Equilibria
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And they couldn't have asked for better weather... 
Pawtucket-Central Falls MBTA Commuter Rail Station | Pine and Barton Streets | Pawtucket
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The cold rainy weather did not dampen the event or the enthusiasm of the many hundreds of attendees at the opening ceremony. They had a large tent in the parking area for the speaking portion before moving over to the station for the ribbon cutting. Nearly every top city, state, and federal politician in RI was on hand. Many from the engineering and construction trades that worked hard to make it possible were also well represented. This station was a long time in the making and today it was finally realized.
Photos from the event:
Pawtucket Mayor Grebien Speaks
The official ribbon cutting
Photos from the event:
Pawtucket Mayor Grebien Speaks
The official ribbon cutting
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good looking station, like the sign
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All aboard at launch of Pawtucket-Central Falls Transit Center
PAWTUCKET – The importance of Monday’s opening of the new Pawtucket-Central Falls Transit Center can’t be overstated for the area and all of the Blackstone Valley and Rhode Island, said
stick n move
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Besides the color this seems to be the first real look at the type of station that the mbta plans to build along the pike in newton. If this is the case then those should turn out really good as wel.
F-Line to Dudley
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Except...it wasn't the MBTA that built Pawtucket. It was RIDOT. RI follows the MBTA design guide for things like platform dimensions and accessibility, but the actual architecture was their own bag.
Not that here is the right place to discuss this, but they did publish the 30% design renders for the Newton Stations back in 2021. Now, admittedly, to my eyes W. Newton and Newtonville look wildly overbuilt - I would have imagined that being relatively deep in the I-90 trench they could have gotten away with a "close to street level" bridge that doesn't necessarily require an elevator - and a single Headhouse.
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The station is already coming close to meeting its rather low passenger projections just days after its opening. There are also plans to double the present parking lot that has 200 spaces in the coming months.
I suspect the station is being helped by the benefit of free parking for the short term. I would imagine commuters that may have parked at either Providence or Attleboro are taking advantage of the cost savings. The state of RI had indicated that it anticipates that it will bid out the parking contract after some six months. The expectation is the selected company will then begin charging.
As an FYI, I went back to the station over the weekend and noticed it has temporary trailer bathrooms. The plan is for a permanent restroom structure to be built and maintained by RIPTA. Noticed that the parking lot at this time only has temp lights as well. looks like they were not able to get them in before the opening. The station could use more trash receptacles at the platforms and especially at the RIPTA bus shelters (where there are none). This will be one of the things that will need to be tweaked.
www.valleybreeze.com
I suspect the station is being helped by the benefit of free parking for the short term. I would imagine commuters that may have parked at either Providence or Attleboro are taking advantage of the cost savings. The state of RI had indicated that it anticipates that it will bid out the parking contract after some six months. The expectation is the selected company will then begin charging.
As an FYI, I went back to the station over the weekend and noticed it has temporary trailer bathrooms. The plan is for a permanent restroom structure to be built and maintained by RIPTA. Noticed that the parking lot at this time only has temp lights as well. looks like they were not able to get them in before the opening. The station could use more trash receptacles at the platforms and especially at the RIPTA bus shelters (where there are none). This will be one of the things that will need to be tweaked.
Ridership booming at new train station; parking to be expanded
PAWTUCKET – Early returns on the Pawtucket-Central Falls Commuter Rail Station indicate that it will avoid the boondoggle hall of fame, as the station quickly approaches pre-opening projections of 520
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How about some Transit Oriented Development instead of acres of free parking?
Also how's ridership on the R-Line and should it be extended North?
Also how's ridership on the R-Line and should it be extended North?
As far as TOD goes, there is a plan, ca 2016/2017, for substantial development around the station including on the site of the current parking lot. The problem is, afaik, no developers have yet bit - I think Pawtucket rents might not yet support the business case, so I think until the old mill buildings north of the station get redeveloped, parking is probably a "best interim use" of otherwise hard to redevelop land (being the old P&W rail yard, no telling what sort of environmental nastiness would need remediating.)
The R-line is in the middle of a fare-free pilot, but pre- pilot it notched about 6k daily weekday riders, apparently about 16% of total system ridership - and, I believe as of the stations opening, was rerouted via it, unless you're thinking of further into CF?
As far as an extension into CF goes, I would imagine thats part of RIPTA's ongoing high capacity study from Warwick to CF, for which even LRT might be on the table.
The R-Line is a combination of the former 11 and 99 routes, which were head and shoulders above other routes in ridership (the 99 was the Pawtucket-Providence route.):
(I haven't been able to find route-by-route data for anything later than 2008 -- if someone else has it, I'd be grateful. @Stlin where are you getting the 6,000 number? That looks vaguely on target with the numbers from 2008.)
The RIPTA Ridership Survey for the 99 (obviously pre-dating the R Line) suggests that only about a quarter of riders transfer from another bus. (I'm not clear how the survey is controlling for round-trips, but given that the "egress" transfer figure is higher than "access", I would guess that the "egress" figure refers to transfers at Kennedy Plaza, which in general has more transfers available, and which serves more of the routes listed in the Top 10 transfer routes.) The survey results also showed a strong preference for faster service rather than more stops: 2 to 1 in favor of faster service.
Given all this, my immediate response would be that the first priority would be to maintain the reliability of the R Line under its current route. All things being equal, that would probably point away from any extensions. That being said, a one-seat ride from Central Falls to Kennedy Plaza via the R Line would probably be faster than the current one-seat ride offered by the 72 -- probably something like 26 min on average vs 35 min on average -- so could open up some new and/or improved access.
The big untapped potential in my mind is the possibility of the commuter rail route offering a faster alternative than the R-Line. During the morning rush, Pawtucket Station -> Kennedy Plaza takes 22 minutes on the R Line. The commuter rail should (see below) take 6 minutes, and then add a 7 minute walk from the train station to Kennedy Plaza (though note that an increasing number of bus routes through-run to the station, potentially eliminating the need for the walk), which comes out to 13 minutes.
Particularly with the Downtown Transit Connector in place (providing modestly high frequency cumulative service between Providence Station, downtown, and the Hospital District), that seems like there's real potential for faster journeys. You would need a significant increase in rail service to make it competitive, but the route is short enough that you might be able to achieve 20-min headways with a single trainset and a slightly compressed turnaround time. (Assuming you could get Amtrak to agree to the dispatching impact, which would be non-trivial.)
(I haven't been able to find route-by-route data for anything later than 2008 -- if someone else has it, I'd be grateful. @Stlin where are you getting the 6,000 number? That looks vaguely on target with the numbers from 2008.)
The RIPTA Ridership Survey for the 99 (obviously pre-dating the R Line) suggests that only about a quarter of riders transfer from another bus. (I'm not clear how the survey is controlling for round-trips, but given that the "egress" transfer figure is higher than "access", I would guess that the "egress" figure refers to transfers at Kennedy Plaza, which in general has more transfers available, and which serves more of the routes listed in the Top 10 transfer routes.) The survey results also showed a strong preference for faster service rather than more stops: 2 to 1 in favor of faster service.
Given all this, my immediate response would be that the first priority would be to maintain the reliability of the R Line under its current route. All things being equal, that would probably point away from any extensions. That being said, a one-seat ride from Central Falls to Kennedy Plaza via the R Line would probably be faster than the current one-seat ride offered by the 72 -- probably something like 26 min on average vs 35 min on average -- so could open up some new and/or improved access.
The big untapped potential in my mind is the possibility of the commuter rail route offering a faster alternative than the R-Line. During the morning rush, Pawtucket Station -> Kennedy Plaza takes 22 minutes on the R Line. The commuter rail should (see below) take 6 minutes, and then add a 7 minute walk from the train station to Kennedy Plaza (though note that an increasing number of bus routes through-run to the station, potentially eliminating the need for the walk), which comes out to 13 minutes.
Particularly with the Downtown Transit Connector in place (providing modestly high frequency cumulative service between Providence Station, downtown, and the Hospital District), that seems like there's real potential for faster journeys. You would need a significant increase in rail service to make it competitive, but the route is short enough that you might be able to achieve 20-min headways with a single trainset and a slightly compressed turnaround time. (Assuming you could get Amtrak to agree to the dispatching impact, which would be non-trivial.)
Looking at the schedule, I am confused. Northbound journeys are pretty consistently timed at 6 minutes. Southbound journeys -- even on weekends -- are timed at anywhere from 12 to 15 minutes, which is 200-250% as long as northbound. Is there any public explanation for this?
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Honestly, I got the numbers from the Providence Journal and the NBC10 articles about the pilot. Where they got the numbers I have no idea - probably by being the local paper and asking, as while the T isn't great about transparency, RIPTA is worse.
RI's most popular bus route, the R-Line, is free starting today. Here's why.
The R-Line accounts for a little more than half of all bus ridership in Rhode Island. And starting in September, it will be free.
www.providencejournal.com
No public explanation that I can see - old Providence Line schedules I have from 2016/2019 range between 9-11 minutes between S. Attleboro and Providence, so whatever this slowdown is it's recent. Is Amtrak doing work on the Southbound track in this area?
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Page 50 of RIPTA's 2019 State of the System has more recent numbers.
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I drove by the station today (weekday Wednesday) and the parking lot's 200 spaces looked to be full. There appeared to be commuter train passenger cars also parking on a side road behind the nearby cemetery where I have never seen cars there before. Would appear commuters are taking full advantage of the temporary free parking. It would seem the doubling of the parking lot is actually needed. The Pawtucket station has certainly had a far better start than the Wickford Junction Station. Wickford to this day ten years since its opening still gets few passengers.
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Yeah, having gotten on and disembarked at Wickford about 10 or so times in that decade, it's been a uniformly depressing experience, given how woefully underutilized it's been. 120-minute trips to Boston and adjacency to central RI's population hole can do that... but then, during the pandemic, *it really came into its own*: as a COVID-19 testing facility, it's been wunderbar (I've had to go for 4-to-5 tests)... *the miracle of adaptive reuse*!
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Some development in the area near the new station was already in construction mode in anticipation of its opening:
New residential units under construction in an old mill at the corner of Pine and Barton Streets just a few minutes walk west of the station. This project will involve two phases that include a revovation of existing space and new construction. When both phases are complete, the total project will have approximately 182 housing units and 153 parking spaces.
The new home of the Shri Yoga Center under renovation at Pine and Conant Streets in a building that was once part of the Conant Thread - Coats & Clark Mill complex that once spanned some 50 acres and employed over 4,000 workers:
The site of the proposed entirely new construction mixed use Dexter Commons a block from the station on Dexter Street. Some demolition of old structures had been completed but Covid appears to have slowed the project. The project, which had already secured tax breaks, covers 214,000 square feet, including a six-story mixed-use building with 99 spaces in a subsurface parking level, 16,700 square feet of ground-level retail with 66 enclosed parking spaces, and 150 residential units and associated amenities on five upper stories.
For some perspective, the communities of Pawtucket and Central Falls that the new station serves are among the most densely populated and built up areas in New England. Pawtucket is just 8.96 total square miles but has some 75,604 residents. Central Falls is just 1.29 square miles with 22,583 people living within its borders. When combined, the two cities have a land mass of 10.25 square miles with 98,187 total residents. That equates to a population density of 9,579 per square mile. There is little open space not already developed in either city. Unlike many other old manufacturing cities in New England, the populations of Pawtucket and Central Falls have pretty much held steady. Each is just a few thousand off their mid 20th century high populations. This is quite remarkable given the shifting housing demographics, little available space for growth, and loss of many manufacturing jobs during the last several decades along with factoring in the amount of housing lost in Pawtucket with the construction of Route 95 right through its downtown core in the 1950's and 60's.
New residential units under construction in an old mill at the corner of Pine and Barton Streets just a few minutes walk west of the station. This project will involve two phases that include a revovation of existing space and new construction. When both phases are complete, the total project will have approximately 182 housing units and 153 parking spaces.
The new home of the Shri Yoga Center under renovation at Pine and Conant Streets in a building that was once part of the Conant Thread - Coats & Clark Mill complex that once spanned some 50 acres and employed over 4,000 workers:
The site of the proposed entirely new construction mixed use Dexter Commons a block from the station on Dexter Street. Some demolition of old structures had been completed but Covid appears to have slowed the project. The project, which had already secured tax breaks, covers 214,000 square feet, including a six-story mixed-use building with 99 spaces in a subsurface parking level, 16,700 square feet of ground-level retail with 66 enclosed parking spaces, and 150 residential units and associated amenities on five upper stories.
For some perspective, the communities of Pawtucket and Central Falls that the new station serves are among the most densely populated and built up areas in New England. Pawtucket is just 8.96 total square miles but has some 75,604 residents. Central Falls is just 1.29 square miles with 22,583 people living within its borders. When combined, the two cities have a land mass of 10.25 square miles with 98,187 total residents. That equates to a population density of 9,579 per square mile. There is little open space not already developed in either city. Unlike many other old manufacturing cities in New England, the populations of Pawtucket and Central Falls have pretty much held steady. Each is just a few thousand off their mid 20th century high populations. This is quite remarkable given the shifting housing demographics, little available space for growth, and loss of many manufacturing jobs during the last several decades along with factoring in the amount of housing lost in Pawtucket with the construction of Route 95 right through its downtown core in the 1950's and 60's.
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If only it could be as easy as picking up the Wickford Station and dropping in Cranston.