Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos
^ Generally, Indogo service is for the "inner" part of these lines anyway: Serving stuff well inboard of the Salem tunnel, I would picture a train ping-ponging Lynn<->NS on some short interval to bolster the frequencies for Chelsea, Revere (infill) and Lynn (re-zoned to 1A) and let the outer stops keep their existing service.
Similar to how increased Lowell Line service hypothetically runs only Anderson Woburn <-> NS.
It's not going to work that way because of the way the buses work. Everything that goes into Lynn terminal proceeds to Wonderland. Because BLX never came. Frequencies and fare structure ALWAYS rule rider decisions over the most convenient seat. They stay on the bus no matter how often Indigo runs, they pay a subway and not Zone 2 fare, they get higher Blue Line frequencies, and they get free inter-line transfers without a douple-dip. Nobody who takes a North Shore bus is going to make their rail transfer at Lynn commuter rail station regardless of what pulls into it. Nobody. Their asses may hurt from sitting in the same seat from Salem or Marblehead, but what's an extra 7 minutes of numbing buttocks when they don't need to give up that seat and get all of Blue's advantages when they disembark. Faster 3-stop trip to NS ain't gonna do it when the best-of-the-best frequencies won't match Blue and the fares won't be anywhere near as good as bus-to-Blue.
Walkup crowds to Central Square are the primary audience, because they haven't already boarded a bus. Walkup crowds at Central Square with Lynn at the end of the line are not anywhere near enough to sustain it. I would even venture that most of the ones who have to get to Chelsea--the one destination that Indigo terminating at Lynn does open up that was never easy to access by bus before--are also going to prefer Blue and a transfer to Silver Gateway in large numbers over the seemingly more direct Indigo route. Maybe not a huge majority, but slight...because they're conditioned to think that bus is cheapest, and don't want to do math in their head on interzone fares. It sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Go to Salem and you're no longer talking buses that need to make 100% of their runs to get anywhere. Buses that make 100% of their runs to Lynn narrow the inconvenience of staying on 5-7 more minutes to Wonderland to point where the fare + frequency advantage outslugs it. Not so if you're coming from Peabody, Danvers, Beverly, or Salem and can take a really short trip to Salem instead of staying on another 45 minutes to Lynn. Not so if you're coming from Marblehead and can cut your trip short at Swampscott. And definitely not if the Zone fares are recalibrated so 1A goes out to Lynn or further and Salem has an absolute ceiling of 2. That even gets the Lynn<-->Chelsea link firmly established on Indigo instead of the less logical bus<-->Blue<-->Silver. This is maybe one of the
best Indigo routes of all at Salem, with recalibrated fares. It is one of most tragic first-cuts in a budget shortfall if it's Lynn-only and all mainline stops out to Beverly stay this high off-scale for the commuter rail entire system on fare equitability.
They have to prove they're brave enough to trade half-decade or more in cumulative farebox recovery losses with cheaper 9-5'ers by recalibrating the zones so they can achieve decade-plus cumulative farebox growth from backfilling with more all-day paying bodies period. And stick to that plan without getting skittish at the first budget shock. Because it is a 10-year plan. Not a commitment you can have high confidence in them keeping. It would be awesome if they did, because this would be such a transformative thing at the right distance with the right fares. It would
encourage BLX buildout,
encourage way better and more comprehensive bus coverage of the whole North Shore, and result in one of the more tangibly dramatic diversions from cars of any one region in the district.
But it takes some brass ones to enact the plan that intentionally incurs some farebox recovery losses and stick with it to the whole duration for paydirt. It's hard to do that with an agency that almost since inception has governed itself crisis-to-crisis. There's unfortunately no half-solutions here, no "Let's poke to Lynn and see what happens, then maybe other enhancements are negotiable." No, that's defective by design and makes it as likely or more that the plug gets pulled on the whole thing. Which is a senseless waste. This is jumping in the deep end, and not hesitating to make that jump.
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As for "hypothetical" Lowell service, that's got some real caveats they're not taking into account.
1) GLX so completely and utterly changes the game that everything they think they know about Medford and Winchester demand is going to need a major re-examination after rapid transit opens. Even though those first 3 Lowell stops are not directly served by the Green Line.
West Medford has the 94 feeding it out of Davis, passing by College Ave. en route. The 80 Davis-College Ave.-West Med-Arlington Center is a block up the street from the commuter rail station. Both routes are very fast into Davis, but could stand to run a little more frequently. The second GLX College Ave. opens for business the ridership on these two routes EXPLODES out the wazoo being a two-line rapid transit link. And demands way higher frequencies. GLX is going to do that to a LOT of bus routes. Those are how big its coattails are. In Somerville and Medford.
If the Route 16 extension ever happens, make that 3 rapid transit transfers on a brisk on-the-clock trip from West Med (to go along with the close walking distance). If the bus frequencies post-GLX scale up to 10-15 minutes all-day to satiate demand, with those routes graduating into the upper division on ridership, the same frequency + fare portability > one-seat advantage rules over West Med commuter rail. You're going to see a major shift away from it, even at a Zone 1A, because of those golden-rule factors. It's a well-patronized commuter rail stop and will continue to have its place, but the mode share will shift in a major way away from it. And that's not a bad thing...that's "happy trails" for all involved who get exponentially better transit options in the aggregate.
Now, project that bus transformation out to the next 2 stops. Wedgemere and Winchester have the 134 out of Medford Square, and Wedgemere *sorta* has the 95 out of Med Sq. terminating in no-man's land between West Med and Wedgemere. They're left out of the College Ave.-Davis connector, though, which is probably a shortfall that needs correcting right now. But what happens when GLX starts and the bus routes go topsy-turvy? There's going to be tons of demand for a half-and-half variation of the 94 Davis-College Ave.-West Med and 95/134 continuing up Playstead Rd. and Main St. That neighborhood around Main is way, way too dense to send to Medford Sq. exclusively, and they are not in commuter rail walking distance because of a street grid broken up by the conservation land. They badly need a route to College Ave. and Davis with rapid transit connections. So you are going to most likely get a bus route up Main that hits Wedgemere. And a bus route that either continues and hangs a right on Church St. to Winch Ctr. or takes the 134's path up Mystic Valley Parkway to that station. Again, you'll be doing this whether there's Indigo or not because the Red-Green super-routes beckon way too hard to the CR-inaccessible neighborhood in between, and if you get that far the only reasonable place to tie it up in a bow for a turnback and idling spot is Winch Ctr. Which now means the same frequency + fare portability > one-seat golden rule is now in effect for the first THREE Lowell stops, not just West Med. Indigo's starting to look awfully duplicate here.
2) Anderson. The state's trying way too hard to make Anderson "REGIONAL TRANSPORTATION CENTER" a thing. A destination unto itself. Anderson's never going to be a destination or TOD paradise. It's surrounded by trucking, light industry, and raw materials (stone, etc.) processing plants. Because there is no more valuable place in Metro Boston to be situated for truck shipping and aggregates distribution than 128 @ I-93. Same thing for Mishawum, which they have been trying to make a 'thing' for 30 years now. To the point where it's time to stage an intervention about their trying to make Mishawum a 'thing'. It's a big-box Mall. 128 @ 93 is a fine place for a big-box Mall. For maximum revenue there's few better places.
It's not Westwood. It's not the Woburn equivalent of Assembly-in-the-making. Anderson is a parking sink. Some locations a parking sink is the best use of a site, and parking sink is probably the best possible thing you should have here. Suck up the 9-5'ers from both Exit 35 on 128 and 37C on 93, keep them the hell away from the Reading interchange, put them on nice free-flowing Commerce Way where the traffic doesn't bother anyone, feed them one of commuter rail's fastest and most frequent schedules, throw in a well-patronized Downeaster stop, and throw in a Logan Express location. That's what Anderson does; it pools suburbanites and 9-5'ers. It's not a development narnia. It's not an all-day destination. It's going to be quiet with a full lot in the afternoon. The only thing it really needs is to have the missing west entrance to New Boston St. finally completed, and convenient commute-hour bus service to Burlington and the office parks that ring 128.
Indigo here is going to disappoint on the off-peak, because it tries too hard to make Anderson into the all-day 'thing' that it's not, which the land use doesn't support, which the land use doesn't need to support because the existing land use is probably the best land use. For whatever reason the "Transportation Center" branding and 30 years of trying to make lemonade from lemons at Mishawum has reinforced some fruitless stubbornness. "MUST...make...Woburn...parking...sinks...a...thing!"
What does that leave if not West Med/Wedgemere/Winch Ctr where buses and GLX change the game, and Mishawum/Anderson which are so heavily skewed to 9-5'ers? That badly-needed infill for Woburn at Montvale Ave.? Sure...but I don't think you can hang a full Indigo service plan on that one alone when the buses to rapid transit are taking their share of the first three stops and all-day demand craters past here. Backstopping the buses and the 9-5'ers with some extra service for pure convenience. I guess...but there are many worthy Indigo candidate routes, so is that the best use of one of only a handful of bullets in the chamber?
How about just making a trade? The Haverhill Line CR schedule goes back to its pre-1979 routing via the NH Main, and Reading becomes an exclusively Indigo route. It has the neighborhood walkup density. It has decent amount of pre-existing duplicate bus density paralleling it 1-2 blocks away on Main St. all the way from Malden Ctr. to Reading; that's a strong hint at under-served demand when none of it is hitting any non-CR destinations like that post-GLX world in Medford. It has a prime 128 site at Quannapowitt Pkwy. for an infill park-and-ride with lots of existing and potential mixed-use adjacent development: today with corporate business parks, shopping center, medical center, hotel, and walkup residential with bus access ringing the whole south half of the lake....tomorrow with something nicer adjacent to the would-be stop than Subaru of Wakefield.
THERE'S your 128 stop that can anchor itself with a mixture of 'destination' development and varied all-day demand. Leave Anderson to fill up with 9-5'ers. Certainly if you run full-blast and ever-escalating Lowell and Haverhill peak-hour trains that sprawling lot in Woburn is going to fill up to the max and leave little room for the off-peakers. So direct the off-peakers to Quannapowitt, and run those Burlington buses to ping here too where the off-peak travel times on 128 aren't that bad.
Is that a better use of valuable Indigo bullets in the chamber than backstopping Lowell just because? You still get best-of-both-worlds 128 access. You still enhance both sets of the inner-burbs' transit access to very significant degree between bus-to-rapid transit and Indigo rail, instead of picking one corridor as winners and one corridor as losers. And you still stiffen up NH Main frequencies by a lot with Haverhill trains that now make a tolerable hour to Haverhill and stimulate a lot more native ridership. Plus Lowell (along with Worcester and Providence) is the one line capable of serving moderate off-peak conventional schedules as a regional intercity destination, so that's not going to be a dead midday by any stretch.
I'd honestly prioritize Reading first and split the difference on multi-modal resource allocations. Only one corridor gets Indigo trainsets, but both get the super-sizing they deserve.
