^ if Sullivan gets a RUR stop, looks like East Somerville / Inner Belt should too!
Never. Not there. The
only driver pushing the Sullivan superstation is access from RUR to the mega bus hub, particularly for North Shore linked-trip demand. And it's a slow-grower hedge at that, designed to safeguard from the 2-stop Orange transfer backtrack from North Station getting too overloaded after full-build RUR has swamped NS terminal with all kinds of new traffic sources. Even with that terminal saturation prospect it's expected to take many years for Sullivan RUR stop to start seeing sustainable utilization, because the RUR-induced transformation effect of linked trips enhancement really needs to sow itself across the whole system--
including car-free commute options to the outer Purple Line stops--for behavior change to start cranking up demand at a bus terminal like that. The only reason the Mystic Working Group has eyeballed the
build sooner is that the time to actually blow up chunks of retaining wall to create room for the Purple platforms @ Sullivan is when the City & MassDOT are executing their plans for a Square-tying grand headhouse fronting the current bunker, which will be pile-driving the shit out of enough concrete to begin with to make shotgunning construction jobs a potential cost-saver. It's widely expected, however, to take
decade or more to attract more than flies at whatever platform does get carved out of that retaining wall after it does open.
There is
no analogy to any other transfer stops, no matter how sky-high the surrounding TOD. Just Malden Center bus terminal and its pretty decent (at least alighting-wise) CR utilization that figures to get better with RUR frequencies, and Porter superstation. They already studied GLX/Purple superstation possibilities to the hilt in the initial scoping with Tufts and Union, finding no demand because those aren't major bus terminals. Umpteen-times rehashed "Zombie Wonderland" and "Zombie Alewife" likewise don't ever study out to demand despite presence of goodly amount of buses and promises of higher Purple frequencies because the transfers are shit-inconvenient by walking distance. For the same reason no amount of sky-high ceilinged TOD at Assembly is going to get an RUR stop plunked there, East Somerville will never qualify eiher. One 15-min. mode to one 6-min. mode simply isn't a behavior-changing draw. You need
buttloads of frequent buses fanning out across the compass from a bona fide terminal--
and the multi-modal rail transfer--to make it cook as a prospective superstation. The predictive data there has been so rock-solid consistent across a multitude of service configuration scenarios that it overpowers the quality/quantity of surrounding TOD.
East Somerville is mega TOD...especially after McGrath gets mercifully boulevarded. But it is not, in that best-case future, yet a diverging-route terminal of extreme significance...so the demand for a superstation isn't going to materialize no matter how high the neighborhood's fortunes go. Superstations consistently require certain discrete X-factor ingredients on the linked-trips. Many, many stratospheric dev. centers existing and future go big without ever having those ingredients...and thus they aren't ever superstation candidates despite their bigness.
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