Regional Rail (RUR) & North-South Rail Link (NSRL)

Re: North-South Rail Link

Joel N. Weber II said:
Has anyone ever built an EMU that accelerates as fast as Tesla's P90D with the Ludicrous Speed option? I think the real limitation is that internal combustion engines are big, heavy, and don't produce much power compared to electric motors, and carrying the fuel probably isn't so much the issue.

I'm wondering whether bi-level cars in the configuration the MBTA uses are actually a win if most of the passengers in a single, full car are going to get off at a single stop, and that single stop is an expensive underground platform. Some of the single level NJT Arrow and SEPTA Silverliner cars have doors at the center of the train car, and that likely would provide a shorter dwell time. If Alon ever decides to do a blog post exploring the dwell time vs time for trains to enter / exit the station tradeoffs, that would be interesting to see; the thing to optimize for is how many total passengers can disembark at the station in an hour, given both the door configuration and the time it takes for the train to enter / exit the station. A few more doors than are present on those NJT / SEPTA trains might even be ideal; I'm not finding any example of a commuter train with as many doors as an 1800 series Red Line train.
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The Bombardier bi-level cars used by NJ Transit actually have both car-end doors and quarter-point doors, totalling 4 doors on both sides of each car, 2 of which are only usable at high platforms. With any NSRL project, I'd envision a massive capital investment across the entire system where we'd also raise platforms at least within the Route 128 ring to allow the reduction of dwell times for the regional rapid transit-like service we're all talking about.

You also wouldn't necessarily see the entire train dumping off at the central station. Considering how drastically a regional rapid rail network would change commute patterns, you'd likely see passenger counts at North and South Stations remain static or increase, hopefully from greater convenience of clockface scheduling and the implementation of whatever transit district congestion pricing we should be implementing with an NSRL capital project. As others have pointed out in previous posts, some trips become one-seat rides through the core to Back Bay or other job concentrations on the network.

Joel N. Weber II said:
But do overhead lines throughout the commuter rail system make any sense?

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/594186544174366720 says Tesla's commercial stationary batteries cost $250/kwh. For $1 billion, you can therefore buy 4 gigawatt-hours of batteries. If you divide that by the T's current inventory of 80 locomotives, that's 50 megawatt hours of batteries per locomotive. 4200 horsepower (Amtrak P42 diesel locomotive at full throttle) is 3.13 megawatts, so 50 megawatt hours of batteries works out to about 16 hours of running a P42 at full throttle.

The 85 kwh battery pack in the Model S seems to be around 1,000 pounds, and you might not want to add 500,000 pounds or more of battery packs to a train, but on the other hand, the heaviest of the Kawasaki bi-levels the MBTA has are 131,000 pounds, and freight cars in the US can be 286,000 pounds, so if you really wanted to have commuter trains built as four car EMU sets that could draw as much power from their batteries as a P42 running full throttle for 16 hours, that might actually be possible.

But in the real world, figuring out what the actual power requirements are and downsizing this appropriately probably makes more sense. (I just don't know where to get good numbers on how much power a commuter train actually uses in its typical run.)

NIMBYs also need to be considered. When we look at the challenges with the Greenbush Line, with South Coast Rail, and even the South Acton ADA vs historical commission delays, I don't see how anyone could reasonably expect building overhead power lines through the entire commuter rail system could possibly have any chance of going smoothly.
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I'm not sure we'd necessarily see NIMBYism to catenary to the point of making locomotives in push-pull configurations or EMUs battery-powered. However, this IS something people are doing.

We can do battery-equipped locos and EMUs for non-NIMBY reasons. For instance, it may be helpful to have some battery-equipped locos as transitional equipment to enable phased electrification of branches. And per your original question - do we really need to put catenary across the entire system - we could only electrify branches within the 'regional rapid rail' network (let's arbitrarily say inside the route 128 ring) and have battery-equipped locos run into unelectrified territory for those trains operating to branch terminals.

Japan Rail, ever the rail technology innovator, has built the EV-E301 series trainset, which is only one trainset that operates on one line in Japan, largely because Japan's network is almost completely electrified. Kinki Sharyo has also made its own experimental demonstrator unit, which is no longer in service.

For battery cost reasons, I don't think it's often seen as a viable solution for non-electrified territory use across the world. Tesla's 'Gigawatt Factory' may change that game at some point, so I won't totally discount it on a cost basis, but batteries also add significant weight to trains, which increases the rate of rail head wear. You also wouldn't need to equip a loco or EMU with a full 16 hours of battery power if the train will only be operating for 2-3 hours in non-electrified territory.
 
Re: North-South Rail Link

Joel N. Weber II said:
Has anyone ever built an EMU that accelerates as fast as Tesla's P90D with the Ludicrous Speed option? I think the real limitation is that internal combustion engines are big, heavy, and don't produce much power compared to electric motors, and carrying the fuel probably isn't so much the issue.

I'm wondering whether bi-level cars in the configuration the MBTA uses are actually a win if most of the passengers in a single, full car are going to get off at a single stop, and that single stop is an expensive underground platform. Some of the single level NJT Arrow and SEPTA Silverliner cars have doors at the center of the train car, and that likely would provide a shorter dwell time. If Alon ever decides to do a blog post exploring the dwell time vs time for trains to enter / exit the station tradeoffs, that would be interesting to see; the thing to optimize for is how many total passengers can disembark at the station in an hour, given both the door configuration and the time it takes for the train to enter / exit the station. A few more doors than are present on those NJT / SEPTA trains might even be ideal; I'm not finding any example of a commuter train with as many doors as an 1800 series Red Line train.
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Bi-levels are the sweet spot. That is why they are the only type of new-purchase commuter rail car in-use anywhere on the continent save for the Silverliner V EMU's which precede by only few years the pending introduction of the first East Coast-compatible bi-level EMU's (more on that later). Metro North, SEPTA, and ConnDOT/Shore Line East are the only operators out of the 24 North American push-pull operators that run all-flats P-P trains. Only 8 of 24 still have any single-levels whatsoever mixed in with their P-P fleets: NJ Transit (500+ cars), Metro North (~200 cars), MBTA (~200 cars), SEPTA (45 cars), MARC (34 cars), ConnDOT/Shore Line East (33 cars), AMT (26 cars), UTA FrontRunner (25 refurbished NJT cars). All but ConnDOT and UTA are scheduled in their official fleet plans to retire all their remaining flats and be 100% bi-level by no later than 2025, which means there'll be only about 5 dozen commuter flats in-service across the whole continent in another 8-10 years. They won't even get sold second-hand like UTA's early-70's Comet retreads because all the first-gen bi-levels from the 80's and 90's are now being retired and traded on the aftermarket. No manufacturer has sold any brand new domestic flats for non-intercity since the (very mediocre-reliability) NJT Comet V's rolled off the Bombardier assembly line 13 years ago. They aren't even available in most vendors' product catalogues anymore. They're strictly Amtrak intercity's realm now.

The commuter agencies all crunched the numbers. The best bang-for-buck in commuter service is a maximum seating capacity per car, a maximum number of passengers per conductor, the most seating capacity for the fewest cars (important for how freaking long some of those NJ Transit trains get...or those rush-hour Providences and Worcesters here), and fleet uniformity in seating capacity so there's no mix-and-match overhead. That ends up trumping by wide margin the door configuration. Optimizing boarding speed is mainly a choice of whether it's 2 x 2 seating and wider aisles, or 3 x 2 seating and more sardine packing. Low platform cars have a somewhat easier time of it because everybody pools to ultra-wide center doors...or two sets of spaced-out center doors. On the Big 6½ East Coast carriers in high-platform territory you can only do bi's with end vestibules to match up with a level boarding platform. But any inconvenience from not being able to distribute through extra center doors gets offset IF there's concerted effort by the RR to get their platforms raised (other than LIRR, MNRR, and ConnDOT...unfortunately not so good on the full-highs progress).


Single-levels are pretty much a DMU niche going forward. You'd buy those for the rapid transit-like passenger flow where the seating and door configuration is optimized for quick-on/quick-off instead of packing bodies. 2 x 2 seating, wider aisles, maybe a few longitudinal seats by the center door to widen out the loitering space, more grab bars. But it's a narrow niche configured for that specific application. 'Every'-cars are always going to favor more seating capacity and will plug into a much wider variety of routes. And the T's bi-levels do a pretty good job distributing crowds. They just really need to get their house in order raising more platforms to full-high without blowing out costs. Somehow LIRR managed to do that with its mid-90's blitz of systemwide raisings in diesel territory so they could introduce the high-only boarding C3 bi-levels.

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Now, there's been no bi-level EMU's for the North American market to-date that'll run on AC power. Only the Metra Electric + South Shore Line gallery car EMU's out in Chicago, which run on DC overhead with less space-intensive onboard components. It's because the extra AC transformers--especially in NEC territory where there are 3 separate voltages--were too bulky to fit in limited space under a bi-level. That is changing now thanks to advancements is regenerative braking, which have shrunk the size of electrics vehicles' radiators to the point where you can fit it all under a bi-level carbody at no loss of seating.

NJT is ordering bi-level EMU's to replace the Arrows in the exact same carbody configuration as its Bombardier MultiLevel coaches. Specs engineering contract was awarded in 2014; contractor should have specs delivered by next year; RFP for the vehicles to be issued in '16 or '17. These will be conventional married-pair EMU's, but look exactly identical to the MLV coaches with exactly identical seating and interior. They'll be non-custom and able to fit in Penn Station, Grand Central, Philly 30th St. + Center City, and Montreal's Mt. Royal Tunnel. It'll be adaptable to other sizes, and also easily served up in the slightly taller MBTA and MARC bi-level configuration or the Bombardier BLV low-level boarding configuration for non- East Coasters. And it can change on-the-fly between the 25 Hz/12.5 kV power source on the Penn-D.C. NEC, the 60 Hz/12.5 kV power source on Metro North, and the 60 Hz/25 kV power source on the Shoreline to Boston and most of NJT's electric branches.

Since NJT has bought only Bombardier product for the last decade and it's an adapted Bombardier design, Bombardier's got the overwhelming advantage for winning the bid over whoever else throws their hat in. This is the one to watch very closely, because it has the potential to become 'the' universal EMU make. If NJT likes what it sees in its smallish initial order of 75-100 units, it'll likely have the contract back-loaded with up to 200 more options. Cash-poor SEPTA, if they're risk-averse at doing another over-customized boondoggle with its Silverliner IV replacements after the debacle that was the Silverliner V's, could pool with NJT for a cheaper-per-unit parasitic order of vanilla MLV EMU's to push the total numbers to something like 500 units. AMT in Montreal is almost certainly going to order them to complement and replace its MR-90's when they do their next electrification expansion, since they're another all-Bombardier shop. GO Transit in Toronto is near-ironclad to be ordering the low-boarding Bombardier version when it starts its electrification (Bombardier being Ontario-based). And so on and so on.

That's where the economy of scale starts getting very interesting for the T if they and RIDOT want to go in for a 75-car Providence + intrastate-RI pool fleet of EMU's. The NJT (and maybe SEPTA) orders could get so large it'll give them years of lead time to infill their electric infrastructure at the yards and boost the power capacity on the NEC before their first deliveries come. If they resist their compulsion to @#$% over-customize and just order generics no different from NJT's except for the roomier car height, NJT will be the guinea pig that pounds out all the bugs and they'll be at "just works" reliability by the time of the order. If Buy America and Buy Massachusetts inanity were relaxed they'd save a ton being able to use Bombardier's home plant while it's still hot churning out other orders. Stretching out the options would give them time to mull whether electrifying Fairmount and electrifying Worcester in stages (Riverside, Framingham, Worcester) can fit in before the last car options are done, and if that's not in the cards they can simply pass on the last few years of options.

So watch those NJT developments closely. Especially with these specs being 6-9 months away from being published, and the RFP being 12-18 months away. If that vehicle ends up a good one and generates interest from other buyers who'll need or want to look at new EMU's within +/- 2-5 years of NJT...that could be what finally makes the economics work well enough to crack the domestic EMU market wide open and make taking the plunge here doable.
 
Re: North-South Rail Link

Joel N. Weber II said:
I believe I've seen at least one Youtube video of B721 which showed something like three reefers and 10 or 15 scrap metal cars.

The reefers seem to be the high value freight, and the typical maximum weight for a freight car in the US is 286,000 pounds (though last I heard, the Pan Am mainline into Maine couldn't handle that much). 286,000 * 3 is 858,000 pounds.

http://www.kawasakirailcar.com/CT_MBTA says some of the MBTA's Kawasaki bi-level cars are 126,000 pounds, others are 131,000 pounds. 126,000 pounds times 7 is 882,000 pounds.

If you can get a train of 7 bi-level passenger cars though the NSRL, I don't see how the weight of three reefers would be a problem.

(And I'm curious what happens to the scrap metal after it gets delivered to Everett. Would there be any viable way to redirect the scrap metal to Track 61?)
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There's zero compelling reason why any of the area freight carriers would pay for trackage rights in the tunnel and the steep insurance rates for it when they have clearance routes and many slots to get to Everett. Assuming those freights could even climb the extremely steep grades of the tunnel, which they can't (Pan Am's wimpy-wimpy power sometimes can't even get over the Mystic River bridge without stalling). The local freight jobs do not contour to straightest-line distances, but rather yard-of-origin and consolidating to the same routes so they don't have to waste time qualifying crews on redundant routes. For CSX that means everything in Eastern MA originates out of Framingham. They even originate the locals that go back west towards Worcester out of Framingham, because Framingham's the yard configured for blocking locals and Worcester isn't. Pan Am sends everything out of Lawrence Yard, their Framingham equivalent; their home base and Worcester equivalent is Ayer, but they haven't used the Fitchburg Line to reach Boston in years...they go around 495.

Neither of them are going to have the faintest interest in the tunnel. Even if the tunnel could support it (the Chunnel, for example, does carry regular freight trains across the English Channel) , they'd never ask because it's all about the yards. Hell, CSX might soon get Pan Am to do its Everett deliveries, keeping the customers for itself but instead of running direct just handing off on the Framingham-Ayer interchange train to Pan Am to take to Lawrence and combine with Pan Am's Everett train. They save more money staffing less crew and paying the T less maint money to use the inner Worcester Line and Grand Junction than they give up by giving Pan Am a cut of the proceeds. Freight route patterns are shaped by profit-and-loss, not the map.


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Re: battery-powered trains. You guys realize what a huuuuuuuge difference there is between car horsepower and train horsepower? The Jetsons shit tech that'll make train power as self-contained as a Tesla is such orders of magnitude different scale that even rapidly-advancing technology is not going to produce that in our lifetimes. Magnitudes. Electric buses may be a real thing as soon as the 2020's, but it gets harder and harder and harder to scale up every additional magnitude to the level of a train. And EMU's are much power-hungrier as a set than any electric push-pull configuration, which is why they are so seldom used for long-distance configurations vs. P-P or power car sandwiches like the Acela. In addition to the orders-of-magnitude power problem, you're shooting for a narrow efficiency target trying to get a battery-pack EMU consist to hit the same upper hand on short/mid-distance efficiency as an on-wire EMU.

Not to mention chasing a moving target. Thanks to advances in regenerative braking, an Amtrak Sprinter takes way less electricity than 1978's state-of-the-art AEM-7 while having ability to haul 4 more cars than a Toaster. They use stored power at coasting speed to only draw a trace, and put electricity back into the grid during braking to make the power supply less susceptible to over-draws when traffic is heaviest. This is good, because a Sprinter needs to draw a LOT of power when it's hauling ass out of a dead stop. If you want more HSR lines without having to rebuild tens of billions of dollars worth of feeders from the U.S.'s increasingly brittle electric grid, those braking and coasting savings are what makes it happen on relatively neutral terms. The newest crop of EMU's proportionately get more efficient to similar degree, since they by their service nature make so many more braking maneuvers for denser station stops that they can put more frequent bursts back into the supply. It helps to keep close train spacing from overdrawing power...something that's a problem today in some places like the Harlem Line where Metro North restricts the lengths of M7 trains because they draw too much juice from un-upgraded feeders.


I would take anything Mr. Musk the Hyperloop Snake-oil Salesman says on this subject with a huge grain of salt. I don't doubt his stature as visionary for cars and rocketry, but he has got some bug up his ass about tearing down HSR causing him to push some real bullshit F.U.D. on the public about how traditional transit infrastructure is obsolete. It's all about his peculiar notions of personal rapid transit somehow disruptively replacing the high-capacity mode. Conventional HSR has never been more efficient than it is now, and nothing else even comes close when actual maths get crunched instead of just taking His Hyperloopness at his word. Alon Levy is required reading on exactly how liar-liar-pants-on-fire Musk is about that subject.
 
Re: North-South Rail Link

FWIW, the street car project in Detroit is planning to use partial battery power. There will still be sections of overhead catenary wire but having battery power allows them to reduce construction cost, fit in tight places and historic areas without visual impacts. Big difference between street cars and EMUs but there is some movement there.
 
Re: North-South Rail Link

Semass said:
FWIW, the street car project in Detroit is planning to use partial battery power. There will still be sections of overhead catenary wire but having battery power allows them to reduce construction cost, fit in tight places and historic areas without visual impacts. Big difference between street cars and EMUs but there is some movement there.
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Same streetcars DART ordered from Brookville: http://www.webcitation.org/6Y2TZkoUT. Dallas has a historic viaduct on their expansion streetcar line that can't have overhead installed, so they use the battery solely to get across that. Brookville's a very small builder specializing in small orders of locomotives or streetcars. Big systems have the option of buying something like the Kinki-Sharyo AmeriTram for off-wire capability on large-scale fleet orders.

But it's all still short-distance on small batteries that still need the brakes frequently pumped during the off-wire excursions to keep a charge, otherwise the battery size kills the performance. It's suited for bus and trolley stop spacing and bus/trolley routes where you're still near the CBD if you overextend the battery while stuck in traffic. This really isn't any different from what's been creeping into the last couple trackless trolley orders over the last 10 years. Only instead of ordering that capability for construction diversions like MUNI does for its newest TT's the off-wire stretches are a regular part of a revenue route.

The orders of magnitude problem still isn't anywhere close to meeting the needs of mainline rail stop spacing, mainline rail acceleration (if you want an EMU that doesn't perform worse than a diesel when it's packed like sardines), mainline rail livery (e.g. the electrical outlets for commuters to plug in gadgets, the onboard Wi-fi transmitters), and the heating/AC demands of climate controlling a max-capacity car (electric heat in particular has hit peak efficiency and has no watts left to pare).

It is something that could do a lot of good on the freight side for small yard switchers. Those are small engines whose only purpose is to shunt cars around inside a freight yard...enough regen braking moves on the constant back-and-forth of puttering around a yard for batteries to work well at keeping them quiet and low emmisions. There's already been a lot of progress there with gensets, where low-power pairs or triplets of small-size DMU-esque diesel engines throttle down or shut off to only single engines when loads are lightest or the regen braking is contributing the most. Lots of those things popping up, including alternative-fuel ones that run on biofuels. The T's two little NRE switchers are gensets, and NYC Subway's new work train diesels are gensets to keep exhaust inside the subway tunnels at bare minimum.


But I think the best you can hope for on the passenger side is a conventional diesel locomotive with regen braking efficient enough to be able to go through an unventilated tunnel a la Penn Station without ever needing to be equipped with pantograph or 3rd rail auxiliary power. And I'm not sure where one would ever apply that on this continent given all the surrounding electric territory ideally suited for a dual-mode that can use any/all wires before transitioning to diesel territory. The rise of AC traction motors that are agnostic to electricity source and can provide equal hauling power off either the electricity generated by the diesel prime mover or through transformer off the pantograph or 3rd rai...obviates the need to even explore battery tech. There's more wiggle room for bringing down the weight of a heavy beast like the ALP-45DP by trimming the FRA buff strength fat than there is trying to shrink a heavy-ass battery enough to shed the same excess poundage.

And it's definitely not going to do much for DMU's for the same reason. Engine tech and better FRA regs can shed some weight and make them gradually more fuel-efficient over time. Enough that full-size bi-levels probably become the majority-purchase in this country. But you're back to the drawing board the second you start larding heavy batteries underneath with the diesel engines and fuel tanks, with lots less room for performance/weight improvement. Not to mention likely trade-offs in power of the diesel engines since that's the component that would have to be shrunk. No one's going to buy wimpier-accelerating DMU's for sole sake of running them silent some of the time on battery. That un-does their whole performance advantage over a push-pull.
 
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Re: North-South Rail Link

Semass said:
FWIW, the street car project in Detroit is planning to use partial battery power. There will still be sections of overhead catenary wire but having battery power allows them to reduce construction cost, fit in tight places and historic areas without visual impacts. Big difference between street cars and EMUs but there is some movement there.
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^ Nobody's going to sweat the visual/historical/cost impact of wires in the tunnel and the NEC already has them. From there, people need only ask: is an overhead wire a reasonable price to pay for direct access to the NSRL. Lowell Line will answer "yes" so will Framingham-Worcester and probably Fitchburg and Lynn as far as 128. Beyond that whomever wants service will have to accept a portal and wires as a package.

And we'll let Melrose's access just keep getting worse and worse just from natural growth around it and wait the 50 years it'll take for them to realize that traffic aint quaint. 2065 is about when we'll have budget for upgrades to the inner Haverhill line anyway.
 
Re: North-South Rail Link

Arlington said:
^ Nobody's going to sweat the visual/historical/cost impact of wires in the tunnel and the NEC already has them. From there, people need only ask: is an overhead wire a reasonable price to pay for direct access to the NSRL. Lowell Line will answer "yes" so will Framingham-Worcester and probably Fitchburg as far as 128. Beyond that whomever wants service will have to accept a portal and wires as a package.
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Dual-modes. The price will come way down by the time NSRL is built. We've got a couple of lines--Fitchburg west of Littleton and all of the Ballardvale-Portland Western Route--that probably can never be electrified without heinous expense. They're pending double-stack freight routes where they've gone to the well so many times before squeezing out more underclearance that after this next effort to hit 20'6" it's too big a reach to come up with the +2'7" extra to reach the 23'1" required for safe running of unshielded stacked cubes under 25 kV wires. Ditto the B&A all points west of Worcester. The only reason the Worcester Line-proper is an easy electrification is because there's only 6 bridges in DS territory Westborough-Worcester, and all of them can go +2'7" by undercutting the trackbed. Forget about west of there; it's 35 overhead bridges between Worcester and Springfield.

And the branchlines are clearly going to be last. 3 Old Colony branches, potentially 3 Eastern Route branches, potentially 2 or 3 Franklin main branches if Woonsocket and Milford are in the mix, 2 South Coast branches, potentially 1-1/2 Cape Cod branches. No way the service levels will merit doing them all, and it'll take quite awhile to get first branch priorities Newburyport and Rockport done; you're probably just looking at Peabody/128 for starters. So the dual-modes will always be a tunnel feature. The trick is to get the heaviest tunnel users--NEC, Lowell/NH, Worcester, Eastern to Salem/Beverly/Peabody, and the Indigoes on EMU's so that's a majority of the traffic. The more cumbersome dual-modes won't slow anything down so long as they're a decided minority on service density. Not hard; branches are always more diffuse than mains, and the branches are going to continue being the primary surface terminal users since they have the weakest destination pair demand. We're really no different from how NJ Transit is going to segment EMU's vs. dual-mode push-pulls into Penn vs. Hoboken once the Gateway tunnel and Penn South expand the capacity.
 
Re: North-South Rail Link

bayvillagebrahmin said:
http://boston.curbed.com/archives/2015/10/monorail-greenway.php
Interesting but should be underground/covered
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The only reason to build a monorail is precisely because they fall somewhere between silent-unobtrusive and swooshy-sexy futuristic (Disney/Vegas/Japan). They're features, not bugs.

Actually, the thing that killed Seattle Monorail extensions was the new safety requirement that there be a continuous egress walkway (rather than having to have a ladder truck come). It made dual beam messy (central egress) and single beam awful (outrigger egress). By the time it was all larded up with gangways, the guideway ended up nearly costing what a two-track light-rail-laid-in-ballast overhead line would cost.
 
Re: North-South Rail Link

Arlington said:
The only reason to build a monorail is precisely because they fall somewhere between silent-unobtrusive and swooshy-sexy futuristic (Disney/Vegas/Japan). They're features, not bugs.

Actually, the thing that killed Seattle Monorail extensions was the new safety requirement that there be a continuous egress walkway (rather than having to have a ladder truck come). It made dual beam messy (central egress) and single beam awful (outrigger egress). By the time it was all larded up with gangways, the guideway ended up nearly costing what a two-track light-rail-laid-in-ballast overhead line would cost.
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I feel like the only reason to build either a monorail or PRT at this point is that a private company is willing to do it for you. No public agency should ever invest in one. Now, if some private operator wants to build and run it, sure. Go ahead.
 
Re: North-South Rail Link

BREAKING: Steve Murphy not a smart man, never was. Full Coverage You Can Count On™ starts at 11!
 
Re: North-South Rail Link

We need a drinking game for every time a politician proposed a monorail.
 
Re: North-South Rail Link

F-Line to Dudley said:
BREAKING: Steve Murphy not a smart man, never was. Full Coverage You Can Count On™ starts at 11!
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Like really not a smart man

Murphy, though, is thinking even broader. "The city is overdeveloped," the Hyde Park resident said, adding he feels that first hand "every time I get in the car." Murphy said Boston needs "almost a moratorium on development, at least in parts of the city right now."
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http://www.universalhub.com/2015/councilors-want-reins-development-bra
 
Re: North-South Rail Link

It's frighteningly easy to come up with a list of 25 (not so) crazy projects.

North-South Link
Red/blue
Blue to Lynn
Silver to green flip
RLX to Arlington

Grandjunction service
GL to Forrest hills
Riverbank subway
Blue eats D
Green to Needham and

Orange to WRoxxie
Orange to Reading
DMU to Danvers
CR electrification
Green to Porter

Green to Woburn
Seaport DMU
Huntington subway
F-line to Dudley
Urban ring!1!!

South Coast Rail
Lowell to Nashua
Franklin to Woonsocket
Worcester Northborough branch
PoP
 
Re: North-South Rail Link

Mongo said:
Like really not a smart man



http://www.universalhub.com/2015/councilors-want-reins-development-bra
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There should be a cap on development based on infrastructure and resources, but after say a 20% to 30% increase in Massachusetts population.. Plans to go above that cap should incur additional taxes to pay for the infrastructure needed, if possible. MWRA communities can probably support an additional 30% increase in water use before needing to consider major infrastructure investment at higher operating costs.

We will have this discussion in fifteen or twenty years depending on how things go.
 
Re: North-South Rail Link

But how will a development cap stop people from moving in and creating a housing crisis. Development caps haven't ever managed to stop that before and they are almost never sustainable so what would be different and sustainable about what you propose?
 
Re: North-South Rail Link

citylover94 said:
But how will a development cap stop people from moving in and creating a housing crisis. Development caps haven't ever managed to stop that before and they are almost never sustainable so what would be different and sustainable about what you propose?
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I don't pretend anything is sustainable. Usually these things work themselves out in unpleasant ways. It would be nice to have a long view and figure out a way to grow beyond our resource constraints in ways that improve quality of life... Less time spent commuting, plentiful and inexpensive food and clean water, good quality housing at an affordable price, time and money and places for leisure.
 
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