The city had best realize that this isn't a Portland-centric facility. The majority of the users come from outside the Metro area, and no one from Windham or Buxton is going to figure out where to park to get on Metro (or even how to pay, since I don't believe they even take cash anymore). Especially if they're taking a Little League team to a Red Sox game.
Garbage in, garbage out. Engineering firms like that need to be carefully managed to produce the desired results, but public agencies have generally lost the ability to provide adequate oversight to contractors. So if you don't provide coherent specs like "Platform needs to provide level boarding matching current and future-size consists while providing freight passing solution", "Platform should not be any bit substandard to existing adequate Thompson's Point platform", and "Waiting room should accommodate established and future-growth passenger loading for Portland; use former Amtrak Standard Station program as a rough guide for required square footage"...you simply leave the contractor to their own devices to deduce what it is you want. And they're usually wrong and/or make cost cuts in the wrong places. It seems like the only guidance NNEPRA gave was "we kind of like ConnDOT's modern station designs", and then let VHB fill in all the blanks from there. Similar problem with the MassDOT Allston project. So much of the general layout of the area is still undecided at the state level and loaded up with placeholders and specs that are still being endlessly dickered over that VHB was unable to fill in enough blanks to net a final plan that works. So they're in a doom loop where endless change orders have to be filed to fix what's broken in the plans, the cost keeps sailing and deadlines keep slipping as a result, and generally none of the stakeholders are happy with how things are going.
I honestly didn't even see the station when I first looked at that render. I thought it was just the "current," to soon have a companion "proposed."
It does impact the time between Portland and Boston, because the new station is closer to Boston and omits the 0.7 of a mile at slow speed between the new station site and the PTC. So that's something (5 mins?) they can put on a
www.wmtw.com
Also, apparently NNEPRA and MaineDOT are working with Mercy, at least so far as enabling pedestrian access across the tracks and access to their parking lots. Mercy's main concern is the safety of their employees and patients, of course.
The 295 bypass didn't have a chance so long as the state was looking at it as passenger-only (or passenger + an extremely occasional baked beans delivery by SLR). It needed to be pitched as a multimodal bypass of the grade crossings for both passenger service AND all bigtime thru Pan Am freights in order to have a usage case justifying the expense. Such that all of the Portland-Waterville and Portland-Auburn/Rumford traffic of sizeable car counts would use the bypass sparing the grade crossings of many minutes of gates-down at a time, and relegating the Maine Central mainline through the grade crossings to just the very short-length Portland locals that worked the Deering Junction area. But the partnership with Pan Am for the Downeaster was rocky from the start because Pan Am was intrinsically a very hard entity to deal with, so they didn't seek those synergies with the bypass. It was always expected that thru freight traffic would continue using the MEC main at no tangible quality-of-life improvement to the city, and with all traffic on the bypass being state-subsidized to light-ridership regions the upgrade cost would've been hard to pay down. Unfortunately CSX wasn't in the picture 20 years ago providing possibility of a much more all-around reliable partner (including for running on-time ops) for all this, but the plan was pretty much D.O.A. without a significant freight revenue tag-team. The state never got around to reconceptualizing it as a major multimodal project that could have legs.Nearly 25 miles of rail line in southern Maine to be abandoned
Maine DOT owns the land the tracks between Portland and Auburn sit on
With the trail lobby buzzards circling overhead, it looks like the bulk of the proposed I-295 Corridor bypass alignment will soon be abandoned, permanently locking the Downeaster into its current, grade-crossing-heavy route through the western side of the city.
Had Maine made a different choice 20 years ago and opted to work toward the I-295 Corridor, Portland could have had a station on Marginal Way, and Bayside might have been redeveloped as a well-integrated, transit-oriented extension of the rest of Downtown.
Thank you for sharing! This is super interesting, and the site is a great overall resourceFor all of Portland, it's about 16% of households that are car-free. That's high for US cities.
Urban Stats
Urban Stats is a database of statistics related to density, housing, race, transportation, elections, and climate change.urbanstats.org
For Downtown Portland, which is basically just the peninsula, it's 36% car-free.
Urban Stats
Urban Stats is a database of statistics related to density, housing, race, transportation, elections, and climate change.
www.masstransitmag.com
This extension could sell-thru better if it were pitched as a seasonal service thru to Ellsworth/Acadia.ME: Proposal for passenger rail to Bangor loses steam in committee
A renewed effort to restore passenger rail service from Portland to Bangor was soundly rejected Thursday by the Legislature's transportation committee, following a similar failed...
Downeaster to Bangor study bill just got defeated in Legislative committee again for the second year in a row. NNEPRA and MEDOT lobbied heavily against it, so it didn't stand much of a chance.
Unsurprising. Like MDOT says every time, I-95 is Service Level A at 70 MPH from the Kennebec River almost to Bangor (where it drops to a harrowing Service Level B), and then the Turnpike is Service Level A from the I-295 split through L/A to Portland. If the existing population had a greater transit propensity, Concord Coach would be running more buses.ME: Proposal for passenger rail to Bangor loses steam in committee
A renewed effort to restore passenger rail service from Portland to Bangor was soundly rejected Thursday by the Legislature's transportation committee, following a similar failed...
Downeaster to Bangor study bill just got defeated in Legislative committee again for the second year in a row. NNEPRA and MEDOT lobbied heavily against it, so it didn't stand much of a chance.
The MEDOT is a department of a US state, not an advocacy group. How do they have the capacity or budget to be lobbying in the first place? That's the dumbest premise I've ever heard.ME: Proposal for passenger rail to Bangor loses steam in committee
A renewed effort to restore passenger rail service from Portland to Bangor was soundly rejected Thursday by the Legislature's transportation committee, following a similar failed...
Downeaster to Bangor study bill just got defeated in Legislative committee again for the second year in a row. NNEPRA and MEDOT lobbied heavily against it, so it didn't stand much of a chance.
MEDOT & NNEPRA‘s “lobbying” took the form of providing testimony in opposition to the bill. It wasn’t a big campaign they poured hundreds of hours of staff time into. I doubt it involved much more than writing a letter and/or showing up to read it.
Ellsworth being 25 miles beyond the envisioned end of the line means that to realize any potential efficiencies from operating a seasonal service targeting the Acadia visitors, you’d have to front the money to upgrade the whole corridor to whatever standard keeps train travel times sufficiently competitive with driving. Maybe you could get away with Class 3 (60mph), but if there’s little to no highway congestion and people are generally driving 80mph on the highway, then it may need to be rebuilt and maintained to Class 4 (80mph).