General MBTA Topics (Multi Modal, Budget, MassDOT)

And has anyone spoken to Canton about building a modern viaduct right next to the nearly 200 yr old historic structure?
Given that there's houses snugly abutting one side of the structure, and a dam and a 3-way intersection snugly abutting the other...no.

But there wouldn't need to be. Up to 3 tracks can go right up through the station to the north approach, and 3-4 tracks to the south approach. A 1000 ft. squeeze-down to double-track is absolutely no constraint to dizzying midcentury traffic levels.
 
????????

All lines have 10-25 MPH speed restrictions placed on them following a DPU visit to track between Ashmont and Savin Hill...


Edit: Press Briefing tomorrow at 10AM..

I can't really think of any finding that could have driven such a restriction across lines with completely different vehicle and signaling technologies except operators just being broadly unsafe.
 
I can't really think of any finding that could have driven such a restriction across lines with completely different vehicle and signaling technologies except operators just being broadly unsafe.

Unsafe operators, or the DPU is ordering more safety inspections systemwide as a result of their findings here, and ordered speed restrictions across the board until they are cleared.
 
Can’t read the whole thing behind the paywall, but initial findings point to… very concerning operator performance.

 
So is the end state a choice between driverless ATO or letting the Pioneer Institute mafia win (AKA shutting it all down in favor of private enterprise)?
 
So is the end state a choice between driverless ATO or letting the Pioneer Institute mafia win (AKA shutting it all down in favor of private enterprise)?

Too bad ATO is probably a decade plus away since the T has little actual vision or planning for the future and modern technology other than magic batteries everywhere. At this point, honestly, could it get worse to just privatize the entire thing? It's basically already collapsed.
 
The clown show continues... just keep shoveling more money into the fire.

The MBTA should be dissolved, it's barely even fulfilling service needs at this point.
 
The MBTA should be dissolved, it's barely even fulfilling service needs at this point.

And replace it with...what? Turn the ROWs into highways?

At this point, honestly, could it get worse to just privatize the entire thing? It's basically already collapsed.

Oh yeah, it can definitely get worse. If there was actual money to be made in public transit, someone would be doing it. I suppose it's might be theoretically possible to run a private system in Boston...except it would be far more limited as a service, and likely cost a great deal more. Of course, you could limit the degree to which a private operator is incentivized to run only the most profitable services (shafting the rest) by means of minimum service requirements and other regulations...which would have to be enforced. You'd probably end up with something closer to the Keolis end of the spectrum (mercenary operator taking a cut, with the state on the hook for things like equipment and capital costs) than something like Brightline.

The only meaningfully-plausible justification for privatizing it (assuming that we have any desire to have a public transit system that exists as a public service for the benefit of the city/state/region) would be if that would guarantee it would run better. I know Britain's experiment in rail privatization didn't exactly go swimmingly. (Turns out public goods are inherently hard to privatize. Go too far towards the business end, and you wind up with giant chunks of services getting culled for failure to make money (saw the same thing in aviation with deregulation killing off tons of routes and the introduction of the EAS to subsidize some of them into sticking around). Put in a bunch of restrictions and requirements and if you're very lucky maybe you'll wind up with a competitive market, but you're much more likely to wind up with one or more fat, lazy incumbents skimming as much as they can out of the business and hoping - and lobbying - that they're too important to get kicked out.

I'll reiterate my usual thesis. The T's problem isn't that it's a public entity, or that it doesn't have a profit motive. The T's problem is that it has been run, and continues to run, extremely poorly. And all or virtually all of the ultimate responsibility for that fact falls on a state government and specifically a state legislature that never bothered to fund the thing properly, and never bothered to care if it was actually run properly. Hardly unique in that, I know, but there's essentially been little to no meaningful accountability for multiple decades, something which is only changing (slowly) in recent years, and even that's more band-aid than culture shift. Providing wide-base public transit is effectively incompatible with being a profitable business; full-scale privatization effectively means conceding that we don't want or need it, and will settle for whatever the corporate overlords deem sufficiently profitable. Outsourcing the day-to-day operations a-la Keolis won't do much good, because it wouldn't change the lack of investment (though if it led to a mass cleaning-house and installation of competent - as opposed to merely rent-seeking - management, it wouldn't be the end of the world).

Too bad ATO is probably a decade plus away since the T has little actual vision or planning for the future and modern technology other than magic batteries everywhere.

They already have ATO/ATC/whatever the hell acronym any given agency is using this week to enforce speeds/separation/signals on the Red and Orange lines. I assume it's insufficiently sophisticated to handle operations (though I thought that all that signal work was supposed to be about upgrading that).
 
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And replace it with...what? Turn the ROWs into highways?

At this point I'd consider mothballing it entirely. Strongly incentivize companies to go fully remote or redistribute offices across the state, re-allocate the MBTA funds to 21st century fiber optics to every home in the Commonwealth and then subsidize parking garage costs only for people making under some income threshold (e.g 40K/yr.) in Boston to handle the remaining service industry workers that would need to come into the city still daily to support the people living here.

Not only should this reduce traffic in the metro to basically weekend levels but it would save a lot of money and spur investment in places outside of Boston which the state badly needs to do.
 
At this point I'd consider mothballing it entirely. Strongly incentivize companies to go fully remote or redistribute offices across the state, re-allocate the MBTA funds to 21st century fiber optics to every home in the Commonwealth and then subsidize parking garage costs only for people making under some income threshold (e.g 40K/yr.) in Boston to handle the remaining service industry workers that would need to come into the city still daily to support the people living here.

Not only should this reduce traffic in the metro to basically weekend levels but it would save a lot of money and spur investment in places outside of Boston which the state badly needs to do.

So your strategy is to basically kill the entire Greater Boston region and by extension greatly injure New England at large. Brilliant.
 
So your strategy is to basically kill the entire Greater Boston region and by extension greatly injure New England at large. Brilliant.

And your plan is to keep throwing billions of dollars away every year for continually degrading service which is currently approaching a state of basically not even functioning?

It's not like Massachusetts is going to suddenly develop accountability. Might as well deal with what we've got which is a totally dysfunctional political system.
 
Not only should this reduce traffic in the metro to basically weekend levels but it would save a lot of money and spur investment in places outside of Boston which the state badly needs to do.

"Starve the beast", but applied to a city.

Certain industries cannot effectively be operated remotely, many derive considerable benefits from being located in specific places, and many more are very unlikely to go fully remote or redistribute outside the city without unending, ongoing subsidies, all of which is secondary to the point that your idea completely ignores the basic reason cities work: consolidation.

Take something like Kendall. Tons of tech and biotech, big and innovative contributor to the state and regional economy. A fair bit of it difficult or impossible to do remotely. Technically possible to do anywhere, but that would lose out on two things: proximity to MIT and Boston's medical and life sciences institutions, and proximity to other tech/biotech companies. Sure, the state could still get the same tax revenue if this company was in Worcester and that company was in Springfield, except they wouldn't do it. Everyone who lives in relative proximity to Boston can more-or-less equally access the various employers. Say you worked for Novartis at the old Necco factory and decided to take a job with Moderna. It's like a block away. It makes recruitment a hell of a lot easier (and better) when you have a big pool of candidates to draw from. If changing jobs means moving from Worcester to Springfield or something, a lot of potential candidates are gonna go "nah", not to mention that those places have fewer amenities to draw in employees to begin with. It'd be a very effective experiment in tanking your own economy.
 
And your plan is to keep throwing billions of dollars away every year for continually degrading service which is currently approaching a state of basically not even functioning?

It's not like Massachusetts is going to suddenly develop accountability. Might as well deal with what we've got which is a totally dysfunctional political system.
Not quite sure why you joined a Boston transit forum if you don't believe transit in Boston will ever work. Is the plan just to spend a couple minutes a day here gloating and telling all of us we're naive idiots?
 
At this point I'd consider mothballing it entirely. Strongly incentivize companies to go fully remote or redistribute offices across the state, re-allocate the MBTA funds to 21st century fiber optics to every home in the Commonwealth and then subsidize parking garage costs only for people making under some income threshold (e.g 40K/yr.) in Boston to handle the remaining service industry workers that would need to come into the city still daily to support the people living here.

Not only should this reduce traffic in the metro to basically weekend levels but it would save a lot of money and spur investment in places outside of Boston which the state badly needs to do.

I’m honestly not sure if this is satire, ignorance, or malice.
 
We're not seeing a lot of new data yet, but the Orange Line headways are now at least 17 minutes, or longer.

The current paper schedules for today, from the GTFS file, specifies that Orange Line trains are to run every 8 minutes.

I'm really curious to see actual headways. Need more data over time to see.

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So uhh this is bad


Just 12 hours after announcing service cuts on the Red, Orange Lines, as well as service cuts on 5 bus routes, without saying it was a service cut! The hits keep on coming! In the same day too!

Sure seems like the MBTA is just falling apart fast, and decaying, post-COVID.
 

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