Timed transfers, even done in the Netherlands, slow down a service to make it more frequent. I somewhat frequently take the train through Zwolle which has a timed transfer to give each destination pair a half-hourly service, and the stop lasts somewhere around 3-5 minutes most of the time. I'd expect the E. Taunton transfer to work out similarly.
I actually have no idea what your point is here and it's just completely detached from the facts, so I'm going to go back to the start and restate the idea:
- Right now, during peak hours, the Commuter Rail from Braintree to South Station comes roughly every half hour. Quincy Center is a little better but headways still average around 20 minutes at best.
- The commuter rail is faster than the Red Line if you are trying to get from Braintree or QC to bus connections at JFK or South Station and downtown, but because it is so infrequent during peak hours it doesn't make sense for most people
- Compounding this is the fact that these few CR trains are split across three branches, which leads to even less frequency on the branches (about 3 times less, believe it or not) resulting in high crowding, again reducing the usefulness of this parallel express service for commuters at Braintree and QC.
- Therefore, if we could add more service, some people at Braintree and Quincy Center who currently have a slow commute on the Red Line could have a faster one on the Commuter Rail, and many communities on the South Shore and in Plymouth County such as Weymouth, Hingham, Bridgewater, Brockton, Abington, etc could have much more frequent service, such as every 15 minutes to Brockton for example.
- However, this requires adding an extra track to the at least some of the single-tracked sections of the Commuter Rail. For some sections this is quite easy, and there is space available on the alignment or dead space between the adjacent road which can be dug out. Other sections would require some space to be taken from the road or just ignored through detailed scheduling.
- And in one spot, there is a choice. Just north of JFK and next to Savin Hill, the extra space could either be attained through taking space from I-93, or by reducing the number of Red Line tracks. The first seems somewhat unwise, given that the relevant section of I-93 already has no shoulder for safety. Removing a lane for the CR could preclude adding one. The second option however, could work.
- By reworking JFK station to only have two Red Line tracks, and moving the split point to a new flying junction, possibly around here, there would be enough for two CR tracks all the way from South Station to just past North Quincy. Combined with a comprehensive renovation of Quincy Center and some smaller workers between Quincy Adams and Braintree, that would leave only around ~2 mi of single track, enough to allow 8-10TPH on the line.
- However, this comes at the cost of adding about 90s to the Red Line trip by stopping at Savin Hill. If anyone is bitching about their commute being longer, this is the time they would be bitching about.
- But again, this would be mitigated substantially by the fact that the additional express CR service would also benefit riders at QC and Braintree, and obviously the benefits to places only on the CR and not the RL. You could call that robbing Peter to pay Paul, but I would strongly argue it's more like "Robbing Peter to invest his money and generate a 3-4x return to Paul, and giving some (but not quite all) of the original sum back to Peter."
