North Station-South Station Rail Link

Would it even be possible to build this in time for the olympics?
 
underground said:
When I read that yesterday, I couldn't figure out what the hell the aim was. I'm still not sure. "We both think this project that no one, including us, is actively working on is good." I mean.... are they putting plans in place? Are they actively talking to people? What's the deal here?
Click to expand...

You know, I'd take Baker a lot more seriously on this if:

1) He'd say it himself instead of having prior governors speculate on his behalf, and
2) If he'd stop calling the indexed gas tax "raising taxes without the people's approval."

Maybe Baker can make the math work, but if he's going to fight the ballot question that funds the project I can't see how he can claim to support doing it.
 
1) He'd say it himself instead of having prior governors speculate on his behalf, and
Click to expand...

Seriously. His entire outreach to liberals and liberal leaning independents is, "Remember Bill Weld? You liked Bill Weld, right? I'll be just like Bill Weld. No, I don't have any specific policy proposals that are like Weld. But seriously, Bill Weld tho."

2) If he'd stop calling the indexed gas tax "raising taxes without the people's approval."
Click to expand...

For better or worse, the "no taxation without representation" argument has a lot of traction. Small sample size and all, but I hear this all the time from friends/family.
 
underground said:
For better or worse, the "no taxation without representation" argument has a lot of traction. Small sample size and all, but I hear this all the time from friends/family.
Click to expand...
2/5 of Voters are confused on this issue, too, and Baker knows that its his job to feel/sound opposed to taxation without representation even if he'd be happy to have the money.

There's like a 40% swing in people's responses depending on how it is phrased:

Suffolk (link below) says that asked about "the issue"
19% like indexing
62% don't like indexing

But asked about Question 1 {EDIT}
50% will vote to keep indexing (No votes)
36% will vote to eliminate indexing (Yes votes)

https://www.suffolk.edu/documents/SUPRC/10_30_2014_marginals.pdf

I personally like indexing or a wholesale sales tax (which, if you believe prices will go up, is much the same as indexing) and will vote No on 1.
 
Last edited:
underground said:
For better or worse, the "no taxation without representation" argument has a lot of traction. Small sample size and all, but I hear this all the time from friends/family.
Click to expand...

It's not that I think that Democrats have made this argument coherently, but that's simply ignorant of how inflation works. A flat tax is, by definition, one that decreases over time. As a comparison, is it taxation without representation that 5% of the cost of a $20,000 car today is twice what you paid on the same grade of vehicle at a $10,000 purchase price in 1990? Of course not. That's just another form of indexing.

You know that, of course. The thing is, though, an argument that is based on an ignorance of high school economics is not an argument. It is a misperception. It needs to be corrected. It should not be allowed to "gain traction," and it should not be treated as a legitimate political position.

I'm actually less worried about your friends and family than I am about Charlie Baker, the "financial genius," misleading the public and actively encouraging voters to act stupid. I don't care whether you like taxes or not, a good Governor doesn't encourage or enable ignorance.
 
I mean, talk about uniformed, most people don't even have an idea of what amount an inflation indexed increase would even be. People think it's about to bankrupt them. They have no appreciation that the price would go up more or less the same amount as the price of milk will go up.
 
Equilibria said:
I know. I just couldn't come up with a better term on the fly.
Click to expand...
Excise Tax should have conveyed it, but that's part of the problem...there aren't many Excise Taxes (per unit sold, gallons, in this case) these days. We get fixed vehicle registration fees and airport PFCs, which are similar, but not quite.

As opposed to Ad Valorem taxes (per price of goods, eg. sales and real estate taxes) where the revenue goes up as the value goes up.
 
Arlington said:
Excise Tax should have conveyed it, but that's part of the problem...there aren't many Excise Taxes (per unit sold, gallons, in this case) these days. We get fixed vehicle registration fees and airport PFCs, which are similar, but not quite.

As opposed to Ad Valorem taxes (per price of goods, eg. sales and real estate taxes) where the revenue goes up as the value goes up.
Click to expand...

Fair enough... I'm not an economist. I guess it's illustrative of the point, though. "Index" isn't an intuitive term, and that's the way people in favor of this keep talking about it. If Martha Coakley would call it "a tax that stays constant as the value of money changes," that might help some.
 
Equilibria said:
I know. I just couldn't come up with a better term on the fly.
Click to expand...

And neither could I after thinking about it... so there's that. Excise tax applies, but you could have excise taxes based on value not quantity so its not all encompassing.

I think there a lot of different arguments at play - Baker is saying your elected representatives should be forced to vote in tax increases since they are politically unpopular, which is a much different argument than saying the gas tax needs to be raised.

Obviously, this indexing seems like a no-brainer. The effect is to make the tax value based, not quantity based. Other significant taxes in the state (income, payroll, sales, property etc.) are based on value, not quantity and if we are going to use this to raise funds more than drive behavior, it should be the same. The bill's backers would be better served to frame it as a funding issue, rather than an incremental tax. We are paying for maintenance either way - would you rather fund it from the gas tax which hits users or general income tax which everyone pays for. I would think most Republicans favor use taxes over income taxes when forced to choose the lessor of two evils.

I'd love to see the state go further and put tolls down on every highway, bridge & tunnel, but that is a different issue that I believe requires federal legislation to implement.
 
Random idea:

tax based on distance from residence to place of employment for vehicle owners who drive to work every day.
 
cozzyd said:
Random idea:

tax based on distance from residence to place of employment for vehicle owners who drive to work every day.
Click to expand...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_miles_traveled_tax

Some western states (Oregon & Washington) are in the early phases of exploring this option. This is a very relevant issue as cars become more fuel efficient and Hybrids/EV replace the existing fleet.

Simplified - You pay a tax based on your beginning & ending odometer reading during the year/month. In return, the gas tax is reduced/eliminated. Complications arise since it is difficult to determine which state a car is in when the miles are being accumulated. Presumably, a state shouldn't be allowed to collect a fee mileage driven on out of state roads. GPS technology solves this but adds costs and becomes invasive.
 
Deetroyt said:
Would it even be possible to build this in time for the olympics?
Click to expand...

No. Megaproject complexity, DEIR hasn't even been commissioned yet because MassDOT withdrew sponsorship of the project in 2006. If a giant funding dump and "GO! GO! GO!" orders rained down from the sky on inauguration day 2015 it would take 10 years just to get the design and engineering locked-down from a dead stop. And that's throwing all the manpower you can at it. You might be able to have the Olympic torch come visit the golden first-shovel ceremony with all the dignitaries, and you might be able to tidy up some pre- construction mitigation to impacted structures before the Games. But even warp-speed/unlimited-money resources thrown at all that run-up labor and paperwork wouldn't be able to get the ground penetrated with the very first wave of heavy construction equipment before 2027-30 at the earliest. It's complex enough to be out of the realm of possibility at even the fastest start and most breakneck pace.


That was the short-sightedness of the decision to withdraw sponsorship 8 years ago. It was a year later in '07 that the FRA sent its official letter of interest to MassDOT re: Washington funding part the project, and then 2 years after that the Obama Administration unveiled their national HSR initiative. The Link was no longer on the list for the national map except as a deep long-term footnote. While none of those national initiatives have gotten much funding because of the paralysis in Congress and the recession, there was a lot of stimulus money spread around to rail projects that the DEIR could've been a few breadcrumbs to slowly start some prelim work. And the Link could've joined the other biggies--East Side Access, Gateway Tunnel/Penn South, CAHSR, all the 'emerging high-speed' Midwest corridors--in jockeying for position on the priority chain. Which would've kept the breadcrumbs coming in small grant doses for continuing the paperwork. Once state support was withdrawn it no longer qualified for even that much help.

I think the series of events since '06 show the value in continuing to advocate for unfunded mandates...even when you don't have the resources to do active work on them. Conditions change quickly. Even the traditionally rail-hostile Bush Administration pivoted after the '06 drubbing in the midterms to more open-minded listening mode on transportation projects of this sort and made some large funding commitments to projects like the canceled ARC Tunnel that has carried over some of its post-cancellation momentum to the substitute Gateway Tunnel project. Then Obama came in and started having the grand (and premature) conversation about national HSR and drawing its region-by-region priority maps. By that point the unfunded mandates that were struggling along as near-hopeless pipe dreams like CAHSR, the various NYC megaprojects, and digging out of the deferred maint hole on the NEC and Midwest corridors to get to the starting gates for better service all took their seat at the table to advocate for their place on the pecking order. The stimulus grants released a lot money to rail projects, including planning studies for the biggies. The #1, #2, #3, etc. priorities got established, and the subsequent trickles in grants have helped push them along. All simply by establishing the expectations of what % the feds are interested in funding when they have the ability so the states had a leg to stand on for planning their funding shares. Setting those expectations is what allowed the California state legislature to pass its self-financing bill to get real shovels-in-ground underway for real on Phase I of CAHSR; they know for every round of federal appropriations what their established odds are at grabbing one of the top 2 shares of the proceeds, and know what gears they can accelerate the later phases to if Congress steps up its infrastructure funding.

Had Massachusetts kept its seat at the table they'd have been able to jockey for their likely #4, #5, #6 or whatever priority for on the national map for N-S, similarly pin down their odds with each round of fed grants for pushing the DEIR incrementally along with more breadcrumbs, and similarly get a rough idea of what their scale-up could be if funding conditions in Congress changed. All things the Legislature must know before it's able to pin the state's majority share of the funding to a dartboard and start tossing around substantive plans for paying for it. By giving up on this and several other projects (Red-Blue, Silver III, Urban Ring) there still isn't even a conceptual framework for that debate.


It's encouraging that some pols are seeing the error of their ways. Although I'm very skeptical that Baker is serious about this (and, honestly, with how scuffed up Weld's reputation has gotten since leaving office from Big Dig fallout and his post-Massachusetts career follies I'm not sure his words matter much these days). They can absolutely re-animate this project. But it'll be starting from a place of zero momentum and with the conversation on national project priorities pretty much over. The N-S Link right now is a vested cheerleader in seeing Gateway fully funded as soon as possible. It's going to take firmly establishing the traffic pump through NYC to Boston to get the feds and Amtrak to pick back up the interest they previously showed in chucking in their probable quarter- or third- share into the project. 2035-40 timetable. It'll happen; it can't not happen with how transformative it is for all stakeholders. But we passed up the opportunity long ago to get a reliably churning DEIR for the first half of the 2010's and a hope/prayer for 2025-30.




Not going to matter for the Olympics. Actually, the build was vanishingly unlikely to be ready before the Olympics even in the rosiest scenarios. But it's also not going to matter for the Olympic bid now, despite the utility of the bid in bringing some of these infrastructure megaprojects back into serious conversation and shaking off that Big Dig syndrome fear of tackling big things. So we missed out on the opportunity to prime the pump with varying levels of additional transportation project activity thrashing around in the background (even if just studies and paperwork) in advance of the bid, in service of helping secure the bid. Stuff that would've helped at upping our visibility at securing funding to accelerate things (if not the Link, then other shorter/mid-term stuff...a more rapid finish to GLX, a giddayup on Red-Blue, etc.).

It also would've kept the inertia of motion going from the Big Dig's end to have kept all those heavy-iron civil engineering firms that were permanently encamped in town from the early-90's to mid-00's working instead of largely closing shop. Despite the continuing building boom and emergence of the Seaport, the amount of engineering activity in the city has drawn down in a big way since the Big Dig's surface scars were healed. And that just can't be re-started on a whim. A Link DEIR funding dump today is going to take months/years longer to bid out than if that whole array of megaproject-qualified firms were still doing loads of work for the state. Engineering inertia of rest also doesn't help sway the IOC; we can't turn on a dime with hugely complex Olympic facility builds as easily when those engineering resources are no longer encamped all throughout town like they used to be for a solid 12+ years there. That hurts too.

And had the DEIR been churning in the background, we would've had some limited pivot points that could've helped Games construction. For example, land prep. If the DEIR pinned down to the last foot what the location of these Link structures was going to be, they could've reshuffled the deck and prioritized some closer-to-surface structures ahead of the deeper tunneling. Things like the NEC tunnel portal in the Pike cut...getting that shallow disruption out of the way, and perhaps packaging it with an air rights deck-over from the Albany St. area to Back Bay. Maybe even those vaunted Widett Circle air rights could've justified the disruption to T facilities for Link-related construction that begat Olympic-related construction...instead of just the latter which wouldn't have been an acceptable disruption to the state. You can't, for example, know exactly where your nearest air rights pilings could be laid vs. the would-be tunnel footprint if the DEIR and prelim engineering hasn't progressed to the point where you can narrow that preferred tunnel routing to within a couple feet of final.

Lots of indirect things like this could've stemmed from cranking the momentum of a previously treading-water Link DEIR up a couple notches, and finding out what the Games-serving injection points are. Even if the main construction itself happened well after the games. Then just generally maintaining a much higher rate of pre-existing, ongoing civil engineering activity and involvement by big civil engineering firms throughout the city instead of letting it go considerably colder after the Big Dig wrapped.


If they learn some lessons from this short-sightedness it'll help a lot for the future. Olympic bid or no Olympic bid. But the politicians and brainrot of MA politics have to change first, and I just don't see that happening soon enough. Not with these two Gov. candidates, and definitely not with the ossified Legislature.
 
No. Megaproject complexity, DEIR hasn't even been commissioned yet because MassDOT withdrew sponsorship of the project in 2006. If a giant funding dump and "GO! GO! GO!" orders rained down from the sky on inauguration day 2015 it would take 10 years just to get the design and engineering locked-down from a dead stop. And that's throwing all the manpower you can at it. You might be able to have the Olympic torch come visit the golden first-shovel ceremony with all the dignitaries, and you might be able to tidy up some pre- construction mitigation to impacted structures before the Games. But even warp-speed/unlimited-money resources thrown at all that run-up labor and paperwork wouldn't be able to get the ground penetrated with the very first wave of heavy construction equipment before 2027-30 at the earliest. It's complex enough to be out of the realm of possibility at even the fastest start and most breakneck pace.
Click to expand...

Can you tell me more of the complexities of the project? The short word is this is a megaproject. But I can't fully comprehend the scale. My understanding from some stuff mentioned before is the big challenge is the portals while the easy part is the tunnels as all it needs is some excavations as the walls has been placed. I presume that understate the challenges too much. I'm am also trying to imagine what eats up the time even with the largest engineering team possible to survey and plan such a project?

Edit: Okay, I guess one factor after rereading is the fact time is needed just to get a team of engineers together, much less start surveying, designing, and planning.
 
Equilibria said:
It's not that I think that Democrats have made this argument coherently, but that's simply ignorant of how inflation works. A flat tax is, by definition, one that decreases over time. As a comparison, is it taxation without representation that 5% of the cost of a $20,000 car today is twice what you paid on the same grade of vehicle at a $10,000 purchase price in 1990? Of course not. That's just another form of indexing.

You know that, of course. The thing is, though, an argument that is based on an ignorance of high school economics is not an argument. It is a misperception. It needs to be corrected. It should not be allowed to "gain traction," and it should not be treated as a legitimate political position.

I'm actually less worried about your friends and family than I am about Charlie Baker, the "financial genius," misleading the public and actively encouraging voters to act stupid. I don't care whether you like taxes or not, a good Governor doesn't encourage or enable ignorance.
Click to expand...

It's even more sinister. You rightly pointed out one way in which their nonsense argument about "taxation without representation" fails.

The other way is even simpler: there was representation. This is taxation WITH representation. Our representatives voted on this tax raise. It's not mysterious. It's just a nominal tax raise that takes place over multiple years, with the goal being no real-valued tax increase or decrease. Nothing new about that. For example, we've had automatically sunsetting tax raises and cuts go off without a hitch over the past several years at the Federal level. When the payroll tax cut expired a couple years ago I did not hear a single peep out of the Republicans about how that it was suddenly "taxation without representation." Not even a peep about how it might be bad to let a tax cut expire in a recession -- because they really don't care about taxes that largely only affect non-rich people. But now I digress.

It's certainly valid to push for a law that cuts taxes, either through the normal process or via ballot initiative. But this claim of "taxation without representation" is something else: it's a claim that attempts to de-legitimize our elected representatives, and demonize the legislative process, by saying that they aren't representation. And that's why it's so poisonous and ignorant.

Of course, it's politics, so anything goes. Hopefully the voters of Massachusetts will see through the muck.
 
ant8904 said:
Can you tell me more of the complexities of the project? The short word is this is a megaproject. But I can't fully comprehend the scale. My understanding from some stuff mentioned before is the big challenge is the portals while the easy part is the tunnels as all it needs is some excavations as the walls has been placed. I presume that understate the challenges too much. I'm am also trying to imagine what eats up the time even with the largest engineering team possible to survey and plan such a project?

Edit: Okay, I guess one factor after rereading is the fact time is needed just to get a team of engineers together, much less start surveying, designing, and planning.
Click to expand...

It's probably going to be $4-6B. At least. And that's after they come to some sort of real-world bargaining about the value of the kitchen-sink frills like Central Station that have less-than-clear purpose in the big picture. The part underneath I-93 is--if you don't go off-footprint with Central Station (reason why that's the #1 cut to make)--relatively easy. But you have to construct a 1-mile lead tunnel from the NEC near a lot of Big Dig infrastructure, build a South Station bunker far underground offset on the Dot Ave. side with all the connecting elevators/escalators needed to the surface, thread out of SS between Silver/Red/Big Dig tunnels in very precise trajectories set aside during the Big Dig, and swing out under Ft. Point Channel for a couple blocks to get on your the injection point into the I-93 footprint. That's easily half the project cost right there at SS ground zero. Off 93 to North Station, NS Under, under the Charles, then popping up next to Boston Engine Terminal is considerably easier and more straightforward. The Garden and Leverett/Zakim inclines were more or less designed to let it slip by the side of the building and Orange Line.


The surface disruption is very tightly confined to SS...pretty much from where the NEC leads tap-dance around ramps east of Albany St. to the Northern Ave. injection point into the 93 tunnel. So not even close to as breathtakingly invasive as, say, East Side Access construction or the Gateway+Penn South combo. Which explains the extreme difference in price tag between this project and those two near- Big Dig behemoths. But the planning and engineering alone will take that long, as will planning for mitigation to surrounding structures (not Big Dig-level disruption, but they have to take the same systematic approach to surrounding structures and businesses that worked pretty well during the CA/T build).

And tough decisions will have to be made up-front about. . .
-- Central Station
-- Whether they need to defer things like the 1-mile Old Colony and Fairmount lead tunnel to a later tack-on in order to rally resources around the core build.
-- Do those side-by-side 2-track bores on the mainline portion both get built for Day 1? Or is it better to finish and activate 1 cavern and a few underground platforms to get baseline service going and leave the other cavern and rest of the terminal platforms empty for a few years to stagger out the money and speed up parts of the schedule? Would getting it half-running sooner help fish for the money and voter enthusiasm that'll helps finish the deferred parts sooner?
-- How much run-thru is feasible right off the bat? How many lines to you have to pre-electrify? It's a steep tunnel and dual-mode push-pull locomotives, while usable in the tunnel, are going to perform like ass on a steep uphill grade. Do you want to ration it to just the basics--EMU's only with Providence, Worcester, and Lowell only on the starter rollout? Do you want to defer acquiring those dual-modes until after you get, say, the Eastern Route all EMU'd so the clunkiest rolling stock isn't making up the majority of the run-thru service right from the get-go? Do you want to do that skeletal Providence/Worcester/Lowell EMU- + Amtrak-only thru-routing with the one cavern-only early-start build...then open the second cavern, the remaining platforms, electrified mainline #3, and rollout of the dual-modes in a follow-on package?

Lots of stuff like that. You need the DEIR done to estimate costs and figure out the most equitable way to prioritize. Except for the go/no-go on Central Station absolutely none of this rationing or phasing prohibits the full build. But it is a value judgement about what's most important to go first, and is a partial opening sooner better for priming that funding spigot than a complete opening later?




You just can't do all that between a cold reboot in January 2015 and Summer 2024 in a way to leverage it for the run-up to Summer 2024. They passed up that chance in 2006. Fastest humanly possible planning process with unlimited resources just won't put a shovel in the ground that quickly. Navigating complexity of this sort...even if it's a more limited area of impact and lower overall price tag than the Big Dig, or ESA, or Gateway...just can't be rushed like that. And it would've been a hell of a lot easier to get going had all the pan-Big Dig engineering firms not drawn down and gone home. Don't underestimate the inertia effect of that for getting transportation project momentum un-stuck OR being able to make the nimblest possible pivot for Olympics building as part of the sales pitch to the IOC. Boston did lose a considerable amount of city-wide civil engineering scale after the Big Dig drawdown. Today's discrete building-by-building projects--while active as ever--are a different and more limited engineering animal vs. the kind of awesomely mega project expertise that was occupying the city like an invading army in the previous decade.
 
This sort of thing, by the way, is exactly why trying to use the Olympics as a cudgel to get all of these wish-list items checked off is fucking stupid, because even with a magic wand to wave that provides infinite willpower and eliminates cost concerns "because 'world-class,' or, something" there's still only so much time and so much manpower you can marshal that has to get divided over all these disparate moving parts.

I'm not fundamentally opposed to all Olympics ever. What I am opposed to is the idea that we're going to put together this impossibly perfect bid with all these wonderful expectations for how all our problems with the current transportation infrastructure will be solved immediately. That just won't happen even for the laser-focused narrow projects like Red-Blue where it COULD happen. What'll actually happen is the same thing that happens with any and every transportation project that happens in 2014, except instead of NIMBYs coming out of the woodwork to oppose specific project X, you'll get NIMBYs opposing the Olympics themselves.

And here's the kicker - there's a path forward here that turns the Olympics into the kind of advantageous thing that 2024 backers want it to be. If I'm understanding F-Line's argument correctly, he's touching on the thing that needs to happen for the Olympics to actually result in measured improvement to transportation in Boston.

The prep work needs to start now for Boston's bid to host the 2032 or 2036 Olympics. The people backing Boston 2024 who are doing so because they genuinely believe in the Olympics as a thing which could transform the city for the better need to face up to reality that it's already too late for that, there just isn't enough time in less than a decade to do anything truly "transformative." At best, we'd get Red-Blue, some of the un-sexy improvements that are happening either way like new signaling, and some DMU service - no Link, no electrification, no line extensions, the Boylston curve wouldn't get fixed, nothing that's the list of "things we'd need the weight of an Olympics push or similar to get done" is going to get done for 2024.

It would get done for 2032. It'd definitely get done for 2036. But we have to start on it now, which means - first of all, dropping the absurd and comical pursuit of a 2024 bid that we're not equipped to win anyway - and second of all, making a measured and reasonable list of these big ticket projects and saying "we're going for it, whether or not we win the bid."

Of course, therein lies the problem, and the paradox of the Olympics bid as cudgel through which to batter past opposition.

If we wait until the standard bidding time to start work on these things, there just isn't enough time for it to get done. But, if we jump the gun by the decade or so we'd actually need, we don't really have the weight and the momentum of the Olympics behind any concerted push.

Which is why the work on the Link and such should start again on the assumption that someone else has to deal with the Olympics in their backyard.
 
I don't think there's anyone who's said N/S Link is necessary for the Olympics. I definitely haven't heard Fish say that, and I don't think I've heard any transportation people say that. Weld and Dukakis definitely didn't say that. The only reason it's brought up here is because a bunch of infrastructure nerds asked "what if?"
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top