Not at all addressing the point I was making, which is that, in NSRL/RR World MOST TRAINS COULD INDEED GO THROUGH THE TUNNEL.
But now, I will address your non-NSRL ops concern. If you were to read the original TM report of last year, you would see a diagram of the track layout in SS. Thirteen platforms:
1&2 Worcester Line- 8tph-15min dwell
3-7(5 tracks) Prov-4tph Stou-4tph Franklin-4tph, Needham 4tph 16tph- 18?min dwell
8&9 Amtrak-1-2 tph 60-120min dwell
10&11 Fairmount Line-4tph- 30min dwell
12&13 Old Colony-6tph-20min dwell
You could move Franklin to Fairmount and still have 15min dwells, leaving 10tph on 5 tracks
Convert Needham Line to OL and you are down to 8tph on 5 tracks. Two tracks for Amtrak aren't enough? Give them 3 tracks and leave Prov and Stoughton with 4 tracks and 30min dwells.
Alright...this is getting needlessly circular. I'm just going to bullet out in the most succinct terms possible what's at stake here, and then we can do whatever we want...talk on-topic or throw more TPH spreadsheets into the void.
1. TransitMatters published a Phase I implementation plan. The goal of the implementation plan was to synthesize their biggest-picture 'manifesto'-type golden principles established from last several years of advocacy into a document that can trace out build priorities for Phase I. It accomplishes that by laying out breadcrumbs from the generic to the more specific.
2. The document is not an ops explainer. 85% of its intended casual rider + involved rider + municipal leader + state leader audience does not know what "TPH" means; that's Klingon to them. Years of demographic data, community input, and technical research informed these findings, and years more of all-the-above will flesh it out to actual on-the-ground implementation. Its purpose is merely laying out the breadcrumbs from soft-focus to spot-focus and pointing in the direction to any deeper-dive resources that foretell consequential things about the big picture. That includes acknowledging up-front where there is uncertainty still to flesh out, where outside factors may change decision-making, and charting inflection points where build decisions and bang-for-buck decisions may lump differently in the end.
3. "Phase I" implementation means "Phase I RUR"...not NSRL. TM could not possibly have been any more explicit from Day 1 that RUR has buck-nothing to do with NSRL. It compels debate on NSRL without depending on it. Anything NSRL by sheer physical timing will slot on Phase Eleventeenth of RUR implementation years ahead of ANY timeframe treated in this document. Yikes...we'll be spending most of RUR Phase I's duration figuring out what the hell can be done about the State's last tankapalooza NSRL paper study, and trying to get public debate that's been dragged way off-topic back on functional footing. Only then can we actually 'manifesto'-to-'action' ourselves a stab at implementation plan there.
NSRL is not a question anyone--least of all TM--is asking here. It is doubly so irrelevant to any of the 'proof' addressing unforced-error logical inconsistencies in this report. There's plenty of grift for NSRL talk amid pan-RUR universe...but stop invoking it in reference to this implementation plan. It couldn't possibly be further off-topic.
4. The document is not making giant risky leaps of faith un-backed by detail analysis. It's also not refraining from taking declarative stances in spite of variability of micro-analysis. All it sets out to do is establish its own logic that will follow through from the general declarative statement to the action plan...for Phase I, not Phase Eleventeen. It's wholly understood there will be snags. Take the following hypothetical example that is NOT indidicative of any logical problem.
EXAMPLE: Haverhill :30 RUR
- Declarative statement: "Haverhill is an RUR corridor worthy of service parity to the other ID'd corridors, meriting :30 bi-directional all-day service scheduled at consistent clock-facing intervals."
- Detail problem: "Crap!...our traffic sim plots keep getting Andover-Lawrence meets on the midday off-peak snared in Pan Am and Amtrak interference, even with Ballardvale double-tracked. We don't have money for additional track work in Phase I. We can sort of make it work by moving individual trains back and forth 3-9 minutes on that shift, but that makes a mess of the clock-facing and MVRTA-Larwrence bus transfers."
- Burning question, via Mayor of Lawrence: "You recently asterisked our schedules as up for further refinement, which concerns me. Is my city going to get the :30 minute service you say it needs?
- Declarative answer: "We are absolutely committed to making sure the Haverhill Line has RUR schedule parity with the other Phase I priorities. Your frequencies will average out to :30 in Phase I, even if there has to be make-up slots for the interference. We are actively problem-solving how to better even out the clock."
- Mayor's reply: "Thank you! That direct-addresses my biggest concern. Our rep from MVRTA has some additional comment."
- Helpful extra, via MVRTA GM: "Read us in on this. We have flex to accelerate or delay bus departures by up to 5 minutes, but it gets harder from there. It'd be better to schedule as many small variances as you can fit, and stack any missed-transfer writeoffs to bigger whiffs that are fewer/further between."
- Follow-up: "Great to know! I'll make sure the ops team involves you every step of the way."
^See^...nuthin' the least bit illogical about how the 'manifesto' level follows its own action breadcrumbs, even with known probabilities of hitting snags.
5. It doesn't matter if there are 80 different spreadsheets showing something that could work when the report's own logic ensnares itself in a trap before ever getting that far. Doesn't matter even if TM's own scoping studies show a way, because their stated logic precludes showing that way. The document is supposed to read self-contained on its own logical progression, and the breadcrumbs to supplemental info are just that...wholly supplemental, not something the 85th-percentile audience will ever seek. So let's run with that example.
EXAMPLE: South Station is solved by ops reform, not SSX.
- Declarative statement: "If the terminal is organized with every service having a 'home' berth instead of ad-hoc platform assignments, interlocking and ops optimization handles all the traffic making SSX unnecessary."
- Logical conflict: "There are more services at the terminal than number of 'home' berths, and the interlocking optimization is already happening. That makes no sense. Either you expand the terminal, or it's 'ad hoc' assigning like you said wouldn't work. It can't be neither."
- Burning question, via Boston City Council: "Something has to give here. Are we building some of SSX but not all of it, or is service not going to be as full as it's cracked up to be? What do I tell Fairmount Corridor voters who are sick to death of contradictory answers???"
- Weak reply: "Well, we have some Trains Per Hour charts that say it works out anyway. It's in Appendix Q of our scoping archives."
- Trolly retort, via Councillor Michael Flaherty ( ): "TPH?!?! That sounds loud. And I will tell you the good people of middle B Street DO NOT LIKE loud things! WHARRGARBL!!!"
- Drowned-out plea, via district Councilor: "Look, it's hard enough to hold a Q&A session in my district with three different language barriers to contend with. I can't reassure anyone with 'Oh, it doesn't really mean what it says.' Why doesn't it just say it???"
We haven't even gotten to the State meeting yet where Pollack is dunking on them left and right and the Globe gleefully runs red-meat headlines about the dunk context. No nth-level citations of 80 different proof-of-concept TPH charts left on cutting room floor are going to matter one whit when years of TM firmly in driver's seat of the prevailing narrative gets coughed up to the naysayers in one moment of rush-release pique. Their own "show-me" document gets upended by the "show-me" statement becoming all about how it can't take the manifesto to a more actionable place without self-contradiction. It doesn't matter what 'proof' is in the actual technical memorandum Appendices yet to come. It upended itself on the very salvo-to-action messaging.
6. Invoking one's own "put up or shut up" advice...perhaps aB is not the place to be sharing 80 different ops-explainer TPH plots alleging that a written-word contradiction isn't so bad if only one were to dive deep enough into the weeds to practically drown in the detail. Nobody at a civic meeting is going to be referencing an annotated aB thread transcript when they try to parse a "2 + 2 = 5"-level whopper to the audience. Maybe TPH spreadsheets are an inquiry best-served by e-mail straight to TM asking why they aren't making a layman's TPH argument or using their own scoping data, because for all it's beaten-to-death here no amount of TPH replying on this forum ends up pressing the "UNDO publication" button on what they chose to say. How much more bluntly can this be put? TM pressed the "Publish" button; only they can press "UNDO" for a fix. It's their problem they chose to run it with such *extremely* specific declarative terms that left them with no other way.
Carry on, now.