General MBTA Topics (Multi Modal, Budget, MassDOT)

I realized that the one line that we've been waiting to convert to a bike trail is abandoned, right after posting, and tried to delete my comment, obviously unsuccessfully...
 
Today was a big MassDOT/MBTA Board meeting, including:

Commuter Rail Vision Update | https://cdn.mbta.com/sites/default/...tober/2018-10-15-fmcb-rail-vision-update.pptx

GLX Update | https://cdn.mbta.com/sites/default/.../2018/october/2018-10-15-fmcb-glx-update.pptx

Red/Blue Constructability Study | https://cdn.mbta.com/sites/default/...fmcb-red-blue-connector-constructability.pptx

I'll leave these here rather than split them up among the project threads, but we can move conversation if we have to...
 
Equilibria said:
Today was a big MassDOT/MBTA Board meeting, including:

Commuter Rail Vision Update | https://cdn.mbta.com/sites/default/...tober/2018-10-15-fmcb-rail-vision-update.pptx

GLX Update | https://cdn.mbta.com/sites/default/.../2018/october/2018-10-15-fmcb-glx-update.pptx

Red/Blue Constructability Study | https://cdn.mbta.com/sites/default/...fmcb-red-blue-connector-constructability.pptx

I'll leave these here rather than split them up among the project threads, but we can move conversation if we have to...
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Well, those Red-Blue cost comparisons sure do show how utterly full of shit that 2010 DEIR was. Magically all 3 evaluated tunnel construction methods now only cost 48-84% as much, with construction schedules anywhere from 50-80% as long. Funny how a little daydreaming about a big real estate catch @ Suffolk Downs ends up unskewing numbers nearly overnight.

From what it looks like, there doesn't seem to be any major drawback to doing cut-and-cover with an open-air trench in the 2 left lanes of Cambridge St. other than their pool of qualified contractors would be somewhat smaller than with the other methods. All of the scary impacts the DEIR cited to try to turf that option look mitigable, and hospital emergency vehicles should suffer no disruption if on-street parking on Cambridge St. is temporarily suspended on all blocks where the left lanes are actively being dug up for the trench. Since the T isn't in the business anyway of getting usual-suspects bidders business, that one perceived drawback--lack of construction experience--seems solvable by simply looking harder and wider afield for qualified Top-Down C&C bidders. In other words, do your jobs and the $200M dig is doable.

God, I hope these new figures light a fire to get that thing back on the front-burner now that the DEIR hatchet-job has been outed by real vetted math for exactly what it was. Every day we keep talking about funding nonfunctional back-assward South Coast FAIL alt. routings instead of R-B...especially now that the numbers have been de-crookeded...is another day this state spends with its head firmly planted in the arse-of-despair.


-------------------------

RE: CR study. . .

Get the overwhelming impression that Urban Rail is the only one of these concepts that's fleshed-out enough to have any legs for making the Tier 2 analysis. There's too much undefined about the Express & Skip-stop schemes; the political sausage-making in picking winners/losers for a given schedule would be too much a horror show and asterisked too many times to net coherent schedules. There's no way to keep provincial politics from making a royal mess of that. And physical plant + ops bases are not aligned in any physical way/shape/form to permit non-terminal short-turning on a grand scale all day long so the New Connections scheme seems like a reeeeal reach and total nonstarter even if it comes with assumptions of some buttload of "first-worldy" -type ops reforms.

If I had to guess, this is going to get pared down to Urban Rail vs. Urban Rail/Zonal Express as a final two. They've got that "Indigo/128" integrity-of-concept going for them as a bedrock, and check off the most boxes on the TransitMatters bucket list of top system recs using Urban Rail as the bedrock. Options for 495-land and intrastate intercity at least get a lot more concrete with the dense 128 service layer established on any mainline that'll support it, and some lines (Framingham/Worcester most prominently) already have daily schedules with a quasi-Zonal Express resemblance so there's a modicum of real-world starting point in MA for fleshing out that concept into something they template.


Interesting (although...caveat...it's only so-far appearing on the most out-there New Connections scheme that's least likely to make the cut) that they finally are acknowledging that Needham and/or Reading have a future that might be Orange-painted and not Purple-painted. Something they're likely to contend with in more stark terms when they try (and likely fail) to model out an Urban Rail schedule for Needham that achieves anywhere close to the headway parity of all other Indigo-branded routes on that map. It's a first acknowledgment that Amtrak growth is going to put the SW Corridor in a vice grip beyond any level that Needham can tweak itself out of to hold onto its slots. And may also be disclosing an oblique NSRL footnote that the Reading Line is too much of a gimp to match wits with any south mainline pairings in its current single-track begats grade crossing hell form, with costs for the necessary throughput upgrades favoring Orange construction methods over Purple. First time in 45 years either of those have been ID'd as going-concern dilemmas for rapid transit conversion decisions in any big-picture planning doc.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
Well, those Red-Blue cost comparisons sure do show how utterly full of shit that 2010 DEIR was. Magically all 3 evaluated tunnel construction methods now only cost 48-84% as much, with construction schedules anywhere from 50-80% as long. Funny how a little daydreaming about a big real estate catch @ Suffolk Downs ends up unskewing numbers nearly overnight.
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Not to deny that, but we're also dealing with a completely different administration, staff, consultant, etc. than in 2010.

F-Line to Dudley said:
If I had to guess, this is going to get pared down to Urban Rail vs. Urban Rail/Zonal Express as a final two.
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Agreed, though it will be interesting to see if Sec. Pollack's repeated slow-walking of urban rail in public meetings is a knock against. She's making a big show out of advocating the interests of the endpoints and outer suburbs, though that might just be for appearances when the decision to invest in urban rail is ultimately made.

F-Line to Dudley said:
Interesting (although...caveat...it's only so-far appearing on the most out-there New Connections scheme that's least likely to make the cut) that they finally are acknowledging that Needham and/or Reading have a future that might be Orange-painted and not Purple-painted.
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Roslindale is in Focus40 - I don't remember if Orange-to-Needham is. I wish the MBTA would seize the day with the Northland development and get some money toward Green Line to Upper Falls. Bring it that far at first while Needham gets its act together and the CR replacement shakes out, then extend it stop-by-stop (Gould, then Highlands, then Center and Junction).
 
esmanga said:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/10/25/what-works-boston-transit-221839
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I love how they stretch the ageism theme to its absolute flimsiest limit by portraying Aloisi as the "token boomer" of the avocado-eating gang of do-gooders as if being Transpo Sec. and having the longest career in gov't service makes him the bumbling dad stereotype who doesn't know how to use a smartphone.

Nice exposure and all for what they're doing, but dear god did this feature force-fit the most superficially irrelevant angle to hang the whole story around. Never stop Politico-ing, Politico. :rolleyes:
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
I love how they stretch the ageism theme to its absolute flimsiest limit by portraying Aloisi as the "token boomer" of the avocado-eating gang of do-gooders as if being Transpo Sec. and having the longest career in gov't service makes him the bumbling dad stereotype who doesn't know how to use a smartphone.

Nice exposure and all for what they're doing, but dear god did this feature force-fit the most superficially irrelevant angle to hang the whole story around. Never stop Politico-ing, Politico. :rolleyes:
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Huh? I didn't read the "token baby boomer" mention as a slight at all. It's just pointing out that Aloisi is not of the same generation as the rest of Transit Matters' core. Where are you getting anything about "the bumbling dad stereotype who doesn't know how to use a smartphone"?

That's all coming from you, not the article...
 
JumboBuc said:
Huh? I didn't read the "token baby boomer" mention as a slight at all. It's just pointing out that Aloisi is not of the same generation as the rest of Transit Matters' core. Where are you getting anything about "the bumbling dad stereotype who doesn't know how to use a smartphone"?

That's all coming from you, not the article...
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This. And Jim has been joking about it all day. This is how he referred to himself even before the Politico piece. Jim is a crucial part of our organization, helping us navigate the political waters and grounding us at times when we are getting too abstract.

This Politico feature has been amazing for us in terms of donations & volunteer requests. Very exciting. People from all over the country are sharing, contacting us and letting us know we've inspired them to take action with us or wherever they live (such as one person in KC joining the Kansas City Regional Transit Alliance to help them out). That's what this is about: letting people know we can make transit better in the US no matter what politicians or ideologues like Elon Musk tell us.
 
JumboBuc said:
Huh? I didn't read the "token baby boomer" mention as a slight at all. It's just pointing out that Aloisi is not of the same generation as the rest of Transit Matters' core. Where are you getting anything about "the bumbling dad stereotype who doesn't know how to use a smartphone"?

That's all coming from you, not the article...
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Good transit advocacy does not discriminate by generation. At all. It does discriminate by class given who most selfishly protects car culture and how overrepresented that class interest is within gov't, but it damn sure isn't a generational difference. Old grannies with a senior bus pass advocate just as hard for what TM is pushing as college kids and younger professionals do. Ride any route that passes through >1 neighborhood (e.g. more diverse demographic sampler than simply "through a college campus") and the passenger count will almost always snap to the same mean distribution between ages 1 and 80 of people reliant on and personally well-invested in good transit practices.

Politico was trying way too hard to force-fit the "Millennials saved. . ." / "Millennials ruined. . ." Mad Libs feature template that's such popular clickbait these days onto what TransitMatters is doing, with a dash of Silicon Valley-like disruptive innovation techbro tropes spackled on top. And it didn't fit the subject at all. Nothing about freeing transit planning from ossified "Not Invented Here" syndrome has anything to do with age...but everything to do with attitude. TM striking a nerve across generations is exactly why it's gotten traction as an advocacy coalition. Hell, if this were really a "techbro" revolution it would almost certainly end up succumbing to the exact same self-destructive class divisions that's made the real Silicon Valley's tech sector show its true colors of late as fundamentally anti-transit. The fact that the TM phenomenon has not (intentionally or unintentionally) erected those kinds of self-limiting walls around itself and has structurally set itself on a path for greater inclusiveness means that the real story here quite explicitly does not conform to those tropes. We'd be seeing a very different effect if that were a relevant theme, because there are concrete examples right in the world of transit planning where ageism and techism create more division not unity.


A very, very good story is in there...but because Politico can't not be clickbait trash that good story ended up getting dressed up in completely the wrong trousers with those Millennial/techbro tropes and losing its plot in the process. Based on the direct quotes from the interview subjects who seemed to unaware of such strong generational angle being pursued, I'd wager this piece probably began its life as a straight-up story of DIY thought/attitudinal reform in transpo planning and then got ordered by an editor to be force-fit as "another Millennial push piece". The storytelling seems to bear tons of rewrite-to-trend scars, and that ends up why it reads with such an odd disconnect between story facts/content and the story theme being aggressively flogged.

It makes for crappy journalism to elevate thematic hashtagging over content, but nobody familiar with Politico should be the least bit surprised because this is exactly how always roll. Shame that TM's first bit of national exposure had to get fed through that kind of content food processor, but hopefully it inspires somebody else to do more longform pieces. I mean, one of the upsides of Politico being trash that tries to pass itself off as steak is that it's quite the ego trip for a lot of other outlets to try to do them one-better without being so stereotypically Politico about the presentation.
 
^ F-Line, you’re getting yourself really worked up over nothing here... I’d bet that >9/10 people who read this article will walk away thinking “cool, that’s a group that’s making positive change through talent, passion, and a lot of hard work.” The generational angle certainly isn’t the main takeaway of the piece, and I bet that it hardly even makes most people’s radar.

But you read the article and your takeaway is, basically, “trash generational warfare”?
 
JumboBuc said:
^ F-Line, you’re getting yourself really worked up over nothing here... I’d bet that >9/10 people who read this article will walk away thinking “cool, that’s a group that’s making positive change through talent, passion, and a lot of hard work.” The generational angle certainly isn’t the main takeaway of the piece, and I bet that it hardly even makes most people’s radar.

But you read the article and your takeaway is, basically, “trash generational warfare”?
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There's no need to cherry-pick a bunch of widely-separated random words from my post and fake a "trash generational warfare" quote out of it, nor describe imaginary worked-up body language and spittle that last I checked no secret webcam is recording for the Interwebs' viewing as I type. If you aim to credibly argue that I'm over-implying the intent in my posts...try doing it without leaning hard on the same infraction in yours.


No, the generational angle wasn't the main takeaway. It did, however, read disjointedly like the generational framing was a forced editorial decision after the fact to retrofit a near-total unrelated story around Millennials. I'm not the only one who saw that; there were a lot of online comments echoing that sentiment (whatever grains of salt one may grant to a given commenting venue). I don't think the act of pointing out that a framing exists and that for X, Y, Z reasons it's irrelevant/askew to the actual reporting subject means taking an automatic flying leap to crazytown histrionics of pure feeeeeelings. If that were true then AB has a lot to apologize for from the seventh circle of crazytown hell re: large quantities of what passes for media critique in the Dev forum. :rolleyes:


The "millennials" hashtag is sitting right bloody there at the bottom of the article page, and that's the tag this article got its main Twitter push under. That's why Politico is so dogged about pitching to canned themes, even as they go upsteam trying to class it up with more in-depth longform articles. Hashtag-pushing is their business M.O; it's why they're a profitable online media powerhouse in a generally unfavorable media biz climate. Let's face it, #transponerd doesn't draw as many eyeballs as #millennials...so they're gonna do whatever cosmetic surgery on the lede form-fits it to draw eyeballs, hell or high water. You know that--explicitly or subliminally--by seeing the name "Politico" on the masthead. This is what they do. It does mean you still must filter their more useful reporting through a "Note to self: this is Politico" lens, because the single-mindedness of their editorial theme-fitting does get in the way of journalistic practice. By-design.

This article was pretty middle-of-road by that standard. They've both published dumptrucks more paint-by-numbers dreck and produced more immaculate straight-on original reporting than this example. They're a big and prolific enough outlet to have a very broad spread. Also, it speaks volumes about how compelling a case TransitMatters is that the real grist of the story managed to shine through despite the editorial transparentness of the forced lede. It's possible to fully acknowledge all that was interesting about the story and still feel like the piece couldn't stay nearly enough out of its own way pushing a theme totally irrelevant-to-topic.

And...as I said in the last post, the fact that a major outlet like Politico published it at all will encourage more national attention and more longform reporting by other outfits that aren't as limited by the peculiarities of their own house style. That is a Good Thing™ in the end, no?
 
Without going way off the track here, I get exactly what F-Line is saying.

That article had a very heavy bent on the whole "Millennials leading the way, everyone else is taking a back seat" angle.

Reading his comments, he has nothing but praise for TM and everyone involved. His critique was solely on the way the article was written by politico. It's a style issue.
 
Agree with North Shore and F-Line. There was good stuff in there about how much TM is doing and their overall approach. But the presentation lens was a big distraction.
 
I personally liked the last line in the piece about keeping it all local. Any chance you guys can get Dukakis on board with that? When I went to a NSRL presentation, he spent way too much of his time on national politics.
 
https://www.auctionsinternational.c...mass-osd-mbta-locomotives-ma-15838-7-bp-97976

Hey, y'all! If you ever wanted to be the only garage on your block to have a non-working locomotive with several million miles on the odometer parked in it, now's your chance! Bids start at 25 bucks.

(Difficulty: weighs 260,000 lbs., have to tow it yourself.)

97976_7225006.JPG
 
statler said:
You need to be a industrial scrapper to buy it. There are people and companies that do this sort of thing for a living.
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Yes, and these original 1978-series F40PH "Screamers" have accumulated too much metal fatigue in their frames from being ridden hard on a daily basis for 37 years to be candidates for remanufacture as like-new locos like many frames nearly as old routinely are. They've been stripped of nearly all usable parts and some panels of body sheeting to keep feeding the active 1988/2nd-gen F40PH-2C fleet, and the horns + number boards for separate auction (because those are for whatever reason considered valuable collectibles for weird foamer types). And any named locomotives honoring longtime commuter rail employees or transit advocates have long since had their commemorative plaques removed and either returned to the honorees' families or re-dedicated onto active T locomotives. So there's nothing left except the dessicated hulks as shown in the pics.


In total it's a 17-unit fleet they're disposing of. The freight yard on the Middleboro Line at the SEMASS trash-to-energy facility in Rochester doesn't have a ton of space to bring in the blowtorches, so looks like the scrap advertisements are being spaced out no more than couple at a time. Unit #1013 was the only one in the whole fleet that was still operable at the time of its Purple Line retirement, but its last run as a loaner for Grafton & Upton RR's Santa Train was like 3 years ago so doubtful it's revivable today with all the parts that have likely been harvested from it. Unit #1000, the first all-new piece of commuter rail equipment the T ever purchased, is the only one parked at the Rochester dead line that has any historical significance worth setting aside in preservation for a museum...but probably only as a static display because getting it to run for somebody's excursion service would take too much work for a nonprofit to afford.
 
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