Green Line Extension to Medford & Union Sq

[vanshnookenraggen]

 

[Arlington]

Build it light. Get it running. Then do upgrades.
Organization before electronics before concrete

The key is all-door ops, and 3-car ops--which are already a 3x to 5x improvement on Newtons 2 door, 2 farebox ops.

At 10 minute headways, one-sided entry{CR + Fence assures that}, and near-nobody riding outbound in the AM, I don't see how track-crossing is a schedule reliability issue worth $250m in head-houses

And if schedule reliability needs fixing, start with signal priority on street ops of the B, C, and E.

And Union Sq still needs no headhouse, since the tracks end there. (With knockout sections for when we go on to Porter, and we need a headhouse then,)

 

[Matthew]

While there are technically ways to avoid it, both Fenway and Longwood (on "D") also rely heavily on at-grade track crossings to get passengers to and fro. Nobody is going to walk up the hill, around a long detour, merely to avoid a track crossing that takes them directly to the platform, if they don't have to do so.

Are you right about accessibility requirements being stronger nowadays? Absolutely -- and it's a great thing. And track crossings are not a good solution. Avoidance would be best.

Removing faregates (in favor of PoP) is not a small thing. Those are expensive proprietary technology that has a tendency to break down and needs constant monitoring by costly inspectors and maintenance techs. Perhaps even more significantly, the design of a station with faregates is more complex than a station without faregates: when you have faregates, you must design two separated, independent areas that do not allow passage except via the gates, but both must have sufficient maneuvering space for large crowds and both must be be completely fire-safe with proper egress. Without faregates, you only need a single such space.

Do I want to reopen the station design issue? Not particularly. But I have no doubt that use of PoP would save a lot of money both in capital expenditures as well as continual operating costs. That's why almost all newly-built, modern light rail systems use it.

 

[belmont square]

This is Somerville, with triple-decker density surrounding almost all the stations. Every single station is going to get passenger loads 2 to 4 times the typical D Branch station, much closer to actual heavy rail passenger counts. So you need to build your stations to accommodate those loads.

I don't think the 6 new glx stations are expected to carry more than the 6 station stretch of the d from reservoir to fenway. Other than the beyond airport station portion of the blue line, we're really not talking heavy rail ridership

 

[Arlington]

I don't think the 6 new glx stations are expected to carry more than the 6 station stretch of the d from reservoir to fenway.

Thanks for that image! Now imagine how awesome Reservoir-Fenway would be with consistent 3-car ops and barrier-free 9-door boarding, 6 doors of which are low-level (vs 2 car and 2 door). Now offer that at Union, Gilman, Lowell, & Ball. Sweet. (Keep College, Brickbottom, & Lechmere headhouses)

 

[Shepard]

I think laying the tracks to College Ave and completing the Union Branch is the best idea I've heard. Saves lots of money in the short term, and long term those Somerville in-fill stations are not really in doubt.

 

[fattony]

What flew for acceptable rapid transit in 1959 does not fly in 2019. What works in Norfolk with a few hundred passengers a day does not work in Somerville with 5,000 passengers per day at stations. This is not a surface streetcar line, and this is not Newton with nicely sized residential lots and light walk-up traffic.

This is Somerville, with triple-decker density surrounding almost all the stations. Every single station is going to get passenger loads 2 to 4 times the typical D Branch station, much closer to actual heavy rail passenger counts. So you need to build your stations to accommodate those loads. That means grade separation, no bullshit with track crossings. They are not safe for passenger loads that high, they are less safe for people in wheelchairs, and having to wait for floods of people to cross the track will absolutely murder your schedule reliability.

The D Branch is not a good comparison whatsoever. Only five stations actually force track crossings (Brookline Hills, Beaconsfield, Newton Highlands, Waban, Woodland - all less than 2000 riders/day), and all to the inbound platform. The others have an entrance/exit to both platforms. That means that when you have the largest crowds at once, many of them can directly exit the platform. That simply would not be true at Ball Square and Lowell Street, plus Union Square (island platform needed as a terminus without room for tail tracks).

The vehicle is the technology, not the service. The service that Somerville demands and requires is rapid transit, regardless of whether that comes as Green Line, Orange Line, or Silver Line. That means a service where passengers are separated from the paths of the trains at all times, with station designs suited to handle massive crowds. The south end of the Orange Line is a much better comparison for what level of demand we're looking at. Those concrete bunkers wouldn't be any cheaper than the stations as they are currently designed, especially if the MBTA got sued again for accessibility requirements. Ramps are not suitable for actual mass access, and dual elevators are the name of the game. POP saves absolutely nothing for these stations except the actual faregates - you can't actually skimp out on much else without making the stations less usable, less safe, or less likely to pass code. By the time you go through literally years of redesign - in the process completely fucking over the community through delays and through stations that don't serve them as well as these do - you're not going to save any money no matter how much you fantasize about third-world asphalt platforms.

Build it light. Get it running. Then do upgrades.
Organization before electronics before concrete

The key is all-door ops, and 3-car ops--which are already a 3x to 5x improvement on Newtons 2 door, 2 farebox ops.

At 10 minute headways, one-sided entry, and near-nobody riding outbound in the AM, I don't see how track-crossing is a schedule reliability issue worth $250m in head-houses

And if schedule reliability needs fixing, start with signal priority on street ops of the B, C, and E.

And Union Sq still needs no headhouse, since the tracks end there. (With knockout sections for when we go on to Porter, and we need a headhouse then,)

You've both convinced me

 

[tangent]

I think laying the tracks to College Ave and completing the Union Branch is the best idea I've heard. Saves lots of money in the short term, and long term those Somerville in-fill stations are not really in doubt.

If it comes down to cancel or scale way back, then this is the best way to scale back. Unbuilt stations will get built, but unbuilt extensions to the line won't.

 

[Arlington]

If it comes down to cancel or scale way back, then this is the best way to scale back. Unbuilt stations will get built, but unbuilt extensions to the line won't.

This was my first thought, but then gave into the temptation to drop 3 Newton-style stops at Gilman, Lowell, Ball (which are the stops that are getting only "infill" development and not real TOD anyway). That's a teeny bit of feature creep, but it s the very most useful part.

Besides, I don't think the FTA is going to let us keep our FFGA if we drop whole stops.

 

[Matthew]

FWIW I think I fully agree with whoever it was that said that this is just a problem of gouging.

Politicians have committed to this project at all different levels. They can't say no. And the consulting firms know that they can't say no. So they've goosed the prices up and up. The companies know that they can keep asking of more and more money and what choice does the public have?

It's bargaining, plain and simple. The contractors want more money, so they're yanking the price up as high as they think they can go without truly breaking the political will to do this. Secretary Pollack has to put the "no build" option back on the table if she's going to have any chance of calling their bluff.

You see the same shit going on in NY and NJ over the Hudson tunnels, or just about any other project. The corruption levels are sky-high here (I can't wait to leave) but I'm sure the same goes on in MA as well. The cost of the tunnels has nothing to do with how much it costs to tunnel, but rather, it has to do with how much money the public will tolerate being spent without causing electoral consequences.

 

[kjdonovan]

Gilman services what is currently the library, high school, and city hall. All of which the current administration has hinted or outright stated it wants moved elsewhere. The buildings are historic, but could be largely redeveloped to create a large new commercial and residential neighborhood with approximately the same footprint as the Partners HQ. This administration is probably heading out in another 3 years when Curtatone runs for governor, but the ground will be laid for future redevelopment of those parcels.

 

[Ruairi]

FWIW I think I fully agree with whoever it was that said that this is just a problem of gouging.

Politicians have committed to this project at all different levels. They can't say no. And the consulting firms know that they can't say no. So they've goosed the prices up and up. The companies know that they can keep asking of more and more money and what choice does the public have?

It's bargaining, plain and simple. The contractors want more money, so they're yanking the price up as high as they think they can go without truly breaking the political will to do this. Secretary Pollack has to put the "no build" option back on the table if she's going to have any chance of calling their bluff.

You see the same shit going on in NY and NJ over the Hudson tunnels, or just about any other project. The corruption levels are sky-high here (I can't wait to leave) but I'm sure the same goes on in MA as well. The cost of the tunnels has nothing to do with how much it costs to tunnel, but rather, it has to do with how much money the public will tolerate being spent without causing electoral consequences.

Thought this myself. Seems like madness to say that it could be off the table unless it's a bargaining position. If it wasn't, she wouldn't have said that until absolutely every option had been explored. The question, for me, is how long does the thing get delayed while they fight over the price. Seems like an expensive game of chicken at the tax payers expense.

 

[tocoto]

just for perspective...for $250M the state could buy 25,000 low income residents used cars. It's a lot of money for few miles of track and 5,000 trips a day.

 

[Matthew]

just for perspective...for $250M the state could buy 25,000 low income residents used cars. It's a lot of money for few miles of track and 5,000 trips a day.

Can we put that comparison to bed?

You could technically buy some kind of vehicle. And let's assume away all of the difficulties associated with buying a used car. Now who pays for the gas, the insurance, the registration, the driver training (for those without licenses), the parking, the pollution, the sudden influx of traffic on roads already full...

Oh and "5,000 trips a day?" That's South Coast Rail. GLX is projected closer to 50,000 and will likely outperform that. The fundamentals are good. The rising cost is highly suspicious.

The problem here is that the Commonwealth is getting ripped off and doesn't know how to stop it. This is the problem when you depend entirely on outside consultants to do this kind of work.

From an article about Madrid Metro Sur construction (cost: $41.3 million / kilometer):

No large firm of consulting engineers
was hired as general project managers. It is
the author’s opinion that experience in
other cities and countries has shown that
such an approach does not actually produce
savings in time and cost. The project
management of the civil engineering and
architectural elements was carried out by
just three Chief Engineers, and six further
engineers, all of whom were direct employees
of the Madrid Regional Government.
Electrical and mechanical installations have
been carried out by this group, together
with other Madrid Metro staff.

 

[The EGE]

I don't think the 6 new glx stations are expected to carry more than the 6 station stretch of the d from reservoir to fenway. Other than the beyond airport station portion of the blue line, we're really not talking heavy rail ridership

No, that's not true. The EIS predicts 49k boardings and alightings (thus 24500 boardings), which averages out to 3500 boardings per station. (That's 2030 ridership; 2019 ridership is estaimated at 92% of that). Only three D stations come even close to 3500 a day, and the entire line Fenway-Riverside is 24,600 per day. And that's with GLX estimates that are probably major lowballs. Among stations with similar residential+commercial density to what's planned for the GLX, Porter gets 8800 boardings a day, Davis 12800, Oak Grove 6600 (including 500 or so park and rides). And Davis was never expected to perform anywhere near that well. So we're talking about the possibility that actual ridership will skew rather higher.

Airport-Wonderland is about the same, but that's dragged up by the major transfer stations at Airport and Wonderland. Per-station ridership will be rather higher than the Wood Island - Revere Beach stretch.

Not building the intermediate stations is an incredibly useless idea. That guts the ridership, guts the usefulness of this project to Somerville, and gets you 10% of the benefits at 90% of the cost. You're still not going to save much on the stations - either you spend the money now to have the provisions for future stations (bridge widenings, drainage), or you spend more later to do that work after the corridor is actually in place. I'm willing to bet construction costs are higher in the middle of an active rail line, too.

Want to actually save money on this? Get it done faster. Construction cost goes up way faster than inflation does.

 

[vanshnookenraggen]

just for perspective...for $250M the state could buy 25,000 low income residents used cars. It's a lot of money for few miles of track and 5,000 trips a day.

This is a really stupid comparison. Apples and oranges.

 

[Arlington]

This is a really stupid comparison. Apples and oranges.

He said it was for PERSPECTIVE not comparison. I take that as a question of scale, not substitution. The scale of the overrun is enormous when you consider the impact that $250m can have on people's mobility.

But I'll push the comparison at least this far: when the price of apples gets out of control, folks start substituting oranges.

The Government's goal is to deliver mobility to a large number of people affordably. There has to come a point where gratuitous overruns come too-obviously out of the rest of the state's mobility budget.

More to the point, Beacon Hill is going to freak if they see $250m in statewide-collected gas-taxes being diverted to cover overruns in Somerville, knowing that to do so, some of it will have to come out of, say, plain-old, cost-predictable, repavings and stripings in the other 39/40ths of Senate districts and the other 156/160ths of House districts.

Out in Podunk, just about anything you can buy for $250m (used cars, repaving all of East Brookfield) would have more political appeal than uncapped construction costs.

 

[West]

It's bargaining, plain and simple. The contractors want more money, so they're yanking the price up as high as they think they can go without truly breaking the political will to do this. Secretary Pollack has to put the "no build" option back on the table if she's going to have any chance of calling their bluff.

I increasingly agree with Matthew. The state’s only credible way to rein in costs is to credibly threaten to cancel contracts (especially the consultants’ contract) and let it out to bid again.

Thought this myself. Seems like madness to say that it could be off the table unless it's a bargaining position. If it wasn't, she wouldn't have said that until absolutely every option had been explored. The question, for me, is how long does the thing get delayed while they fight over the price. Seems like an expensive game of chicken at the tax payers expense.

It is an incredibly risky game of chicken. But just knuckling under to escalating costs has gone past the “risky” stage and has reached the stage of actually realized bad news. If MA cancels contracts and starts over, the people who currently have contracts get to be re-exposed to risk along with the taxpayers.

Baker and Pollack have access to way better economic forecasting than most of us. The great macro-economic risk these days is deflationary pressures, with events in China at the forefront. The relatively low price in oil derives from that, and the long and insane real estate bubble in China may also finally be popping, and event that would be vastly more significant than their stock market drop. All of this could very easily portend better pricing around the world for construction materials. It will take a while for it to work through the system, but then renegotiating contracts on GLX will also take a while. It would be incredibly risky to gamble on this, not least because no one, not even the Chinese government, knows what the hell is really going on in the Chinese economy. But staying the current course on existing contracts already has the skyrocketing costs baked in.

 

[fattony]

I read in the Globe today that Lechmere, Union, Washington, and Gilman would account for 75% of ridership and the 3 outer stations the remainder. That is a nice Paredo answer to the question of where to make cuts if they are really needed.

That said, I agree with Matthew that Pollack and the State are absolutely negotiating and I don't think the project is in as dire straights as is being suggested.

 

[The EGE]

You can't do that. CLF absolutely has the state by the balls. Unless the project is completed to "Medford Hillside" - which is Winthrop Street by all historical definitions, but the state managed to get College Ave tolerated - then they will file another lawsuit, and there is zero doubt they will win. The upside of that is that because the project is specifically a result of the CA/T construction, tolling 93 is much more likely to pass USDOT muster than it would otherwise.