General MBTA Topics (Multi Modal, Budget, MassDOT)

[themissinglink]

Orange Line service resumes after ‘small fire,’ MBTA officials say - The Boston Globe

There was a small fire in a third rail insulator on the track near Tufts Medical Center, the MBTA said Sunday evening.

www.bostonglobe.com

 

[Banker & Tradesman]

The outgoing director of TransitMatters penned a valedictory op-ed for us, where he calls for a much more robust long-term plan for the T's future:

The MBTA Needs a Long-Term Vision – Or We’ll Pay the Price

Greater Boston is a region of big ideas. The MBTA, however, isn’t thinking big enough, and its leaders need the CRE industry’s help to expand their horizons.

bankerandtradesman.com

Greater Boston is a region of big ideas. The MBTA, however, isn’t thinking big enough.

Massachusetts lacks a coherent strategy for its transit future. Without it, construction costs will keep rising, congestion will worsen, and housing development will continue to be shaped by today’s transit map – locking in car dependency for generations.

The state keeps solving yesterday’s problems instead of anticipating tomorrow’s needs. A world-class transit system drives business investment, increases property values and unlocks commercial growth. But we’re letting short-term funding limitations dictate our region’s future. The result? A region struggling with some of the worst traffic congestion in the country and a housing crisis exacerbated by poor transit access.

Over the next five years, Massachusetts should expand electrification pilots and implement transit-oriented zoning reforms to lay the groundwork for future growth. Within 10 to 15 years, we must move beyond incremental improvements and commit to full regional rail electrification while establishing dedicated funding sources.

Over the next three decades, the goal should be a transit network enabling car-free living at scale – reshaping where people live and work, strengthening the state’s economic competitiveness, and ensuring Greater Boston remains a leader in sustainable urban development.

The MBTA has a long-range plan in development. That’s a start.

But we can’t afford another bureaucratic exercise that results in a wish list without commitment or a vague plan with no timeline, funding strategy, or private sector engagement.

 

[themissinglink]

MBTA riders frustrated by broken escalators at Aquarium station

The escalators are broken in both directions at the Aquarium stop.

www.cbsnews.com

 

[Riverside]

Transit Matters has posted the job description for the Executive Director role.

 

[Longfellow]

Transit Matters has posted the job description for the Executive Director role.

Time for one of you guys to step up! Kidding lol, you definitely need serious experience in the non-profit industrial complex to be considerd.

 

[KCasiglio]

I know the non-profit world doesn't pay comparable to the private sector but that is a shockingly uncompetitve salary range.

Come be my boss and make more money!

Job Opportunities | Boston Region MPO Careers

www.governmentjobs.com

 

[HenryAlan]

Yeah, that was my immediate thought, too. They won't get somebody who can do all of that for $90K to $100K. If that's all they can afford, they should consider re-structuring it as a 0.6FTE position.

 

[stick n move]

The outgoing director of TransitMatters penned a valedictory op-ed for us, where he calls for a much more robust long-term plan for the T's future:

The MBTA Needs a Long-Term Vision – Or We’ll Pay the Price

Greater Boston is a region of big ideas. The MBTA, however, isn’t thinking big enough, and its leaders need the CRE industry’s help to expand their horizons.

bankerandtradesman.com

Have to agree with this. Nsrl and electrification right now are treated as something that would be nice to have one day but in reality they are non negotiable must haves for the future competitiveness and success of the region. Right now we have no short term, medium term, or long term plan for how we are going to get from here to there. That needs to change. We dont need shovels in the ground, but there needs to be a plan for how were going to get there and what the funding sources are going to be. Nsrl, electrification, and dense development around transit is the 3 headed monster that would absolutely transform cost of living, mobility, productivity, connectedness, innovation, sustainability and so much more in the metro region. There is no other way. We either move forward or get left behind. Boston has had a good run for the last couple decades, but nothing is guaranteeing that it is going to continue on forever. We need to skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it was. If we stay reactive instead of proactive we will get left behind.

 

[Banker & Tradesman]

Nsrl and electrification right now are treated as something that would be nice to have one day

FWIW, that wasn't really the attitude that GM Eng and Mike Muller (executive director of commuter rail) projected at yesterday's Greater Boston Chamber event about the future of commuter rail, even if prior administrations might not have approached the issue with any great urgency.

We didn't wind up having the time to write it up for the site, but it sounded like the big obstacle is cost of the infrastructure and the time it would take to install the overhead catenary -- the oldest locomotives will need to be retired before enough catenary can be strung and enough EMUs or locomotives can be procured to replace them. Muller estimated it would take 10 to 15 years to string wire, and site, permit, finance and build the necessary substations even under their "discontinuous electrification" idea where you only hang wire over ~250 miles of the 600-mile system, with a focus on inside the Route 128 corridor to start. Full-system electrification, he said, would cost $30B +/-

(under that scheme, Muller said, the T would take advantage of what he called "advances" in BEMUs and battery-electric locomotive tech to avoid having to undercut low bridges, string wire in tunnels or through politically sensitive areas like town centers or environmentally sensitive areas like wetlands)

Instead, he said the T plans an "iterative" approach to rolling stock modernization/electrification, starting with the Fairmount Line. The idea, he said, is to use that as a proving ground for their discontinuous electrification idea, since it already has wires and adequate substations at the start and finish.

Eng and Muller both seem to really believe the necessity of fast, frequent regional rail service and spent a decent chunk of time yesterday trying to build a case that it means electrified rail. But they don't seem to have confidence the state can afford it on its own, and think it has to be a P3, or otherwise privately financed.

Our screenshots of (some of) Muller's slides are attached.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

(under that scheme, Muller said, the T would take advantage of what he called "advances" in BEMUs and battery-electric locomotive tech to avoid having to undercut low bridges, string wire in tunnels or through politically sensitive areas like town centers or environmentally sensitive areas like wetlands)

This is such a crock of shit it's not even funny. Total belief in magic beans when there's reams of data on the cost breakdowns showing this is not true.

 

[bigpicture7]

The even more puzzling / interesting question is wtf it would need to take 10-15 years and $30billion to do this right.

Whatever underlies those figures needs to be unpacked and elucidated.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

The even more puzzling / interesting question is wtf it would need to take 10-15 years and $30billion to do this right.

Whatever underlies those figures needs to be unpacked and elucidated.

They're not going to unpack it. I've heard Muller talk before. He's a complete and total kool-aid drinker on the magic of batteries to solve all the world's problems and get you out of jail free from having to string icky wires. They are not looking into these factual discrepancies at all. It's all warmed-over talking points, and that's all it will ever be from them.

Which sucks, because his and Eng's talking points on the need for Regional Rail service levels are very good and very in-line with the advocacy drumbeat. But technologically they are in complete la-la land on what they're trying to sell.

 

[TheRatmeister]

Full-system electrification, he said, would cost $30B +/-

Where the hell is that number pulled from? Firstly, 600 miles is not the length of the CR system, it's around 450. I have no idea how you get 600, that's way more than you could possibly have just in yards/depots. Maybe if you count each track as separate? That's more than a little disingenuous. Secondly, even if we take that 600 mile number at face value, and use the Caltrain Modernization program as our cost reference, which is absolutely insane and should not be the baseline since the project was generally mismanaged plus they got shafted on rolling stock costs, paying around 30% more compared to the MTA/LIRR for example, we still come out under $30 billion. (Not by much, it's around $27 billion, but still.) If we use the costs of the NE Corridor Electrification in 2000 as a baseline, we get $4.5 billion instead. Given the rolling stock procurement presumably the end result would be somewhere in the middle, I'd guess around $8-10 billion for the entire system.

 

[TheRatmeister]

or environmentally sensitive areas like wetlands)

Also, do animals particularly care about overhead lines? I feel like if anything the birds would be all for it.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Also, do animals particularly care about overhead lines? I feel like if anything the birds would be all for it.

Also..."politically sensitive areas". In NIMBY-ese, that means: EVERYWHERE. And once you concede the town centers, it'll be everyone's backyard that becomes "politically sensitive". Then the places where nobody lives, because nature.


They want so so hard to believe that wires are completely optional.

 

[TheRatmeister]

They want so so hard to believe that wires are completely optional.

I do think BEMUs will have a future, such as on short branches like Foxboro or maybe even whole lines like Greenbush, Kingston, or the Newburyport line north of Beverly where the frequencies are probably never going to be that high, maybe every 30 minutes max in most circumstances. Battery costs trend downwards, and so it seems likely that they either do or will make sense in some situations, just like DMUs can make sense over electrification today. But trying to extrapolate that out to the entire network is... reckless, to say the least.

 

[Riverside]

Where the hell is that number pulled from? Firstly, 600 miles is not the length of the CR system, it's around 450. I have no idea how you get 600, that's way more than you could possibly have just in yards/depots. Maybe if you count each track as separate? That's more than a little disingenuous. Secondly, even if we take that 600 mile number at face value, and use the Caltrain Modernization program as our cost reference, which is absolutely insane and should not be the baseline since the project was generally mismanaged plus they got shafted on rolling stock costs, paying around 30% more compared to the MTA/LIRR for example, we still come out under $30 billion. (Not by much, it's around $27 billion, but still.) If we use the costs of the NE Corridor Electrification in 2000 as a baseline, we get $4.5 billion instead.

Given that they say "388 route miles, 650 track miles", I assume that they are counting each track as separate. Which I don't think is actually that disingenous -- wire cost is 1:1 per track mile (at least just in terms of the physical wire itelf), the catenary "poles" also increase in size and material if they cover multiple tracks, and the underlying electrical demand also increases with parallel tracks, since you can run that many more trains.

I haven't checked your cost figures for Caltrain, but honestly that sounds like it's probably exactly how they came to their cost estimate (for better or worse). Particularly in a verbal presentation, and one where they are explaining why they are forgoing plans for systemwide electrification in the inital build, saying "$27B" would imply a higher level of precision than is actually accurate, so rounding to "$30B" is more accurate overall.

That all being said, yes, using Caltrain figures is debatable, and it seems like there is a lot of a priori thinking going on.

Also, do animals particularly care about overhead lines? I feel like if anything the birds would be all for it.

I mean, I think there are pretty obvious drawbacks. It's not the overhead lines, it's the catenary poles every so many feet and the concrete used to hold them in place, and it's the disruption from construction, both in terms of the physical presence of equipment and in terms of the inevitable runoff.

Now, to be clear, I'm not saying it's a valid justification for not electrifying tracks through wetlands. Far from it: at this point, my heretical take is that we should radically de-emphasize EISs for mass transit projects. (Imagine debating whether to use water from a fire hose on particular corners of a burning house, since the water might damage priceless paintings inside. We must put out the fire, and so we must get people out of cars.)

But the potential impact on wetlands seems relatively easy to imagine; the answer isn't to deny that impact, but to acknowledge it and frame it against the harm of the no-build alternative.

 

[Banker & Tradesman]

Also, do animals particularly care about overhead lines? I feel like if anything the birds would be all for it.

They may not care, but wetlands etc. carry additional levels of environmental permitting -- a salient issue in this home-rule state.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

I do think BEMUs will have a future, such as on short branches like Foxboro or maybe even whole lines like Greenbush, Kingston, or the Newburyport line north of Beverly where the frequencies are probably never going to be that high, maybe every 30 minutes max in most circumstances. But trying to extrapolate that out to the entire network is... reckless, to say the least.

Honestly, 30 minutes/4 TPH is plenty much service to amortize electrification costs. You practically need to breach above hourly service for it to be a good value, but :30 is more than fine and many agencies around the world have/can/do make valuations based on those service levels. Maybe the Fall River and New Bedford branches at hourly, and the Cape past Buzzards Bay at hourly (where :30 is likely overkill) could be omitted, but those are pretty much just bit remainders so I don't think you fragment fleets and ops just for remainders...you try to git 'R dun. Plus with 25 kV substations covering about 30 route miles apiece there's not really any branchlines you'd omit on cost. Everything north-of-Beverly can be one sub, and Franklin+Foxboro can share one sub (which would probably be located off the Framingham Secondary between Walpole and Foxboro anyway, because that's where the heavy-duty power lines cross the ROW).

In world practice, it's sparser-service tertiary branches that are most appropriate for BEMU's, where saving on not just the subs but the OCS works in one's favor. And we don't really have any tertiary branches...not like we used to when the Marblehead Branch and Saugus Branch and Medford Square Branch and Stoneham Branch and West Medway Branch and Central Mass Branch and Dedham Branch ran only a fraction of the service of the other mainline branches due to lack of all-day demand and fact that running dense service would vulture too many frequencies from much more heavily-utilized branches like the ones that still survive on the system. Even the Old Colony trio if the mainline capacity got fixed all deserve :30 service.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

They may not care, but wetlands etc. carry additional levels of environmental permitting -- a salient issue in this home-rule state.

What in an OCS system touches wetlands? All of the hardware sits on the existing graded ROW. If they're able to continually service and upgrade the signal plant without onerous environmental permitting, they should be able to do the same with the electrical plant because it's all within the same trackbed envelope. The NEC Shoreline from New Haven to Boston runs a SIGNIFICANT percentage of its distance through wetlands, and it only took Amtrak 4 years to go from design-build contract signing to first electric trains running. They didn't get hung up on environmental regs, much less the politics of "home-rule" regs. This is a solved problem.