Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011
That map is amazing! Talk about forward-looking vision! None of that actually even fully happened, only the RL and BL partially.
The most depressing thing is that every single one of those extensions is still a rated MPO project except for Allston/Newton, which is impossible now because the Pike Extension cannibalized former Tracks 3 & 4 of the Worcester Line that the extension was going to use.
-- Riverside was built, but it was built cheap and ahead of schedule before the MBTA came into existence. Coincidence?
-- Braintree was built, but initial construction was underway at the time the T was created by legislative fiat. All they did was keep the contracts the MTA inked going. And finish the Quincy-Braintree leg 10 years late. Coincidence?
-- Red to Alewife ended up taking the Mass Ave. and Fitchburg Cutoff RR routing instead of the Mt. Auburn St. subway and Watertown Branch, but Arlington Ctr. and Lexington still beckon after being cut back at the last minute.
-- Blue-Lynn is STILL a max-priority project.
-- Rozzie and West Roxbury are STILL shut out of the rapid-transit system. To add insult to injury, when it was decided that the Orange Line was going to relocate the loss of the El in Roxbury was supposed to be counterbalanced by this extension bringing Rozzie and West Rox into the city. Nope...they did the same exact weasel move and cut it at just the Forest Hills relocation.
-- That never-used Orange Line express track from Community College to Wellington was supposed to be for the Reading extension, and Wellington Yard had almost twice the tracks it does now because they built the Haymarket-north extension in anticipation of Reading. Nope...T folded like a chair and canceled the whole thing when Melrose NIMBY's started saber-rattling. As opposed to Greenbush and South Coast Rail where NIMBY's are there to be coddled and given limitless power of ransom.
-- Needham still keeps a lonely vigil for its extension, holding community meetings every year and passing resolutions emphatically in support of the extension and further discussions with the T. The last one just a few months ago, and citywide support's on a very strong upswing. Because they're above their pain threshold with Highland Ave. congestion, the overloaded bus this route would replace, and the Needham Line's perennially limited service due to meager track capacity from the south. And continue to pass resolutions they will...even when the resolutions say "Hey, T! You realize this is the cheapest of the never-builts to do?"
I think the state needs to sheer off the commuter rail into its own sub-agency. The buses, subway, and ferries all serve an exclusively Metro Boston district inside of 128. The CR almost exclusively serves an outside Metro Boston district, and the only inside-128 local commuters it does pick up are the ones the T broke rapid-transit promises for. BERy and the MTA had their district and their priorities square on the district. The MBTA doesn't know what it wants to be, other than it can serve no one well trying to be a statewide transit agency. Nothing more starkly illustrates that than South Coast Rail.
It had to take on certain necessary compromises at its founding because of the bankrupt private RR's and doubts that ANY kind of commuter rail would survive without subsidy. So it wasn't the case of the MBTA being doomed from the start. Far from it. But with the DOT reorganization busting up some of the gov't fiefdoms maybe it's time for a more logical mission statement and division of labor: a MassPort for ports, an MBTA for strictly Metro Boston transit, a MassHighway for highways, and a MassRail to manage the passenger and freight RR networks. Make them live in their own budgets in their own realms designed for purpose. It's physically impossible for the MBTA to manage itself with such contradictory missions, and subway vs. CR would get right-sized attention if they weren't co-mingled with one mode being a disproportionate parasite off the other. Don't forget, the Red Line carries more passengers than the ENTIRE commuter rail network. It's lunacy to starve it to death by cutting the Red-Blue connector while continuing to push sinkholes with one-tenth the ridership out in the suburbs. The number of fare-paying commuters is not even on the same planet to make this an objective debate.
The T's fiscal, maintenance, and project paralysis are the end-stage atrophy of having such a muddled district. These 1945 plans weren't pie-in-the-sky Tomorrowland/Jetsons ideals. BERy and the subsidized street railways (bus lines) were just consolidated into the MTA metro district with a 10-mile/128-like radius around downtown, and this was go-time for how they were going to charge ahead into the car and post-RR era. Get rid of the streetcar lines, supplant all the inner-suburb commuter rail the RR's can't swing anymore, and throw max vigor at a real rapid-transit system. It's basically the Washington Metro grafted onto a pre-existing 19th century subway, but pretty much the same district makeup and relationship with outer beltway and highways. We're 60 years late getting with that program, and that's a structural and leadership deficiency not a fiscal one. Anything is fiscally or temporally impossible if you're incapable of managing it or messaging it. That's where we are today: we can't f***ing move dilapidated shack Lechmere across the street.
