Reasonable Transit Pitches

There's one more option north of North Station: Send the red line onto one of the barrels on route 1. Red line either takes over the entire lower deck or leaves a lane. Red follows 1 up to Northgate, where there's a massive park and ride to compensate for the now reduced capacity of rt1, and intermediate stations where appropriate.

Edit: and apparently EGE had the same idea 20mins ago.
 
The EGE said:
What about adding the Red Line to a Tobin replacement bridge or tunnel, and running it under (or over - there are only a handful of overhead bridges to deal with) Route 1? The injection point from NS onto the Tobin ROW would be ugly, but the rest of it is a pretty clean ROW to work with. Gets you a real stop for the Bunker Hill area, downtown Chelsea, and pretty nice swaths of Everett and Revere.
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You'll be waiting a long time for that chance. Tobin isn't even close to end of useful life, nor is it carrying all that much more traffic than it was designed for because of the NE Expressway never being completed. It'll last to its 90th birthday, at which point even the most pessimistic timetables for the NSRL and UR builds will have them up and running with all new routes that could've potentially used this injection point already spoken for.
 
Can we use the LED ceiling signs on the Subways & CR to deliver delay information?

Right now the signs mostly have 2 dimensions of information:
[Next stop:][Harvard Square]
[Entering][Park Street]


What if we could "insert" new information in that first position?

[Delays at][Harvard Square]
[Disabled train at][Park Street]
[Ill Passenger at][Wood Island]

Sure would be better than garbled PA.
 
Sorry for bumping this thread, but had a question about the Silverline tunnel under D St. always being pined for on this board. Does anyone with knowledge know if this was built with an eventual extension of the tunnel under D st in mind? With the Manulife building thats currently over the "Silverline Way" street, it seems difficult, though certainly not impossible, to extend the tunnel. The heavy equipment needed to dig up Silverline Way would have trouble fitting under that building's overhang, no? And the road's curvature would seem to add another engineering difficulty. It seems like the Silverline busses could start to surface as soon as it crosses under the sidewalk on the east side of D St. (with a fence blocking access to the tunnel from the sidewalk itself). I'd love to see this done as a concession from the developer of the open parcel next to Silverlineway Station. Can anyone with more knowledge of this share some info/thoughts with me?
 
Deetroyt said:
Sorry for bumping this thread, but had a question about the Silverline tunnel under D St. always being pined for on this board. Does anyone with knowledge know if this was built with an eventual extension of the tunnel under D st in mind? With the Manulife building thats currently over the "Silverline Way" street, it seems difficult, though certainly not impossible, to extend the tunnel. The heavy equipment needed to dig up Silverline Way would have trouble fitting under that building's overhang, no? And the road's curvature would seem to add another engineering difficulty. It seems like the Silverline busses could start to surface as soon as it crosses under the sidewalk on the east side of D St. (with a fence blocking access to the tunnel from the sidewalk itself). I'd love to see this done as a concession from the developer of the open parcel next to Silverlineway Station. Can anyone with more knowledge of this share some info/thoughts with me?
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It wouldn't be a tunnel per se. More like hollowing out the incline so it stays in an open cut with a D St. overpass slapped on top, and incline moved under the Manulife overhang. The busway from D to SL Way is loaded on Street View. You can advance along the curve to see that it isn't anything special. What's obvious there when you see the slack space on the sides is that if you cut retaining walls straight down you'd end up with a solid 4-5 ft.'s worth of extra shoulder padding vs. the current incline. And that extra width makes the slight curve in the incline a piece of cake for the buses to maneuver.

Not that expensive in real terms. Just low motivation for the annoyance of having disrupted service detouring around the block for a couple years while the cut's being dug, then months and months of service disruption past BCEC when they hollow out the old incline and punch under D to connect it to the new cut. It's unfortunately going to take another bad truck-on-bus accident at that crossing...with injuries and ugly media fallout...to shock the system and light a fire under some Gov. + Legislature to protect their asses by fast-tracking the build.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
Not that expensive in real terms. Just low motivation for the annoyance of having disrupted service detouring around the block for a couple years while the cut's being dug, then months and months of service disruption past BCEC when they hollow out the old incline and punch under D to connect it to the new cut. It's unfortunately going to take another bad truck-on-bus accident at that crossing...with injuries and ugly media fallout...to shock the system and light a fire under some Gov. + Legislature to protect their asses by fast-tracking the build.
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Gah! Why does it take "a couple years" and then "months and months" to dig out an 800 foot trench? It just took about one year for One Seaport Square to dig a 120k sf foundation down multiple stories and build up a 775 car parking garage in its place. That strikes me as a way bigger task then extending a two-lane cut-and-cover tunnel a few hundred feet. If they close off D street to traffic between Summer and Congress, why couldn't this whole thing be done in a season or two?
 
JumboBuc said:
Gah! Why does it take "a couple years" and then "months and months" to dig out an 800 foot trench? It just took about one year for One Seaport Square to dig a 120k sf foundation down multiple stories and build up a 775 car parking garage in its place. That strikes me as a way bigger task then extending a two-lane cut-and-cover tunnel a few hundred feet. If they close off D street to traffic between Summer and Congress, why couldn't this whole thing be done in a season or two?
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See Green Line Extension thread.
 
Semass said:
See Green Line Extension thread.
Click to expand...

I know that this comment is tongue-in-cheek, but a tunnel under D is nothing like the Green Line Extension. It would be a small, manageable, stand-alone project that could easily be handled by any of a large number of excavation and road-building contractors.

It'd be more like Silver Line Gateway, only much, much smaller.
 
Just as a thought experiment - what's the real engineering-minimum possible time it could take to build a tunnel / underpass for the SL @ D street?

Talking just 'shovel in the ground' - not planning and permitting. Assume away all politics. Assume all parties richly incentivized to get it done ASAP. Assume money no object. (PLEASE remember i'm asking for a thought experiment.)

What are the steps?

1. Relocate utilities.
2. Retaining walls
3. Excavation
4. Place overpass
5. Pave
6. Lighting and signals.

My assumption is that many of these can be conducted in parallel.

That's just my guess - I have no direct experience with construction of any kind.

But just as a guess - what's the real length of the critical path? Would it really take more than 3 months?
 
CSTH said:
Just as a thought experiment - what's the real engineering-minimum possible time it could take to build a tunnel / underpass for the SL @ D street?

Talking just 'shovel in the ground' - not planning and permitting. Assume away all politics. Assume all parties richly incentivized to get it done ASAP. Assume money no object. (PLEASE remember i'm asking for a thought experiment.)

What are the steps?

1. Relocate utilities.
2. Retaining walls
3. Excavation
4. Place overpass
5. Pave
6. Lighting and signals.

My assumption is that many of these can be conducted in parallel.

That's just my guess - I have no direct experience with construction of any kind.

But just as a guess - what's the real length of the critical path? Would it really take more than 3 months?
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Work zone underneath a building, adjacent to another (Waterside Place), adjacent to a highway ramp, across the street from hotels where convention-goers really shouldn't be disturbed 7 nights a week by EVERY jackhammer in the arsenal being busted out at once?

Yeah...that's more like 9-12 months as a best-case. Even with cleanroomed infrastructure it's not like this is a depopulated area. Pure common sense and human decency says you can't push the limits that far. This isn't a case where life in these buildings is unable to go on for as long as the cut is in-surgery. That's the only scenario where you'd do maximum-pain/quick-finish out of necessity.


In Massachusetts bureaucratic time, though? This is probably a 1 year to 1-1/2 year thing. Not the least bit impressive, but also not egregiously laggy by the standards of public construction projects here. I would say they can limit the time Silver gets seriously disrupted--teardown of the old incline and connection to the new-poured cut--to only a couple months if they stage it right and blitz that one job. Having to detour around the block on D while Manulife to SL Way is blocked off for construction isn't a huge stressor, so "1 year" ≠ "1-year transit shutdown" like the Gov't Ctr. renovation or when the Green Line was relocated underground at North Station. The opposing sides of D street are polar opposites for time crunch and relative service disruptions (benign on the Manulife side of D, severe on the portal side of D). As well as polar opposites on abutter impacts. So you would expect this to be two project halves of very divergent construction pace.
 
CSTH said:
Just as a thought experiment - what's the real engineering-minimum possible time it could take to build a tunnel / underpass for the SL @ D street?

Talking just 'shovel in the ground' - not planning and permitting. Assume away all politics. Assume all parties richly incentivized to get it done ASAP. Assume money no object. (PLEASE remember i'm asking for a thought experiment.)

What are the steps?

1. Relocate utilities.
2. Retaining walls
3. Excavation
4. Place overpass
5. Pave
6. Lighting and signals.

My assumption is that many of these can be conducted in parallel.

That's just my guess - I have no direct experience with construction of any kind.

But just as a guess - what's the real length of the critical path? Would it really take more than 3 months?
Click to expand...

The project is certainly feasible, and could be built in less than a year if the busses could be detoured to the carpool lanes between SS and the TW Tunnel. Utilities should be simple because the area was obviously totally redone for the Big Dig project.
 
I wonder if there is enough room to build a temporary portal next to the current portal and the west bound exit 25 ramp. That way service could be maintained while the old portal is being demoed. That area needs to be dug up anyway to build a new retaining wall on the south side of the portal. The temporary portal could take advantage of the existing exit 25 tunnel wall.
 
Scalziand said:
I wonder if there is enough room to build a temporary portal next to the current portal and the west bound exit 25 ramp. That way service could be maintained while the old portal is being demoed. That area needs to be dug up anyway to build a new retaining wall on the south side of the portal. The temporary portal could take advantage of the existing exit 25 tunnel wall.
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There isn't, because of the WB Exit 24/25 offramp. Once the ramp dips under D St. it immediately splits into 2 lanes and widens out to fill the whole space until it's right on the other side of the SL incline's retaining wall.

If the incline had any shoulders whatsoever you could demolish it half-and-half while keeping 1 lane open, as is common on a lot of highway construction projects. But there literally is no shoulder, so that won't do for threading 60-footer buses through.

Most likely this just is going to have to be a "rip the band-aid off" final stage, wherein project sequence goes:

  1. Close the D-SL Way busway and detour buses around the block. Minor inconvenience, but it'll do.
  2. Do all the excavation and finishing work for the new cut/incline at acceptable pace.
  3. Close that D St. block to all non-transit traffic, re-stripe the southbound lane as a narrow 2-way, thread the buses through that to a temp-configuration Congress intersection, and close the northbound lanes on D entirely.
  4. Do the excavation and overpass work to D northbound (typical MassHighway half-and-half bridge job).
  5. Do as much pre-prep as possible for the ripping of the band-aid.
  6. "Bustitute" the bus. Unfortunately there's no physical way to short-turn inside the Transitway the way the center walls and wire layout is set up, so it has to go idle for the duration of this step. Run SL1 and SL Gateway express straight from the curb at South Station, stopping only at BCEC. Run SL2 to all stops and beef up the frequencies. Pull out every trick in the book to mix-and-match when there's a convention in town, including traffic-coning a lane of Congress as makeshift transit lane on days where there's unusually crush-load special event traffic. Use the Transitway downtime wisely to repave the damn potholed thing, install a signal system, and stay ahead of general SGR.
  7. Haul ass on demolishing that incline, pouring the new floor of the cut, and carving out underneath D St. northbound.
  8. Reinstate service "work-in-progress" the second there's a way through. Even if it means there's a 1-lane pinch under D northbound and an inspector directing traffic while they finish one of the retaining walls, even if it means weekend or off-peak outages. Even if it means surface traffic on the new D overpass is still messed up until they finish the last of the SB overpass deck.


#6-7 is the only high-pain point. That's the one you want to throw construction workers at multi-shift to try like hell to get it done in one construction season, get the abutter hotels' buy-in for night work to speed it up, and have a kitchen-sink traffic management plan for the surface. If that means you go at more leisurely pace on #1-5 to police the overtime hours on the part of the build that's only a minor inconvenience to service...do it. Nobody's going to remember that the cut under Manulife took forever as long as the final connection work got done with all due haste.


It won't be the end of the world. We survived the Green Line bustitution during the North Station relocation because they had their shit together on the mitigation plan. SL service is going to be a lot better without that blasted light toilet-clogging things, so don't induce any delays at that high-pain pinch and riders will be duly impressed by the improvement when it goes back online. Just like they were with the convenience of the North Station superstation when the north side of the Green Line went back online.
 
Tombstoner said:
Are these genuinely relevant variables?
See Green Line Extension thread.
Click to expand...

Based on the reasonable standard of abutter mitigation along the Big Dig for all those years of 24-hour construction noise and vibration, I'd say yes.

Scope is obviously way different with T-under-D, and the way the project would need to be structured for minimal transit outages you're talking a short "rip the band-aid off" phase on only the portal-to-D portion. But things like not keeping hotel patrons up at night is why you don't rush the cut work under Manulife to absurdity. There are people who have to work upstairs, and people who have to sleep within a block's radius. If it means that part of the project takes longer because the loudest jackhammering has to be constrained to a few hours a day...so be it. Silver will survive with the around-the-block detour for however long that takes.

Just be sure to stack the deck with 24/7 construction when it comes to leveling the old incline and connecting that to the new cut...because there's no way to swing that one without suspending all Transitway service. That's the stage you pull out the stops on neighborhood/business outreach, and erect temp sound-muffling walls/overhang around the work zone so you can work all night.
 
Create a (short) Aerial busway by extending the South Station parking lot loop: give it a downramp/connection to Dot Ave (this is not possible from the Bus loop which is configured as a dead end). Run a branch of the Silver Line on it connecting to Summer St. (this assumes that the Post Office has been torn down)
 
This is one of the alternatives for Mt. Auburn Street in Cambridge:

AfLLpBF.png


In particular, I am looking at the eastbound bus lane, with adjacent exclusive bike lane. My proposal is to do exactly this (in one direction where there isn't room, and both directions where possible) wherever there is high bus ridership route, on an overbuilt semi-highway, that should be a more urban street. For example, it could start in the following locations:

  • Continuing along Mt. Auburn Street (the entirety of the 71 bus route) all the way to Watertown Square
    • 71 bus - more BRT elements.
    • Improved bike connections across the square to the Charles River Bike Path
    • Eventually, good connections to the Cambridge-Watertown Greenway
  • Mass Ave from the Harvard Bus Tunnel to the Cambridge/Arlington border.
    • 77/83/96 - more BRT elements.
    • Improved bike connections to Harvard Square park paths, Alewife Linear Park (major improvements at that intersection with Cedar/Mass Ave), Alewife Greenway Paths

Eventually, the pilot could move to these locations:

  • Brattle Street/Brattle Square/Elliot Street in Cambridge from JFK to Bennett
  • Cambridge Street in Allston from North Harvard to Harvard Ave
  • Comm Ave from Kenmore Square to Packards' Corner
    • Partially planned as part of Comm Ave improvements
  • Brighton Ave from Packards' Corner to Union Square, Allston
  • Route 9 in Brookline/Boston from Washington Street to South Huntington
    • Partially planned as part of Gateway East project
  • Huntington Ave (Back Bay) from Cumberland Street to Stuart Street
  • Mass Ave in Cambridge/Boston from Amherst Street (Cambridge) to Albany Street (South End/Roxbury)
  • Washington Street from the Pike to Melnea Cass
    • Partially completed for buses (Silver Line), but remove the parking in favor of a separated bike lane.
  • Tremont/Columbus/Seaver from Ruggles to Blue Hill Ave
    • Partially completed for bikes in one direction on Seaver.
  • Hyde Park Ave from Ukraine Way to Metropolitan Ave
  • Warren Street (Roxbury) from Dudley St to Quincy St
  • Blue Hill Ave from Warren St to Mattapan Square
 
London has tons of bus only lanes. It'll happen here eventually...
 
Brits are very enthusiastic about installing bus lanes ... they won't do much else to fix buses otherwise, but they do love bus lanes. Even pointless bus lanes, especially ones that end at the worst spots, dumping the bus back into general traffic when it needed separation the most. It's a strange thing to see, coming from the States.
 
We've discussed at length how the jumps between Zone 1A/Rapid Transit, Inner Express, Outer Express, and Zone 1 do not make much sense. My proposal is to have steps that make more sense. Any feedback is very much welcome. These are with the new fares that will be implemented this summer:

  1. Local Bus
    • Fare: $1.70 (unchanged)
    • Pass: $55 (unchanged)
    • This includes all local buses. No proposed change.
  2. Zone 0:
    • Fare: $2.25 (unchanged from Rapid Transit Fare)
    • Pass: $75 (down from $84.50 cost of LinkPass). For many reasons, I think there should be much lower ratio from fare to pass. It encourages people to use mass transit more, it discourages fare evasion, etc.
    • This includes the following services:
      • All Rapid Transit (Red, Blue, Green, Orange Lines).
      • "New" Zone 0 Commuter Rail (North Station, South Station, Back Bay). For now, this only covers travel between Back Bay and South Station. With the N-S Rail Link, all travel between these three core stations would be covered by a Zone 0 Fare/Pass.
      • A Zone 0 pass includes all travel on Local Buses.
  3. Zone 1:
    • Fare: $4 (more expensive than the $2.25 Zone 1A, cheaper than the $5 Inner Express Bus)
    • Pass: $100 (more expensive than the $84.50 Zone 1A, cheaper than the $128 Inner Express Bus)
    • This includes the following services:
      • All Ferries
      • "New" Zone 1 Commuter Rail includes stations within 5 miles of a theoretical Central Station. All stations are currently Zone 1A. The stations in "New" Zone 1 would be: Chelsea, Malden, Porter, Yawkey, Boston Landing (under construction), Ruggles, Newmarket, Uphams Corner, Four Corners/Geneva, Talbot Ave, JFK/UMass.
      • "New" Inner Express Buses. Different from, and more restrictive than, what we currently classify as Express Bus. It includes any buses that get on I-93 at Exit 32 in Medford (the 325 and 326) and the "500" bus (my proposal):
        • Currently some 501 buses running in the non-peak direction take the "quick" way to/from Brighton to get back to the peak passengers. I propose to turn this into Allston's very own Express Bus. It would start at the same location in Brighton as the 501 (Winship & Union). It would then take Cambridge Street eastbound, making the same stops as the 57 and 66 along this stretch. Then, the 500 would get on the Pike at Exit 18 for a quick ride Downtown. Unlike the 501, it would emphasize this route at peak times in the peak direction. This would dramatically improve the connection from Allston to Downtown.
      • A Zone 1 pass includes all travel on Zone 0/Local Buses.
  4. Zone 2:
    • Fare: $5 (more expensive than the $2.25 Zone 1A, same as the $5 Inner Express Bus, cheaper than the $6.25 Zone 1, $7 Outer Express Bus)
    • Pass: $125 (more expensive than the $84.50 Zone 1A, cheaper than the $128 Inner Express Bus, $168 Outer Express Bus, $200.25 Zone 1)
    • This includes the following services:
      • "New" Zone 2 Commuter Rail includes stations within 10 miles of a theoretical Central Station. Similar to, but wider than, the current "Zone 1," including some current 1A/2 stations. The stations in "New" Zone 1 (with current Zone in parentheses) would be: Riverworks (2), Lynn (2), Wyoming Hill (1), Melrose/Cedar Park (1), Melrose Highlands (1), Greenwood (2), Wakefield (2), West Medford (1A), Wedgemere (1), Winchester Center (1), Belmont (1), Waverley (1), Waltham (2), Newtonville (1), West Newton (2), Forest Hills (1A), Roslindale Village (1), Bellevue (1), Highland (1), West Roxbury (1), Hyde Park (1), Morton St (1A), Fairmount (1A), Readville (2), Quincy Center (1).
      • "New" Outer Express Buses. This includes all remaining expresses (other than the 325, 326, and "500.") Any of the 3xx that take I-93 (except 325, 326), the 4xx that take Route 1, or the 5xx that take the Pike (except the "500").
      • A Zone 2 pass includes all travel on Zone 1/Zone 0/Local Buses.

The Zones would continue further out on the CR.
 
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