JeffDowntown
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Becomes much more problematic to split when you plan on BLX to Lynn and Salem. Those areas need the capacity of a full BL frequency.
If You Were God/Goddess | Transit & Infrastructure Sandbox
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ulrichomega
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Currently the Green Line moves trains with incredibly (relative to other lines) frequencies through the downtown tunnels. I would think that changing the signaling and trains over to that model would result in an increase in capacity, given that each individual train is basically the same capacity. With that in mind, I don't think a single branch this side of Lynn would be the end of the world. Anything past that, though, and I think the lower speeds of LRT versus HRT wouldn't be viable. Salem is almost 50% farther than Riverside is from downtown, and that is going to absolutelysuck at 40mph. With some form of regional rail out to Salem I can't imagine most people would want to ride a Type 9 all the way to GC Versus just transferring to another line at North Station (and with NSRL that proposition probably becomes even worse for an LRT ride).
I did spend some more time pondering on this over the weekend and came to similar overall conclusions RE: southerly routes as Riverside, though I'm a bit more bullish on the whole thing. A Storrow Subway would essentially provide the second spine for the Green Line we like to talk about some much here. There's so many potential southern Green Line branches we'd like to incorporate that the current tunnels just can't support (A to Alston, new Harvard branch, Needham, etc.), and a converted Blue Line that doesn't have to feed right back into the same crowded Park Street provides a lot of needed capacity for those destinations.
This, of course, runs right back into differing needs at either end of the line, though I'd argue that the current Green Line is facing those same issue right now anyway. We've already seen issues with running the traffic-running E-branch on a dedicated ROW (vehicle restrictions from lack of stop signs, traffic-induced delays, etc.). I'd argue these challenges aren't insurmountable, but I could be convinced. As a thought experiment, though, I do think the (potential) increase in capacity through Airport and the ability to bring real rapid transit to Chelsea via a branch (as well as the even more pie-in-the-sky thoughts of a second trunk for the Green Line) are big upsides.
I did spend some more time pondering on this over the weekend and came to similar overall conclusions RE: southerly routes as Riverside, though I'm a bit more bullish on the whole thing. A Storrow Subway would essentially provide the second spine for the Green Line we like to talk about some much here. There's so many potential southern Green Line branches we'd like to incorporate that the current tunnels just can't support (A to Alston, new Harvard branch, Needham, etc.), and a converted Blue Line that doesn't have to feed right back into the same crowded Park Street provides a lot of needed capacity for those destinations.
This, of course, runs right back into differing needs at either end of the line, though I'd argue that the current Green Line is facing those same issue right now anyway. We've already seen issues with running the traffic-running E-branch on a dedicated ROW (vehicle restrictions from lack of stop signs, traffic-induced delays, etc.). I'd argue these challenges aren't insurmountable, but I could be convinced. As a thought experiment, though, I do think the (potential) increase in capacity through Airport and the ability to bring real rapid transit to Chelsea via a branch (as well as the even more pie-in-the-sky thoughts of a second trunk for the Green Line) are big upsides.
Aprehensive_Words
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Thanks for the compliment! The biggest challenge (other than the hairpin turn you illustrate there) to routing via the farthest-north dashed line is that you'd be headed up a steep hill. From the Washington Street-Parkway intersection to the Everett Street-Parkway intersection, you're talking between 40 or 50 feet of elevation change. I assume that would make cut-and-cover tunneling hard, not to mention difficulties in setting up a station that's flat enough for ADA, no? But trying to tie into Bellingham Square is a neat idea. Definitely helps keep a big section of Chelsea in the walkshed. The ultimate chad routing would be to hit the Bellingham Square bus stop, where the 111 and 116/117 come together and it's at something of a walkshed sweet spot. Can that work with Red Line turning radii?
HenryAlan
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Returning Blue to LRT strikes me as a fairly expensive and time consuming project. We can't just wire-up the tunnels with catenary and throw some Type-10s on to the tracks. Every station would require significant modification to accommodate the Type-10s, which would mean a long period without any Blue Line at all. But what about instead, simply treating the Blue Line cars as they are, as LRT? Why couldn't a BL style train (maybe four cars instead of six) run on the GJ or SL3 ROWs? Just build some raised platforms for stations, and run the trains -- is there some specific reason this wouldn't work for the type of service pattern @ulrichomega proposes?
Really good points about speeds and journey times, I hadn't been thinking about that.
Re Storrow Subway as second spine: I think a full-build subway under Huntington is more effective as a second spine, in particular because Storrow totally misses the Back Bay CBD. Huntington takes care of Riverside, Needham, anything to JP, and should be able to integrate to a Nubian Branch using the flying junctions at the Pleasant St Portal and the quadtracking going into Park St. (Assuming that most/all Kenmore services terminate at Park, which I think they should, given that the B & C will always be unusual legacy lines.) (And potentially using a Back Bay <> Seaport subway to divert one of the western branches away from Park.)
But yeah, the big thing for me was realizing that Storrow would cost access to Back Bay — maybe you could swing doing that to one of the A/B/C/D/Needham routes, but I don’t think you can really do more than that. So to me that puts a cap on the ability to serve as a second spine.
Ah you know that’s my bad, I had misread and was still thinking you were using a TBM up through there. That definitely seems tricky. I don’t know the turning radii off-hand, but @F-Line to Dudley or @The EGE might.
I think — and I’m not an expert, but — I think it comes down to grade crossing/grade separation. I believe the standards are more flexible for LRT rather than HRT (in part because HRT has more of the underside “guts” exposed). Obviously you want LRT to be grade separated as much as possible but in a pinch it can still do a lower-impact grade crossing than HRT can.
6 min frequency would be more than enough. Quincy/Braintree is no less populated/dense as Lynn/Salem
JeffDowntown
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Lynn has 25% greater population density than Quincy. 8,500/sq mile versus 6,000 per sq mile.
Blue Line trains sets are shorter and narrower than the Red Line, so Blue Line train sets have about 50% of the passenger capacity of a Red Line train set. To get close to Red Line capacity in Lynn and Salem you need every Blue Line train going there.
So no, it is not appropriate to propose supporting a denser population area with much less passenger capacity.
I also expounded on this at some length on my blog. (My current thinking favors a past-Kenmore alignment with a series of phased builds to BU Central, then eventually West Station, and in the long term continuing to extend stop by stop to Newton Corner and possibly Watertown Sq. In the near-term though, I am increasingly in favor of building all the way to BU Central/BU Bridge as a "Phase 1" extension: BU is where the jobs are, and if the transfer hub at Kenmore can be shifted toward BU, it reduces the pressure on a Cambridgeport <> Longwood Urban Ring route to do a diversion to Kenmore, in favor of a more direct route via BU Bridge.)
(In my perfect world, West Station would be deprioritized in favor of a resurrected Cottage Farm station to serve BU -- for similar reasons as listed above, but also because it would reduce the need for a Kendall <> West Station spur. But West Station seems to have a lot of momentum and I don't think a commuter rail station at BU has ever been studied.)
What I think a lot of this boils down to: while I think it's worth considering the pros and cons of converting the Blue Line to modern LRT ("light rail as heavy metro"), I think on the balance it makes more sense to keep the Blue Line as (upgraded) HRT, and focus on converting as much of the Green Line as possible from old-fashioned "light rail as light metro" to modern "light rail as heavy metro".
And then goes through dense population almost the whole way in. The space between Lynn and Eastie is as much swamp as anything, so, no.
And RL trains cannot carry twice as many people as a BL train. 50% more is probably closer to reality.
Aprehensive_Words
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FWIW, it smells like the West Station momentum is driven by a desire to avoid "another Seaport" as Harvard builds that out into another big commercial growth node over the next few generations. And given how successful biotech developments have been in Watertown, it's not necessarily an unreasonable worry that there'd be tenant appetite for more space closer to the industry epicenters at Kendall, Harvard, BU and MIT.
Ofc the Seaport has some of the problems it does because no one in the mid-90s anticipated that we'd have a decade of ultra-low interest rates that could juice development of the neighborhood better than anything the Yankees gave Roger Clemens to shoot into his arm, outpacing politicians' ability to upgrade the transitway tunnel, and it's an open question whether a Fed Funds rate that, during boom times, topped out at or below where it *bottomed out* during most past recessions was all a historical fluke. So maybe those fears will fade in time if rates stay relatively high and construction slows down.
I mean... not really? Quincy has roughly the same population as Lynn (and while it's true that the Red Line also serves Braintree, Lynn would be absorbing bus transfers from numerous North Shore communities) -- both Quincy and Lynn are about 100K, though Lynn is indeed denser. The Red Line makes 4 stops within that region of 100K people and then... runs non-stop to JFK/UMass at which point frequencies double.
BLX, on the other hand, would squeeze all of Lynn's 100K into one (maybe two) stops... and then would need to also pick up all of the current ridership from Revere, before joining the second branch at Airport, at which point you finally get the double frequencies that the Red Line enjoys north of JFK/UMass.
So... yeah, it seems like high frequencies would actually be more important on a BLX than on the Red Line -- especially given the higher number of riders funneling through a single station... that's exactly the scenario where raw carrying capacity is insufficient and needs to be matched with adequate frequency to prevent crowding.
Huh, that's really interesting context, thanks! Yeah, I guess I shouldn't necessarily say I'd want West Station to be de-prioritized -- it does seem like a valid place to build a station. But more that I'd love to see something centered closer to BU as an additional build. (Though I grant that the stop spacing gets a little close with Lansdowne.)
Yeah, it's true. Cottage Farm 2.0 is more a bit of crayon-mapping-perfectionism than anything else.
Delvin4519
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Curious idea/thoughts, how many bus routes could be axed outright, if the existing railway ROWs are all activated for use as a high frequency transit corridor (with ~0.75 - 1.05 mile station spacing on these ROWs)?
Would be very curious to see if the rail lines were the perfect lines on the map, what (bus) routes would still constitute the key bus (high frequency bus) network? (bus = street running route, including current streetcar lines)
The best I could come up with is this map, where red lines could be abolished completely, pink/magenta lines is a so/so or so, and blue lines no change. Kinda hard to redraw the lines when existing TOD mostly follows the existing lines, or trying to route new routes through the middle of city blocks.
Mostly just a thought exercise of trying to redraw the high frequency bus network; into a new key bus/streetcar network; sans existing transit ROWs. The blue lines in the map basically try to avoid any duplicating the rail lines at almost all costs, since those rail ROWs are to be the primary high frequency transit corridors.
The route 30s and 80s could have the map redrawn entirely, axing route 32 completely. Few changes for the 110s and 20s routes. Route 77 can be abolished completely with rapid transit extension.
All those key bus routes I've gotten rid of for rail transit, one bus route that could become high frequency (or turn into streetcar) is Arlington Center - Clarendon Hill - Ball Square - Winter Hill - Sullivan Sta. - City Square/Navy Yard - Haymarket Sta.. Reroute route 57 from Allston Village to Central Sq. Cambridge. Surprisingly, Malden Ctr. -> Medford Sq. -> Davis Sq., is still around as a high frequency route. Redrawing the rest of the high frequency network either keeps the same bare bones, or it's a huge headache for me to decide which routes can through run.
Would be very curious to see if the rail lines were the perfect lines on the map, what (bus) routes would still constitute the key bus (high frequency bus) network? (bus = street running route, including current streetcar lines)
The best I could come up with is this map, where red lines could be abolished completely, pink/magenta lines is a so/so or so, and blue lines no change. Kinda hard to redraw the lines when existing TOD mostly follows the existing lines, or trying to route new routes through the middle of city blocks.
Mostly just a thought exercise of trying to redraw the high frequency bus network; into a new key bus/streetcar network; sans existing transit ROWs. The blue lines in the map basically try to avoid any duplicating the rail lines at almost all costs, since those rail ROWs are to be the primary high frequency transit corridors.
The route 30s and 80s could have the map redrawn entirely, axing route 32 completely. Few changes for the 110s and 20s routes. Route 77 can be abolished completely with rapid transit extension.
All those key bus routes I've gotten rid of for rail transit, one bus route that could become high frequency (or turn into streetcar) is Arlington Center - Clarendon Hill - Ball Square - Winter Hill - Sullivan Sta. - City Square/Navy Yard - Haymarket Sta.. Reroute route 57 from Allston Village to Central Sq. Cambridge. Surprisingly, Malden Ctr. -> Medford Sq. -> Davis Sq., is still around as a high frequency route. Redrawing the rest of the high frequency network either keeps the same bare bones, or it's a huge headache for me to decide which routes can through run.
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Teban54
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I know this is just a thought exercise, but in a lot of cases you may still need to perserve some bus routes for local service along or adjacent to railroad ROWs, particularly areas between rapid transit stations.
Route 32 is the most obvious example, given the distance between Readville, Hyde Park and Forest Hills, and the route indeed gets good ridership at almost all stops north of Hyde Park. Both the 77 and the 1 get decent ridership on sections that overlap the Red Line ROW (Porter-Harvard-Central): southbound route 1's alightings at Central is 27% of boardings at the station.
Even route 120, which is not nearly as frequent as the abovementioned ones, gets decent ridership between Wood Island and Orient Heights.
Delvin4519
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Yea. I should have mentioned. This assumes restoration of historical stations to ensure a stop spacing of 1 mile or a bit less, to ensure the 10 minute walksheds (or .5 mile, or 1 kilometer/12 minute walkshed) to cover the area well. Each stop would need to be about a 14 - 21 minute walk from the next stop.
For headways, the Red Line in this hypothectical example would be every 3 minutes, instead of the every 11 - 12 minutes it is currently.
For example, route 108 could be scrapped and removed outright with Edgeworth station on the Oak Grove - Wellington rail line. The Medford Sq. - Wellington line would have East Medford and perhaps Middlesex Ave. stations.
The ROW between Readville and Forest Hills is going to need several stations to cover the gap. It's the whole reason why there's a very frequent bus route on that ROW today, but could be hypothectically redundent in this sandbox enviornment if the ROW could be used for high frequency transit. The same goes for West Roxbury - Rozzie. (Again, this is the sandbox thread, so assuming quad tracking, etc., for express track/redundency track).
Rinse and repeat until as many bus lines and street running lines are removed and swapped in favor of high speed transitways. Mostly then once at that point, those buses can be redistributed across the system into fewer and more frequent routes. One of the huge bottlenecks in frequency for bus routes is the number of bus routes and length of bus route mileage distance. So consolidating as many bus routes as pssible and limiting route duplication can do signficantly to boost bus frequency. Then, high capacity rail having multiple lines can provide additional redundency on that end. This also allows for much more streets to go pedestrianized and more dedicated bike lanes to be built, as many routes no longer have buses flying down every 6 minutes, save for emergency vehicles or the rare instance of a necesssary diversion.
This way, parts of Washington St. in Rozzie Sq. can be pedestrianized, which would probably be a much better enviornment with frequent transit on the rail ROW, and the perpendicular street running route will have additional buses/streetcars to go around.
The most surprising thing to me is that all of the 80s Lechmere buses (80, 87, 88) could theoretically be wiped out outright, only the 69 bus route would be left over.
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Teban54
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What if Boston gets a 4th heavy rail line?
Presenting to you, my take on the Indigo Line:
Google Maps link here.
This proposal has some similarities to Aprehensive_Words's "Blue Bobby Pin" proposal by as well as F-Line's "Red X" proposal, but it was developed independently - I just took a long time to sketch it up.
The motivating question behind it was: Which parts of Greater Boston still needs a rapid transit line?
South
As of today, there are two significant transit deserts to the south: Nubian/Warren St corridor, and the Fairmount ROW. The former is more easily handled with various LRT proposals, so I focused on rapid transit conversion for the Fairmount line.
I know F-Line has explained why Fairmount can't be taken off from the FRA network... So let's just leave it as God Mode handwaving lol. Although you can instead do Red X as per F-Line's proposal for the southern half (converting one of the Red Line's branches into a separate line), and still follow the same route to the north.
Downtown
The main goal here is to add a station at the heart of the Financial District, right at Post Office Square. Despite the area being surrounded by rapid transit stations at all four corners, many offices are just a bit out of the way. My Indigo Line would immediately offer connections to all other rapid transit lines.
A North Station-South Station subway link is also nice, but not the intention, as this clearly has a smaller chance of happening than NSRL.
An alternative routing I considered was to head into North End via Hanover St and cross into Charlestown from there, but I ultimately felt it wasn't worth it.
North
Assuming no heavy rail conversion for GLX, the transit desert is clearly the vast space between Orange and Blue lines: Charlestown, Chelsea, Everett, Revere. Urban Ring can offer circumferential service, but they do have the density for a radial service.
Charlestown and Chelsea can be easily linked via a God-Mode tunnel in the vicinity of Tobin Bridge. But then you face a choice between Everett and Revere, and both are just a bit too far from Orange and Blue lines. Here, I present both options, and I'd say both have good arguments for them.
Regardless of which city you pick, a tunnel under the respective Broadway will probably work best, though also expensive. Both options rejoin at Linden Square (the Revere alignment has the additional benefit of serving Northgate shopping center while doing so). I did consider following Route 1, but the density and land use along the highway ROW is not great.
Far North
This is more of a "nice to have" situation, but since the old Saugus Branch ROW exists, why not? This brings us to Saugus Center and West Lynn, before joining BLX and Regional Rail at Lynn. Alternatively, you can turn it west from Saugus Center to Square One Mall. Saugus doesn't deserve a heavy rail line today, but hey, we're in God Mode, right?
Presenting to you, my take on the Indigo Line:
Google Maps link here.
This proposal has some similarities to Aprehensive_Words's "Blue Bobby Pin" proposal by as well as F-Line's "Red X" proposal, but it was developed independently - I just took a long time to sketch it up.
The motivating question behind it was: Which parts of Greater Boston still needs a rapid transit line?
South
As of today, there are two significant transit deserts to the south: Nubian/Warren St corridor, and the Fairmount ROW. The former is more easily handled with various LRT proposals, so I focused on rapid transit conversion for the Fairmount line.
I know F-Line has explained why Fairmount can't be taken off from the FRA network... So let's just leave it as God Mode handwaving lol. Although you can instead do Red X as per F-Line's proposal for the southern half (converting one of the Red Line's branches into a separate line), and still follow the same route to the north.
Downtown
The main goal here is to add a station at the heart of the Financial District, right at Post Office Square. Despite the area being surrounded by rapid transit stations at all four corners, many offices are just a bit out of the way. My Indigo Line would immediately offer connections to all other rapid transit lines.
A North Station-South Station subway link is also nice, but not the intention, as this clearly has a smaller chance of happening than NSRL.
An alternative routing I considered was to head into North End via Hanover St and cross into Charlestown from there, but I ultimately felt it wasn't worth it.
North
Assuming no heavy rail conversion for GLX, the transit desert is clearly the vast space between Orange and Blue lines: Charlestown, Chelsea, Everett, Revere. Urban Ring can offer circumferential service, but they do have the density for a radial service.
Charlestown and Chelsea can be easily linked via a God-Mode tunnel in the vicinity of Tobin Bridge. But then you face a choice between Everett and Revere, and both are just a bit too far from Orange and Blue lines. Here, I present both options, and I'd say both have good arguments for them.
Regardless of which city you pick, a tunnel under the respective Broadway will probably work best, though also expensive. Both options rejoin at Linden Square (the Revere alignment has the additional benefit of serving Northgate shopping center while doing so). I did consider following Route 1, but the density and land use along the highway ROW is not great.
Far North
This is more of a "nice to have" situation, but since the old Saugus Branch ROW exists, why not? This brings us to Saugus Center and West Lynn, before joining BLX and Regional Rail at Lynn. Alternatively, you can turn it west from Saugus Center to Square One Mall. Saugus doesn't deserve a heavy rail line today, but hey, we're in God Mode, right?