Forest City/MIT Project @ University Park | 300 Massachusetts Ave | Cambridge

BussesAin'tTrains said:
^ It's getting THAT crowded quickly, especially with all the TOD growth.
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I don't know. I guess what I consider crowded has changed since I moved. When I was living in Allston, I used to consider taking the T home with the crowd to Red Sox games incredibly crowded...now I consider that way below average for rush hour traffic.

Does anyone know what the normal interval is in between trains at rush hour? If intervals are 5 minutes for example, it'd be far more realistic to reduce intervals to 3-4 minutes, rather than increase the number of cars. This would avoid any of the ridiculous construction costs that would be associated with expanding platforms, etc. and probably wouldn't cost any more in terms of other variable costs. For obvious reasons it'd also be able to be implemented immediately.

One thing that happens both here and back in Boston is the short sightedness/idiocy of some riders who refuse to move IN to a car. They walk two steps into a train and say "I'm on" and then stand there like an idiot, totally oblivious to other people trying to get into the train. It fucks things up and is totally avoidable. It also compounds quickly, and soon you have extremely crowded entrances/exits and empty middles of trains. Sometimes I see situations where an additional 50+ people could fit on a car but can't get on due to crowded doors. If there were T police on each car, instructing riders to move into the car entirely, they could increase the efficiency of how many passengers get into each train during rush hour and would be far less costly than any other option out there. I know that sounds weird, but some times the simplest fixes are amongst the most effective/efficient.
 
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It's supposed to be an average of 4.5 minutes headway on the trunk section. That's why I suggested resignalling. Still not cheap, but quite plausible. Requires redoing a bunch of electronics (wires, signal blocks, signal heads, etc) in the central portion, downtown. And probably buying new, additional vehicles.

However, F-line suggests that Park Street and DTX stations can't handle any more trains per hour because of passenger flow and long dwell times. So then you get into the question of rejiggering those old stations to prevent "traffic jams" of people in the corridors. Who knows how much that will cost? And maybe ordering trains with wider/more doors to speed up boarding/alighting and deal with the door-hugging issue.
 
Matthew said:
It's supposed to be an average of 4.5 minutes headway on the trunk section. That's why I suggested resignalling. Still not cheap, but quite plausible. Requires redoing a bunch of electronics (wires, signal blocks, signal heads, etc) in the central portion, downtown. And probably buying new, additional vehicles.

However, F-line suggests that Park Street and DTX stations can't handle any more trains per hour because of passenger flow and long dwell times. So then you get into the question of rejiggering those old stations to prevent "traffic jams" of people in the corridors. Who knows how much that will cost? And maybe ordering trains with wider/more doors to speed up boarding/alighting and deal with the door-hugging issue.
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We're strictly talking red line here though, right? If it were the Green Line the traffic thing would make sense since there are multiple branches on the same track, but it don't get how the red line could face traffic problems by reducing its current 4.5 min intervals. Trains here run on 40-60 second intervals during rush hour (with about a 20 second standing time in between those intervals), so I don't see how there could be traffic problems for any of the heavy rail lines.
 
Since it's easier than trying to formulate the post again, here's what F-Line said in response to that point (during a discussion about the merits of GLX from Union to Porter):

F-Line said:
That can only do so much when the Big 4 transfer stops can only handle so many people at once. Look at Park St. on any delay-filled morning. It can easily take 5 minutes to empty a train and close the doors with the wall-to-platform-edge crowds heading for the stairs. It's becoming a safety issue. And when a Red crowd is streaming upstairs it's virtually useless to try to get downstairs from Green. Here it's not train frequency or capacity but station capacity that's the limiter. And DTX is in a similar boat. They're so old and have already been modified several times over in the last hundred years that they can't be made any roomier. I'm not even sure that emergency exit on the far end @ Park can feasibly be modified into a Red-only exit, and that's just about the only thing left to study with that station.


So while tighter headways flush the crowds out of Cambridge it accelerates the oversaturation at Park + DTX. It buys a couple years of time by consolidating a string of failure points and shoving it across the Charles into 2-3 gigantic black holes downtown whose dwell time attrition will quickly start decaying on-time performance all over again. The line will have greater capacity for the whole span of peak hours--and that is a hugely good thing--but it will be just as vulnerable to locking solid at peak-most rush. And then you're quickly rolling back to where you started re: commutes gone to hell multiple days per week.

The only way Red is going to be able to resiliently handle hyper-dense service is if the transfer load is spread away from Park/DTX. Red-Blue has to siphon a big load before Park. Seaport-Back Bay has to siphon a big load before DTX. And the only way for Green to remain functional when Red is throwing so many thousands more daily passengers downtown is to have multiple relief valves spreading away from Park and ensuring that more passengers stay onboard through Park instead of packing the platforms and the narrow Red stairs.

So, yes, I think re-signaling pretty much demands the diversions. Red-Blue and Seaport-BB as ironclad requirements, and 'Ring'-ier diversions like this easy Porter link and the eventual real-deal UR cementing it in the long-term @ Broadway or Andrew and possibly that Harvard-BU spur. It won't work as Boston's Lexington Ave. line equivalent on service density and passenger load if it doesn't have multiple rapid transit transfers outside the downtown core transfers. This is why those warnings about downtown circulation circa-2030 are so dire. The only way to solve it without the congestion harming the economy is to fix the service density AND the radial connections. It's not either/or, and one fix can't hide the other need for very long.
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95' to the roof plus mechanical penthouses. Something like 250,000 sq-ft.
 
^ Who knows anything about the "Library Storage Annex" - the weird white box next to UHaul? Is it MIT? Is it going anywhere any time soon?

The side streets in this area have so much potential. Lots of little, odd industrial buildings with unclear ownership/use. Looks like about a 20-30 year pipeline of continued redevelopment within a couple block radius of this site. Some city councillor (Minka, I think) claimed Cambridge could only sustain a population of about 115,000. Just looking here, not even the rest of Central plus Alewife plus Leechmere, that seems laughable.
 
fattony said:
^

Some city councillor (Minka, I think) claimed Cambridge could only sustain a population of about 115,000. Just looking here, not even the rest of Central plus Alewife plus Leechmere, that seems laughable.
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Sounds like something a knucklehead city councilor might say. Per our friends at Google, they are sitting at 106k+ as of 2012, and going strong. That next 9,000 will really handicap them....
 
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I think I stumbled on the facade sampler for this at the corner of Waverly St and Putnam Ave. I didn't have time to grab a shot, but I'll try to get back there tomorrow.

Sadly, it looked like the standard value-engineered lab building facade materials.
 
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