MBTA Commuter Rail (Operations, Keolis, & Short Term)

The only difference is the peak/off-peak distribution

Which is the vast majority of the ridership. The extra off peak trains are mainly they were forced to not layoff Union members as part of the spending bill. May as well make them do something even if it's empty. But surely there's gotta be a time limit and when the inevitable spending cuts come, it will be gone.

I am assuming they will bring back the peak service levels when ridership justifies it. But only then.

The CR lines that are seeing higher ridership are because of the OL shutdown and the subsequent subway troubles and the CR stole share from it. Doesn't impact the WL and for sure doesn't impact the Outer part.
 
You're changing the subject again. You said THIS 👇 false statement:
They haven't brought back 2019 service levels on the WL as a whole either. And WFH is why.

Which is the vast majority of the ridership.
No, it's not a "vast majority". There were 12 peak IB's, 9 peak OB's on the 2019 schedule. There are 11 peak IB's, 9 peak OB's on the 2023 schedule. It's a net reduction of 1 unidirectional train. And @Teban54 already provided you with the cite that CR ridership is at >90% pre-COVID ridership (94.8%, in fact, as of October!). It's on you to find the specific citation that the Worcester Line is severely lagging the system in ridership recovery to support this claim.

Your...vibes...are...not...facts.

The extra off peak trains are mainly they were forced to not layoff Union members as part of the spending bill. May as well make them do something. But surely there's gotta be a time limit and when the inevitable spending cuts come, it will be gone.
Direct citation on the union blocking it? Don't think for one second you can fling a claim that provocative out there without backing it up with a hard news cite.

Your...vibes...are...not...facts.

I am assuming they will bring back the peak service levels when ridership justifies it. But only then.
They already have, unless you're holding out on the 12th inbound peak slot as the crux of your entire "vast majority of the ridership" argument.

Your...vibes...are...not...facts.
The CR lines that are seeing higher ridership are because of the OL shutdown and the subsequent subway troubles and the CR stole share from it. Doesn't impact the WL and for sure doesn't impact the Outer part.
Show us the numbers, then. Show us where the Worcester Line is severely lagging and show us where the subway-overlap stops are busting out to an extreme skew.

Your...vibes...are...not...facts.


Seriously, this is starting to border on outright trolling. :rolleyes:
 
Screenshot 2024-02-03 at 23.30.53.png

@F-Line to Dudley @jklo I'm basically going to just throw this over the wall and then run away. Data excludes weekends, federal holidays, Black Friday, and the days between Christmas and New Years. If anyone else knows where I can get more accurate CR data I would appreciate it. "Spring 2018", whenever that was, had detailed station info, 2023 had every day listed but ridership was totaled by line. A dataset with both would obviously be preferable.
 
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As a lifelong Downeaster person, I rode the Lowell line for the first time a couple months ago. Was shocked by how slow it is. Theoretically it's one of the oldest railroads in the US, certainly not new service, and yet it takes 45 minutes to an hour to go 25 miles. The train was crawling along like it was light rail. Is this how the commuter rail always is? Does keolis not care or does the state not care? I feel like commuters would be reasonable demanding 60mph service.
 
As a lifelong Downeaster person, I rode the Lowell line for the first time a couple months ago. Was shocked by how slow it is. Theoretically it's one of the oldest railroads in the US, certainly not new service, and yet it takes 45 minutes to an hour to go 25 miles. The train was crawling along like it was light rail. Is this how the commuter rail always is? Does keolis not care or does the state not care? I feel like commuters would be reasonable demanding 60mph service.
That may have been some issue with the train you were on? The line is predominately rated for 60-70 MPH (per OpenRailwayMap), both before and after the Wildcat Branch. There is no track or equipment reason for those trains to run any slower than the Downeaster does. Since the scheduled effective speed is 35 miles per hour (43 minutes to go 25), I assume there are some significant time penalties for station dwell, acceleration/deceleration for stops, etc. If so, that's an issue of local vs express service, and not an issue of somebody not caring.
 
As a lifelong Downeaster person, I rode the Lowell line for the first time a couple months ago. Was shocked by how slow it is. Theoretically it's one of the oldest railroads in the US, certainly not new service, and yet it takes 45 minutes to an hour to go 25 miles. The train was crawling along like it was light rail. Is this how the commuter rail always is? Does keolis not care or does the state not care? I feel like commuters would be reasonable demanding 60mph service.

From transitmatters:

The Lowell Line connects North Station with Lowell in 46 minutes. In comparison, nonstop trains made the trip in 45 minutes when the line first opened in the 1830s.

Modern operations using electric multiple units (EMUs), high track standards and level boarding at all stations could reduce the end-to-end trip time to 31 minutes. The schedule will be even faster if the North-South Rail Link (NSRL) tunnel is built, eliminating the slow approach to the stub-ended North Station.


The entire line from North Station to Lowell should be electrified. The cost of doing so, based on recent projects in similar countries, ranges between $6o million and $100 million.

Electrification allows for significantly faster end-to-end trip times. The line's straight trajectory allows EMUs to achieve very high speeds: 80 mph on the line south of Winchester and 100 mph on the section of the line north of Winchester. Additional reasons for electrification include reliability and reduced emissions. EMUs are more reliable than modern diesel locomotives and have better acceleration and braking qualities. Fast, electrified Regional Rail reduces emissions by replacing current diesel train trips and attracting new riders who would otherwise be contributing to congestion and pollution on the I-93 and US-3 corridors.

Focus your advocacy towards the state. That’s who would be responsible for electrification efforts. A project like this requires funding and commitments from the state government.

Any way you slice it, the Lowell Line isn’t first on the priority list. Newburyport/ Rockport from North Station to Beverly, Fairmount from South Station to Readville and the entire Providence Line will be fully electrified first. Getting those three lines complete will make it so much more likely and imminent for the Lowell Line.
 
Any way you slice it, the Lowell Line isn’t first on the priority list. Newburyport/ Rockport from North Station to Beverly, Fairmount from South Station to Readville and the entire Providence Line will be fully electrified first. Getting those three lines complete will make it so much more likely and imminent for the Lowell Line.
Yes, but also, Lowell would be a strong candidate for pre-electrification diesel Frequent Regional Rail (more details at link). 45 minutes sucks, but it's also well within the realm of rapid transit commutes (and the journey from high-ridership Anderson/Woburn is only 25 minutes). Even the 45 minute journey still means that basically all of downtown and some of Back Bay is within a 1 hour commute, and that expands to most of Back Bay and the Seaport if you stretch your commute to 1:05. Several Lowell Line stations have good placement to support walk-ups and bus transfers, exactly the kind of station that would benefit enormously from near-walk-up-and-go 15 minute frequencies.

Newburyport/ Rockport from North Station to Beverly
I know this idea does not originate with you personally, but I remain confused by it. Is this supposed to assume that trains beyond Beverly will be dual-modes/battery trains? Because otherwise you're still going to have 2 trains per hour coming in from Newburyport and Rockport. If our target is 15 min frequencies, then that's 50% of your service already accounted for as diesels.

Targeting 10-min frequencies inside of 128, with electric short-turns terminating at Lynn or Salem, could be more reasonable, but that's not something I see being specifically proposed.
 
Yes, but also, Lowell would be a strong candidate for pre-electrification diesel Frequent Regional Rail (more details at link). 45 minutes sucks, but it's also well within the realm of rapid transit commutes (and the journey from high-ridership Anderson/Woburn is only 25 minutes). Even the 45 minute journey still means that basically all of downtown and some of Back Bay is within a 1 hour commute, and that expands to most of Back Bay and the Seaport if you stretch your commute to 1:05. Several Lowell Line stations have good placement to support walk-ups and bus transfers, exactly the kind of station that would benefit enormously from near-walk-up-and-go 15 minute frequencies.
Generally speaking, rail is competitive with Boston car commutes if you can do 128-to-Terminal in under 30 minutes, and 495-to-Terminal in under an hour. The Lowell Line already meets the competitiveness standard handily, especially at the 495 end where it's 10-15 minutes faster there than any other line not-named-Providence.

mbta-rail-timescale.png
 
Generally speaking, rail is competitive with Boston car commutes if you can do 128-to-Terminal in under 30 minutes, and 495-to-Terminal in under an hour. The Lowell Line already meets the competitiveness standard handily, especially at the 495 end where it's 10-15 minutes faster there than any other line not-named-Providence.

mbta-rail-timescale.png
Isn't this the Downs-Thomson paradox in action, and so rail travel times will generally be "competitive" with driving? The time to drive a commute tends to match the trip times of equivalent trips taken on public transit. If we speed up the trains, people will switch from driving, and car traffic will speed up until it hits that equilibrium again. If the trains run slower, people will switch to driving until traffic is so bad it is the same time to just take the train.
 
That may have been some issue with the train you were on? The line is predominately rated for 60-70 MPH (per OpenRailwayMap), both before and after the Wildcat Branch. There is no track or equipment reason for those trains to run any slower than the Downeaster does. Since the scheduled effective speed is 35 miles per hour (43 minutes to go 25), I assume there are some significant time penalties for station dwell, acceleration/deceleration for stops, etc. If so, that's an issue of local vs express service, and not an issue of somebody not caring.
I posted in preparation of me taking the Lowell line again last night. This could be me misreading hwo fast we were actually going, but there are significant stretches, especially in the first third of the journey, where the train seemed to be at a crawl (5-10mph). My expectation for a straightish, double tracked rail line is that it should just be flying between stations, but I'm not an expert. It felt exactly like the rapid transit trains do when they run into signal and slow zone issues. We even stopped at one point for a minute or so. I even saw a Downeaster fly by us. I didn't think to time the journey but I think it was closer to an hour. This matches my experience from a couple months ago.
 
I posted in preparation of me taking the Lowell line again last night. This could be me misreading hwo fast we were actually going, but there are significant stretches, especially in the first third of the journey, where the train seemed to be at a crawl (5-10mph). My expectation for a straightish, double tracked rail line is that it should just be flying between stations, but I'm not an expert. It felt exactly like the rapid transit trains do when they run into signal and slow zone issues. We even stopped at one point for a minute or so. I even saw a Downeaster fly by us. I didn't think to time the journey but I think it was closer to an hour. This matches my experience from a couple months ago.

Rather than going by a really unrealiable "gut feeling," I highly recommend getting some actual data. Speed Tracker apps are quite handy for this type of thing.
 
We even stopped at one point for a minute or so. I even saw a Downeaster fly by us. I didn't think to time the journey but I think it was closer to an hour. This matches my experience from a couple months ago.
If it took an hour, that's 33% longer than the time table indicates. I guess the question is whether it is consistently slower than scheduled, or whether you encountered some bad luck. As for that Downeaster flying by, it will definitely go faster, because the only stop it is making is at Anderson RTC. I don't know whether the MBTA would have reason to run a Lowell Express, but if they did, it would certainly move at a higher speed than the locals.
 
Isn't this the Downs-Thomson paradox in action, and so rail travel times will generally be "competitive" with driving? The time to drive a commute tends to match the trip times of equivalent trips taken on public transit. If we speed up the trains, people will switch from driving, and car traffic will speed up until it hits that equilibrium again. If the trains run slower, people will switch to driving until traffic is so bad it is the same time to just take the train.
Commuter Rail travel times really aren't that variable, though. Unlike the price we're paying with rapid transit's slow zone hell, the CR network's speeds have been stable for decades. With on-time performance that's generally gotten a little better over time as some dregs-of-system lines (Fitchburg, Worcester, Haverhill) have gotten infrastructure improvements for some of their traffic management flaws. That chart I posted was from 2012, and there's been scant change in the dozen years since...and certainly little to none in the negative direction. Loading really doesn't affect it much, because there's built-in schedule padding for things like low-platform dwells on particularly packed runs. So all the movement and instability has been on the roads side. And part of the attraction of public transit is its relative schedule certainty (current crisis-era rapid transit excepted) compared to the crapshoot on the roads. Traffic loading on the roads is such that an accident or construction can freeze traffic even on the off-peaks, with a big part of our current traffic hell being the sheer unpredictability of trips at any hour of the day. With some commutes, like I-93, being so incredibly unpredictable that you have to lean worst-case on planned trip time pretty much all of the time.

The good thing is that the rail mode has nothing but improvement in for it if we implement real Regional Rail. Electrification with EMU's will shrink several minutes off every trip and absorb the stop timings of new infill stations. Systemwide level boarding will allow the padding for variable dwells to be slashed back, so schedules can improve by running within smaller margins for error at no loss to OTP. On existing track, at existing track classes...no need for TransitMatters' superduper impractical and way-more-expensive-than-they-think 100 MPH track quality with intercity-class EMU propulsion that isn't available for purchase here. The rest is simply frequencies, frequencies, frequencies for the enticement. And, obviously, fixing the woefallen rapid transit division so that it's up to the task of distributing those loads from the terminals. The roads, by contrast, are always going to be a crapshoot at peak...even if the peak loading ends up decreasing a bit because of transit increases. It's been bad at rush hour for too many generations here to go any other way. About the best future prognosis you can dream up for our roads is that maybe that maddening inconsistency of the off-peak decreases a bit with less all-day loading, and goes back to a somewhat more predictable earlier era. But that's not a paradox of two sides always inevitably coming to cancel-out equilibrium. The volatility is inherent on the highways; it's not on a properly functioning rail transit system, which our Commuter Rail mostly is and definitely projects to be if we implement RER practices.
 
If it took an hour, that's 33% longer than the time table indicates. I guess the question is whether it is consistently slower than scheduled, or whether you encountered some bad luck. As for that Downeaster flying by, it will definitely go faster, because the only stop it is making is at Anderson RTC. I don't know whether the MBTA would have reason to run a Lowell Express, but if they did, it would certainly move at a higher speed than the locals.
You can easily track on-time performance on any CR line with the T's Service Reliability tracker. The Lowell Line has been pretty stable over the last 30 days. 2 days at 89%, 3 days at 93%, 1 day at 94%, rest of the time at 96% or above. 16 days this past month a perfect 100%.

It's either incredibly unlucky to hit multiple severely delayed trains on the Lowell Line in a widely-scattered sampling, or the vibes don't quite match the facts.
 
MassDOT will host a public meeting on the Northern Tier Passenger Rail Study (service to North Adams and Greenfield) on Thursday, March 28, from 6-7pm:

This prompted me to update and expand my analysis of North Adams service via Springfield. Looking more closely at the numbers, it really is a no brainer -- bootstrapping into the CommPass rail improvements (using the NNEIRI model) would be extraordinarily less expensive, would be equally fast or, at worst, increase travel times to Boston by 40 minutes, and would serve a stronger market to boot.

The 40 minute journey time increase isn't great, but to eliminate it, you need to spend something like $1 billion, increasing the cost of the project by something like two or three times if not more. And yes, it's an extra 40 minutes to Boston, but it also provides an actual 1-seat-ride to much closer and more valuable destinations, such as Amherst/Northampton, Springfield, and Worcester.

(I'm a little skeptical of comparing the numbers in the Northern Tier study and the NNEIRI study -- I'm a little surprised the differences could be that extreme -- but I think the via-Springfield approach intuitively makes a lot more sense, so I'm modestly confident that a closer analysis would bear out the general conclusions I'm putting forth here.)

Speculative map for visual interest:

New England Rail v2.png
 

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