This pitch is about a reorganization for planning and operating purposes. It's reasonable technically, but would qualify as a crazy pitch, politically:
Set up an agency with funding from all New England States to run a system that is somewhere in-between Commuter Rail and Intercity Rail. This system, which I'll call New England Rail Road (NERR), would be in charge of operating and/or planning for the following services:
- All Providence-Boston service that does not continue beyond, say, Bridgeport:
- RIPTA would operate, and plan, Providence based commuter rail, going south through Wickford Junction and beyond, and north to Pawtucket and potentially even Mansfield. Also RIPTA would plan and/or operate any Woonsocket service.
- MBTA would operate any short turns on the current Providence Line (Mansfield, Attleboro) and any Stoughton runs.
- NERR would operate any trains that stop in both Providence and Boston. These include just plain Providence-Boston runs, as well as plan for, and eventually operate, any longer runs (say to Connecticut or whatever).
- Amtrak would continue to operate Northeast Regionals and Acela Expresses
- Any Hartford-Boston service (maybe via Springfield, maybe over the Next-Gen Amtrak ROW, which will never happen)
- All Springfield-Worcester-Boston service:
- MBTA would operate any short turns that don't go to Worcester (Framingham, etc.)
- NERR would operate, and/or plan for, Worcester-Boston runs, Springfield-Boston runs, etc.
- Amtrak would continue to operate Lake Shore Limiteds
- CapeFlyer
- New Hampshire Capital Corridor
- Downeaster
- South Coast Rail
- Maybe Fitchburg runs (not counting short turns)
- Projects connecting non-Boston New England cities, i.e. New-Haven-Hartford-Springfield, Central Corridor Rail Line, etc.
This enables the Commuter Rail system to focus on shorter, more frequent, services within the Boston area. The NERR can operate and plan for, what are essentially intercity rail lines.
This seems like a solution in search of a problem that doesn't exist.
-- Commuter rail has upper limits for how long the trip can be before comfort level becomes a factor. Those seats were not designed for >90 minute rides. And at 2-hour trips you really need to start considering food service, which is Amtrak's #1 loss leader expense but also a veritable necessity for most of the routes they run. There's a reason why commuter rail districts have boundaries, even in the middle of states like Metro North vs. Shore Line East and NHHS.
-- There's a demarcation point where it gets harder and harder to provide local commuter rail service the more super-duper conjoined runs you have to dispatch at >50 miles from the terminal. For example, it's actually going to start costing the T Providence Line growth slots in the future the more their schedules get predicated on making large numbers of end runs stretching past Providence/Green to Wickford Jct. and Kingston. That's why RIDOT's instate service isn't all a conjoined super-run with the Providence Line. Neither service could ever run often enough being dispatched >100 miles in one shot. And ultimately when the instate service is up to saturation running the T is going to have to cull back the Providence Line schedule and not run past Green more than a couple times a day.
-- It likewise gets harder and harder to supply equipment to run both local commuter rail and long distance regional rail out of the same facility. Doing so out of Boston with overlapping service everywhere and stuff departing hours on end 100 miles out of town is hard. There would have to be seas of purple cars eminent domaining every inch of Widett Circle, filling up Beacon Park, and grabbing every inch of Readville space to support Connecticut runs. And all of that's going to be crimping capacity into South Station moving into position. The CR mode was never designed for kitchen-sink overlap of everything from subway service to Amtrak. Amtrak doesn't have to have a huge storage yard every 100 miles because they don't run 27 local routes in addition to the long distances. Southampton Yard, New Haven, NYC Sunnyside Yard, D.C. Union, Albany: the entire East Coast intercity network runs out of just those places.
Different modes for different purposes. You can only blur the lines so much between what's commuter rail and what's intercity before you end up with neither and a system way, way too hard to administer.
As for the destinations:
-- There is very little market for Boston-Springfield or anywhere Boston-Connecticut. Those places do not have a natural jobs orientation to Boston. They're the kind of work trips you take once in awhile to visit a different corporate office or catch a flight out of Logan instead of Bradley. In other words, Amtrak-type trips.
-- Amtrak Regional service to New Haven and Bridgeport is already so frequent there is no way thru-running commuter rail can top those frequencies for the capacity reasons listed above. Shoreline regional travel
truly is a non-issue.
-- We're already scraping up against the outer limits of a Boston-Rhode Island commuter market. Wickford Jct. is an instate-RI growth prospect and is always going to have long odds of having more than a few riders stay all the way to Boston. It's 1:45 on the clock...past the "ass hurts and I'm hungry" comfort level achievable on a commuter rail coach. Even if/when our equipment hits 90 MPH on the NEC that's not going to bend back any closer than 90 minutes. So T.F. Green is the effective outer limits of the Boston commute, with Wickford and Kingston peanuts not worth doing more than 3 or 4 times a day and Westerly out of the question.
-- We don't have to change anything as far as RI and NH are concerned, because the subsidy agreements with those states are elastic enough to lean on the T for all their instate needs...including the ones that don't run thru to Boston. So bureaucratically there's nothing to do here. And in fact those states have an easier time getting their 'ins' to commuter rail siphoning off the T.
-- Likewise, out-of-MBTA-district runs can return the favor. The Knowledge Corridor is ideally served by Massachusetts chucking in subsidy to CTDOT to run mixed NHHS commuter rail service patterns north of Springfield to Greenfield. If VTTrans wants to get something in its own state going we can subsidize them to run south of Brattleboro to Springfield. But all 3 states don't need to be conjoined because Hartford isn't a commute destination for Brattleboro, or vice versa. More Vermonter frequencies serve that need for daytrip business trips.
-- There really aren't many more places the T needs to expand to. See the service area:
http://www.mbta.com/uploadedfiles/A...sals_2012/Map of MBTA Service District(1).pdf. This is just for commuter rail; the bus district gives way to the Regional Transit Authorities at Route 128. Cape and South Coast are pretty much it other than spot infills such as: Dunstable for the Lowell-Nashua extension, Blackstone and Millville for a Franklin Line extension to Blackstone-Woonsocket, Berlin and Clinton if the Northboro/I-290 branch off the Worcester Line were built. The density cavity on the western outskirts of the district and 90-min. "ass hurts/I'm hungry" threshold draw practical borders that aren't worth stretching.
-- Connecticut? Portland, ME? There's no need to lard them on because those are far greater than 90 min. trip times ill-suited for commuter rail and perfectly suited for nicely frequent Amtraks. Substantial expansion of state-sponsored Amtrak service is the answer. Including Boston-Montreal to bring Eastern MA and Vermont much closer, lots more Downeasters, lots more Inlands. Amtrak does this very well. Reorganizing their state-sponsored services under a murky regional umbrella without clear purpose is quite likely to harm the quality of service on these routes. Not to mention pass up a whole ton of federal funding.
I think the alphabet soup works plenty well if each agency got the requisite funding. The interstate cooperation is much better than it was and all the New England state (well...maybe not NH) are very much on the same page about their local, regional, national, and international rail visions. We're ahead of the rest of the country on this.
Things to work on are fare interoperability. This has already been a boon on the bus side with the RTA's in Massachusetts all moving to Charlie Cards. We desperately need to get commuter rail similarly compatible, because then you can probably port Charlie over to RIPTA and link those buses to all of RI's T-run rail transfers.
From there you can sort of morph like EZ-Pass did into the proverbial babel fish transit pass that talks to ALL the states' fare collection systems. One card usable on any city bus in MA, on RIPTA, on CT Transit; on any commuter train be it T/RIDOT, Shore Line East, Metro North, NHHS/Knowledge Corridor, VTTrans. One card for paying for parking in any commuter lot in any state.
That pretty much does it. You don't need the satisfaction of having it all run under one acronym or one logo or one color scheme when all the abstraction is removed from the customer. Pull into lot or take bus...swipe card. Train pulls up...swipe card. Anywhere. That's what EZPass did...it didn't marry the NYS Thruway Authority to the Mass Turnpike Authority, etc. etc. It just make paying road tolls totally transparent in every state along the eastern seaboard. There's no reason why all manner of public transit can't work the same.
