Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011
I know I've made this point before on the board, but why is an extension to Porter dead obvious?
1) Porter already has a rapid transit connection to downtown
2) Anyone potentially connecting to the Green Line at Porter from the Red Line has the option of doing so 12 minutes later at Park Street, and is likely to access any Green Line station between Riverside and Science Park quicker via that route
3) Anyone in Porter or Davis trying to access Union Square or Lechmere can already do so via a bus connection (87 and 87/88, respectively). Since neither of these buses are among the T's busiest, a reasonable first step would seem to be to increase frequency on the 87/88 before investing millions in a rail extension.
I know, I know. People won't use the bus b/c they prefer rail. Maybe the legions of travelers thumbing their noses at the 87 should inform the people on the 1, 111, 66, 28, 23, etc about that rule.
The Red Line is extremely overloaded. Ridership going to downtown is already outpacing capacity and causing dwell times at Park, DTX, and SS that make it hard to keep schedules at rush hour (even when crap isn't breaking down). Currently carries as much as Orange + Blue combined, about 110K more daily than the entire commuter rail system, every T expansion project on the table ends up piling thousands more riders onto it, and its natural growth curve as-is just keeps going up and up and up. They have to spread transfer ridership away from those downtown stations or we're going to have B-line level scheduling problems on it in another decade. The deadest-obvious solution of course is the overdue Red-Blue connector peeling all the Blue transfers to under-utilized Charles instead of double-switching at Park or DTX. I still don't think that's going to be totally enough, though. Ridership growth is eventually going to re-saturate it without more radial connections.
Green-Porter has these advantages:
1) Pulls Cambridge commuters who need to get to the North Station/Haymarket area or switch to Orange Line NS-Oak Grove from needing to go well out of the way downtown to switch.
2) Opens up much easier downtown access to 77 and Alewife bus route riders from Arlington and other suburbs. They've got it painful if they have to get northbound from Park/DTX and can only do so by boomeranging downtown on an overstuffed RL after sitting on a bus in overstuffed traffic.
3) Harvard riders can avoid the crush to/from downtown, where they never get a seat, with a 1-stop reverse commute move to transfer. Seats available, minimal dwell times, low stress...and they're transferring at the terminal of a branch with much lower ridership as opposed to getting another sardines trip on Green or Orange downtown. If you're gonna have to ride 2 lines anyway, wouldn't you pick the faster one that has few people on it at rush? All that contra-flow traffic really helps at rush hour between Harvard-DTX on Red.
4) The 87 is not a fun bus...at all. Navigating Somerville Ave. to Lechmere is an exercise in pain threshold because of the huge multi- light cycle backups at the Union Sq. intersection. The Union-Porter corridor is so dense it needs the transit help just as badly as getting the branch to Union in the first place. The only reason the branch was not designed from Day 1 to go all the way and target Somerville Ave. relief is that the original plans for the Green Line extension had 1 branch only covering Union and Medford with a subway zigzag through Union connecting the two. That proved too expensive to engineer, and since serving Union was a Big Dig transit mitigation requirement for the extension they split it into two branches in the final design. Porter couldn't be accommodated in that final design because doing Union on its own branch at all was an unplanned compromise. Cambridge and Somerville via STEP recognize that this ROW only came available when the project was in late design stage, but that's why they want an independent later phase provisioned.
5) Porter redevelopment. Cambridge/Somerville have independently sketched out via public meetings future visions for Porter and upper Somerville Ave. to give the area more of an identity. One big part of that is tackling the giant Fitchburg Line canyon that separates the two. They've proposed air rights cover-over of the commuter rail from Beacon St. to the station, Somerville Ave. driveway from Exchange Mall, linear park and some sort of air rights development on top, and reconnecting more of the severed street grid in the Wilson Sq. area like Sacramento St. To do that construction work with all the rebuilding of retaining walls and whatnot to support air rights cover they're probably gonna have to ride the coattails of a transit project. This is it.
6) Easy to do. The ROW will fit it as-is on its property lines up to Beacon St. Park St. Somerville grade crossing at Conway Park is ideal location for an intermediate stop. From Beacon to Porter where the probable air rights cover is they'd likely peel out under the Fitchburg tracks in a box tunnel. Box tunnel is the cheapest and lowest-impact means of tunnel construction (it's how the Fields Corner-Ashmont subway was constructed over a former open-air cut). Regular under-street subways are much more involved because they require sewer and utility relocation and a 20-25 feet buffer between street and tunnel roof to sandwich all those utilities. A box tunnel needs no such buffer space, and the bare tunnel roof would in effect become the new Fitchburg trackbed with the tunnel walls becoming the new surface retaining walls supporting the air rights cover. And would have no impacts to Somerville Ave. because the 700 or so feet of tunnel is entirely under the Fitchburg ROW's footprint. Station would punch through the fare lobby wall underneath the commuter rail doors...short ramp upstairs for the CR, short ramp downstairs for the Green Line. Not inexpensive by any means, but put it this way: GL extension as 2 branches + the extra later tack-on Porter leg would price in-total significantly less than the original plan of 1-branch + Union subway + 1 extra stop further to West Medford. Bang-for-buck wise this is a lot better than what we started with.
