was planned.

I guess I'm looking for really inspiring courses of action on MBTA projects, or in other words, was it always like this? Or was there some golden era of fast-tracked subway extensions that I can yearn for a return to.
 
I think a problem you're going to run into conceptually is where to draw the line to say that "this is when this idea was proposed". The current GLX could arguably be said to have been proposed in 2005, 1990, 1945, or 1926. Likewise, the D Line was eyed for rapid transit conversion as early as 1945.

But I do think it's still an interesting question!
 
Tangential question: how far did the final build deviate from the original proposal?
 
SL3 Chelsea busway, prolly. But only the discrete 1 mi. of busway, because Eastie Haul Road was its own separate longer-gestation truck freight project.

Although TBH even that one didn't burst forth from nothingness. There was low-level stuff advancing for awhile before that one got forged in the public eye as a quick pickup, not to mention crucial amounts of cribbing from the Urban Ring Major Investment Study for the stop sitings and etc. It just snapped together cleanly enough from its constituent parts that when it came time to present they didn't have many remaining holes to fill on the dev plans.
 
Almost every rapid transit extension since 1945 was proposed then, if not before (particularly the 1926 report). Riverside, Wonderland (proposal to Lynn), Braintree, Oak Grove (Reading), and GLX (Woburn) were all 1926 proposals reprised in 1945; the 1926 study also recommended a study of a circumferential route that would probably have resembled the Urban Ring. Southwest Corridor was discussed in 1926 but not 1945 (where an extension to Dedham via West Roxbury was planned); it didn't come back until I-95 planning in the 60s. Red Line extension to North Cambridge was first discussed in the 1930s; the 1945 report called for a circuitous route via East Arlington, then a Mattapan-like run to Arlington Heights. By 1966, northwards from Harvard toward Porter and thence to Arlington was favored; going via Davis was first proposed in 1972.

I would call SL3 so derivative of the UR that it hardly counts as the record. SL Waterfront went from first official proposal to open in 17 years, as the need for rapid transit to the Seaport wasn't even considered until the 1974 base closing. Almost ever other major corridor has been known for decades.

Interestingly, Red-Blue is actually largely recent - it didn't appear in any official proposals until 1978, though it was briefly considered by the BERy in 1924. The 1926 proposal, and some plans in the 1970s, instead had an extension south to Park Street to hook into the Green Line.
 
How long did it take to build the extension from Franklin/Dean to Forge Park/495? Forge Park opened in 1988, not sure when it was first proposed as a station, but considering how it was a single-stop, ~3 mile extension I'd assume it was likely one of the quicker-built MBTA expansions.

Unless of course you were referring only to rapid transit expansions and not commuter rail expansions.
 
How long did the Westminster station gestate for?

What if this was restricted to concrete proposals, and not crayon drawings?
 
The 1926 proposal for Lechmere–Woburn didn't name station sites, but it's likely they would have been the same as those proposed in 1945, which 1-for-1 replaced existing commuter rail stops. Those were Prospect Hill, Winter Hill, Somerville Junction, North Somerville, Tufts College, Medford Hillside, West Medford, Wedgemere, Winchester, Cross Street, Woburn Highlands, Woburn. (The first three B&M stations were already closed at that time). Those sites have pretty much remained constant since, except for Route 16 replacing Medford Hillside around 2008. Union Square, interestingly, was not considered until Beyond Lechmere in 2005.
 
anthtucker312 said:
How long did it take to build the extension from Franklin/Dean to Forge Park/495? Forge Park opened in 1988, not sure when it was first proposed as a station, but considering how it was a single-stop, ~3 mile extension I'd assume it was likely one of the quicker-built MBTA expansions.

Unless of course you were referring only to rapid transit expansions and not commuter rail expansions.
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Commuter rail has too many asterisks, since public involvement of any kind in it was fostered via emergency circumstances when the private RR's went bankrupt and the federal Interstate Commerce Commission very suddenly started greenlighting mass service discontinuations on all unprofitable routes. The legislation that created the MBTA itself was the shock byproduct of the great 1958 bloodletting of NYNH&H and B&M branchline discontinuations and mothballing of dozens of mainline stations and the need to very quickly come up with a subsidy mechanism before everything else folded from the accelerating momentum of the ongoing collapse. That was probably the single-fastest we ever publicly-politically moved on any transit issue whatsoever.

And even then you could say we were almost a decade too slow at actually controlling our destiny in any planned-out manner. Anyone with two eyes could've seen that once Wartime semi-nationalization of the RR's was removed (as it was by the end of the Korean War) the whole works was going to collapse almost instantaneously into a black hole. Rationalizing what size route network *was* worthy of public service was a big ongoing debate amongst policy eggheads in that era. A whole lot of top-level political capital just naively believed the ICC would never relent at mandating that service be retained no matter how much money the private carriers were hemorrhaging that it ended up being a total numbing shock that when they did. And then, all of a sudden, like 12 different line schedules completely disappeared from Metro Boston in the span of one year and that was enough of a crisis that Legislators *had* to do something en masse to ward off threats to their own reelections.
 
RandomWalk said:
How long did the Westminster station gestate for?

What if this was restricted to concrete proposals, and not crayon drawings?
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Wachusett was first proposed in 2005 at the beginning of Fitchburg Line planning; the state legislature had mandated studying to Gardner and beyond in 200, but that 2005 study found that past Wachusett wasn't practical as commuter rail.

What do you define as a concrete proposal? The 1945 report laid out exact alignments and station locations.
 
Was the 1945 proposal “we will build this” or “we might build this in a future world”?

I would define a concrete proposal as the former.
 
The EGE said:
Wachusett was first proposed in 2005 at the beginning of Fitchburg Line planning; the state legislature had mandated studying to Gardner and beyond in 200, but that 2005 study found that past Wachusett wasn't practical as commuter rail.

What do you define as a concrete proposal? The 1945 report laid out exact alignments and station locations.
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It's also a bit different when the same stations had previous lives on the same mode. Wachusett stayed on B&M schedules until 1946 at very nearly the same location (other side of the same curve @ Princeton Rd.). The old station building itself was only torn down in 2006 after being deemed too far gone for historic preservation, and the old platform staircases to the street lasted until the bridge over MA 31 was replaced coincident with the new station. No...there was nothing there when service ran to Gardner from '80-87 so it was new for public consciousness, but it wasn't exactly a far-out idea. Lots of CR stations have come on-again/off-again at the same deeply established locations over the years. The first MBTA subsidy era ('64-76) was especially volatile for that...here one year, gone the next, back again, un-back again.

Whereas I can't recall any full-time stop at a non-obvious historic location getting cued up on the quick. Excluding perhaps the trials with employee-only private-biz flag stops, of which Riverworks is a present-day survivor and Lechmere Warehouse in Woburn was fairly long-lived. Anderson RTC, Middleboro/Lakeville, Forge Park...non-traditional sitings anchored around planned nü-TOD, and all got intensely studied beforehand. Mishawum, a very *obscure* and long-forgotten old-timey stop...that one was so studied-to-death that it was many years late before it belatedly opened in '84. The inversions of the outer Worcester Line restoration infills from their traditional downtowns to parking sink locations was the end-stage product of way too much studying of the wrong metrics.
 
RandomWalk said:
Was the 1945 proposal “we will build this” or “we might build this in a future world”?

I would define a concrete proposal as the former.
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It was a specific set of build recs trying to muscle top-down planning...so the intention distilled in that oft-circulated final map fully was "we will build this" and not, sadly, the Crazy Transit Retro-Pitches it's been recast as since the Internet rediscovered it from obscurity. Some of the reports that fed into it worked out other Alts. that did end up on the cutting room floor, but for the final map the state actually bought up a majority of the ROW's in question for the expressed purpose of git 'R dun.
 
Good to know. I had heard it described both ways.

Too bad that contemporary US transit planning makes it look like a collection of pipe dreams.
 
RandomWalk said:
Was the 1945 proposal “we will build this” or “we might build this in a future world”?

I would define a concrete proposal as the former.
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I’ve seen this distinction in the terms “proposed” versus “planned.” It seems that if you are using this definition you are looking for a timeline from beginning of planning to completion, not proposal to completion.

But I’m open to being corrected.
 
The MBTA needs to establish, with State and local support, an officially proposed HRT/LRV system for the Boston metro area. Then it needs to be displayed on the MBTA website, with a description and status of each segment: planning, design, or construction. This is exactly what Seattle's Sound Transit system has done on its website at https://www.soundtransit.org/system-expansion. For the MBTA and the Boston metro area, establishment of an official proposed transit system, with efforts made to at least do an EIS for each segment, would help to open up potential Federal funding of these segments; for example, through the potential Federal infrastructure bill, which the MBTA is woefully unprepared to take advantage of.
 
Assembly went pretty fast. I don’t remember transit as an option during the “ikea is coming”years

[BIG EDIT BELOW]
@JeffDowntown remembers it better than I. It may still be record fast.

This post:https://archboston.com/community/threads/assembly-row-development-assembly-square-somerville.1335/
Says that in 2006 you had two colliding proposals Federal was coming in with TOD and Ikea was still haggling on its site (but by then IKEA probably knew that the the new Central Artery had greatly eased access from North Shore to the Ikea in Stoughton, which opened in 2005. It'd have been in 2006 that IKEA was negotiating an exit and sale, not site and store)

So I haven't found a "first proposed" / "first agreed" but it waited until the 2009 Stimulus Bill get get the station funded, Feb 2011 gets the construction agreement (per Wikipedia), starts track diversion Sep 2011, and then it opens Sept 2014 (yikes! 7 years ago!)
 
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Charlie_mta said:
The MBTA needs to establish, with State and local support, an officially proposed HRT/LRV system for the Boston metro area. Then it needs to be displayed on the MBTA website, with a description and status of each segment: planning, design, or construction. This is exactly what Seattle's Sound Transit system has done on its website at https://www.soundtransit.org/system-expansion. For the MBTA and the Boston metro area, establishment of an official proposed transit system, with efforts made to at least do an EIS for each segment, would help to open up potential Federal funding of these segments; for example, through the potential Federal infrastructure bill, which the MBTA is woefully unprepared to take advantage of.
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We have Focus40 here which is basically that, the difference is we don't have many new corridors in need of HRT/LRV compared to a younger transit system like Seattle. I think the MBTA's plate is plenty full with regional rail, overhauling the existing lines and stations, and redoing the bus system, which they are already doing. https://www.mbtafocus40.com/
 
Id vote for Chelsea. Unlike other extensions that have been proposed for decades, that one happened like magic.
 
Arlington said:
Assembly went pretty fast. I don’t remember transit as an option during the “ikea is coming”years
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Assembly Station was in planning during the IKEA is coming years. I remember thinking how bizarre it was to imagine planners believing people could/would use transit to shop at IKEA!
 
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