From my perspective, it's not obvious to me what the benefits to closing stations are, though? What are the actual cost savings?
- Maintenance: how much maintenance do these stations really get? I'm sure it's not non-zero, but? I mean, there's snow removal?
Pretty much. The ones on the closure list are all non-ADA, so it's a deferral of upgrade monies they'd have to spend later. In the case of Plimptonville the funded double-track Phase III through there sticks another fork in it for access to the opposite track.
- Lighting: seems like a very small savings, and potentially not even available if you need to keep the lights on for liability reasons
Def negligible with LED's. I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually start seeing solar cells on the canopies powering the station lights off-grid, so that will really really bring utility costs down. There's also the ASA scrolling displays...but the modern-install ones use less juice than the 20-year-old (red LED) ones at a lot of stops. Also nothing preventing radio-controlled e-Ink displays where it's not worth the cost to do a full install.
- Parking: probably the biggest immediate savings -- end the contract with the "pay to park" company, although likewise lose out on any possible revenue -- again, absent snow removal, it seems like there's very little maintenance cost here
Yeah, although parking revenue collection needs a shitload of efficiency-minded reform. If AFC 2.0 weren't such an integration dumpster fire, we'd have
co- Charlie + EZ-Pass (for garages and/or controlled-exit lots) parking fare integration yesterday. Nevermind the number of overly parking-centric stops to begin with. They lose the biggest share of money on those concessions because of slophouse administration.
- Operations: Okay, so you shaved 2 minutes off the train's runtime... that's not really, you know, a lot
And totally situational, to boot. Do you skip stops because you're running layer-cake services (see: Worcester Line, Newton...or possibly Haverhill-via-Wilmington skipping West Med or Wedgemere) where differing schedules need to be balanced? Okay...but then the layer cake is valuable enough in itself that you've got crossovers for managing the meets/overtakes and well-defined service tiers still keeping everything slotted with logic. Is this the NEC? Yeah...with the Amtrak vs. Purple speed differential past Ruggles you've got a new outbreak of conflicts if Forest Hills starts appearing on any Providence/Stoughton schedules. Ditto if Hyde Park can't be rebuilt as 2 side platforms w/ 2 center passers after Tk. 4 comes back. Ditto why there will never be calls for the 1970's
East Foxboro stop to come back as a flag stop between Sharon and Mansfield when CR has a shot of topping 90 MPH on that stretch.
Other than that, we simply don't have enough differentiation between key stops and
anti-key stops to systematically treat the nothingburgers as a separate class. Especially when ADA has to be considered.
Every stop, whether new or accessibility-unupgraded, needs a hook of some sort.
I suppose that if you severely cut multiple stations on a line, you could justify running shorter sets with smaller crews, but... again, like, what's the point?
None...because shorter sets don't really make a difference.
(1) The braking profile of current T push-pulls mandates 4-car minimums or else there's a speed restriction. With
xMU's all their studies to-date (both the older DMU look and the current EMU RFI) eyeball 3-car self-propelled minimums, not a whole lot different. Now...Amtrak maintains its brake systems to run as small as 1-car trains on the
Springfield Shuttles and Metro North as small as 2-car in CT branchline territory, but as a scale fit 4 is roundest number that makes sense for the T's systemwide fleet management for push-pull (as will be 3 cars when we're running self-propelled). Braking systems today are technologically way, way different than when we were running 1-car RDC singlets 50 years ago; that's not a relevant example at all. It also makes no fuel/acceleration difference because the weight of an empty car is so cosmically lower than the weight of a full car.
(2) Even in the coming era of self-propelled cars, the downtime required for switching out cars to right-size consists is a huge time/cost chew. Obviously it needs a cumbersome switcher assist when it's push-pull, but considering that some of our likeliest EMU buying options may have unpowered sandwich cars there's also limits to how much fine-tuning becomes self-limiting. Especially given Reason #1 re: braking and the non-difference of empty car weight, it's never going to make sense to cut it below 4 P-P or 3 self-propelled cars. Just balance the staff accordingly and keep the extra cars closed when it's dead and that literally is the cheapest ops. Now...when we finally put fleet shortages behind us and have more uniform-configuration sets there'll need to be a lot more attention paid to optimal consist size on
greater-than off-peak, and balancing where applicable extra frequencies vs. crowd-swallowers. South Station in particular is going to need that because of the size/demand disparity between Providence/Worcester vs. branchline trains that may need to use the same platform. But that's extracurricular to this discussion of minimums. Minimums are pretty well-defined vs. the spread, for very practical reasons.
With the exception of Cedar Park, these proposed closures seem like a cross between "closing stations we've long wanted to close" and "sacrificing low-ridership and unadvocated stations in order to be seen to be doing something." All of which distracts from the things which will impact more people...
It would be easier if (1) Cedar Park weren't such an outlier, and (2) these closures were breached previously in a forum less politicized than this service cuts scare package. Plimptonville, for instance...we know the Norwood-Walpole double-track Phase III project was probably going to whack it because running wrong-rail for the inbound flag stops just to reach the P'ville platform just wasn't worth it, and neither is touching the station in any way to enable 2nd-track boarding. The DT project
didn't explicitly say anything about it; that's just sort of assumed. Likewise, the Rail Vision's needs for tightening bolts on Rockport schedule-keeping for :30 + :30 churn balance with Newburyport makes Prides Crossing an obvious one. But that hasn't been stated until now. The Weston trio vs. the 128 superstation: obvious that Hastings and SH are goners and that KG is transitional-only until the 128 stop gets built. Those areas can be way better served by buses to :15 Urban Rail terminating at the superstation. But, frustratingly, the Rail Vision makes no mention of the 128 superstation. Says a lot about infills elsewhere on the system...but brainfarted there despite advocacy that's been cooking hot >decade.
As for Cordage Park...we don't even know how the fuck service levels are capable of increasing so the Plymouth Line gains a mandate to clean up some of its initial missteps. South Coast FAIL Phase I pitting itself against Cape Cod threw that question into chaos. I guess we'll have to wait for a manufactured crisis like Kingston Collection's big-box moonscape closing its doors to throw the end of the line into existential crisis before somebody posits the question.
...like buses. As far as I can tell, there isn't actually published list of proposed route changes? Even though it looks like there is a map included in the powerpoint with exactly that information? (i.e. the list seems to exist, somewhere, internally)
There's a spreadsheet of bus routes GIS-fed into the interactive map, downloadable off the site they set up for the presentation. It's an absolute Yellow-paint bloodbath. Cuts to the Melrose routes, for instance, dovetail with the CR cuts in that the axe is so brutal it's just going to maim transit shares across town and take everything with it. I don't know if there's a lot you can read into it, though, since this was clearly the scared-straight presentation. You could get lost in the weeds there weighing pros/cons and what is/isn't likely to be real. Definite regional bias, though. North region and especially North Shore...which already get the poor end of the stick for bus frequencies...are gutted like a fish. Nothing multimodally makes a lick of sense anymore in context if those cuts are to be real.
