Re: North-South Rail Link
Is there any part of NSRL like say, the portals, that would be physically easier to build before SSX? Rather, would it become harder to build after SSX? I'm thinking about Hudson Yards, where the portal for the future Gateway tunnels was built before the air rights developments, because waiting would have made it much more difficult and expensive.
No, because there's absolutely nothing to pre-prep with something so thoroughly subterranean. The surface impacts are going to be virtually nil to the city. The space for the main bore already exists in the fill under 93, the lead tunnels all stay 100% below the footprint of existing terminal-district CR tracks, 4 of 5 portals themselves either are right across the tracks from Boston Engine Terminal or Amtrak Southampton Yard, and the last one is in the NEC pit under the Washington St. bridge completely unaffecting any Pike air rights slapped over the pit. The hard parts are the union stations themselves, especially that offset SS Under and Dot Ave. trajectory that has to straddle Ft. Point Channel.
What about doing SSX as the underground platform which you would do for NSRL? So, SSX becomes a phase I for NSRL. Probably would increase the cost of SSX, but it reduces the cost of NSRL and literally and figuratively puts NSRL on the right track.
No, it doesn't reduce the cost at all. Because the mainline tunnel under 93 is far and away the cheapest segment (esp. if Central Station gets the axe), SS Under far and away the most expensive, and the lead tunnels collectively the
longest segments of the whole works by pure tunneling feet. You would spend two-thirds or more of the total project cost for 8 measly platforms that take an excruciating-slow crawl to reach, and require the same service outages to change ends on the platforms. Remember, thru-running is the way you get equal throughput out of way fewer platforms. +13 stub tracks at SSX on fully level ground adds effectively 2-2.5x as much total capacity as +8 stub tracks underground when you factor in the constraints of very slow-speed grades and long escalators up from underground. There is literally, absolutely no reason to turn a shovel unless you're planning to dig all the way and tap all the benefits of thru-running.
Keep in mind in context of Moulton's bogus SSX rant...+13 platforms and relocating USPS are not where the SSX sticker shock is coming from. It's the terminal amenities and surrounding development. USPS is simply a kick-the-can game between city, state, and fed agencies with nobody willing to take the lead on breaking the stalemate. If they truly wanted to Phase I/Phase II it they could get that over with and just build the final-designed track structures first and quickly. Then be done with the everything that would ever matter to train service and some bleary-eyed schlub wanting to get to work with enough extra crowd-swallower schedules that he doesn't have to stand in the aisles every morning. Bare-ass platform slabs with shitty aluminum shelters dumping out into a weather-unprotected open egress, and track spacing to permit future air rights like the anchoring stumps that have been between all the other platforms since 1989. That's it. It's an isolated fraction of the whole package because track switches and 800 ft. platforms are all fixed-cost construction increments. But that alone is the perma-fix on the ops side.
Nobody's proposing shearing it off like that because it's less-sexy train ops stuff and not instant-gratification glass headhouses, public boating on the Channel, and row buildings on Dot Ave. When the pols who control the purse strings never need to commute to the actual thing they're building or have any of their insider peers who do either, it becomes all about the edifice and not the function. Hence, you get people like Moulton giving a soundbite freak-out about "why this edifice and not that???" without acknowledging what the hell either is supposed to do. And making the public wonder if anyone truly knows what it is they're trying to spend money on.
They
can completely separate the form from function on SSX by only a handful of years on the construction schedule at zero change to the final product. At this point it's probably the best overall plan to bake in a mid-act intermission to recharge the budget so they can get this show on the road. They refuse to do so because to them it's all about the edifice and not the mundane function of a fucking train station cattle-corralling people into the city with some degree of efficiency that scales to growth. Same myopia that gets NYC pols trying to one-up themselves with grander Penn-Moynihan Station amenities that nonetheless leave those narrow, claustrophobic platforms and exit stairs at Penn just as narrow and claustrophobic as they've been the last hundred years.
Thinking this through though what is the point of NSRL if you decide to dead end most of your indigo service at North and South Stations? Sure, that is where your established commuter patterns mean most people want to go, but you lose the network effects if you force a lot of transfers or wait for infrequent n-s service versus just running most of the trains trains through.
Well, yeah...that's exactly it.
1) As mentioned, 128-to-128 service is going to be the primary driver for this, not 495-to-495. And on the other end, intercity is being significantly undervalued vs. 495-to-495 park-and-rides. So the assumptions of traffic proportions and weighting need to be adjusted in the next scoping study vs. what they were assuming 15 years ago in a completely different era.
2) The 4-on-2 Indigo mismatch north-vs.-south is going to need some rapid transit builds so you DON'T have to short out northside Indigo routes. 3-on-2 would probably work just fine if the pairs got artfully alternated, but something on one of the color lines is likely going to need to swallow that 4th north schedule. I'm guessing Reading is the easiest target, because the inner Western Route is a capacity gimp as a thru route and the required money to add tracks and eliminate crossings is roughly par whether it stays CR or flips Orange.
3) To get the full benefit of the network effects you need to get everything calibrated and clean up the mismatches like #2, or else it's not going to fire on all cylinders. Keep in mind this is a seismic change in transportation patterns never seen in the 180 years of Boston's mainline rail spoke network. It's not enough to build the thing, but the follow-through on cleaning up the minor service inequities and making a sea change out in the 'burbs with last-mile bus feeders are just as important as the $8B in steel-and-concrete. This is another warning of the SEPTA Fallacy of it being a drop-in replacement terminal. It's not. It's horrible value-for-money if the same-old, same-old runs underground without giving treatment to the whole Eastern MA multimodal network. And since it creates some new winners-and-losers inequities like that 4-on-2 Indigo mismatch, its value for delivering on what's promised hinges on secondary adjustments throughout the network.
In that sense it's way more than an $8B project. It's one neverending
service-oriented investment of incalculable $B's spread over many decades incorporating other realms far flung from rail. Because it's going to change the demographics of Greater Boston and how they use all manner of infrastructure. It's sort of like the Big Dig in that the $14B (and rising) CA/T is the biggest steel-and-concrete monolith you can see with your own eyes, but 20 years of growth and investment therein of all the things we talk about on the AB Dev forum--total non-transpo things--have direct coattails from it. "New Boston" itself is the neverending, half-century level continuation of the Big Dig...now spread out so umpteen degrees-of-separation from the $14B CA/T to stuff like the petty arguments in the Aquarium Garage thread. And in some critical cases, boomeranging right back on the transpo network because of the threat the overload this torrid growth throws on the subway poses to further growth if the powers-that-be don't do anything. Debates about supertalls and new neighborhoods and the BRA don't draw from the same funding source as the CA/T...but it's the same economic engine chugging along that's building all this stuff, bringing in the private money that returns in-profit that brings more private money, and posing the next set of existential dilemmas. History irrevocably changed because of the network effects of the CA/T.
That's how you need to frame the NSRL and the mobility debate writ-large. If the Big Dig's economic engine was the half-century of continuous action for securing Boston's prospects, 1990-2040...then think of this (i.e. NSRL and associated rapid transit + last-mile feeder consideration) as the follow-up economic engine covering 2040-2090. Not a monolith. The network effects have to be framed in similar "New-New Boston" terms fanning all the way out to what developers are going to be building what where, how that positions Boston to take advantage of employment changes beyond the current tech/innovation era, what demographics that's going to attract. To a much wider region than just the CBD this time.
For whatever reason, pols have no trouble explaining the network effects of the Big Dig in terms of "New Boston" coattails. It's the same narrative that needs to push the NSRL. Justification for the $8B tunnel/terminals (past the skittishness of "Can we keep it on-budget, with oversight, and free from criminal enterprise this time?") isn't hard to find if you spin the same way as Big Dig and New Boston: the neverending investment that secures 50 years of good times. They know how to do that; it's been the mantra for 20 years now. For whatever reason the messaging here just hasn't congealed and they're not talking enough beyond the $8B tunnel + terminals and show-me gimmicks like "Look!...Fitchburg-Greenbush!" animated GIF maps. Of course it's going to look like a raw deal if no picture is being painted other than "Same old commuter rail, expensive new digs." That's not how they justified greenlighting the CA/T, and not how they can plain-English explain the enduring net-positives to the economy in spite of the damage all the project corruption caused. Chalk it up to that same Penn-Moynihan myopia of pols fighting to one-up each other on pork but coming from a closed-rank class that has no awareness of the function of what they're fighting for. Maybe Seth should stop flying to New York when Acela first-class is sold out and try taking a Regional for a change.
