Beton Brut
Senior Member
- Joined
- May 25, 2006
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How about an underground walkway between Green Line at Symphony to the Orange Line at Mass Ave?
The people who use 128 are tax payers too and deserve better roads.
About 20 years ago the T had a consultant look into connecting the red and blue line. The result was that there would be a net increase of about 12 riders a day.
The people who use 128 are tax payers too and deserve better roads. It always seems to be an us vs them scenario.
I think there is benefit to connecting the red and blue line I just feel that for the short term riders have the ability to get where they are going they just have to use more than one line. I would much rather see areas that have poor or no rapid transit connects to Boston get improvements first. I have zero faith in any T consultant and little faith in consultants in general. The phase I like is 'consultants paint circles around bull eyes'. I'm sure the study left out the fact that for every rider that no longer has to hop on the orange or green line you are freeing up space for additional riders on those lines.So there's no reason to improve service for the thousands who are inconvenienced by the half-baked current system because the net gain is anticipated to be ~12 riders?
They are not removing a breakdown lane. After this project is done there will still be a breakdown lane and an additional lane. All the bridges have to be rebuilt, on and off ramps reconfigures and probably utility changes.Leaving aside the insanity of removing the breakdown lane (isn't this essentially a Sand & Gravel repaving project?) in order to "add" a lane that's already acting as a thru lane ...
What are you basing this on?The Green Line extension? Dying a death slower and more painful than the Arborway restoration.
I'm not more enthused about the 128 lane addtition. This fixes an existing problem. If not just too make commuters life a little saffer and easier, it will reduce polution and gas use. These lane drops still cause a bottleneck. I'm sure you are wondering, I don't own a car.Paul, please don't take any of this as an attack, but in a later post you said, "The future is all about public transportation." If you think that's true, why are you more enthused for the 128 lane swap?**
A quick search I found $200 million, I don't know if this figure is still current. I'm sure the figure can be found somewhere on the web.Will it cost billions?
The original design was to have a train run in the median strip and therefore the original median was very wide.This is going off, and I know there have been visions of it, but why not just lay down track in the space opened by the lane widening.**Connect those suburban office parks we love with mass transit.
I don't understand why people keep mentioning the airport in conjunction with the Red/Blue connector. The airport is not the only purpose of the Blue Line. It also serves many other businesses, homes, and recreational areas.
The 128 widening project strikes me as wasteful because it really doesn't add any capacity at rush hour -- you'll go from 3 lanes + breakdown used as additional lane, to 4 lanes with no traffic in breakdown lane. The current experiment is surprising to people at first, but so are many other local traffic quirks (rotaries, concert parking on Storrow Drive, closing Memorial Drive in Cambridge on Sundays)
But with the breakdown lane used for travel, it's already got four lanes during rush hour. That's why I don't see this project as especially productive. The marginal benefits of having a full-time breakdown lane don't seem to be worth the cost.
Because Ron, when that fourth lane starts to get backed up (and it will), then they will have a fifth lane for overflow traffic!
Of course that will necessitate building yet another lane (for safety reasons, of course) etc..etc..
Because Ron, when that fourth lane starts to get backed up (and it will), then they will have a fifth lane for overflow traffic!
Of course that will necessitate building yet another lane (for safety reasons, of course) etc..etc..
Very well put Statler.
Back to the Blue/Red line connection, here's a hack: build a pedestrian tunnel connecting Park Street and Government Center. Install some of those nifty people mover thingys they have at the airport and now you have essentially connected all of the lines in a mini-network made up of Park St, Downtown Crossing, and Government Center.
Install some of those nifty people mover thingys they have at the airport
Speaking of which, I was at Wellington today and you have to walk through a hamster tube about a half mile long to get out of the station. It could definitely use a people mover...or five.