I think that would require so much platform lengthening that you might as well convert to HRT.
It's not platform lengthening as they'd obviously be running as singlets there. It's that squealing demon, Ashmont Loop. While it's within curve tolerance of all existing GL loops including the Park St. one everybody's fretting about for the new car order, it exerts its share of punishment on the vehicle trucks every trip because of its tightness. With its noise problems already being notorious, even after the the rail greaser hack was installed to knock down the worst and most ear-damaging decibel readings it was chucking up around the neighborhood. Running the stretched cars may be technically feasible because the curve tolerances are a shade above bottom, but by necessity of having to loop on every single trip there's an escalating maint tax in-play on both the vehicles and loop track structures with that wear being non-optional to all ops. At least with Park Loop once the new inbound fence-side thru crossover is installed B trains will be returning permanently to GC Loop and Park Loop will be back to its former status of being used only as a late-schedules bailout deployed on strictly as-needed basis. It'll exert negligible wear profile on the new fleet by virtue of being used only chance handful of times per day. No such luck with Ashmont Loop being non-optional all-day/every-day for 100.00% of service.
Also: really...we're
already bitching that the Type 9's are old??? Amenities-wise there is absolutely nothing second-class about those vehicles. They just aren't 100% low-floor and thus not laid out for the same kind of optimal crowd-swallowing that GLT's New World Order ops regime requires for Green to re-balance itself amid the give-and-take of all the lineside upgrades. All of that's moot anyway on the High Speed Line since there are no downtown transfer station crowds to swallow, no platform dwells pushing the bounds of schedule margin-for-error, and no branch timing issues forcing major shift in lineside upgrades. There's no platform dwell on the M--nor any foreseeable future crowding sources--big enough to get anywhere close to overtopping the flow limits of the low-floor section of the existing cars to a point where dwells exceed the OTP threshold. The existing cars each having two sets of low-floor doors where the PCC's have none (and where they have only 1 center door total instead of 2) already succeeds at cutting platform dwells out there to the barest possible minimum. With no potential source of surge crowding big enough to overtop those gains, 100% low-floor vs. 50% low-floor is a net-zero ops or schedule gain. Especially when PoP is going to allow fare collection at the low-boarding doors to bypass the steps on the front. With maximal ADA accommodations still provided for outright wheelchair patrons at the high-floor front doors by the permanent mini-high ramps installed at every station except Valley Rd. (exempt for its unmodifiable non-compliant hillside egress).
It's strictly a personal aesthetic gripe that the 9's aren't 1:1 the same layout as the 10's on Green. Absolutely nothing real-world is contributing to the inferiority complex if they get that stock. The remaining inferiority complex on the corridor quite literally
is the fact that the state won't even dignify it with a token paper-study option looksee for the HRT conversion, the literal only thing that could be a meaningful service improvement over LRV's + a mild headway boost from having enough LRV's to slightly buff out service levels. And 6-minute HRT headways are a gigantic improvement, so the whole "La-la-la! I can't hear you!" over a frigging
paper study should very much be considered a slap in the face at the neighborhood. For whatever reason that chagrin is getting transferred into contempt for the Type 9's being so-called 'sloppy seconds'. Understandable psychology if you've just had your home turf insulted like that, but a total misdirection from the real issue because
↑as above↑ there is net-zero difference Type 9 vs. Type 10 at livery accommodations for what the M in its current shuttle form is capable of throwing at the fleet in terms of foreseeable passenger loads. Better to ask self why that
feels so insulting when it's not actually...because then all gripes are going to correctly point at the cheapshotting the state gave the corridor over refusal of the HRT paper study.
If the M corridor had an advocacy group halfway as organized as Somerville STEP to disseminate those issues on-demand in bite size form to the public, all that 'psychological' stuff over getting short shift from the state would be more easily understood and less easily misdirected like this. But unfortunately while the Mattapan transit advocacy is consistently
loud it's also consistently been lacking in enough focus to
articulate itself efficiently. They're mad, for sure, but it's frustration that the state is imposing a value-judgment handicap on their heads over what's worth studying. Which is really the withholding of the HRT paper option that rankles so much...but it's coming out as a 1:1 GLT comparison (i.e. not nearly relevant enough example) because their reference points aren't fleshed out well enough to articulate it more on-point. They need some messaging help here to put 2 and 2 together on what it really means value proposition-wise to
not be treated any longer like second-class citizens. They wouldn't be focusing on this trolley type argument diversion if they knew how to bottom-line their real sentiments more clearly.
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