MBTA "Transformation" (Green Line, Red Line, & Orange Line Transformation Projects)

I was talking about asking questions not how to have respectful disagreements.

Literally all I was saying is that people should be free to ask questions when they dont know something and get respectful answers. Thats all.
 
F-Lines responses would be soooo much better if 1. They were much shorter and 2. He didnt try to belittle everybody who asks a question.

This is the transit section of the forum, if you dont know something about transit this is where you should ask a question, I dont get what the problem is. People shouldnt feel like if they ask a question in here theyre going to get shit on, thats ridiculous. We can be better than this. If you have a question, ask it, you shouldnt feel like youre going to get anybodys “wrath”. Not everybody knows everything, thats why questions even exist, plus everybody learns if someone asks a question, even the ppl who didnt ask. It should be encouraged to ask questions and get respectable answers. Everybody wins in an environment like that.

I hear ya. In my case, F-Line's answers to my questions were exceptionally informative, I learned much from them and they were very much appreciated. I think F-Line's a great resource, stays on subject and I'm learning a lot from the posts. I'm very grateful for the non-confrontational tone he took in his thoughtful answers to my questions. Although I had read F-Line's posts for many years, I had never before gotten up the courage (because I am truly a novice in the Transpo realm) to ask a question directly. I appreciated the informative answers very much.
 
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At the risk of incurring wrath from known sources

Act like this is a specialized Wikipedia

  1. Put the highlights in the top section which most will read
  2. Link the details which you provide to series of #'d references
  3. Put the References at the End of your posting
    1. Link to other sources of information through the same numbering system

Thus [as a purely hypothetical example]

I disagree with X's comments because my experience with measuring YYYY GHz signals *1 In particular X quoted the work of Prof BagsofDogWaste*2 and Mr. CatBoxContents*3 neither's of which information are apropos to the discussion and my original posts -- because of the excessive amounts of Ground Water*4 during the period mentioned by X compared to recent periods.

References:
*1 my [hypothetical] personal experience with measuring GHz signals including my published papers *5,6
*2 Prof BagsofDogWaste paper
*3 Mr. CatBoxContents testimony in front of Congressional Committee Chaired by Rep Markey [Congressional Record March 17, 1988]
*4 US Dept of Agriculture Report on Ground Water levels in Southeastern Middlesex County 1950 through 1960

Now THIS is a different example of a poster...............

.
 
Regarding Albany Garage: most of the busses running out of Albany are expresses from Newton,Waltham and Brighton. As very few people are traveling out of the CBD in the AM or into it in the PM, a better place for them would be to the west, perhaps the Weston tollbooth space.
 
Regarding Albany Garage: most of the busses running out of Albany are expresses from Newton,Waltham and Brighton. As very few people are traveling out of the CBD in the AM or into it in the PM, a better place for them would be to the west, perhaps the Weston tollbooth space.

Not an accurate picture of fleet assignments, though. Albany sources six Top 100 routes: the 57 (#9), CT2 (#52), 65 (#53), 59 (#88), CT3 (#93), and 60 (#94) doing a collective 19,700 daily boardings. 501 (#79) and 504 (#86) are the only Pike expresses that crack the Top 100, with the seven (out of nine total) 5xx routes assigned to that particular garage chucking in only about 9850 daily boardings. With many of them running extreme-limited schedules because of their skewed peak orientation. Albany currently houses 129 buses, third-most of the system's eight diesel garages after enormous-size Charlestown and twice-as-large Cabot. Do the rough math portioning Albany's equipment sizes to the route utilizations outlined above and you can't even begin to accumulate enough offsets to make that expendable.

Ari O. has floated the "park 'em out in a black hole in Weston" idea, too, in his occasional quest to completely and totally misunderstand the point of storage yards. It doesn't wash at even a basic arithmetic level because generously--when ridership and shift skew are factored--you're only talking about a little over a quarter of Albany's equipment shares that could function properly being booted out of downtown. With the size of Albany relative to systemwide garages cementing the utter impossibility of moving enough bodies elsewhere to make the property available. Even if you did boot the 5xx's elsewhere (actually proposed in the T's more ambitious prior-decade bus facilities plan, as they'd shift with a few other west-region inhabitants to a reactivated Watertown Garage)...the need for substantially more frequencies on some of Albany's other routes plus rebalancing all of Downtown to surge frequencies where needed backfills any 5xx removals in a nanosecond. And leaves you wishing for still-more local capacity where that came from. It's doubly moot if we implement Urban Rail to Riverside on the Worcester Line, because that would force a massive consolidation of the 9 total 5xx routes into just a few remainders that provide coverage the rail line + surge transfers at stops like Newton Corner leaves lacking. So that Weston salvation ends up doubly irrelevant in the end.


There's no question Albany Garage is a covetous property for South End redev transitioning out of the Ink Block. But, truly, unless a few pretty steep land-swap conditions are met it's not going to ever be possible. Namely, those conditions to make the property tradeable are:
  1. The state can get City- interference-free buy of all of Widett + the BTD tow lot parcels so the more dire Purple Line rail storage needs are accommodated AND there's space to stick close to 100 buses in there. "Interference-free" being...sadly...a nearly impossible ask with City Hall and the BDPA, as all the perfectly future-proofed air rights provisioning in the world doesn't seem to help their brainlock over how to handle these parcels.
  2. Planks of the last Bus Facilities Plan study from 10 years ago like the Wellington 60-footer garage and reanimation of Watertown get brought back folded into today's considerably less-ambitious ongoing Facilities Plan to offset reductions-by-consolidation from Albany's move across the street and bank provision for 20-year growth that's going to need to pump more Yellow Line frequencies into downtown.
  3. There is at least *realistic* hope of an NSRL build in the next 25 years that allows for trade-over of reductions of that ≤30 trainsets of Purple Line storage @ Widett to future expansion bus parking to fortify 50-year needs where urban car shares are going to be much lower and the Yellow Line is going to be a vastly different and more scaled-up animal writ-large than anything we can comprehend today. Effortless transition land-use (or underneath air rights -use) wise if those parcels are under state control at ground level, but the bigness of the century-level needs makes Step #1 all the more important re: the state getting interference-free land swappage.
Unless we can grit it through all of those, Albany Garage isn't going anywhere no matter how much the valuation of the parcel it sits on soars from adjacent redev.
 
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The same Eurozone that the transpo blogosphere loves to lecture us on our inferiority towards has city-size passenger yards for its immense layer cake of hyper-local, semi-local, urban-regional, intercity-regional, and HSR services.
Yeah, if anybody isn't clear on this, they should go to Montmartre in Paris and look at the massive track works and yards feeding in to Gare du Nord and Gare de l'Est. It's kind of shocking because none of it is visible at grade level. Paris may build super dense right up to the edge of this infrastructure, but then there is tremendous geography behind those buildings and alleys dedicated to rail.

 
Yeah, if anybody isn't clear on this, they should go to Montmartre in Paris and look at the massive track works and yards feeding in to Gare du Nord and Gare de l'Est. It's kind of shocking because none of it is visible at grade level. Paris may build super dense right up to the edge of this infrastructure, but then there is tremendous geography behind those buildings and alleys dedicated to rail.

Per the MBTA Blue Book(sorry, but you know,data) of the 90 am peak buses going out, only 13 at NOT on routes to the west. Now, that says to me that 77 of them are. The 59 and the 57 go to Watertown. In addition, Cabot puts a number of busses out west as well. Because, for this purpose, the number of people who ride the bus is not relevant. It's the number of busses assigned. Albany is actually the easiest garage to move.
 
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I think you may have replied to the wrong post, I had nothing to say about bus routings.
 
F-line, I think that you have a fundamentally flawed perception of the bus system. Let's look at the "key routes", the fifteen lines that move half of the folks using busses. 111 goes to Haymarket. 39 goes to Copley. 1 follows Mass Ave. Is Mass Ave Downtown? 116&117 go no closer than Maverick Sq. 57 turns around at Kenmore. 71,73 and 77 don't get any closer than Harvard. The rest are all southwest of Nubian and Ruggles
95 percent of all bus rides are intermodal, most to HRT or LRT. Most busses go no where near downtown, nor should they.
 
F-line, I think that you have a fundamentally flawed perception of the bus system. Let's look at the "key routes", the fifteen lines that move half of the folks using busses. 111 goes to Haymarket. 39 goes to Copley. 1 follows Mass Ave. Is Mass Ave Downtown? 116&117 go no closer than Maverick Sq. 57 turns around at Kenmore. 71,73 and 77 don't get any closer than Harvard. The rest are all southwest of Nubian and Ruggles
95 percent of all bus rides are intermodal, most to HRT or LRT. Most busses go no where near downtown, nor should they.

Where are you storing those buses when they are not running? Charlestown and Cabot are full, and the Arborway Garage expansion was canceled by staunch neighborhood opposition. That mythical white hole out in Weston is within reach of less than 25% of the equipment assignments from Albany, to be nearly zeroed-out if Urban Rail displaces most of the Pike express routes. There are no new tracts of land in the outer neighborhoods that the City would allow to be zoned for that purpose. The last two Bus Facilities studies had no answer for any all-new tracts...only existing T properties. So where does all this go?

If there is a misperception here, then please perceive for me where all that storage is going to go for us to do all those fun property-takings downtown? Cite specifics. It is not going to go down that all buses will simply forever be moving 24/7, because as shown above that doesn't even happen in places around the world where service on a given transit mode is offered 24/7. It has to rest somewhere. When 2 decades of internal studies have found no "somewhere else" to re-draw the storage v. route map...we're wedded to the Big Three CBD garages for permanence unless that improbable "somewhere" gets offered up for land usage from what today is nothing...and city-level institutions with extreme unwillingness to change zoning for tranit storage allow an about-face on their opposition. It makes no difference if geographical spread of routes is off-center with geographical spread of garages when there is no mechanism available to make the geographical spread of garages more perfect with the routes. We tried that with Arborway expansion, and City Hall revolted. It can't just be that you SimCity full-speed ahead with properties as if "somewhere" is being taken care of by someone else and you can re-doodle the route assignments on a whim. There is no someone else. So name what mechanism is going to serve all that up for us.
 
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One cannot debate with someone who invents statistics and ignores evidence.
Never mentioned closing anywhere but Albany. Unclear why you would bring up Cabot or Charlestown.
I agree that well implemented Regional Rail will potentially radically affect the 5xx routes, as well as 57 (and others) This strengthens my argument. A much smaller facility to the west could service the remaining lines as feeders to RR. You are arguing over a dozen busses.
Oh, and the 12 busses on am peak on the 70 could just as easily come from Weston than Charlestown....
 
One cannot debate with someone who invents statistics and ignores evidence.
Never mentioned closing anywhere but Albany. Unclear why you would bring up Cabot or Charlestown.
I agree that well implemented Regional Rail will potentially radically affect the 5xx routes, as well as 57 (and others) This strengthens my argument. A much smaller facility to the west could service the remaining lines as feeders to RR. You are arguing over a dozen busses.
Oh, and the 12 buses on am peak on the 70 could just as easily come from Weston than Charlestown....
Bus lines that run from Brighton Center/Watertown Square to downtown are approximately equidistant to Albany St and Weston (on the Pike). However, one of those is the (near) terminus for the bus routes while the other is entirely non-revenue generating. I could see you arguing for Watertown Square as a replacement instead of Weston for the 501/502/503/504 routes but you're not. Your bias is clear: Redevelop valuable property near the core is most essential. The arguments being placed against you are the following:
-The current trend is to invest in buses and bus lanes, and less for trains for future transit needs in the downtown core.
-Bus Garage capacity is at maximum it is hurting the bus network. We need more garages instead of just moving them. This is especially true when we consider that we need extra capacity for when rebuilds on aging garages are needed. This is where Montmartre came in. The argument being that a large scale city with an effective transit network does not skimp on transit infrastructure on valuable land lest it hurts the needed transit. You're not going to heavily advocate tearing down fire or police departments to build more buildings in the core.
-2014 is old data. Albany also has more local routes now: The 4 and 55. It uses 91 buses at AM peak (not really an increase) and stores 130 buses total. So Weston would need to hold all 130 plus additional for future expansion/need.
-Weston to Watertown and Brighton is adding non-revenue generating miles which makes effective capacity less efficient. This applies to the 501-504, 4, 55, 57, 60, 65, 708 (CT3), & 747 (CT2) or according to the 2014 data: 61 buses at AM peak. Again, you are not arguing for Watertown yard reactivation which makes more sense for most of the routes listed.
-F-Line brought up the maxed out capacity of Cabot and Charlestown because the local downtown routes need a home and expansion and your proposal only accommodates 12 buses not because he was implying you said to tear them down. He also discussed how nowhere else inside of 128 (where the local buses are needed) were open to having a garage built.
-On the topic of expansion: With the calls for bus lanes from North Station through to the Seaport, where these additional buses going to be stored if not Albany St.?

Now, I disagree that building in Weston at all is a bad idea and I think you speak to that. Local bus going to commuter rail stops in a regional rail scenario is going to be a future need. Last mile trips are essential to reducing congestion and bus coverage needs expansion. Weston could provide local triage and free up lines such as the 70 and 70A for more capacity at Somerville.

As a side note: this quote was weird:
1 follows Mass Ave. Is Mass Ave Downtown?
Mass Ave. is less than a Mile from the Albany St. Garage. It literally runs through the South End. The #1 Bus uses Albany St. If the argument is that the south end is where the valuable real estate is, why are you trying to discredit the streets and major bus routes in the south end? What a self-defeating defense that was.
 
Weston to Newton Corner is 4.4 miles. Newton Corner to Lansdowne Station is 4.6 miles. Albany St is another....2 miles?
F-Line is arguing that there is pent up demand for BRT in the CBD. My point about the key routes is that very few of them are in the CBD. And I am not arguing to move the 1 to Weston either. And when did rt1 get moved from the Cabot?
 
Weston to Newton Corner is 4.4 miles. Newton Corner to Lansdowne Station is 4.6 miles. Albany St is another....2 miles?
F-Line is arguing that there is pent up demand for BRT in the CBD. My point about the key routes is that very few of them are in the CBD. And I am not arguing to move the 1 to Weston either. And when did rt1 get moved from the Cabot?
So, how many half frozen reverse commuters will I find down on Otis St ready to commute out to Watertown Sq on Mon AM. While in theory they are revenue generating, I don't think that the missed revenue would pay for even an hour of the bus drivers wages.
 
And if the 5xxs are cut back due to RR, Watertown Sq might fit them, although I like it better as an IMC trolleybus garage better.
 
So there are approximately 1000 bus spaces now. The MBTA would like to add 250 more.
The plans for the new Quincy Garage and the expansion of Southampton would provide nearly half of that(120).
Next I would reactivate Watertown for use for In Motion Charging busses. Full utilization of N. Cambridge and Watertown should give us 70 more.
I like using state land near the rt 1 rotary in Revere(one of Ari's proposed spots). F-Line likes Wellington. Either would do the rest of the job and give us enough storage to close Albany. Revere could also have a role with at least some of the 4xx busses if Lynn is closed. A small facility in Salem might be in order for the rest of the 4xxs.
 
Weston to Newton Corner is 4.4 miles. Newton Corner to Lansdowne Station is 4.6 miles. Albany St is another....2 miles?
F-Line is arguing that there is pent up demand for BRT in the CBD. My point about the key routes is that very few of them are in the CBD. And I am not arguing to move the 1 to Weston either. And when did rt1 get moved from the Cabot?
So, how many half frozen reverse commuters will I find down on Otis St ready to commute out to Watertown Sq on Mon AM. While in theory they are revenue generating, I don't think that the missed revenue would pay for even an hour of the bus drivers wages.
I mean you have a point for AM peak. Winship St is pretty much approximate. Newton Corner is closer to Weston. But the PM reverse there's not even a comparison.

Here's Boston's own proposal for BRT in the CBD. A NSRL or another subway line could replace it eventually, but that's not soon on the docket for completion.

The #1 comment had nothing to do with which it specifically comes from. You were making a point about buses in the CBD or the lack of them, specifically. On one hand, you are arguing for the real estate value of the space in the South End for something other than a bus yard and on the other hand you are saying the South End isn't the CBD so buses in it don't count. Is the South End a major part of the city or not?

My bias is utility
It's one version of utility. Saving room for the infrastructure to make a city function is another.


All in all, It's not a bad question to pose, they're two sides of the same coin.
And if the 5xxs are cut back due to RR, Watertown Sq might fit them, although I like it better as an IMC trolleybus garage better.
No doubt
So there are approximately 1000 bus spaces now. The MBTA would like to add 250 more.
The plans for the new Quincy Garage and the expansion of Southampton would provide nearly half of that(120).
Next I would reactivate Watertown for use for In Motion Charging busses. Full utilization of N. Cambridge and Watertown should give us 70 more.
I like using state land near the rt 1 rotary in Revere(one of Ari's proposed spots). F-Line likes Wellington. Either would do the rest of the job and give us enough storage to close Albany. Revere could also have a role with at least some of the 4xx busses if Lynn is closed. A small facility in Salem might be in order for the rest of the 4xxs.
Given that the city of Boston is looking at BRT through the core, I would agree with F-Line that until an in-city trade is made slightly further out (or at Widett) the parcel is more valuable as a bus garage. The Quincy garage is under hostility from the local population so it's not a guarantee until it's being built.

The dream goal of the 4xxs would be to get the Blue line to Lynn and eliminate them.
 

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