That's true, but skipping this would also mean all North Station-Nubian or Medford-Nubian passengers have to transfer at Park St now. Given that Boylston is the least used central subway station, perhaps that should be viewed as an opportunity to have a higher quality transfer at a less busy station. Park St is already insanely busy and adding even more Gov Center & North - Copley & West transfers could be quite bad. From there you would be looking at a full Park St rebuild and then costs are really going to skyrocket.
But I think this ultimately gets at the question of: Is this even a worthwhile goal? Is Medford/Newton/Needham/Seaport traffic really enough to justify platform lengthening across the network? As I mentioned previously 5 minute headways with 2-car Type 10s already quadruples capacity on the Washington St route, for example. Would the extra 50% bump:
- Justify the costs
- Make sense to put towards the GL in the first place? There's plenty of platforms that would need to be lengthened at pretty significant cost. Given that an orbital route would take load off radial routes, would that money be better spent as a nice down payment on a new orbital line?
Okay yeah, this is a reasonable counterargument that has changed my mind.While the ridership statistics did give me a curious idea of consolidating Boylston and Arlington into an in-between station at the site of the former portal between Arlington St and Charles St (provisioned for Post Office Sq), as for closing Boylston itself, I agree with @TheRatmeister's conclusions: Ironically, while consolidating Boylston may have value in today's Green Line, it likely becomes much less desirable in a full GLR world.
With B and C cut back to Park St, the transfer possibilities actually increase at Boylston and Park St: In addition to transfers to the Red Line (don't forget additional passengers from Nubian), now they will also need to handle transfers between the Kenmore system (my Lime, your Green) and the Bay Village system (my Green/Gold, your Gold). Opposite-direction transfers have to go to Park St regardless, but Boylston can help alleviate same-directions transfers, which I feel will be more common than opposite transfers - particularly from A/B/C to Government Center, North Station*, etc.
Demand for 3-car Type 10s on the GLR, assuming it's feasible?
If we assume feasibility is not a question, I actually feel there will almost certainly be demand for 3-car Type 10s on the core GLR routes: my Green (North Station-LMA) and Magenta (Seaport-South Station-LMA) Lines.
Unfortunately, I think that the Silver Line Seaport stations will also present limitations here -- I just did a quick check and I think that, for example, Courthouse is in the neighborhood of 200' -- which poses a challenge even for 2-car supertrains, to say nothing of 3-car hypertrains.From a super quick overview it seems like some other problem points would/could be:
Plus some smaller works for the other GLX stations and some other D branch stops like Newton Centre for example.
- Science Park, as you said
- Haymarket
- Gov Center NB
- Prudential
- Symphony
- Riverside
- Reservoir
- Medford/Tufts
(I had originally been going to suggest running supertrains on the North Station-LMA service and hypertrains on the Seaport-LMA service, but obviously that wouldn't work if the Seaport stations are too close.)
So, a target of 225' may be what we have to live with.