Green Line Extension to Medford & Union Sq

Wasn't one of the benefits of the GLX supposed to be 'balancing' the system as a whole and reducing the number of trains that had to short turn at Park Street, Government Center or North Station?
 
What's the point of a single-track shuttle? If that's the plan, why not just axe Union Sq all together and run more frequent 87 busses or an 87A between Porter and Lechmere via Union? According to the current plan, Union essentially has two stations. "Washington" on the main line and "Union" on the Union branch. Both are on the periphery of the square in different directions. Inman Sq loses out more from axing the Union Branch than Union Sq does.
 
Texasian said:
Wasn't one of the benefits of the GLX supposed to be 'balancing' the system as a whole and reducing the number of trains that had to short turn at Park Street, Government Center or North Station?
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Kinda, but what's your point?

Trains short turn today because (1) we don't have enough of them and (2) too few trips start/end on the northern end of the GL. The balancing was more about finding people to sit in seats in the "counter-rush" direction, and then justifying new ops in underused tunnels.
 
BussesAin'tTrains said:
What's the point of a single-track shuttle? If that's the plan, why not just axe Union Sq all together and run more frequent 87 busses or an 87A between Porter and Lechmere via Union?
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"Because busses ain't trains" seems like the correct answer to that.

Restated: cross-platform, in-system, all-doors transfer @ Lechmere.

It really depends if Baker believes that voters in Somerville can tell the difference between construction on a single track line vs a double track line by 2018.
 
Arlington said:
"Because busses ain't trains" seems like the correct answer to that.
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Would be if the train was connected to anything... What's the point of this shuttle that just pings back and forth? The Mattapan shuttle is a relic, they shouldn't be building anything like that anymore.
 
BussesAin'tTrains said:
Would be if the train was connected to anything... What's the point of this shuttle that just pings back and forth? The Mattapan shuttle is a relic, they shouldn't be building anything like that anymore.
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I'm thinking it connects at Lechmere, what do you see as "not connected"

And connections, if cross-platform, work well. I'm assuming they'd have a dance at Lechmere not unlike the dance that the CTA's Purple/Red do with the Skokie Swift (a shuttle) at Howard St. (F-Line, yes, I know, Howard is a 4 track, 2 platform with turning-loop vs Lechmere is just a center island. I don't know if the [end-change] required for a U-shuttle would gum things up, I assume Arup has some sense that at 5-minute headways a shuttle could turn)
 
BussesAin'tTrains said:
What's the point of a single-track shuttle? If that's the plan, why not just axe Union Sq all together and run more frequent 87 busses or an 87A between Porter and Lechmere via Union? According to the current plan, Union essentially has two stations. "Washington" on the main line and "Union" on the Union branch. Both are on the periphery of the square in different directions. Inman Sq loses out more from axing the Union Branch than Union Sq does.
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The bus is slow and constantly stuck in traffic.
 
Arlington said:
I'm thinking it connects at Lechmere, what do you see as "not connected"
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He's talking about being connected into the Green Line itself, being able to ride from Union to Heath or wherever that branch is going. It's all about the 1 seat rides or 2 seat connections to Red, Blue, Orange, or bus.
 
datadyne007 said:
He's talking about being connected into the Green Line itself, being able to ride from Union to Heath or wherever that branch is going. It's all about the 1 seat rides or 2 seat connections to Red, Blue, Orange, or bus.
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Right. I don't see the benefit of having isolated rail lines that are not integrated with the system. The Ashmont-Mattapan is another example that should be whacked; not for busses, but for an RLX. What Arlington is calling efficient cost-cutting, I see as horribly inefficient and useless transit; just to say "we did something for less $! And it's still a TRAIN!"

Again, if you want to save money by slicing and dicing, cut the Union branch outright. Union will still have a station at Washington (Inman loses out the most in this scenario, but that's Cambridge) and Somerville still gets the main transit line up the gut, negating some bleating from City Hall. No need for a half-assed, political "high-speed shuttle" at all.
 
And yet, the Skokie Swift provides useful transit by just ping-ponging off a busy mainline exactly as a USq shuttle would to Lechmere (desirable enough they extended it beyond Skokie, eventually, though it never ever went to the Loop)
 
While I can see a benefit of a back-and-forth ping-pong from Union Sq. to Lechmere, wouldn't that basically entail a substantially more complicated Lechmere station design to allow Union trains to turn and get the cross-platform transfer Arlington envisions? And of course Union Sq. Station will also need to be redesigned from scratch in this case.

And if a one-track line is being built to avoid having to do as much with the Fitchburg line, the line also becomes impossible to upgrade to a full branch down the line without destroying the single-track line's infrastructure, which is kind of an unpleasant outcome. Also probably kills the possibility of a Porter extension.
 
What's the cost savings here? Building one flyover of Fitchburg, instead of two and losing the headhouse? While having to find room to squeeze a third track, bare-bones transfer station at Lechmere station? I'm just not getting it.

Maybe fun sandboxing. But not a good proposal moving forward on GLX...
 
Interesting stuff in that presentation. Anyone familiar with viaduct design here? What's the advantage of using ballast in the original design as opposed to direct fixation or in using side-mounted catenary poles as opposed to center? (I assume there must have been an advantage or they could've done the lighter thing in both cases)

Will downsizing the Vehicle Maintenance Facility as proposed be a problem for future expansion or upgrades?
 
I'm not sure we aren't all way ahead of ourselves. Has anyone actually studied what it would cost to BUILD this project? We can't keep extrapolating from WSK's estimates, because we know those were inflated. How much off the $3B do we save simply by rebidding the project?

The nature of this story is that answers are a little hard to grab, but here's a guess:

http://www.mbta.com/uploadedfiles/About_the_T/Board_Meetings/3-BRGLookback.pdf

It's from November, but see slide 14. No budget at the time the presentation was written. Have they made a reliable one since then? Is $2.99B the real number, per slide 11? If so, why do they say they don't know?

If it's a $2.5B project in reality compared to the $2.3B that they thought it was, then you have to cut a lot less, yes?

What I'm missing here (as I've been missing it throughout the Baker Administration) is the positive ambition. Has anyone bothered to ask what it would cost to build this project under a better contract arrangement, or did everyone just jump to cutting things?

That's all these people are about: Cutting things. Killing things. We're following right alongside them by discussing their limited menu of unpalatable choices without understanding what palatable ones we might have.
 
^ I agree with you. We're all extrapolating based on flawed numbers; but it seems like we're doing so based on signals from the administration that they don't have any. positive ambition about this project.
 
http://www.mbta.com/uploadedfiles/About_the_T/Board_Meetings/3-BRGLookback.pdf

I scanned back a bunch of pages, and I don't think this has been discussed, sorry if it has. Based on the PPT above, here's a summary of how costs actually got inflated.

- MBTA picked a CM/GC contracting structure. Under that system, the project budget was split into 7 incremental guaranteed maximum price (IGMP) segments. What was supposed to happen was that an independent cost estimator (the "ICE") would set an estimate when design was complete on that segment, and WSK would quote any number up to 110% of it. Thus, the total project cost would not exceed 110% of this cumulative ICE-produced total.

- WSK produced a budget when they bid for the work. Extrapolating non-construction costs and contingency (not sure why that was necessary), Slide 11 has that budget at $2.35B.

- The MBTA never bothered to set a budget, nor did the ICE. The budget was seen as a completely moving target. As the design contractor (HDR/Gilbane) completed design work on each segment, they'd offer an estimated cost that was roundly ignored by all parties. Instead, the ICE and MBTA would throw out a number, WSK would refuse to do the work for 110% of it and would suggest a different number, and they'd work to an agreement, essentially throwing out the ICE and bidding each phase like they were buying a car.

- The first time this happened (October 2014), extrapolating WSK's agreed-upon IGMP for IGMP 1-3 (i.e., the first chunk) gave an extrapolated total cost of $2.46B.

- The second time this happened (August 2015), extrapolating WSK's agreed-upon IGMP for IGMP 4A (i.e., the first BIG chunk) gave an extrapolated total cost of $3.09B.

One month later, an unexplained peer review study gives us $2.99B, including the inflated total for IGMP 4A. I can't find any paperwork on how that estimate was done, but Slide 14 insists that no one has ever actually costed out this project. AFAIK, the only independent estimate of what it SHOULD cost to build is from Arup, which I think argued that if you cut all of their proposed stuff, you'd save 40%, to a total of $1.8B.

My point is, we haven no firm reason to believe that $3B is the actual project cost. What if Arup is correct? I'm not sure, because Arup's cost savings slide is trash. It adds up to 109%, so the bottom can't be a total. Does it mean percentages of the 40% maximum, with 9% made up of newly-incurred costs? If so, cutting Union Square and replacing it with buses saves 15% of 40%, or $180M. If that's right, is that really worth cutting Union Square if doing all the other VE gets you to $1.98B?

We have no basis for discussion. We don't know what any of this costs, and we don't even know what it should. It's imaginary numbers.
 
The lack of real numbers has on and off made me nervous about what was happening with the cost inflation but I never realized it was that bad until now. So essentially no one knows what this really costs but is acting like it costs what a contractor that can say anything they want is saying... Am I reading this correctly?
 
citylover94 said:
The lack of real numbers has on and off made me nervous about what was happening with the cost inflation but I never realized it was that bad until now. So essentially no one knows what this really costs but is acting like it costs what a contractor that can say anything they want is saying... Am I reading this correctly?
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Here's what I'm saying:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/111hO7GeyRqoPgsHw_Rboe-KqTrHdx1b4Hz9m-SR-2HY/edit?usp=sharing

This is what I've collected over the past hour. Note the bottom. When the MBTA cancelled the contracts (thus freezing the budget), $567M has been committed. Presumably some of that was for ongoing work on IGMP 1-4A, but let's assume that's half the total. We get $670M committed, only $103M of that going to anyone under the cancelled contracting system.

Key point: This was caught in time. The Commonwealth lost some money on WSK's overestimate of 1-4A, but only 48M, assuming that the overrun rate in this Globe article holds true:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2...e-extension/2GIx45SiQdXotzJZJtmB5N/story.html

WE OWE NOTHING ON THE REMAINDER. We have basically returned to zero. Any estimates based on WSK's haggled numbers vanished in December.

So... we're left with this mystery "Peer Review", done in September (so including WSK's inflated 1-4A but not 4, but with 4-7 estimated in that context). That's where I know $3B from. I'm confused by that number, because it's only $100M off of the $3.09B extrapolation that was hyperinflated by WSK's haggling.

Another key point: That estimate is NOT where everyone else knows $3B from, I think. All the media reports in mid-September (and since) have pegged the $3B estimate to extrapolation, not to re-estimation. I'm not sure whether that was a mistake.

Reality in September was that WSK's 1-4 was committed. That's $206M. Assuming $567M from before is still committed, WSK was assumed to receive $2.217B for the rest of the project by the Peer Review, and $2.317B using extrapolation.

Are you telling me that with all the haggling that you're blaming for this entire problem, WSK only overestimated the actual cost of the project by 4.5%? That's within the 10% that they were allowed, so how is this their fault, then?

Did WSK just underestimate to $2.35B earlier intentionally, knowing they could negotiate the cost of the project higher and higher by increments?

And the question of the day: Who the heck did that $2.99B estimate, and what were their assumptions when they did it? We know they assumed $670M or so was on the books, but how did they do the rest, and how much did they inflate it based on what was known in September? Remember... the RFI didn't go out until November 3rd. The MBTA hadn't done any due diligence in the industry at that point.
 
Equilibria: it is pretty obvious that Arup's savings slide is about overlapping elements, but each element is assigned a % of project for scale-comparison. Stations are 25% of all costs. Union branch (including its station) is 15%. Each row potentially includes iteme in the other rows.

If you say "let's simplify all stations by half" Arup is telling you you're addressing 25% of budget, and implying that saving 50% on 25% saves 12.5%. (They are also pretty explicit that the stations are over designed, suggesting Yawkey instead)

Arup's notes that given the double counting it nets out to 40%, with their big focus being on simpler Lowell Line construction , touching the CR less everywhere,and simpler stations.
 
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