New Red and Orange Line Cars

Joel N. Weber II said:
I was on an 1800 series Red Line car today, and was looking at one leaf of the door next to the length of my shoe, and it looks like the width of one door leaf on an 1800 series car is probably 25" or 26" or 27" or 28". If the new cars really do end up being 32" per leaf, that's probably slightly wider than we have now, but it probably won't have a huge impact on dwell times.
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You seem to have missed the point of that post you quoted. The new 4-door cars are replacing 3 door cars and if a door is malfunctioning, a wheelchair can still fit through a single leaf. Currently if a door is broken, the wheelchair may try to fit through, realize it can't, have to move through the crowd to get to another set of doors, etc. This increases dwell times. With this eliminated, times should be improved.
 
While the Blue Line extension to Charles/MGH would be a good thing to build, I don't think it's the low hanging fruit in reducing dwell time at Park St and Downtown Crossing.

http://www.archboston.com/community/showthread.php?p=183716 has F-Line to Dudley proposing ``a second Red-level Park St. egress/headhouse onto the Common from the emergency exit end of the platform to relieve the overstuffed stairs and worsening dwell times.''

There's the existing Park St underpass that connects the northbound Green Line platforms to the southbound Green Line platforms. The west end of that underpass is the elevator machine room for the southbound Green line platform elevator; if you relocate that elevator machine room and maybe enlarge the elevator in the process, the door to that elevator machine room could turn into the entrance to a tunnel going under the westernmost Green Line track, and then that tunnel could go diagonally to the midpoint of the Ashmont / Braintree bound side platform. You probably want a tunnel 20' - 30' wide for that, and you probably need to widen the staircase connecting that underpass to the southbound Green Line platform, but something along those lines could probably help to convince some of the passengers transferring between Red and Green at Park to use something other than the two easternmost cars of the Red Line trains.

There are also lots of opportunities to improve bus service to divert some trips away from Park / Downtown Crossing, like extending 28 to Kendall, 23 to Central Sq in Cambridge, getting rid of the 1's crazy indirect route to Dudley once 23 does Central to Dudley directly, and then you can have 1 be Central to UMass-Boston, which means that Green Line riders from west of Copley who want to get to UMass-Boston can just transfer to the 1 at Hynes / Prudential and stay out of Park.

32 could be extended north along South St, Centre St, and South Huntington, and continue from there to Harvard and/or Central and/or Kendall.

More generally, West Station should get a busway that runs north-south to connect it to Harvard, so that you can have routes that originate at Harvard and continue to West Station, and from there one route could continue along the B branch to Boston College, another route could head down Babcock to Coolidge Corner and out to Reservoir, a third route could head down Babcock and continue by mirroring parts of 66/39/32 as alluded to above, a fourth route could be a revised 22, running from Harvard to Coolidge and then follow a bit of 66, a bit of 39, a bit of 14, and then most of the current day 22, terminating at Ashmont, a fifth route could go from Harvard to Coolidge, run along Longwood Ave, then St Alphonsus St, then Tremont St, then continue along 15 to Kane Sq and continue from there to Savin Hill Station. It's important to make sure that West Station is designed so that these routes can proceed efficiently through West Station; the West Station plans I've seen so far seem to envision something that will work about as badly as bus circulation at Dudley has been working in recent memory.

http://www.archboston.com/community/showthread.php?t=4473&page=18 has some proposals for Wonderland / Chelsea to greater Cambridge bus service.

http://www.archboston.com/community/showthread.php?t=3664&page=144 suggests extending 110 to Davis.

We could probably be making some incremental progress on many of these things for relatively small money while we wait for funding to appear for the Blue Line extension.
 
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datadyne007 said:
You seem to have missed the point of that post you quoted. The new 4-door cars are replacing 3 door cars and if a door is malfunctioning, a wheelchair can still fit through a single leaf. Currently if a door is broken, the wheelchair may try to fit through, realize it can't, have to move through the crowd to get to another set of doors, etc. This increases dwell times. With this eliminated, times should be improved.
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It's pretty rare that I actually see wheelchairs on the Red Line. Are there any objective statistics that show that more than 1 train out of four at Park or Downtown Crossing has at least one wheelchair boarding or disembarking? (I think the BCIL settlement has some language indicating the T is supposed to be collecting some sort of information vaguely along these lines...) And what percentage of wheelchair trips have the desired door having only one leaf opening with the current state of maintenance? (The failure mode I saw today was that one leaf seemed to have its recycling trigger causing it to reopen when being closed and nobody was near that door, not a failure of the leaf to open.)

My suspicion is that there is less than one trip an hour where an actual wheelchair user experiences the desired door leaf not opening at Park / Downtown Crossing, which makes me think that specific issue probably doesn't have a meaningful impact on overall dwell times. It doesn't matter if you have one train an hour with a three minute dwell if every other train keeps the dwell time under 60 seconds, and I don't even think this issue is going to add two minutes to the dwell time by itself if it does happen.

If the T is widening the doors enough that one open leaf is enough to let a wheelchair out, I think the T's planning process probably boiled down to ``let's keep doing what we were doing two or more decades ago when the last batch of Red Line cars were ordered, without bothering to think about dwell times at all, but let's make sure that if a wheelchair is in a crowded Red Line car where it's impossible for a wheelchair to move 1/4 of the length of the car to the next set of doors that the wheelchair won't be trapped and unable to disembark if one door leaf malfunctions''.

And I think I was aware that my observation was tangential to your main point.
 
Joel N. Weber II said:
It doesn't matter if you have one train an hour with a three minute dwell if every other train keeps the dwell time under 60 seconds
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Actually, I think it matters very much. That's how bunching gets started, and it's hard to sort out that kind of delay without degrading or compromising service in some way.
 
jdrinboston said:
Why are you wondering about something that has been widely public?

The losing bidders are suing, claiming that the bid process was flawed. Certainly not the first or last time such a lawsuit will be filed.
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That plan has been killed. The court has overruled it, saying that it just has no basis in fact.

It was thrown out the window, and the lost bidders cannot move any further with it, so the T can move on with the procedure of having CNR rehab the old Westinghouse factory and eventually begin making the new rail cars. :cool:
 
Joel N. Weber II said:
While the Blue Line extension to Charles/MGH would be a good thing to build, I don't think it's the low hanging fruit in reducing dwell time at Park St and Downtown Crossing.

http://www.archboston.com/community/showthread.php?p=183716 has F-Line to Dudley proposing ``a second Red-level Park St. egress/headhouse onto the Common from the emergency exit end of the platform to relieve the overstuffed stairs and worsening dwell times.''

There's the existing Park St underpass that connects the northbound Green Line platforms to the southbound Green Line platforms. The west end of that underpass is the elevator machine room for the southbound Green line platform elevator; if you relocate that elevator machine room and maybe enlarge the elevator in the process, the door to that elevator machine room could turn into the entrance to a tunnel going under the westernmost Green Line track, and then that tunnel could go diagonally to the midpoint of the Ashmont / Braintree bound side platform. You probably want a tunnel 20' - 30' wide for that, and you probably need to widen the staircase connecting that underpass to the southbound Green Line platform, but something along those lines could probably help to convince some of the passengers transferring between Red and Green at Park to use something other than the two easternmost cars of the Red Line trains.
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Joel -- your suggestion seems reasonable -- however, any significant modification to Park Street -- particularly the elements of the Green Line that date back to the original Subway can easily run afoul of the historic aspects

The same has been the case at Boylston where a number of proposed improvements were KOed by the historic nature of the structures
 
On the other hand, my understanding is that historic preservation is not allowed to be used as an excuse to avoid making transit infrastructure wheelchair accessible; where conflicts arise between accessibility and preservation, the design of accessibility improvements are required to be made as consistent as possible with the historic style to the extent that doing so doesn't inhibit the required accessibility. (I think this has even come up with Park St elevators in the past.)

A tunnel from the midpoint of the Ashmont / Braintree bound side platform to the Green Line to Green Line underpass has the potential to be helpful for both capacity and ADA reasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Street_(MBTA_station) claims ``Park Street station is partially wheelchair accessible'', and this connection would give that Red Line side platform wheelchair access to the Green Line platforms.

I don't think it would be acceptable to charge that tunnel to the ADA budget in the short term, since asking wheelchair users to just use the center Red Line platform for now is far less problematic than the commuter rail and surface Green Line stations that have no accessibility (I think there may still be a dozen commuter rail stations with 500 or more daily boardings and not even a mini-high platform, for example) which are more appropriate priorities for ADA efforts, but any historic preservation claims that try to argue that that elevator machine room door is a historic element which needs to be preserved (which seems pretty absurd anyway if you actually look at the current state of that door) could probably be overruled by an ADA argument.

I also think that if the current laws say that we can't ever widen Park St staircases solely because of historic preservation, we need to work with the relevant legislative bodies to get those laws loosened slightly so that we can widen staircases if doing so makes sense and the new staircases follow the style of the old as much as is possible within modern safety standards. I doubt that among Boston area voters, the majority think that keeping staircases at Park St as narrow as they always have been for the sake of preserving historical staircase widths is more important than a transportation system that functions.

(And as I've thought about it more, I'm coming to the conclusion that a good look at whether any of the other existing staircases at Park St could reasonably be widened would likely also be worthwhile. I wouldn't be surprised if widening the stairs to the center Red Line platform is impractical, but there might be opportunities to widen some of the Red Line side platform staircases.)

If the west Red Line exit to the surface gets built and ends up having a mezzanine whose floor is 10' to 15' above the surface of the Red Line platforms, building a tunnel to connect that mezzanine to the existing Green Line to Green Line underpass might also be worthwhile. If that mezzanine had an elevator to the Alewife bound side platform, that could help to complete the set of wheelchair accessible paths between platforms, although there is some risk that that tunnel would be such an indirect route that it would not be well used, except perhaps by people traveling between the Green Line trains and the new street level access at the west end of the Red Line platform.
 
MBTA Survey - Pick the New RL, OL, & GL Livery

Official MBTA Survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/vehiclesurvey2015

Voting ends November 3, 2015.

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OrangeLineOption1.jpg

OrangeLineOption2.jpg

OrangeLineOption3.jpg


GreenLineOption1.jpg

GreenLineOption2.jpg

GreenLineOption3.jpg


RedLineOption1.jpg

RedLineOption2.jpg

RedLineOption3.jpg
 
Re: MBTA Survey - Pick the New RL, OL, & GL Livery

My impression: Whole lotta meh.

I like the dots, but the trail of them should cover more of the car. I think I like the T supergraphic a little more. IIRC, last time we, the public, picked livery was for the CR and we picked the T supergraphic.
 
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Re: MBTA Survey - Pick the New RL, OL, & GL Livery

Which design is more likely to run in the aftermath of a snowstorm?
 
Re: MBTA Survey - Pick the New RL, OL, & GL Livery

I think the zip-a-tone pattern would be more time consuming (and thus more expensive) option to maintain, thus much more likely to fall under deferred maintenance and will look like crap most of the time. The first option is easily the most boring but probably the most practical. Funny how it usually works out that way.
As for the Green Line, aesthetically I love the dark gray but it the green is more obvious choice.
 
Re: MBTA Survey - Pick the New RL, OL, & GL Livery

Not a huge fan of any of the Green Line designs, would have preferred something a bit closer to the "traditional" pattern with the lower part of the train being green.

On Red/Orange I chose Option 1, but I have to say I'm a huge fan of those train ends, I hope what we end up getting looks something close to that.
 
Re: MBTA Survey - Pick the New RL, OL, & GL Livery

The orange color used on the Orange Line pictures is too light - the "Big T" looks way better in the higher-contrast red. Voted for it anyway.

I agree on the Green Line - all fine, none great. Is that a Type 8 in the pictures, or are they also revealing the CAF train designs here? With all the paint, I can't really tell...
 
Re: MBTA Survey - Pick the New RL, OL, & GL Livery

Equilibria said:
The orange color used on the Orange Line pictures is too light - the "Big T" looks way better in the higher-contrast red. Voted for it anyway.

I agree on the Green Line - all fine, none great. Is that a Type 8 in the pictures, or are they also revealing the CAF train designs here? With all the paint, I can't really tell...
Click to expand...

That is the CAF Type 9 design
 
Re: MBTA Survey - Pick the New RL, OL, & GL Livery

I voted for 2 on the GL just because I like that the front is all green. All the GL options kinda suck. I agree with others, I wish there was a "classic" option with a solid green bottom.
 
Re: MBTA Survey - Pick the New RL, OL, & GL Livery

I like Photo 1's in ALL pics!!
 
Re: MBTA Survey - Pick the New RL, OL, & GL Livery

I chose Option 1 for each. I like as much Orange, Green, and Red as possible.
 
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