Green Line Extension to Medford & Union Sq

That is true, but it just feels like it's not being calculated in.

It is brought up at every meeting. And there is that official response (it's on reddit somewhere) that also acknowledge it. All the discussions and planning is the bare-bones to save the project rather than an extra measure or financial prudence trying to get maximum value by getting the most essential for minimal cost.

The key reason for this feeling of this is the of any sense of planning in the scenario of what should we do if we reduced the cost below $2bn with some signs of ability and fore-planning on the scaling of features back up in light of being below that and/or by additional funds that should raise the minimum threshold (like the $75 million and other moving of the budget).


Theoretically, all of this maneuvering plus a new contractor should mean a new cost of being well below $2bn. Plus with the moving of earmarked money and offers additional money pushing the $2bn to $2.1bn and etc. Yet, when someone asked if it can be scaled back up if have the means, the response wasn't exactly straightforward.
 
The biggest villain here seems to be the 3rd party cost estimator. While they were supposed to be working for the T to serve as the check to the contractor, they instead increased the price in lockstep with the contractor. This seems like malpractice and failure of duty to the client. The T ought to focus their legal department here and sue them at least to recover the cost of the redesign and rebid.
 
The original plan was for a ramp up from the inbound Union Square track to the inbound mainline, and a jug-handle ramp on the other side for the outbound (with a branch to the maintenance facility, but I think they dropped that). They're looking at eliminating the inbound ramp and sending both tracks up the jug-handle, with a flat interchange at the top. They said they can't send both up the short ramp because there's no room to put a flat stretch for trains to wait before merging into the mainline. (Question is whether a two-track long ramp is actually cheaper than long and short single-track ones.)
 
Why is this so expensive for less than 5 miles? They don't even have to dig up any streets.
 
ceo said:
The original plan was for a ramp up from the inbound Union Square track to the inbound mainline, and a jug-handle ramp on the other side for the outbound (with a branch to the maintenance facility, but I think they dropped that). They're looking at eliminating the inbound ramp and sending both tracks up the jug-handle, with a flat interchange at the top. They said they can't send both up the short ramp because there's no room to put a flat stretch for trains to wait before merging into the mainline. (Question is whether a two-track long ramp is actually cheaper than long and short single-track ones.)
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Too late to change the Red Bridge junction plan anyway. The support pegs were one of the non-canceled contracts, because proximity to the commuter rail and need for the staging area to occupy a Northpoint parcel means commuter rail ops get impacted and that private parcel can't be built on until all the space-intensive contruction staging is cleared out. It'd be 100% sunk cost to change the flyover alignment at this point, and a pause means they have to bogart just as much side space if/when they resume work. The only thing they can defer is the actual steel-laying of the deck on top of the finished pegs, because that can be done whenever using a narrow-profile work zone.

December progress. I haven't seen any more recent shots, but work continues. They had cages for a half-dozen more pegs assembled on the grown at the time this pic was taken.

640px-Red_Bridge_viaduct_supports_under_construction%2C_December_2015.JPG


Big pegs to the left are the mainline, smaller pegs immediately adjacent are for the Community Path (only a couple of those have been poured, which is why the path routing is changeable), and the half-poured pegs to the right are for the Union Branch flyover. Note how close the artists' lofts are from the work site, and that 4 RR tracks of Fitchburg Line are immediately below those two mainline supports in a trench.


So you can see what I was describing in my last post. The flyover has to swing out to make room for itself amid the tight pinch on the NW side of the Fitchburg trench and the loft property, and then has to drop close to 40 feet to get down into the trench before the McGrath overpass just out-of-view to the left. There's no other way to do it. The only real changes or deletions they can make is simplifying the feeds from the carhouse. That was going to be a flyunder on the Medford Branch side, which seems overly complicated when non-revenue moves are sparse enough to be fine with an at-grade junction. But that's not a hugely consequential project change in the grand scheme either.
 
bigeman312 said:
Decision Day. Any predictions?
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Unless it is cancelled outright, then my big prediction is that it doesn't really get decided today... It moves forward (but essentially delayed), made pending on additional Federal money.

This part seems key: "State officials have also taken initial steps to shift additional federal funding– originally planned for a later, further expansion of the line to Route 16 in Medford — toward this phase of the project."
 
Yeah. This will be a press conference of pending follow-ups. Up/down just isn't going to happen right now when so much community feedback, the trail folks' revised plan, and the Cambridge/Somerville offers of financial assistance (still un-ratified by the city councils) all came down in a torrent the last 10 days. It's too much information to process so quickly, much less get revised price quotes from the contractor consultants in an instant.

The media should've known better than to hype this as D-Day. Nothing this complex ever gets decided in totality with one statement.
 
T consultants to present scaled-down Green Line plan

Consultants hired by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority have designed a scaled-back Green Line extension proposal that would cost about $2.3 billion, but the state’s top transportation official says many questions remain about whether the state is ready to build it.

The MBTA’s board is weighing whether to continue with the long-awaited Green Line light rail extension into Medford and Somerville after officials revealed that its original $2 billion cost estimate could be off by up to $1 billion. On Monday afternoon consultants hired by the T’s board to cut costs will present a new version of the project, which they say will cost $2.3 billion.

But even with a simpler project and additional money pledged by Cambridge, Somerville, and a regional planning organization, the MBTA would still have to fill at least a $70 million gap to finance the project, according to Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack.

...
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You have to figure they find a way to close this relatively small $70,000,000 gap. For a major project like this, that seems like a minor amount and not something that should hold the project up.
 
We should have an AB pool over when a Green Line train ever carries revenue service past Lechmere. At this point I'd throw my monopoly money on June 2020.
 
The EGE said:
We should have an AB pool over when a Green Line train ever carries revenue service past Lechmere. At this point I'd throw my monopoly money on June 2020.
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I think you're way too early on that. The Globe article quotes Pollack as saying that if the board were to go forward with the revised plan, construction wouldn't begin for "at least another 18 months."

So late Nov/Dec 2017 at the earliest. I think mid to late 2021, or maybe even 2022 is the best case scenario. Better than having the project killed altogether, but still more waiting.
 
Maybe I haven't lived here long enough, but its mind boggling that the state can't figure out to build an up to date, modern transit extension.

I'm a supporter of the GLX, but at the end of the day, paying $2.3 billion for a 5 mile extension along existing ROW to 1950's standards is appalling. Something stinks, and its not the station bathrooms because those have been cut.
 
June, 2018. That's right. I am the optimist who is constantly let down. I also don't think the project will be complete by then, but rather we will see a train running to Union and/or Washington around that date.
 
$2.3 Billion? This doesn't make sense to me. My understanding is the consultants is about present a total bare bones version of GLX. A version with ramps everywhere, scaled back bridge, less retaining walls, and minimized bike paths. Then there's my understanding that essentially all the $1BN estimate is contractor bloat.

Yet again, this is another example of it means when comments comes up of "what about the contractor bloat?" Yes, we have councilors voice about it. Yes, it is mentioned multiple times in every meeting. Yes, there's that response on Reddit by Kate Fichter that acknowledge and explain a fitting logic of making a total review and maximizing the chance of being the right price by attacking both ends of cost drivers.

But, does that article and pricing give any hint of that?

Then there's also the mention that is still $70 million dollars short? I thought the contingency budgeting is at roughly $300 million? Thus fitting to the $2.3Bn and that's not including the Cambridge/Somerville offer. Granted, they may not want to put the entire contingency, but that does mean the money is prepared.


None of this make sense. Does anything want to explain to me how am I wrong in these understanding of these numbers? If these numbers are right with my understanding, then the only viable conclusion I can derive is they manage to cut down $700m in features and thus the new cost is $2.3bn thus whoever wins the new contract still get to run away to the bank and we'll get a GLX that is closer to the D-line but at a price (or my understanding of what should be the price) closer if we had chosen to extend the Blue Line to Somerville.
 
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No, it doesn't make sense. There is no way in hell this still comes out as high as $2.3B unless they're ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ at the contractor fraud. Comparable transit projects in the U.S. simply don't cost that much, as has been analyzed to death by many transit bloggers.
 
Really would need to see an itemization of work done and the cost to see what makes sense.

From what I have read there is a lot of blame going around for the overruns on money already spent on work already done or in progress now. Although, even say if they wasted $350 million of the $700 million already spent or committed, that doesn't account for it all.
 
Yep. That maint facility was chock full of lard. They need storage and a spot-repair garage, not a mini-Riverside nerve center. If they need shop space for future expansion when we're in Urban Ringsville, that's what parking garage'ing Riverside to claim the south lot for more maint space is for or glomming onto some cheap abutting industrial property in Everett/Chelsea is for. The halving of car storage space might bite them in the butt in a 4-car train Central Subway era, but the facilities always looked way excessive for the task.
 
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