De-coupling the real estate elements from the transportation elements is going to be key to getting a rational valuation for SSX. Too much of the scary (and sandbagged) price tag for the monolithic project was tied up in the real estate redevelopment, the palatial Dot Ave. headhouse that was planned, and unrelated junk like a Harborwalk extension and potential public dock space in the Channel. Those have nothing to do with platforms and trackwork for the capacity expansion. It needs to be broken into pieces so each unrelated part can live on its own budget with its own backers. I'm fine with the USPS redevelopment kick-starting sooner than the 8-years-stalled everything else, so long as the buildings conform to the acreage footprint scoped out by the SSX studies. Let the raw track expansion live within the Rail Vision budget at however many additional tracks ops reform numerically studies out to require (it's not zero, but it might not be all the way to +7 either). Let the monument-building headhouse live within its own budget (or, better yet, don't do it at all or at least for a long time). Let the Harborwalk and anything they're doing to tart up the Channel interface be somebody else's budgetary problem.
It's the Charlie Baker way!
Maybe SSX could be future proofed by having some temporary stub end tracks at South Station with the option to extend? It may put some pressure on the NSRL moving forward.
NSRL tunnels need to begin much further out than that for the grades to be adequate. The tunnel portals would be around Back Bay and Widett. A future proofed SSX would mean building a deep bore station, and at that point it would be easier to just build the link than make a bunch of stub ended platforms deep underground.
The station cavern is going to be either 100 ft. underneath Dot Ave. and the Channel (CA/T alignment) or 100 ft. underneath South St. almost a block west of the station (South/Congress alignment). It doesn't touch the footprint of either the existing station or the SSX-expanded station, so there's nothing to provision for.
2018 NSRL Reassessment Report (this is the Baker tankapalooza effort): https://www.mass.gov/lists/north-south-rail-link-feasibility-reassessment-study-documents
I remembered a comment I meant to make three months ago (which I admit seems like it says concerning things about how my brain works), so I'm back to this:
Lynch: West-East Rail More Important than Boston North-South Rail Link
A top local congressman says he thinks pursuing the North-South Rail Link between Boston's busiest commuter rail hubs may be a waste of time.bankerandtradesman.com
“Having sat on the Transportation Committee, being a party to the debate that goes on between states that we negotiate with: New Jersey has a tunnel they want; Arizona wants to add 500 miles of highway. There are all these competing — Chicago wants to expand their airport — we’re competing for dollars. We sit as a committee and we review the impact. So if we put our project forward and say ‘We want $20 billion for a tunnel so people don’t have to change trains’ — we lose, we lose, we lose,” Lynch said.
