What if Westfield served as the terminus as the better I-90 Park-and-Ride? It has an exit off the Mass Pike and might be a good place for a layover for the EW service. I certainly would not go any further than Westfield (bus-on-Pike is how I'd go further west) but for people who're driving for E-W service and want a place to park and ride, Westfield might be a better "cheap commuter parking" place vs Springfield .
Because that's repeating the #1 sin of the E-W Study vs. NNEIRI: intentionally ignoring the absolutely frigging
massive NORTH-SOUTH ridership by pretending the hugely well-calculated Inland Route SPG-HFD-NHV numbers don't exist against all credulity. NNEIRI wanted 8 round trips daily Boston-Springfield-New Haven for
starters (meaning up to a couple backfill trips of slack remaining after all is buffed out). And ConnDOT is in a terrible hurry to shower us with money to partner on subsidy. You're going to dilute
any of those megalopolis-catchment slots by vulturing more of them for a stub-out in a town of 41K just 9 miles away...then turn back home? How does anything related to this scheme expect to make its margins with upside-down priorities like that leading it by the nose? How do we expect to make a go of this at all by telling an enthusiastic funding partner in ConnDOT: "Hi, we're insane. Keep your money because we plan to be insane alone."
This is embracing the same idea that Baker/Pollack are leveraging for their study tankapalooza. We shouldn't be trying
harder to make the tankapalooza work by digging in OCD at Westfield, we should be saying "You guys are liars and morons for foisting garbage that doesn't lead FIRST with the Inlands which everyone and their mother knows will make margins." It's a born self-own. And sequencing MA-only first in some sort of hometown nod is ass-backwards because the lion's share of intra-MA ridership evaporates without the thru routing to New Haven...so practically speaking all negotiations are off if the Inland Route isn't the primary backer of the B&A upgrade work. There's very sound reasoning behind the MPO's vomiting all over this study and not stopping at calling it "flawed, needs improvement", but rather saying it's unsalvageable garbage that needs to be tossed entirely for the NNEIRI's service baseline. You can't make a working proposal out of E-W's study assumptions. It is literally born to self-own.
So taking the bait on a Westfield troubleshoot isn't helping to fish it out, it's furthering the self-own to make sure nothing ever happens. The Inland Route has to be Priority #1 with a bullet to bring the margins, or else nothing else--not Westfield, not Pittsfield, not Montreal, not Albany--is payable.
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Second...the other practical reason that Westfield can't be up-front in planning is because B&A slots are not so plentiful that any west-of-SPG routings can have first dibs at filling out their schedules while leaving enough for the rest. West Springfield is the largest and busiest CSX yard of them all in-state, so any passenger trains crossing the Connecticut River have to engage the full daily freight schedule...not just the SPG-WOR freight schedule where there has already been one major level of traffic dropoff before the river. NNEIRI was able to craft the 8 Inland round-trips + 1 BOS-MTL round-trip vs. the SPG-WOR freight schedule in a way that was spread nicely and evenly across the clock (while not fully clock-facing) to capture maximal demand. Pretty reliable 2-hour departures and 2-hour arrivals at South Station hitting Springfield, plus the timed meet at SPG with the Vermonter netting a second two-seat/cross-tix Montreal round-trip from Boston.
Start predicating the schedule spread on >4 Westfield turns per day in some vague notion that it's first therefore it has to have some degree of quasi-parity with Hartford, and the pax schedule rapidly starts decaying in integrity from having to engage 10 miles of maximal CSX traffic. More useful slots get outright lost (such as the expansion past 8 Inlands per day that will eventually be necessary to max it out to 90 minute departures). But more disruptive than that is that even amongst the total slots you keep that even spread scheduling against the clock that makes trip planning at South Station attractively coherent starts getting gapped out to hell by the domino effect of the Westfield turns setting themselves against all cross-B&A freight scheduling, and thus leading everything else by the nose to scramble moving up or down against the clock prioritizing available nooks and crannies instead of even 2-hour churns. Now you start having a daily schedule at South Station rife with 2 Springfield-running trips leaving in a 20-minute span followed by a 2:30 gap because Westfield has to break with the spacing to deal with CSX, disrupting the ebb-and-flow of what's behind it. Or worse. It'll be a mess. The B&A
whole-corridor just isn't that clock-facing flexible because of the way CSX traffic chunks out Worcester vs. Springfield vs. Albany/Pittsfield, and that's why you don't let
whole-corridor engaging schedules inversely set the table for everything on the interior chunks. You work the interior chunks first, then leave foraging for nooks to the less-frequent
Lake Shore Ltd. and Berkshire trains.
Clock-spreading scheduling is going to collapse on itself if Westfield has to be put on a pedestal that's even two-thirds par with the Inlands. If we're simply chasing the highest-leverage trips first, the Inlands those cross-tix diverging trips are utmost importance and Westfield isn't looked at as a distinct destination at all vs. Pittsfield. Yes, that's unfortunate for Westfield because their train slots won't be all-day plentiful enough or even enough to break reliance on the bus. But there's no easy solution to that because if we're maxing out train traffic by demand the slotting to Westfield is going to
have to be more irregular than the slotting to Hartford/New Haven because simply because of which chunk of B&A it resides on. And you can't in good conscience prioritize that chunk's slotting to the ruination of all other's schedule spread against the clock. It means in all practicality you're NOT brainstorming at all on how to short-turn trains at a Westfield Pn'R, but finding justifications to backfill more cross-Berkshire trains to Pittsfield and Albany so when that least-flexible chunk of B&A is engaged it's engaged at max efficiency for all its catchments at no demerit to anything on the inner chunks turning/diverging @ SPG.
If that means builds touching Westfield and Pittsfield has to by necessity come later than the base Inland build for purposes of maximizing investment, so be it. Western MA
already understands this perfectly well, which is why the MPO's are all wearing war paint to kill the E-W study and go back to NNEIRI basics before E-W sandbags everything on its coattails. Just if the Berkshires have to necessarily go on the back-burner for the base build, if you're going to commit to reaching them
next time...keep the promise and don't half-ass it. Starting with giving Westfield better bus service in the meantime, as more frequencies and some commuter express options timed with the Hartford Line are going to have more impact anyway than rigging E-W with an ineffectually spaced token schedule. I guarantee a Westfield poke that continues to sandbag the Inlands isn't going to be palatable to them anyway because Hartford Line starts out with more massive and immediate mindshare, and that any *properly* constructed corridor projects which don't treat Pittsfield and Westfield equally on that chunk of B&A would be immediately attacked as half-assing it and transparently engaging in more divide-and-conquer tactics. City of Westfield was read in by Captain Obvious long ago on these projects and what it means to them. It isn't going to be swayed by quarter-measure one-seat rides that don't address their biggest commute needs first (i.e. Hartford Line connections first, Inland connections second, everything else cross-state direct third and on a sliding scale).
