I present to you: The Blue Bobby Pin.
Route:
- The project would use the infield of the various Charles Circle ramps to the north of Charles/MGH and Lederman Park as staging ground and laydown to send a TBM north underneath Storrow, the Charles and Revere Park to form the rapid transit component of the Tobin's eventual, tunneled replacement.
- Pull the TBM out of the ground somewhere around the Kayem factory back lot in Chelsea (Everett Ave onramp to the Tobin) and turn left in a cut-and-cover tunnel under Everett Ave to the Chelsea commuter rail stop, kinking left to follow Vale Street and across Revere Beach Parkway to Ferry Street.
- From there, follow the low ground around Everett's biggest hill to Glendale Square, where the tunnel turns north up Broadway to the Northern Strand ROW, where a little eminent domain could get you a transit-oriented redevelopment opportunity and a portal to elevated tracks that doesn't conflict with the bike trail too much.
- Elevated guideway follows the Northern Strand until just after it crosses Salem Street in Saugus, where it turns left to follow a power line ROW that, conveniently, is also a quarried-out saddle between a pair of hills, before turning right to run above Route 1 to the Square One Mall.
- An alternate route would follow Broadway past the Northern Strand trail in a cut-and-cover tunnel before surfacing in the infield of the ramps that link Broadway and Route 1, but this would miss the existing multifamily development at Overlook Ridge.
I'm quite charmed by this idea, and I really like the thought you've put into where to build the subway north of the Mystic. Crayoning radial rapid transit in Chelsea is always an interesting challenge because it would be totally greenfield -- the closest we get to a blank canvas, for better and worse. One thought -- could you grab more of the 111 catchment by utilizing the ROW of Route 1? For example, you could add a Bellingham Sq stop by following the highway until you hit the Eastern Route ROW, and then cut back to the (new) Chelsea Station and continue on the route you've plotted.
More aggressively, you could try instead continuing up the highway until it crosses Washington and put another station there. That would split the 111 into two segments of feeder routes less than a mile long each. It would be an awkward curve back to the Revere Beach Parkway to continue on to Everett, but probably there's room for tweaking. (Maybe put the transfer station closer to Chelsea High School and reroute the 111 slightly?)
Something like this:
What I will say, though -- I think this corridor is an excellent fit for
@F-Line to Dudley's
"Red X" proposal (creating a second parallel northern branch of the Red Line that splits at JFK/UMass, runs parallel to the current subway, and then picks up a new subway under Congress St). That would solve your Orange transfer problem, and would leave the Blue Line free to be extended to the west.
Interesting. I wonder if there's any real benefits to be had to reverting the Blue Line back to its Trolley roots if it means no drop in capacity (assuming similar throughput of vehicles). Perhaps the ability to more easily branch on either end? Any ROWs that could take more advantage of light rail than heavy? The ability to tie into the Green Line?
This idea really captured my imagination over the last few days. In general, I'm in favor of strengthening the Blue Line as part of a "heavy metro" network, but as
@The EGE pointed out, LRT isn't, as they say, "your grandpa's light rail" anymore. So this really got me thinking.
I'll reply to
@Charlie_mta first:
I've thought of that too, converting the Blue Line back to light rail (LRV). It would allow the Red-Blue connector to be a surface line along Cambridge Street, by opening up the old portal. A lot cheaper than a tunnel. It would also allow any LRV line from Salem to Danvers to be a branch of an LRV Blue Line instead of a separate line.
Sorry, but that's a hard no from me on a surface Red-Blue Connector; whether LRT or HRT, that connection needs to be fully grade-separated for throughput and reliability. But yes, I think the Danvers scenario is one case where LRT could be an easily build than HRT. (Though I would still want to keep an eye on capacity; modern LRT could probably equally current Blue Line capacity, but as F-Line points out, the Blue Line has not hit maximum HRT capacity. Switching to LRT could end up capping capacity in the long run.)
In general, I'd argue that the main benefit of LRT itself is the ability to occasionally intermingle with automobile and pedestrian traffic. But that's only useful in places where it's otherwise
acceptable for such intermingling. Red-Blue Connector seems to fail that test, and as Boston and its suburbs continue to grow, there will be fewer and fewer places where that is acceptable.
SL3 Branch - Instead of converting this to a Green Line branch, tie this into the Blue Line and have more incentive to extend further into Everett owing to more connectivity than the SL3 can provide. Tunnel under any parts of Broadway you have to, but probably mostly surface-level with a dedicated ROW.
Whether LRT or HRT, I think branching the Blue Line at Airport is not the best idea. It halves frequencies to both branches, and we know from the current situation that there is heavy demand for North Shore bus <> Blue transfers. Even with BLX to Lynn, there's still going to be high demand, so I think half-frequencies are ill-advised here.
Lynn - Allows usage of 1A for ROW for any needed distance to Lynn. Maybe the ROW along Point of Pines is too encroached? Maybe a dedicated ROW bridge over the marsh area is too expensive and you just need to hop onto it for a bit? Maybe on the far side it makes more sense to stick to a more southern ROW to hit potential TOD in the current industrial areas? Sky's the limit here.
Rt 60 - There's a few places to branch here, but the ROW is wide enough to support a median-running branch and the surrounding area seems dense enough to support it, with a few bus lines already running here.
Yeah, this is where I think things get interesting. Route 60 worries be a little bit for halving frequencies to Lynn, but perhaps if you added a transfer station at the end of the Salem Turnpike in Revere, you could mitigate the impact. But Lynn is where some interesting options arise. For one, yes, if needed you have more options for reaching Lynn Central Square (although again, from a capacity and throughput perspective, I'd still prefer a fully grade-separated route into Lynn station proper). But I'm intrigued by the possibility of LRT branch lines spreading out across the North Shore. The Marblehead Branch, for one, would probably be less disruptive as LRT than HRT. And the idea of a short street-running route in Lynn itself -- say, down Washington and up Western Ave -- is very thought-provoking.
That being said: the things that make surface-running LRT more appealing are themselves somewhat at odds with "LRT as heavy metro service", in particular train length and to a lesser extent high-level boarding. Something that's good at running on Lynn streets, or that's good at quietly snaking through leafy backyards in Marblehead, is almost by definition
not going to be good at shuttling huge volumes of Airport and Maverick transfer passengers over to downtown and beyond. Maybe you can find a happy medium, but they do seem a bit at odds to me.
(Maybe you run "heavy LRT" service into a transfer station at Lynn, with non-revenue track connections to surface tracks that handle "light LRT" in those other places. At that point, the conversion really is just about providing rolling stock access though.)
Sullivan Square Extension - Continue the tracks west from Charles/MGH and turn north under Broadway in Cambridge. From there, hop onto the Grand Junction and go north along the GLX maintenance facility tracks to a Sullivan Square extension as frequently discussed for the Green Line. From there, you can run to a number of northern extensions such as the Northern Strand path or even looping back towards the SL3 route and providing a complete looping route from Everett/Chelsea to downtown. Other options include the a Broadway ROW.
I don't love the "bobby pin" shape of these routes, though I agree they'd be theoretically viable. But they don't seem
uniquely viable to an LRT Blue, and they would be equally viable on an expanded Green Line network.
Red Line Connector V2 - Eat the Union Square branch of the Green Line by going west instead of East after the Grand Junction.
This idea intrigues me more, though again this seems equally doable on the Green Line.
