Re: North-South Rail Link
I'm in the NSRL camp here. I've read all the posts and I am firmly in the camp that SSX and NSX are essential for capacity reasons. The cases made on their behalf by F-Line are pretty ironclad. Moreover, we obviously cannot do what Philadelphia did and eliminate the terminal stations and replace them with through-running stations (nor would we want to). To the extent that proponents of NSRL like Moulton and Dukakis give the impression that we no longer have the need for terminal stations or they maintain that SSX and NSX are simply no longer necessary, I find their statements wholly disingenuous and as someone who likes to get deep in the weeds about transportation policy and planning I tend to have the same gut reaction as F-Line.
That being said I disagree with F-Line insofar as I interpret his posts to mean he thinks that we should go full speed ahead on SSX because we need it ultimately anyway and it will be completed sooner while at the same time we leave NSRL for down the road because it will take so long to complete (even if we decided to move forward on it tomorrow) and we have capacity issues right now. I think this position might be a perfect is enemy of the good scenario.
The reason for my disagreement is that this is ultimately a political question; not a technical one. We aren't talking about these projects in a technocratic vacuum. The reality is that there are political considerations and I'm in the camp that believes you push NSRL because- even though in a perfect world we'd start expanding south station post haste while at the same time moving deliberately forward on NSRL- in this real world it is sadly one or the other (at least for the next few decades) and NSRL is so substantially better and more necessary for long-term growth it wins by a mile. Now others might disagree and say the public will get behind a well-articulated vision that includes SSX followed by NSRL but I'm more cynical than that. I think we only have it in us for only one big push in any give 15-20 period.
In short, while these projects should be complements they are instead mutually exclusive. If we do SSX that will be our attempt to address the capacity problems and lack of effectiveness of our commuter rail/regional rail system for the next 25 to 30 years. We will not have the collective willpower to take another stab at that issue until the latter part of the century. However, if you complete the NSRL and punt on SSX for the same timeline that will be an appreciably better situation for the Commonwealth.
With that in mind I say to Hell with SSX and full speed ahead with NSRL. Some may take umbrage with my political conclusion but that is the tawdry logic of it laid bare.
Furthermore, I'm of the same mind as tangent that in this hobbesian world where SSX is NSRL's adversary rather than its partner the reason it is being promoted by Baker is not that it is objectively better; it is because of lack of vision, lack of concern about the long-term and- as tangent suggests- as a sop to real estate development interests (one that is more tangible than the "we can develop all those rail yards sometime in 2027" hogwash that is being promoted by Dukakis and Moulton).
Now if this were our one and only chance to do SSX I might feel differently. However, the post office isn't going to move unless MassDot pushes like crazy for them to sell. So we don't lose the chance to do SSX anytime soon. If I'm wrong and at some point the Post Office does try to sell the State is going to be right there to be able to take advantage of the sale. In effect, I see SSX as a fait accompli. The same can't be said of NSRL.
So if we can only muster one major transportation initiative in the Commonwealth every generation then I would rather we do NSRL because if we go SSX first then we consign the Commonwealth to two separate commuter rail systems that can't address the regions' growth needs for another 25-40 years.
Then what do you tell the Providence Line riders at 5:00pm who can't get a seat in FOUR years, not twenty?
#ItsTheFrequenciesStupid isn't a concept rooted in any one project. It's the portfolio of mobility improvements we have to pursue to keep economic growth moving along. NSRL means nothing if you don't run the frequencies through it. That .org site conveys nothing if it buries the lede on what frequencies run through it. You need short-, medium-, long-, and ultralong-term efforts pounding relentlessly at that hashtag of be-all frequency demand: terminal capacity, fleet capacity, state-of-repair, service streamlining, transfer convenience, and more last-mile opportunities. That means tackling the mundane, the near- shovel-ready, AND getting that Vision Thing in motion for what the encore to New Boston is going to look like when the first act has run its course. All in continuous forward-moving effort across the spectrum. Name one project that's going to be a killshot for all of that. Not NSRL; run the same shit frequencies through the tunnel and all that's accomplished is proving the SEPTA Fallacy all over again.
Frequencies are where commuters are feeling the pinch now. It's a pinch that's going to turn critical in months you can count off in double digits and subsequent Presidential election years you can count off by 1. It resonates with them every day. They are willing to vote right now, and in any 2-year election, for a coherent no-bull effort at addressing that. The politics is not just local, it's mano e mano.
Just eavesdrop on conversation any rush-hour train every day of the week and you will hear a din of discussion about daily mobility challenges: the stress of finishing up work in time for the right train, the proverbial repetitive motion injury of peeking at that paper schedule umpteen times a day, gripes about the crowding or that morning train that died, hopes/dreams about how much easier and more flexible life would be if they only had better frequencies. The conversations are incredibly incisive. Strip out the ponderous arch-urb Interwebs detail and this same AB thread can be conducted live with any Joe Blow commuter in 140 characters at a time or in 5 minutes of shootin'-the-shit facetime in the vestibule between stops. Any day of the week, any time of day. With complete understanding. Nobody knows the issues better than the people who live it, and they speak the same language. I bet you'd find that the Legislators most on-point with these issues overwhelmingly draw from the pool of ones who themselves are daily train commuters to the State Capitol. #ItsTheFrequenciesStupid is that universally resonant.
Advocacy is dead-on-arrival if the first words out of an advocate's mouth are about technocratic political science abstractions. All these commuters hashtagging #ItsTheFrequenciesStupid with their daily lives are going to draw from that is "You're telling me government is permanently inept at walking and chewing gum at the same time and unable to change. So
I have to change to suit the lesser-evils polluting my election ballot by lowering
my long-term economic and lifestyle expectations because
I won't get more frequencies while I'm still in the workforce? And this is somehow
better for
my wellbeing to wait patiently? Man...fuck this political bullshit! I'm pushing 50, got no cartilage left in my knee, and am going to be doing this routine for another 15 years. Tell me how I'm going to get a seat on this sardine can?"
Fatal. Full-stop fatal. The advocacy is lost before it ever leaves the terminal. It's lost before you ever get around to straightening out the pols on what the hell this thing is supposed to do, because it's already lost and diluted the only people with any quasi-effective power to push their pols bottom-up. It's lost because #ItsTheFrequenciesStupid is the driver for everything, and the advocacy is slipping off-target with message pollution about political abstraction and steel-and-concrete triangulation. Look at what taking eyes off the frequency prize for political expediency and steel-and-concrete target fixation has gotten us so far:
- "BRT: It's like a train with rubber tires! Slow, disconnected, without direct transfers, without traffic separation and a dangerous-ass traffic light on the Transitway, but. . ."
- "Indigo is a DMU line, and running DMU's through West Station means Indigo." [*voice trails off at "How often?" question...vehicle RFP gets canceled when question doesn't go away*]
- "SSX is first and foremost a headhouse and real estate gateway! Which we can't afford to do in-full, so let's stop having meetings with USPS."
- "South Coast Rail is economic salvation under totes kewl electrification at 10 unidirectional trains per day skip-stopping half the intermediates, 2 hour off-peak frequencies, and no last-mile feeder improvements. And takes a steaming shit all over port freight revenue we're hoping to grow the economy with, and now may take a steaming shit all over Middleboro, Cape, Plymouth, and Greenbush frequencies because reasons. But trust me...Fall River and New Bedford are ghost towns without it."
- "Salem and Beverly downtown parking garages are offsets for GLX delays. No...stop laughing! They might hit league-average occupancy in 10 years or so! Also...we didn't bother to double-track the Salem platform so no additional Newburyport/Rockport peak trains. I can't explain how that'll help fill the underutilized garages, but oh well...sunk cost."
- "Yard capacity? Some place that can send out 60-foot buses onto five-alarm overcrowded routes? How banal; I don't hear the works 'headhouse' or 'parking garage' in there."
I know politics are what they are, and have twisted themselves into such a pretzel over the last 20 years that limited single-tasking incrementalism is one of the few ways to move a backlog of initiatives through the paralysis. But how does one expect that to change? By watering down the value proposition of one's own advocacy with wonkish abstraction? No. The public's got a single mind of #ItsTheFrequenciesStupid, and that bullet list above underscores the same exact trap of plot being totally lost because the framing became all about steel-and-concrete, political expediencies leading to singular focus on monument-building at the expense of public service, and mass confusion about what the hell the project was supposed to do. You may think it's acknowledging political reality. I think that's working within a trap that leads to nowhere but murk and atrophying momentum.
If things are to change it's going to take lots of pressure-and-time, and enforcing a mantra that's so universally resonant bottom-to-top that it drives action "borderless" of project boundaries. #ItsTheFrequenciesStupid is what's on every voter's brain. Focused and cranked up to fever pitch it's what voters are going to put on the Legislative critters' brains. It creates the pressure-over-time to work the gears on the necessary political triangulation. And it's universal and all encompassing enough to avoid putting the blinders on for one steel-and-concrete project area to exclusion of others, avoiding a lot of the short attention span temptation to forsake walking and chewing gum at the same time.
I don't know how to construct such an advocacy that delivers results across multiple projects through pressure and time. I'm not a community organizer nor have I had enough facetime with them to get much picture of how it goes in the trenches. We probably need more resident experts on AB and other places offering that perspective, because it's lost in our own arch-urb abstraction (see: Dev. Forum, SUPERTALL, obsession with). But I've seen--we've all seen--the wreckage of too many advocacies that fell into a triangulation trap and took eyes off the prize. And seen Greater Boston struggle as a region to overcome that trap on a few too many of its advocacies. On transpo alone the 25-year casualty list is way longer than that bullet list above.
The common thread with it all is #ItsTheFrequenciesStupid was the initial taut and universal value proposition, and it got polluted to distraction by other abstractions. Many of those distractions self-justified by the advocates as the unavoidable cost of doing political business. Laser-like focus on the hashtag doesn't even begin to describe how disciplined the messaging is going to be if we truly want RER-style mainline rail mobility in this region with development of all the last-mile coattails and all the 50-year economic growth that secures. Whatever magic tricks it takes to sell that while dealing with political realities...but it is O-V-E-R before it begins if attention wavers one micron off the universal truth. History has proven that too many times over to convince me otherwise. We're going to have to up our game on keeping that focus on the universal value proposition
in spite of the political realities, not shaped by and inevitably diluted by them.
We're getting the teachable moment right now this week with all the SSX vs. NSRL confusion erupting in every forum from top-level political to Interweb wonks to Joe Citizen. We have a shitload of work to do top-down and bottom-up focusing the laser on that value proposition as Job #1 above all else. If #ItsTheFrequenciesStupid is the hashtag we're trying to bullseye, then first act is cleaning up #ImConfusedWhatIsThisThing and getting everyone on the same page. Before thinking through the political abstractions. There's no abstraction to wade through without a clear value proposition; abstraction before proposition is the death of any advocacy.