General MBTA Topics (Multi Modal, Budget, MassDOT)

Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

saulblum said:
If the weekend figures were recorded during the summer, that would make sense, given the beach destinations the Rockport line serves.
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SaulB -- that's a good observation - some might just be touristing to Salem?

I would think that part of that should apply to Newburyport as well -- none of the other lines really serve touristing as Plymouth is not close to the tourist venues
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

whighlander said:
SaulB -- that's a good observation - some might just be touristing to Salem?

I would think that part of that should apply to Newburyport as well -- none of the other lines really serve touristing as Plymouth is not close to the tourist venues
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A more interesting statistic would tell us how many of those weekend passengers started their trips at an outlying stop coming inbound, and how many started in or near the city going outbound.
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

http://medford.patch.com/articles/mbta-offers-interim-plans-in-lieu-of-green-line-extension

Among the potential interim solutions offered in the recent report MassDOT report:

Free or discounted Charlie Card passes for study area
Convert lanes on Route 28 to be bus/bike lanes
Improved bus shelters in Medford and Somerville
Increase in green line trains serving Lechmere Station
Phased implementation of extension
Creating addition multimodal (bus, commuter rail) stations in Ball Square/Gilman Square/Union Square/Assembly Square
Increased service for 85, 94, 90, 89, 88, 96, 77, 73, 71, 69, 47, 61L, 28, 23, 22, 15 bus lines
subsidies for public purchase of electric vehicles
priority parking for electric/hybrid vehicles
Mystic River Reservation Multi-use Trail in Medford construction
Additional construction of Somerville Community Patch
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LOL interim solutions... sure, that's what they are.
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

subsidies for public purchase of electric vehicles
priority parking for electric/hybrid vehicles
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They are seriously proposing these as interim solutions for a transit line extension that would get thousands of riders? A solution that would directly subsidize car use? If only this were a joke.
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

Keep in mind that these geniuses are also counting "add 1000 parking spaces" as some kind of mitigation project. Nothing like massive parking lot expansion to help reduce the number of cars on the road...
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

metasyntactic said:
They are seriously proposing these as interim solutions for a transit line extension that would get thousands of riders? A solution that would directly subsidize car use? If only this were a joke.
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Matthew said:
Keep in mind that these geniuses are also counting "add 1000 parking spaces" as some kind of mitigation project. Nothing like massive parking lot expansion to help reduce the number of cars on the road...
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You must remember that the legal settlement was about *air quality* mitigation of the (alleged) air-quality problems the Big Dig posed. It was not about transit use or cars on the road. There are laws against air pollution, but there are no laws against car use.

So Transit spending was the settled-upon solution to an air quality lawsuit that never came to trail. Transit spending was not the proposed solution to not enough spending on transit or too much (petroleum) car use.

So the legal imperative is to improve air quality.

If you can get enough people into electric cars that would provide more air quality mitigation than an electric train (because the train has a big, dusty construction process, complete with concrete-off-gassing).

So Medford, Somerville and Cambridge were promised in 1990 lower emissions. And you know what? They've *already* gotten them, thanks to changes in cars. Check out this chart from California:
Chart_emissions.gif


Cars have gotten *so much cleaner* since 1990 that even with vehicle miles increasing 20%(blue bars), bad emissions have fallen to 1/4 of their 1990 level.

If the Big Dig increased traffic flows by 30%, the affected areas would still be seeing air-pollution drops of at least half.

Given this change in car technology, it is hard for the CLF to maintain that the people in the affected areas are worse off today than they were in 1990. They're better off. They are probably way better off than the settlement imagined (and since it never went to trial, the "facts" relied on in the settlement were whatever the CLF and Mike Dukakis wanted them to be).

No way, however, was the CLF's solution going to cut emissions in half. If you'd asked them in front of a judge at the time "Will you accept other configurations of transportation that cut emissions by HALF", they'd have laughed (because it would have been thought crazy-optimistic) and I'm sure quickly said "yes."

Its hard to hold either side to any numbers since none were used (no real emissions #s, no real cost-benefit of projects numbers).

But it is highly likely that if they aren't already way better off than the CLF ever woulda "settled" for, they maybe better off enough that all's that's needed is greater use of electric cars. Or an 80E and 87E express bus.
 
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Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

Cars have become much cleaner than the old days. The 1000 parking spaces deal was written around 1990, however.
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

Curtatone and STEP should have a field day with these "Solutions."
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

If you can get enough people into electric cars that would provide more air quality mitigation than an electric train (because the train has a big, dusty construction process, complete with concrete-off-gassing).
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Good post Arlington. Puts the rationale behind the CLF settlement in perspective. But I'm not sure I agree that electric cars provide better air quality than electric trains. In the end they're both getting their electricity from a (mostly likely fossil fuel) power plant. And I have to believe that an electric train moves people more efficiently (i.e., more passenger miles per kWh than an electric car).
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

AmericanFolkLegend said:
Good post Arlington. Puts the rationale behind the CLF settlement in perspective. But I'm not sure I agree that electric cars provide better air quality than electric trains. In the end they're both getting their electricity from a (mostly likely fossil fuel) power plant. And I have to believe that an electric train moves people more efficiently (i.e., more passenger miles per kWh than an electric car).
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All true, but the CLF air quality claim is about the local impact of the Big Dig (gases wafting from i-93) and so the preference for electric vehicles is a combination of electricity being made "offsite" and it being more economical to scrub where its generated than at point sources. (That point source bias, as it turns out was wrong. The cars cleaned up right nicely).

On the Electric cars point: consider that the Greenbush line cost $250,000 per new rider. Those riders have low (but not zero) emissions as train riders and there were high emissions to build the line (and tunnels).

For that same amount of money they could have "endowed" an electric car in perpetuity for each and every new Greenbush rider (the rest were already taking the ferry) and given them to anyone willing to use them for their commute. On top of that, no takings, no operating costs, no pension obligations.

GLX is better, but not fabulous, as its costs have risen. If it were $500m and 10,000 new riders (or if $1b gets you 20,000 new riders) that'd be just $50,000 per new rider

If its up to $1b, and only 10k new riders, its up to $100,000 per new rider and, well, giving away electric cars in a community-bike style program starts looking competitive.
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

metasyntactic said:
They are seriously proposing these as interim solutions for a transit line extension that would get thousands of riders? A solution that would directly subsidize car use? If only this were a joke.
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Worse, it's subsidizing cars for the wealthy. Most people cannot afford a low emission vehicle even with a subsidy.
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

Adding electric cars to the road, while helpful to local exhaust-based pollution, does nothing about eliminating the problems with building more parking lots downtown. Electric vehicles take up just as much space as gas powered ones. Flattening more of downtown to build more and more parking lots is a terrible outcome.

The parking freeze in downtown Boston is also a Clean Air Act regulation. So, you'd just be trading one violation for another.

The Green Line extension is expected to pick up a lot of current transit riders. So, while using the "per new riders" metric has some merits, it's really bad at evaluating costs when considering a reconfiguration of an existing service area. If you base your evaluation on "per new rider" alone then you'll wind up giving too much weight to extending service instead of fixing existing problems.

Greenbush fails miserably in both the "per new riders" and "per any riders" metric. The GLX is much closer to par when you consider all potential riders, and the fact that they'll be rerouted from slow, polluting diesel buses.
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

Matthew said:
The Green Line extension is expected to pick up a lot of current transit riders. So, while using the "per new riders" metric has some merits, it's really bad at evaluating costs when considering a reconfiguration of an existing service area. If you base your evaluation on "per new rider" alone then you'll wind up giving too much weight to extending service instead of fixing existing problems.
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We're back to the question of what "existing problem" is trying to be solved and who should pay to solve it.

The long-established (FTA, not just me) policy of "Incremental $ only for incremental (i.e, new) riders" has its faults, but it is better than all other alternatives at delivering the most good for the least $.

We're being asked to solve an air quality problem. If you could solve it with a big gas-sequestration-and-burial plant for $1, we should do that, declare victory, and live with no new transit passengers at all. Sorry.

Taking a passenger off a bus and putting them on a train does not lower their impact on air quality. It makes them less grumpy, but not less gassy.

There may be a political need to make people less grumpy, but there's no economic/policy/engineering justification. 20,000 grumpy bus riders are what makes this a political winner in Somerville...but also what increases the chance of building an economic loser.

ONLY people who would otherwise have been in a single-occupant vehicle really count because the whole air-quality justification hinges on getting them out of their fossil car onto a bike, onto a bus, into a carpool, out for a walk, or on to a train.

From an air quality standpoint bike = walk = bus = big bus = electric big bus = light rail...yes, the things on the left of each "=" is a touch ">" its right-hand neighbor, but not by much and we can't justify any $ spend just moving people between those non-car modes.

The GLX expects (roughly) 30,000 daily users, of which 10,000 are new and 20,000 are stolen from buses (most of which will still be plying the streets). While the 20k are huge political supporters, what's the air quality justification of giving them any weight at all?
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

Somerville is looking at the GLX as an economic development tool in addition to a transit solution. Union Sq., brickbottom and a potential stadium, ball sq. will all become hugely desirable and see home renovations and more infill. Union has seen some just on a speculative basis. Somerville looks at the GLX and imagines the possibility of having 3 new areas as hot as Davis sq. which was made what it is today by the redline. It doesn't matter how many electric cars you give away all the "solutions" are nothing compared to the total impact of a rapid transit extension.
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

choo said:
Somerville is looking at the GLX as an economic development tool in addition to a transit solution. Union Sq., brickbottom and a potential stadium, ball sq. will all become hugely desirable and see home renovations and more infill. Union has seen some just on a speculative basis. Somerville looks at the GLX and imagines the possibility of having 3 new areas as hot as Davis sq. which was made what it is today by the redline. It doesn't matter how many electric cars you give away all the "solutions" are nothing compared to the total impact of a rapid transit extension.
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With $1b of other people's money, its hard to not view it as an "economic development tool" and to start imagining oneself in posession of 3 new Davis Squares. The question is, why should anyone who lives more than a 10 minute walk away pay for any of it (as we are being asked).

As sexy as Davis Sq is, the fact that Somerville never built anything taller than 4 stories in Davis says they have a proven record of not fully capitalizing on the transit it has (Arlington VA would have gone 10 stories tall and added 5000 transit-accessible apartments, given the same infrastructure).

As soon as you suggest that Somerville pay for it through Tax Increment Financing (taxing the value that transit creates), you find they're not quite as good at finding the value in the projects as one would hope.

The plans are lovely. Who should pay and why?
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

Arlington said:
ONLY people who would otherwise have been in a single-occupant vehicle really count
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I think this is the crux of the matter. And I'm not blaming you, it's the attitude of the FTA and other agencies.

There's a general attitude in this country that only drivers count. So all attention focuses on them, even if the issue at hand is transit. That's why you see quixotic "transit" projects get pushed while existing bus riding communities get shorted. It happened with the Silver Line, and it's been happening with the GLX as well. The use of the "per new rider" metric is part of that. Measuring effectiveness of these kinds of projects is hard. I do sympathize with that. There's too many different ways to view the problem. But "per new rider" has a severe drawback that must be accounted for when weighing options.

Because Somerville has several bus routes already, many of the people who live there are already transit users. In fact, in my interactions with residents there, I find that most of the people I meet are very supportive and welcoming of non-car modes. They're already trying to make do. But because of that, this "per new riders" metric ends up hurting the very people that would appreciate improved transit the most. The 80 and the 87 have at best 20 minute peak headways and range from 30-60 minutes off-peak. That's a fundamentally different type of transit product than the Green Line, which runs at 6-15 minute headways all day and night (ostensibly). Discounting those riders using a "per new riders" metric is throwing them under the bus.

I do agree with a lot of the small points you made about air quality and the different modes. But trying to solve the pollution problem by only looking in a microscope isn't going to work. Supplying a little bus service here and there doesn't make a large scale difference, even though it may snag a few people out of their cars. What does make a huge difference is rethinking the way we use land and plan transportation. The two go hand in hand inseparably. This is why electric cars don't solve the air quality issue. Individually, each electric vehicle that replaces a gasoline vehicle reduces a small amount of emissions. But on the large scale, you still need humongous highways and parking lots to support all those individual vehicles. And that eats up land and spits out sprawl, which creates a worse environmental and quality-of-life problem.

The rising cost of the GLX bothers me a great deal. It should have been a no-brainer: existing 170-yr old ROW through dense city with room to spare. There's been some legitimate issues, but, I think they've gold plated it too much. This isn't about replacing a bus with a streetcar, it's about replacing a bus with a real rapid transit line. The kind of line that entices people to make many more trips without a car, or even choose to forgo car ownership entirely.
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

Arlington said:
The question is, why should anyone who lives more than a 10 minute walk away pay for any of it (as we are being asked).
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Why should anyone pay for anything more than a 10 minute walk away from them? Because we're adults and we live in society, that's why.
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

This may also be a good place to note that about $150 million for next year has been programmed to pay the GANs for the Central Artery/Tunnel according to the draft STIP that was released yesterday. This is a continuing annual payment that has been occurring for a while now and is planned to end in FFY 2015.
 
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