How would a rider to Newton have a different experience on a short turn rather than a Framingham run?
Green Line Reconfiguration
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bigeman312
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I don’t follow. How did you come to the conclusion that you can’t you get 15 minute headways to the Newton stops with higher frequencies to Framingham and Worcester? There’s no long-term reason why adding a Riverside branch would increase frequencies to the Newtons. I understand if there was a rolling stock limitation and a lack of crossovers, but those are highly solvable on the timescales we are discussing.
More specifically, you could have a schedule like:
- 2 tph to Framingham (all stops)
- 1 tph to Worcester (all stops)
- 1 tph to Worcester (skip Wellesleys and Naticks)
- 1 tph service to Springfield and beyond
Adding the Riverside branching would only harm the frequencies to points west of Newton and do nothing to increase the theoretical maximum frequencies to the Newtons, unless I’m missing something. Please let me know if I am!
None of the stations on Framingham/Worcester line east of Southborough have notable parking capacity, especially to the extent Riverside does. The lots that do exist have historically had very high utilization, at least pre-COVID. For people who want to use a P&R on occasion, Riverside would be very useful, especially given it's excellent location by road, and (most importantly) get them to buy into the project.
This gets back to the What is the Point of Riverside discussion from last year.
I've never been able to find the data/study online, but I know the Town of Wellesley has conducted a study of who was using the Riverside lot (despite it being in Newton).
With Regional Rail we would probably get a P&R on 128 in Waltham, and Needham Green Line would probably have a P&R at 128.
These are interesting points, but I've gotten lost in this back and forth. What exactly are you arguing in favor of?
bigeman312
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Oh I see! You are arguing specifically for frequent service from an inner belt park and ride for political buy-in. I missed that!
If that’s your aim, why not add an infill stop on the Worcester Line in Weston at Recreation Rd (which I’ll call Weston/128 Station here). Here are some advantages for the Weston/128 proposal over the Riverside proposal, as I see them:
- You have higher ceiling on potential frequencies for both the park and ride in discussion and points west of 128. This is the big one.
- You can get a one-seat ride from Weston/128 to points west, unlike from Riverside
- It’s actually a better situated site, which could theoretically have direct access from both 128 and the Pike
I think the biggest reason to run Regional Rail to Riverside is to unlock P&R capacity (and the political support that would likely come with that) which can't really be replicated anywhere else on the line.
Yes, skipping Riverside is probably better, but I do think if you asked people "would you rather have 15 minute service to Riverside OR 30 minute service to Framingham/Natick/Wellesley" a sizable number would prefer the Riverside option. This is especially true if the Riverside Urban Rail would have the subway fare and the CR fare differential would continue.
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WarpedReality
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I think building a CR infill station in Weston at "Norembega Junction" with provisions for future extension of Riverside trains makes the most sense to me.
bigeman312
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It’s important to be honest about the tradeoffs here. The question is, would you rather have:
- 15 minute service to Riverside and basically nonexistent service to anywhere in the MetroWest or Central and Western Mass because those 4 tph are most of the slots. At best something like hourly service to the MetroWest and Central Mass on Worcester locals and maybe a couple Springfield trains a day.
- 15 minute service to Weston/128 and all of the other Newton stops, while still retaining 20 minute service to many stations in the MetroWest, 30 minute service to Worcester, and hourly service to Springfield
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WarpedReality
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The parking lot at Riverside is hardly a piece of priceless irreplaceable infrastructure.
Parenthetically, I’ve always thought of my handle as referring, not to the station, but to the branch!@Riverside made some great timetables demonstrating this reality. Ironic, considering their username
@737900er, I hear you about the PnR capacity, but I’m not sure there’s that much capacity to unlock. There was a study a few years ago on PnR parking capacity — I’d need to go find it — but my vague recollection is that Riverside has some capacity, but is still well-used right now.
Is your main thought that Regional Rail would traverse Riverside <> Downtown faster than the Green Line?
Why the either/or nature? Moving Auburndale west to Rec Rd with a P&R capacity allows both. Shifting W Newton a bit west and Auburndale east would increase the utility of the system without significant increased cost over rebuilding where they stand.
Sorry, Newtonville
This post could go here or in Crazy Transit Pitches, but the other thread is in the midst of a different conversational topic right now, so I'm gonna put this here.
Earlier this fall, I went down a rabbit hole of analysis on the B & C Lines, as I increasingly realized that they... well, they're kinda weird. The full writeup is available on my website: The curious case of the MBTA’s B and C Lines.
But the bottom line is this: nowhere else in the system can you board the equivalent of a local bus 3+ miles outside of downtown and get a one-seat ride all the way into the core.
The degree to which this is exceptional becomes, I think, more strikingly clear with a crayon map that imagines that all the heavy rail lines were LRT similar to the B & C + Boylston St Subway (click through for big version):
As I wrote on my site:
Don’t look too hard at the details of this map – it’s not meant to be a particularly serious exercise. For example, it’s all-but-certain that in some alternate history where the Cambridge Subway was a streetcar subway, one of the branches would have run to the North Cambridge carhouse along the route of today’s 77; I chose not to use that alignment to confound expectations a bit, try to jar us out of the conventional routes we’re used to.
Probably the most provocative example here is the Green Line branch to Codman Square via Nubian (Dudley). The old Dudley el station was only slightly farther from downtown that Kenmore is; Codman Square is 2.9 miles of surface-running from Dudley/Nubian, which is longer than the C Line’s 2.4 miles, but comfortably less than the B Line’s 4 miles. In terms of distance and transit type, a Codman Square line is roughly comparable to a Cleveland Circle line, simply transposed into another neighborhood.
The major difference between today’s Cleveland Circle line and this allohistorical Codman Square line is the presence of the dedicated median on the unusually wide Beacon Street (something like 130 feet from sidewalk to sidewalk). Even the wider boulevards on Seaver St, Columbia Road, or Blue Hill Ave are “only” 80-90 feet wide. So I’m not trying to argue that a system like this should have been built.
Rather, I’m trying to draw attention to the degree to which the B and C Lines are unique. Nowhere else in the system can you board the equivalent of a local bus 3 miles outside of downtown and get a one-seat ride all the way into the core.
~~~
Now, from a Green Line Reconfiguration perspective, this analysis has bearing on the broad perennial question of "What the heck do we do with the Kenmore subway-streetcar lines?", and the more specific question of short-turning the C (and even the B) at Kenmore.
From an equity perspective, I think it's hard to look at the C Line in particular and not conclude that it probably should be truncated. Like, in some ways this story is very simple: Boston's wealthiest immediate neighbor got to keep its boutique local service one-seat-ride into downtown, while every other community at a similar distance had to make do with a bus + subway transfer. That seems pretty straightforwardly unfair.
That being said... the C Line's ridership (to say nothing of the B's) is astronomical. C Line ridership (on the branch) is comparable to the top 10, perhaps even the top 5 bus routes. And of those bus routes, there's only one that reaches similar numbers on a route as short as the C: the combined SL4/SL5. For example, the 23 bus has similar ridership, but is a bit less than twice the length.
And this is of course not surprising. As an OSR, the C is always going to be more convenient than the bus + subway transfers with which it compares. Of course people will be more inclined to take it.
The C Line is indisputably a transit success story. From a utilitarian perspective -- if our goal is to move as many people by mass transit as possible --, truncating the C would appear to be a quantifiably terrible idea.
So, what am I saying should be done about all this? I dunno. I continue to maintain that the B & C should be isolated from the rest of the network due to their unique character -- none of the above changes that -- and I continue to believe that it's not worth designing a system that would require short-turning most C trains, if for no other reason than politics.
Probably what this makes me think about more than truncating the C (a negative action) is what kind of positive actions could be taken to provide similar benefits to other communities. Maybe it's about creating a second LRT or BRT "light metro" network, mirroring the B & C but fanning out into, for example, Dorchester or Chelsea. Maybe it's about extending some routes back inside the Inner Belt but with rapid transit spacing (e.g. extend the T70 past Kendall into Downtown with limited stops, or something similar with the T15).
But either way -- the B & C are weird and I'm thinking about it a lot more than I used to.
Earlier this fall, I went down a rabbit hole of analysis on the B & C Lines, as I increasingly realized that they... well, they're kinda weird. The full writeup is available on my website: The curious case of the MBTA’s B and C Lines.
But the bottom line is this: nowhere else in the system can you board the equivalent of a local bus 3+ miles outside of downtown and get a one-seat ride all the way into the core.
The degree to which this is exceptional becomes, I think, more strikingly clear with a crayon map that imagines that all the heavy rail lines were LRT similar to the B & C + Boylston St Subway (click through for big version):
As I wrote on my site:
Don’t look too hard at the details of this map – it’s not meant to be a particularly serious exercise. For example, it’s all-but-certain that in some alternate history where the Cambridge Subway was a streetcar subway, one of the branches would have run to the North Cambridge carhouse along the route of today’s 77; I chose not to use that alignment to confound expectations a bit, try to jar us out of the conventional routes we’re used to.
Probably the most provocative example here is the Green Line branch to Codman Square via Nubian (Dudley). The old Dudley el station was only slightly farther from downtown that Kenmore is; Codman Square is 2.9 miles of surface-running from Dudley/Nubian, which is longer than the C Line’s 2.4 miles, but comfortably less than the B Line’s 4 miles. In terms of distance and transit type, a Codman Square line is roughly comparable to a Cleveland Circle line, simply transposed into another neighborhood.
The major difference between today’s Cleveland Circle line and this allohistorical Codman Square line is the presence of the dedicated median on the unusually wide Beacon Street (something like 130 feet from sidewalk to sidewalk). Even the wider boulevards on Seaver St, Columbia Road, or Blue Hill Ave are “only” 80-90 feet wide. So I’m not trying to argue that a system like this should have been built.
Rather, I’m trying to draw attention to the degree to which the B and C Lines are unique. Nowhere else in the system can you board the equivalent of a local bus 3 miles outside of downtown and get a one-seat ride all the way into the core.
~~~
Now, from a Green Line Reconfiguration perspective, this analysis has bearing on the broad perennial question of "What the heck do we do with the Kenmore subway-streetcar lines?", and the more specific question of short-turning the C (and even the B) at Kenmore.
From an equity perspective, I think it's hard to look at the C Line in particular and not conclude that it probably should be truncated. Like, in some ways this story is very simple: Boston's wealthiest immediate neighbor got to keep its boutique local service one-seat-ride into downtown, while every other community at a similar distance had to make do with a bus + subway transfer. That seems pretty straightforwardly unfair.
That being said... the C Line's ridership (to say nothing of the B's) is astronomical. C Line ridership (on the branch) is comparable to the top 10, perhaps even the top 5 bus routes. And of those bus routes, there's only one that reaches similar numbers on a route as short as the C: the combined SL4/SL5. For example, the 23 bus has similar ridership, but is a bit less than twice the length.
And this is of course not surprising. As an OSR, the C is always going to be more convenient than the bus + subway transfers with which it compares. Of course people will be more inclined to take it.
The C Line is indisputably a transit success story. From a utilitarian perspective -- if our goal is to move as many people by mass transit as possible --, truncating the C would appear to be a quantifiably terrible idea.
So, what am I saying should be done about all this? I dunno. I continue to maintain that the B & C should be isolated from the rest of the network due to their unique character -- none of the above changes that -- and I continue to believe that it's not worth designing a system that would require short-turning most C trains, if for no other reason than politics.
Probably what this makes me think about more than truncating the C (a negative action) is what kind of positive actions could be taken to provide similar benefits to other communities. Maybe it's about creating a second LRT or BRT "light metro" network, mirroring the B & C but fanning out into, for example, Dorchester or Chelsea. Maybe it's about extending some routes back inside the Inner Belt but with rapid transit spacing (e.g. extend the T70 past Kendall into Downtown with limited stops, or something similar with the T15).
But either way -- the B & C are weird and I'm thinking about it a lot more than I used to.
Teban54
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I do agree that the B and C lines are truly unicorns that shouldn't have existed in an alternative universe. I think this is due to a unique combination of factors:
- BERy didn't complete the heavy rail conversion of the Central Subway to Brighton like initially planned
- Kenmore doesn't even have provisions for short-turns from the east (unlike Harvard, Sullivan etc) (the ability to do so via a new Kenmore North may be relevant if we're thinking about a Kenmore-Seaport OSR via Charles St connector)
- Commonwealth Ave and Beacon St are extremely wide (more so than any other bus corridor), allowing B's and C's existence as streetcars to be more tolerable due to dedicated medians
- Immediate analogs are Watertown (which was the choice to dump in order to free up cars for the Riverside branch, rather than Cleveland Circle which likely had lower ridership) and Arborway, but I think this also applies to all other former streetcar corridors
- And perhaps, the tight curves in the Green Line system (GC-Park, Boylston) may have made it unsuitable for heavy rail conversion, or at least put it lower on the priority list for BERy
Re: Ridership, I do think B's and C's ridership receive a major boost due to the one-seat ride downtown, compared to buses. If all C trains terminated at Kenmore, I think it would have been more akin to the 71 and 73 (entry-level Key Bus Routes), or even routes like 9, 16, 70, 86, 88 and 101 (all serving major corridors, yet only with 40-50% of the C's ridership).
The B's case is different, because it also gets heavy patronage from students commuting to BU and BC without entering the subway system - but even then, there's no good reason why it should have twice the ridership of the 39/28 or similar ridership as the Braintree branch, other than the OSR into downtown.
Not to mention that having the LRT infrastructure in place (and branded as part of the rapid transit network) guarantees an acceptable level of service at all times, which further boosts ridership and confidence of riders to rely on such services. This is after I just observed 20-min headways on the 39 bus on a recent weekend.
Re: Motivation, I actually disagree with this or at least have contrasting remarks:
So I've actually heard very different things about whether provisions were made for BLX beyond Charles/MGH. The Reddit post you linked was from the Monday meeting, but here's what a friend that attended the Thursday meeting reported:
The best way I can think of to reconcile the contradicting reports is: Current design for BLX-to-Charles is too shallow for a cross-river tunnel to Kendall and for a deep bored tunnel along the Riverbank that does not change the Storrow landscape (where TBM is likely necessary for flood mitigation). However, it does not preclude an open-cut or capped-cut shallow tunnel down the Riverbank like F-Line proposed.My friend said:
The other factor that may prevent an extension is the design of the Charles/MGH station. As I mentioned here, the preferred alternative as of 2021 will physically block the tracks from continuing west due to stairs. But it looks like station design is still not finalized yet, and especially given the recent discussion about how the stairs also sit right where an existing pier for the Red Line viaduct is, it looks like the Red-Blue plans may be revised (though another alternative is that the pier will be removed in a revised plan for viaduct rehabilitation).
For now, I'm cautiously optimistic that the final design will not block an extension. But if it does, I have to say that I'll be very disappointed, if not angry, about it. It's okay to not actively plan for a future extension, but such a design goes beyond that and is actively killing any hope that future generations will pick it up.
Anyway, the thought of turning the Central Subway into "heavy metro" in place of the more typical Blue Line extension is certainly intriguing. The main problem I see is the Park St loop with its potential to limit both frequency and fleet. And if the line eventually goes to Newton Corner, Watertown, Waltham etc, a real argument can be made that even a heavy metro with light rail vehicles may not be enough (unlike the D which has much lower density).
Yeah, that's actually something underpinning all my arguments regarding Nubian that even I myself had not realized. The straight-line distance from the downtown core (center of GC-State-DTX-Park) to Nubian is 2.31 mi, similar to Ruggles (2.09), Kenmore (1.86), Central (2.30), Union Sq Somerville (2.27), Sullivan (2.04), Airport (1.92) and Andrew (1.92). So it really shouldn't be the case that all of them get a grade-separated ROW into downtown except Nubian. The Cleveland Circle equivalent is really more like Grove Hall, Franklin Park and points further south, not Nubian itself. Comparing a Nubian surface LRT branch to the C branch (or even the B branch) is really, really comparing apples to oranges.
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My vague, and not at all developed, thinking on the Park St Loop and similar questions is that, in this future, nothing will be regularly terminating at Park (or Gov’t Center, for that matter). All trains will through-run, alternating berths at Park with sorting happening both before and after going through the station.
It does get fuzzy — if nothing short turns at Park, then your Park - GC frequency becomes the ruling frequency for both the Tremont and Boylston trunks. Let’s just say 15 tph for each.
But, assuming a Huntington <> Seaport service, that could be used to boost Huntington’s frequencies. And this would be a scenario where I could get onboard with a Charles St Subway connecting Arlington to Bay Village to enable Kenmore <> Seaport service. The Boylston and Huntington trunks both run 30 tph, each then splitting with half to Park and the other half to South Station.
How a Nubian service fits in here, I haven’t figured out. (But it does feel like it should already be a solved problem based on previous work?) But it’s late, so I’ll have to return to this later.
(15 tph Park <> Bay Village, which then split into 7.5 tph to Huntington and 7.5 to Nubian. Huntington gets freqs boosted by a Seaport service… so I guess we could use the same trick for Nubian and reverse branch that one too? 7.5 tph for Park <> Huntington feels low to me, but I guess in theory there might be enough distribution across all these reverse branches to make it a non-issue?)
BosMaineiac
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Reverse branching some trains from a Nubian subway to the seaport would make sense, as it’d be analogous to an SL4/SL5 combo (plus a good alternative to silver line phase 3). If you have a Washington streetcar it could get dicey tho as that one would probably only be able to go towards Park st, so you’d probably have to have a majority of the Nubian subway trains head towards the seaport in that scenario, no?
Yeah I think the only way this could work is if the Nubian streetcar were rerouted away from the Central Subway, which brings its own share of problems.
The only thing I could think of was to have Park St and Seaport both running 30 tph, each of which get divided up with 10 tph to Copley, Back Bay, and Nubian:
The problem I have with this is that 6 min is kinda a long time to wait for any single service. So I don't love that.
Teban54
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Here's my submission to the Transportation Dreams cartography challenge: A fantasy map dedicated to the Green Line Reconfiguration.
The image below has been compressed due to ArchBoston's limits on display of images. A version with higher resolution can be found here: View attachment main_double size v2.1-01.png
I also want to use this opportunity to thank everyone on this forum who has contributed to the idea of Green Line Configuration over the almost 10 years. I truly feel it's one of the best transit proposals in Boston that I've seen, and yet the idea is so poorly known to the outside world, compared to analogous projects like NSRL and Urban Ring. That's why I made the map in the first place, as an effort to raise public awareness.
The image below has been compressed due to ArchBoston's limits on display of images. A version with higher resolution can be found here: View attachment main_double size v2.1-01.png
I also want to use this opportunity to thank everyone on this forum who has contributed to the idea of Green Line Configuration over the almost 10 years. I truly feel it's one of the best transit proposals in Boston that I've seen, and yet the idea is so poorly known to the outside world, compared to analogous projects like NSRL and Urban Ring. That's why I made the map in the first place, as an effort to raise public awareness.