F-Line to Dudley
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Obliquely accounted for, since they knew 15 years ago that Kendall was going to blow up big (and BU and Brickbottom, etc.). Now, we know specifically how it has blown up big, and those well-invested in the area now know more specifically what sectors are going to keep blowing up for the future. The original predictions were spot-on, but now we have a better eyeglasses prescription on the details. Re-study would refine the numbers, not reimagine them.
Absolutely. We know the overall movement patterns as well as we do because of this study. And because the #1 utility of the Ring is hitting transfer nodes at a radial distance, it accounted for subway growth. For things like the Seaport you'd need to re-plug the numbers to see how its growth impact on the subway affects the Ring at the transfer points, but that's for refinement's sake. They knew 15 years ago that the Seaport was going to grow enough to leave its mark on travel patterns.
Some of the data collection, most certainly. Even if the published product is more like 15 y/o.
For the ridership part, yes. It was still almost irresponsibly thin on the engineering and service plan sides so mode choice, how to build it, and what the base schedules will look like all need tons of firming up. If there's ridership that needs more adjusting, it's in the places that have developed slower than expected: Fairmount corridor (Ring JFK spur), and the very slow walk Harvard's taking with Beacon Park.
Yes. A primary example of where the original study's focus was and wasn't involved their LRT workup. They mapped a half-Ring LRT line Dudley-Kenmore-Lechmere-Sullivan just because that traced most faithfully to the highest by-the-numbers demand on the great ridership patterns survey. It did not take into account that Kenmore-Dudley was not going to be buildable with the rest because of the fatal tunneling costs, that Sullivan-Airport was eminently buildable as LRT, and that the BRT Dudley-Southie-Airport-Sullivan half was incoherently centered for running dense service because of its overreliance on variable Ted traffic. Feasibility played no part...they just looked at the fattest-line ridership pairing overlap, pointed a greasy finger at the top number, and said "There". The re-study that has to make it work already must drop the Kenmore-Dudley leg as a never-will-be for tunneling. It has to look at SL3's shaky OTP in the unexpandable Ted and across the Chelsea St. Bridge and conclude "Airport stop at very ends of the Ring halves, not middle" if it wants to run at good headway. And it must look at the total grade separation on the other side of the Mystic as an LRT "Duh!" now cemented by Encore's presence. Basically, corkscrew the whole thing a quarter-turn to the right to net halves buildable on either mode, that glom very very good to ID'd ridership patterns instead of near-perfect, that's buildable in the near-term from the cost savings of that realigned mode split instead of never at the blowout cost of the tunnel-a-thon.
They can be excused to some degree for not realizing the full depth of the build & service implications because the original studies were so very very ridership-centric...but they left some big Captain Obvious feasibility stuff on the table by putting no thought whatsoever into how to practically organize the Ring's constituent parts. That's now a big task.
But since the study traced out the demand for the other 8 CTx routes that were never implemented, they used metrics specific to ID'ing latent demand from dozens of routes. And the CT2 ridership they did factor was based on finishing the job with the first three routes to make them true express options...also never implemented. On the bus and subway side (where it also included GLX), it was very rigorous at finding latent demand.
Commuter rail--other than Fairmount/"Indigo"--I would agree has much softer data. We weren't thinking of RER back then. RER to this day still hasn't accounted for where all the potential ridership spikes came from. But 15 years ago was also not dirty old post-industrial Kendall. It was growing a lot back then, and the institutions had their plans for where they were going to take it. Those predictions were not voodoo; it was pretty clear what demographics from where were going to be chasing jobs there to what was being built, and what modes of transit they'd be taking to get there. The only thing that would've rendered the study's models invalid is if Kendall made a big whiff on its growth plans and there became a need to do a postmortem as to why. That clearly didn't happen; the study demand tracked remarkably faithfully with actual growth.
As I said, there is no need to reinvent the wheel with the ridership projections...just to wear a new-and-improved set of eyeglasses informed by actual events of the last 2 decades and where the heavies are making their Kendall-area investments now.
