Green Line Extension to Medford & Union Sq

[F-Line to Dudley]

Could we someday reconfigure the Tufts/Medford station to have commuter rail / regional rail tracks as the outer tracks, Green Line as the inner tracks, and one island platform with the northbound Green Line (discharge only) on the inside and northbound commuter rail on the outside, and the other island platform with southbound Green Line on the inside and southbound commuter rail on the outside, to enable cross platform transfers from one mode to the other for passengers continuing in the same direction?

That would require building a flyover somewhere between that station and Ball Sq for the inbound commuter rail track to trade places with the Green Line tracks. At Tufts/Medford, the Green Line railheads would presumably be a few feet higher than the commuter rail railheads to get level boarding for both modes with cross platform transfers.

It looks like the ROW is only tangent for roughly 600' railroad north of College Ave before curving, so for 800' platforms, roughly 200' of platforms would need to be built south of College Ave, and the portion of the platforms south of College Ave might need to be built to be as narrow as possible.

An alternative might be to build the northbound platform for both modes at the same elevation as the current tracks, and build the southbound platform for both modes underneath that (or vice versa); that would eliminate the need to have one mode fly over the other.

If we extend the Orange Line to Reading, and give Haverhill via Wildcat 15 minute headways to Boston, plus give Lowell trains 15 minute headways to Boston, that should provide 7.5 minute headways on the Wilmington to Boston segment.

If commuter rail upgrades to trains that can accelerate at 2.5 MPH/s, could we reasonably have all Haverhill Line via Wildcat and Lowell Line trains make stops at both Tufts/Medford and where a Route 16 Green Line station has been proposed, making Route 16 a commuter rail stop instead of a Green Line stop (building platforms next to the existing tracks is probably a lot less costly than rebuilding bridges to support quad tracking)?

Why would we ever want to do that? CR options were studied during the MIS scoping eons ago, and the corridor characteristics showed absolute bupkis demand for an outer transfer. GLX isn't the slightest like Malden, Quincy Ctr., or Ruggles with their gigantic bus hubs or Porter with with the 1-stop proximity to a gigantic bus hub. Those are the only drivers for CR/rapid transit superstations on the system, and this corridor doesn't have a plausible candidate. It's primarily intra-Somerville and Somerville-CBD transit, with Tufts not being a commuter school and not being nearly the magnet for independent employer variety that the other big schools are. Ridership would absolutely blow for all the messiness construction would entail, and it would slow down Lowell/Haverhill too much to add too-far underutilized infill stops.

The NH Main arguably needs to reshuffle its deck of inner stops, because West Medford's patronage is going to crater and move to Route 16 down the street, with bus optimizations making frequencies to the 6-min. rapid transit transfer always more frequent than a :15 RUR turn. The siphon to Green is going to be too overwhelming for increased CR service to recoup the losses; West Med is firmly in the category of 'migratory' catchment once Route 16 opens. Wedgemere is a problem because it dilutes too-close Winchester Ctr.'s ridership and can't easily be raised to level boarding with a gauntlet track because of the curve. If the post-GLX bus revamp institutes a Davis-Winchester bus route via the 94's Boston Ave. routing that diverges up Playstead Rd. from West Med to Winch Ctr., it'll drag a lot of Wedgemere patronage to GLX-Route 16 or tied in a bow @ Winchester instead. In the end it'll be easier for Haverhill trains to skip West Med + Wedgemere altogether and start picking up the local stops at Winchester for the sake of keeping its end-to-end schedule at an hour, leaving just the :30 Lowell turns at West Med and maybe an excuse to abolish un-upgradeable Wedgemere altogether.


Inside-128 infills for RUR are being considered where the ridership duly slays...places like Salem State U., Newton Corner, Quannapowitt/128, Weston/128, enormous Sullivan Sq. bus hub (see point above re: Malden, QC, Ruggles, etc.), and West Station if the Beacon Park moonscape gets properly developed in our lifetimes. The consensus picks. RUR isn't some free-for-all where it's open season to spray new stops around like confetti for the hell of it where magic pixie dust will make a candidate that previously had no bona fides going for it suddenly contribute buff ridership. The ones that start out strong at CR frequencies stay strong at RUR frequencies; the ones that have fatal problems attracting flies at CR frequencies tend to have more widespread problems holding them back than just the underwhelming frequencies, or else they wouldn't look so squishy in the first place. Sites that have previously studied out with ass ridership--Wonderland, the co-GLX's, Alewife, etc.--are still going to study out with total garbage fundamentals because the sitings and transfer assumptions were flawed as hell to begin with and higher RUR service levels doesn't suddenly make flawed sitings un-flawed. No matter how much some advocates keep pushing those zombie repeats one more time as a political pet.

 

[Javier]

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

Why would we ever want to do that? CR options were studied during the MIS scoping eons ago, and the corridor characteristics showed absolute bupkis demand for an outer transfer. GLX isn't the slightest like Malden, Quincy Ctr., or Ruggles with their gigantic bus hubs or Porter with with the 1-stop proximity to a gigantic bus hub. Those are the only drivers for CR/rapid transit superstations on the system, and this corridor doesn't have a plausible candidate.

What's the best way for Lowell Line commuters to get to Cambridge jobs? EZ-Ride clearly has had some demand, but going all the way to North Station to get to Kendall is inefficient, and I've been thinking the NSRL station should probably be located near Haymarket instead of North Station since North Station's proximity to the Charles limits how much is within reasonable walking distance, but that relocation would probably imply that giving Lowell Line commuters going to Cambridge jobs a better option than West Medford or a station on the Boston side of the river should be explored, especially if we don't want Lowell Line commuters just transferring to the Red Line at South Station due to Red Line capacity concerns.

http://ariofsevit.com/apb/2017/10/28/thinking-big-lets-think-realistic-firs/ discusses capacity challenges with turning trains around at Alewife, and obviously one way to address that would be to extend track past Alewife to provide somewhere beyond Alewife where trains could reverse. But another option would be to add a second north side branch. What if we kept the Braintree trains going to Alewife, and diverted Ashmont trains away from Davis and Alewife and instead sent them to the Powderhouse Rotary and the Tufts/Medford station? The Powerhouse Rotary station would allow all 89 buses to continue toward Arlington Center while also serving the Red Line, instead of having some 89 buses go to Davis and some not, and if there were commuter rail platforms at Tufts/Medford, that would become a Red Line transfer point for Lowell Line and Haverhill Line via Wildcat commuters going to Cambridge jobs.

with bus optimizations making frequencies to the 6-min. rapid transit transfer always more frequent than a :15 RUR turn.

Did you read the part of what I wrote that I quote to repeat here:?

If we extend the Orange Line to Reading, and give Haverhill via Wildcat 15 minute headways to Boston, plus give Lowell trains 15 minute headways to Boston, that should provide 7.5 minute headways on the Wilmington to Boston segment.

Waiting an average of an extra 45 seconds for a 7.5 minute headway express (in the sense of fewer stops than Green Line, not in the conventional commuter rail express sense) train that will skip several Somerville stops will probably enable electrified commuter rail to provide faster West Medford to downtown Boston service than extending the Green Line, and we can provide faster outside 128 to downtown Boston travel times than today's diesel trains provide while adding a few infill stops if we upgrade to trains that accelerate better than diesels.

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

Javier, at some point within the last two months I was walking along Medford St and continued along Pearl St where Medford St was blocked off due to bridge work, but it looked to me like the way Medford St towards the bridge was blocked off had not taken white cane users into account. Do you happen to have any recent photographs of what that currently looks like?

 

[Arlington]

Lowell Line to Kendall via EZRide (or other employee shuttle from NS) works "well enough" that I have several neighbors (in West Medford) who do it. I think the first improvements for Lowell to Kendall are:
1) Dedicated bus lanes on Charles River Dam Rd (imminent!)
2) More Lowell "post rush" (9am to 10am and 6pm to 8pm) service for flexible (&long) tech workday
3) rework the 80/87/88 to tag from New Lechmere to Kendall or Central

The GLX is going to see big crowds on Foot in First Street from New Lechmere to all the new stuff in Kendall.

 

[Javier]

Hi Joel, I do have couple pictures of what it currently looks like

 

[Javier]

Today’s pictures

 

[Javier]

Looks like the Washington st bridge will be widened

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

What's the best way for Lowell Line commuters to get to Cambridge jobs? EZ-Ride clearly has had some demand, but going all the way to North Station to get to Kendall is inefficient, and I've been thinking the NSRL station should probably be located near Haymarket instead of North Station since North Station's proximity to the Charles limits how much is within reasonable walking distance, but that relocation would probably imply that giving Lowell Line commuters going to Cambridge jobs a better option than West Medford or a station on the Boston side of the river should be explored, especially if we don't want Lowell Line commuters just transferring to the Red Line at South Station due to Red Line capacity concerns.

Limited-stop Crosstown BRT on Route 16 spanning Alewife, Mystic Valley Parkway, Medford Square, Wellington, and Chelsea is a big circulating cog to enact at soonest convenience once MVP is finished. One that encourages multidude more plug-in pieces complementing it when you look at the bus routes that congregate around each of those nodes but the connections sorely lacking between them. Limited stops...say: Alewife-Mass Ave. (via busways), Broadway, MVP, Winthrop St., Medford Sq., Meadow Glen, Station Landing, Wellington, Gateway Ctr., Sweetser Circle, Chelsea. The layout of all those transfer nodes touching 16 screams for something radial to immediately tie the room together.

Then extend the Crosstown radial options off this spine with pieces that overlap off the trunk. For example, Alewife-Watertown Sq. is one of the most maddening transit gaps on the entire system. You literally can't get there from here without a convoluted Harvard-transfer intermediary that adds 45 minutes; that drove me insane when I lived in North Cambridge and Home Depot @ Arsenal was a car-only trip. So do something there, but maybe overlap the terminating end of the Watertown-Alewife radial-let to MVP on the first segment of the main 16 spine so there's some corridor continuity. And do the same running through some TBD Chelsea tie-ins to Wellington overlapping the easternmost leg. Strengthens it without the temptation to over-extend more than is truly wise for 16 traffic.

Next exponential change comes from the routes forking off. There's a pronounced bus desert in the Fells encompassing Medford, Winchester, East Arlington, and Stoneham where all the route density fizzes out very soon north of MA 16 and you only have 3 very long and very schedule-brittle north-south routes--350, 134, 132--going super-long distance past 128. Middlesex Fells Reservation being in the middle doesn't explain this; it's actually residue from ex- Eastern Mass Street Railway's extremely belated absorption into the MBTA in 1969. A giant crater had already been hollowed out by the Eastern's bankruptcy, and the T only accelerated that by heaping more service cuts. Now you've got both GLX coming up as a spine and Lowell Line RUR pumping :15 minute frequencies to both the Winchester/Woburn and Melrose/Wakefield sides of the cavity with extremely little last-mile connectivity. It all starts to blur into a jumble. You need lots more GLX connectivity out of MVP, and you need lots more RUR connectivity spanning out of Anderson, Winchester, and a would-be Montvale infill that's as close as rail is possible to downtown Woburn & Stoneham.

Working the GLX side is easy, and the Route 16 Crosstown route running at high frequencies makes it easier still. Right off the bat the GLX reshaping of Somerville routes serves up opportunity to initiate a fork of the 96 on the Davis-College Ave.-MVP circuit up Boston Ave. that diverges from West Medford to Wedgemere and Winchester, greater variety of Medford Sq. matchups, and more Arlington variety than the 80 currently provides. The Boston Ave. spine is pretty strong on frequencies now and will only get stronger once GLX is finished, but there's not nearly enough variety at the diverging points to cover the spread. MVP will catalyze all of that...and this is why West Medford is going to have a mass migration to GLX and not see any big recoup with RUR frequencies. It's the greater variety of buses hitting them as a diverging point that'll keep their travel patterns more firmly affixed to MVP vs. the commuter rail station. Same could be said with a siphon of Wedgemere into Winchester if the 134 got its headways strengthened with another route off the Davis-MVP flank rather than having their only route sent through Medford Sq. They'll become a lot more oriented to rapid transit and the Route 16 crosstown BRT, and Winch Ctr. will become the much firmer demarcation point in native RUR demand.

After that you've got to take some serious stabs at last-mile linkage from the RUR stops. Winchester Ctr.'s a good place to start as there's a lot of east-west density to tap spanning to Arlington and Stoneham. Ditto that would-be Montvale stop being right where the 132 changes from east-west out of Melrose to north-south into Reading. Let's see some genuine spanning of the Reading Line and Lowell Line stops with a couple routes to Woburn Center. And a little bit more at the north tip @ Anderson--west-side entrance completed of course--to tie things up in the district. Then of course the 128 commuter buses spanning the office parks and especially providing high frequencies Woburn-Burlington. As it stands the Reading Line is going to slay on ridership from Day 1 under RUR because its walk-up access is so good and Melrose at least has non-shit bus frequencies up 28 with the outflow from Oak Grove. But the Lowell Line needs troubleshooting because too many of these stops are inside the transit desert acquired on-the-decline by the T 50 years ago but never targeted for re-infill of lost routes. For example, if last-mile connections weren't so anemic there might be a leg to stand on reinstating the old Winchester Highlands stop @ Cross St. closed in 1978 as an effective 'tweener between Winch Ctr. & Montvale that has lots of natural density around it and isn't too-closely sited to the adjacent stops like Wedgemere. But there's zero buses on Cross St. or the whole of Washington...so why bother? It links nothing and starts out in way worse shape than Montvale which at least starts out from Day 1 with a pre-existing spanning bus to Woburn Ctr.

^Those^ are the sorts of things that need a lot of work for the 'vision thing.' It's a very hole-y corridor for last-mile connectivity right now, and that's not its natural condition.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Pt. II. . .

http://ariofsevit.com/apb/2017/10/28/thinking-big-lets-think-realistic-firs/ discusses capacity challenges with turning trains around at Alewife, and obviously one way to address that would be to extend track past Alewife to provide somewhere beyond Alewife where trains could reverse. But another option would be to add a second north side branch. What if we kept the Braintree trains going to Alewife, and diverted Ashmont trains away from Davis and Alewife and instead sent them to the Powderhouse Rotary and the Tufts/Medford station? The Powerhouse Rotary station would allow all 89 buses to continue toward Arlington Center while also serving the Red Line, instead of having some 89 buses go to Davis and some not, and if there were commuter rail platforms at Tufts/Medford, that would become a Red Line transfer point for Lowell Line and Haverhill Line via Wildcat commuters going to Cambridge jobs.

Crazy Transit Pitches stuff we can't enact for decades even if we tried. The big bone I've got to pick with Ari's analysis there is that he consistently misunderstands the function of yards...especially when they intersect with his temptation to play SimCity with real estate and he starts hopelessly confusing his aims. His other article on relocating Cabot Yard onto an unstable rock pile in Braintree blows through about a million red flags on feasibility and ignores just about every world HRT comparison where there are central yards, and begs a remedial re-education on the whole subject. But that's besides the point, because Alewife is the tertiary chokepoint of concern to the primary worsening Park-DTX dwells that are slowly making Red unmanageable under load...and our unwillingness to build the consensus Downtown load relievers like Red-Blue and Transitway-Downtown that perma-fix the problem. Cambridge demand, huge as it is, is always going to be a supplicant to Downtown overloading unless we start getting serious about building consensus-agreement relief projects that should've been built long ago. Branching--and all the thorny issues therein--is still several steps ahead of what decisions the system is living and dying on today.


But we also don't need to get that far ahead of ourselves. All of what I'm talking about ^above^ is bus augmentation to thicken the net in these areas, and hitting the ground running on that immediately as first shovel gets turned on Mystic Valley Parkway and we plan out whatever upgrade prereqs inner Lowell service needs to scale up to Urban Rail frequencies. Just heed the lesson that it's not necessarily the presence of large frequency capacity suddenly moving a lot of people along the corridor that decides whether a station is going to get utilization. The 'zombie' CR + rapid transit superstation proposals that keep coming up like Alewife & Wonderland separated a million-mile walk on asphalt from their transfers is proof of that; the projections always suck ass no matter what new frequency data gets fed into it because the sitings are too flawed to work. And the 'combo' GLX/CR superstations have been studied to death consistently show no upside bona fides vs. the Maldens, Quincys, and Sullivans where the gigantic bus hub is the true difference-maker. So on a corridor like this one the stars aren't--and by all study metrics haven't--coalesced towards superstation demand on the shared GLX and RUR corridor.

Did you read the part of what I wrote that I quote to repeat here:?

Waiting an average of an extra 45 seconds for a 7.5 minute headway express (in the sense of fewer stops than Green Line, not in the conventional commuter rail express sense) train that will skip several Somerville stops will probably enable electrified commuter rail to provide faster West Medford to downtown Boston service than extending the Green Line, and we can provide faster outside 128 to downtown Boston travel times than today's diesel trains provide while adding a few infill stops if we upgrade to trains that accelerate better than diesels.

I didn't ignore anything here. Satisfying West Medford's needs means deep-diving into where their transit trips existing and would-be are going to go. They already did this in the MIS years ago with the rejected CR/GLX superstation ideas, and crunched it some more with the across-street siting of GLX West Medford from the existing CR platform. The share of the pie to straight-to-CBD transit assumed from the outside to dwarf all else on-spec is not the actual story. Greater spread of inter-neighborhood destinations presently way under-served out there is what ends up exponentially increasing West Medford's transit shares. Shaving time off the clock at greater frequencies to North Station is no doubt ONE of those things...and they will get it any which way. But it is dwarfed cumulatively by increasing the spread. And that explains WHY it's projected that the CR station ridership will empty out for the mass migration down the street, because MVP is the biggest catalyst by far to increasing the spread to biggest share of the demand pie. They have their cake and can eat it too with RUR frequencies, but 2 decades of analyzed-to-death corridor studies say they're going to feast on MVP to way, way higher degree than they will more Purple Line frequencies.

So are we going to feed the trends where the trends are by investing more in the last-mile connections they need from their now richly enhanced node? Or are we going to cram the overpriced CR superstation idea that's been a studied born loser on this corridor multiple times over down their throats when they clearly don't want, all because some planning dictator has an individual notion that it's more 'elegant' that way? Remember when Mike Capuano tried to broker the truce on the project price blowout by suggesting an 'interim' CR station that just got folded into GLX later on...and he got shouted down with "No! Just @#$% build it" en masse? They're done re-analyzing and over-analyzing this for a 500th time. Thank heavens the actual planners executing the project aren't buying into that notion and letting it steal bandwidth away from "Better Bus North" as the first next-step that matters after MVP design-build is secure.

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

Javier: Thanks. I was assuming that they intended to prohibit pedestrian access across the Medford St bridge (if that were the case, my understanding is that the giant gap between the ``BRIDGE CLOSED'' sign and the ``DETOUR'' sign to its left should be filled in with some sort of barrier), but if they're intending to allow pedestrian access, as some of your other photos that seem to have been taken while you presumably were standing on the bridge seem to imply, the things that I thought were a problem might well not be.

 

[Ruairi]

Stick, they’re building up a temporary berm to support the drilling rigs for the retaining walls. Once they finish that, the berm will vanish.

the berm is at the same level as school st. bridge now, they've done a huge job over the last few days. Javier may have already posted photos.

 

[Javier]

Ball square

 

[Semass]

I enjoy the newsy reports posted on the MassDOT page:

Green Line Extension Project (GLX)

The Green Line Extension (GLX) project extends MBTA Green Line service north of Lechmere Station and into the communities of Somerville, Cambridge, and Medford.

www.mass.gov

Looks like a lot of good stuff in the next couple of weeks.

 

[shmessy]

I enjoy the newsy reports posted on the MassDOT page:

Green Line Extension Project (GLX)

The Green Line Extension (GLX) project extends MBTA Green Line service north of Lechmere Station and into the communities of Somerville, Cambridge, and Medford.

www.mass.gov

Looks like a lot of good stuff in the next couple of weeks.

Thank you for this! At this particular time, it is good for the soul to read it. I particularly appreciated seeing how most of those areas are going to be having frequent night and weekend work - - this stuff and others like the SST should be in slingshot mode during the shutter-in-home period.

 

[ceo]

Steel up on the western span at Broadway. Didn't get a picture.

 

[Javier]

Hi Everyone, stay safe

 

[Javier]

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

That is a mighty big berm.

 

[BeeLine]

IMG_3577 by Bos Beeline, on Flickr

IMG_3579 by Bos Beeline, on Flickr

IMG_3583 by Bos Beeline, on Flickr

IMG_3588 by Bos Beeline, on Flickr