That's not crazy. That's the actual Urban Ring proposal.Crazy transit pitch time, route it next to the commuter rail out to the SL3 line, then follow the SL3 line out to the airport. Stops at Sullivan, assembly, encore and rt 16/Everett.
Its so crazy that they screwed up the air rights over the tracks for so little benefit, they built just enough to ruin it but not enough to be worth the loss of air rights. It would have been much better if they could just elevate gj with viaducts to skip the grade crossings. Modern elevated transit is awesome because its not the creaky, loud, leaky crap from the past, it looks good and you get awesome views from the train windows. It was so short sighted to build over the tracks and on top of that they have another building currently building over the ROW again. Such a stupid move to completely eliminate this option for the future.
Been looking at this a lot in the past few days. One of the best things I've seen on this board!FWIW...here's the link to my MS Paint drawings from 2020 of what a Green Line'ified Grand Junction would look like.
Do you think that there is any chance that the door could get closed on the BU Bridge Wye from a GJ-Only build?
Unlikely. The insertion angle is pretty sharp.I’m probably doing a hard right into Crazy Pitch territory, but would it ever be possible to bookend the Grand Junction with bi-directional wye where it intersects the Union Square branch as “future proofing”?
I doubt we’d ever get to a point where a Cambridge Loop consisting of connected Porter and Harvard branch makes sense, but it’s a nice dream.
FWIW...here's the link to my MS Paint drawings from 2020 of what a Green Line'ified Grand Junction would look like.
. . .there's only one rail mode that can capture them all: Green Line attachment. Purple Line can't...too many intermediate stops on the GJ for bi-directional service at any acceptable schedule, and Northpoint requires a time-consuming transfer to Green at North Station to reach at all. I hope that's appropriately putting its finger on the scale for their final recs.
Would this do anything alleviate or worsen bunching in the central subway?
Would it be better to to create a new light rail line on the grand junction?
The current study seems to be only looking at West-Lechmere, so that would presumably be the first part built.some Grand Junction/Urban Ring proposals mainly (or solely) link with the Central Subway at the northern end, which has more spare capacity than the Park-Government Center section and points west.
This memorandum provides a consultant scope for consideration by the CRA Board for the proposed Grand Junction Transit Study. The Grand Junction corridor has long been discussed as a possible transit corridor connecting Allston Yards in Boston, through points in Cambridge (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Kendall Square, and East Cambridge), to the existing corridor’s terminus at North Station.
I agree that running a West-Lechmere-Government Center service through Park Street would have little utility. In order to do that though, they would have to fix the Brattle Loop and the value engineering of new Lechmere Yard. "Just run it out of Riverside" starts to look more attractive when you add in the cost of cleaning up previous decisions and keep kicking the can down the road to Needham GLX or whatever the next project is.Specifically to GJ and the northern end, they currently either barely use or don't use the Brattle Loop at all (though in their partial defense, a two-car train doesn't quite fit on the raised platform) to turn cars from Haymarket and points north back north, which would allow adding capacity from GLX, GJ, and anything else on the northern end without interacting with the worst of the traffic congestion in the Copley-Park-GC segment.
This got me thinking (and maybe it's not appropriate for this thread): if this ends up in a West to Brattle Loop via Grand Junction service, would it make sense to brand it as something besides Green? A branch of Green (V Branch)?
Green: whatever the "flagship" LRT line is -- the one that's closest to a heavy rail line. Usually on my crayon maps, this is the Riverside Line connected to the Huntington Line
Teal, Emerald, Aqua: for use on other radial LRT lines where it is useful to distinguish from the Green Line -- for example, I often give the Boylston Street Subway a different color identity than the Huntington Ave Subway, especially if Huntington has been rerouted over to the Pleasant Street Portal. Teal and Aqua obviously are useful for services that go to the Seaport (which I argue should get their own identity), and Emerald is fun because so much of the Green Line runs through the Emerald Necklace -- the name lends itself well (and is actually somewhat imprecise as a color name, meaning you could justify using either a lighter green or a darker green than the official Green Line on the map).
All of which is to say, I do think it will eventually become desirable to do some level of differentiation of LRT services; "Gold Line" for a circumferential LRT route that avoids downtown seems like an easy start, but where/whether we go beyond that is certain an open question.
And I agree that "Diamond Line" vs "Silver Line" might be a little... much, haha, but I really couldn't help myself -- an Urban Ring made of a Diamond Ring and a Gold Ring? That was too good to pass up!