Regional Rail (RUR) & North-South Rail Link (NSRL)
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F-Line to Dudley
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Re: North-South Rail Link
I don't see any trains running.
Yup...that's SEPTA alright.
Some of you need SEPTA in your lives
Terminals are for NERDS
I don't see any trains running.
Yup...that's SEPTA alright.
Re: North-South Rail Link
But, but, it's so pristine without the trains! So clean!
It's like those architectural magazines (damn near all of them) that only take pictures of completed buildings with no people in them. Come to think of it, that's what SEPTA needs to do here, get those friggin people (ick, *shudder*, gross) out of there so we can appreciate the station in all its pure glory.
I know what you're thinking: "give SEPTA enough time, they'll accomplish that."
But, but, it's so pristine without the trains! So clean!
It's like those architectural magazines (damn near all of them) that only take pictures of completed buildings with no people in them. Come to think of it, that's what SEPTA needs to do here, get those friggin people (ick, *shudder*, gross) out of there so we can appreciate the station in all its pure glory.
I know what you're thinking: "give SEPTA enough time, they'll accomplish that."
F-Line to Dudley
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Re: North-South Rail Link
There's nothing wrong with SEPTA Center City as it's physically constructed, the destinations it serves, or what service ceiling it can handle. The only things wrong are the other unrelated tactical blunders made in Center City's name and the hapless way SEPTA goes about its daily business with both hands around neck. Philly's system divide was from two competing private RR's each going 1-on-1 at each other for the same traffic. 2 competing lines to New York, 2 competing lines to Chestnut Hill, 2 competing lines to Ivy Ridge, 2 competing lines to Harrisburg, and head-to-head competition in New Jersey out of their terminals. With transfers to other RR's or streetcar/bus companies at those duplicate destinations sometimes being achievable on 1 competitor but not the other, being priced differently 1 vs. the other, and wildly varying by time-of-day one vs. the other. It was inefficient, and it really broke down in a hurry when competition could no longer profit over inefficiency.
When the private carriers fell the competing terminal setup no longer worked.
Boston couldn't be any more different.
Also...WE WERE NOT PANTS-ON-HEAD STUPID ENOUGH TO CUT SERVICE to the bone as a "feature" of our terminal 'enhancements'. If you think traffic's bad getting in here from I-495, at least you can hashtag your Legislator with #ItsTheFrequenciesStupid and get them retweeting it up the chain with some consistency like the MetroWest bloc is on behalf of the Worcester Line. Philly's 495'ers are never getting their diesel routes back. They're all gone, and it took until 2008 for ridership to recover to 1979 levels because of that "feature".
Caveat emptor to anyone who thinks the conceptual integrity of obsessive target fixation on steel-and-concrete triumphs over #ItsTheFrequenciesStupid. SEPTA is the #1 all-time blunder in the transpo history books when it comes to the real-world consequences of planners telling their riders: "It's politically and ergonomically in your best interests, says I, to have an immediately shittier commute for greater triangulation's sake." Philly felt the economic drag of 30 years of tanked ridership during an era where everyone else's ridership was trending back up. All because their management thought they were playing a clever game of eight-dimensional chess sweeping every unsexy-solve problem on their transpo network under the rug and re-branding the whole shit sandwich of cop-outs as Progress and Reinvention™.
Buying into the SEPTA Fallacy that "tunnel is superior to surface terminal because concept, therefore we should do what SEPTA did because reasons" tosses aside all the other network considerations for a bad case of target fixation. It doesn't do shit for mobility and doesn't satisfy shit for demand if you don't run the frequencies, or if the frequencies never graduate from studies to reality. SEPTA set the all-time high achiever mark by taking a fairly logical and straightforward steel-and-concrete build that should've solved the brokenness of their network for adding frequencies...then CUTTING frequencies permanently in a pique of political sandbagging and trying to paper it over by saying "Look! A run-thru tunnel!" The T's never going to self-harm to that extreme a degree, but it has racked up a long rap sheet of taking eyes-off-prize re: #ItsTheFrequenciesStupid with excessive steel-and-concrete target fixation confusing the issues. The more anyone's own sense of conceptual perfectionism or political triangulation forces them to bargain away the bottom line of that value proposition before advocacy has even begun, the more likely this is to just be another muddled mess that lands on the pile of missed opportunities.
That's the enduring lesson from SEPTA. It wasn't the frequencies. It wasn't the network. It was too much the political rationalizations. It was too much the target fixation and conceptual perfectionism. And they can never undo the full scope of damage they brought on themselves by letting it go down that hole. Learn from it; don't repeat it. Because it's all about the frequencies, stupid.
There's nothing wrong with SEPTA Center City as it's physically constructed, the destinations it serves, or what service ceiling it can handle. The only things wrong are the other unrelated tactical blunders made in Center City's name and the hapless way SEPTA goes about its daily business with both hands around neck. Philly's system divide was from two competing private RR's each going 1-on-1 at each other for the same traffic. 2 competing lines to New York, 2 competing lines to Chestnut Hill, 2 competing lines to Ivy Ridge, 2 competing lines to Harrisburg, and head-to-head competition in New Jersey out of their terminals. With transfers to other RR's or streetcar/bus companies at those duplicate destinations sometimes being achievable on 1 competitor but not the other, being priced differently 1 vs. the other, and wildly varying by time-of-day one vs. the other. It was inefficient, and it really broke down in a hurry when competition could no longer profit over inefficiency.
When the private carriers fell the competing terminal setup no longer worked.
- Intercity all went to Amtrak in 1971 so there was no longer any need for two limited-stop New York or Harrisburg routes or division in who could transfer to what via which route. It all got consolidated, and today offers superior frequencies with that consolidation eliminating any practical need to spread the field with alt-routings.
- Commuter rail was reorganized at the state level, and no longer functioned correctly with lines pointing in the same direction in spitting distance of one another not being accessible from the same terminal. They had lousy frequencies because of how much inefficiency was chewed up by the poor organization of the system under unified ownership. Yes...local frequencies above all else was too the main driver for how they approached their radical-reconfig choices.
- The Philly terminals were relieved of nearly all New Jersey duties, as NJ Transit absorbed a private RR triple-merger of its own that threw open Hoboken Terminal to nearly everyone and allowed trimming non-Philly oriented service from originating in Philly. Reading Terminal retained only 3 lightly-traveled South Jersey routes inaccessible from the rest of the state, of which Atlantic City is the only post-1984 survivor.
- Throw in the usual mid-century slate of private abandonments chopping most branchlines and whittling it all down to intra-city and the strongest freestanding trunks.
- The SEPTA district was created very small, subsidizing only out to Philly's 128-equivalent distance. Their 495-equivalent routes had to have state/local funding laundered through Amtrak and then- federally owned freight carrier Conrail to operate them.
- That's how the Keystones came to be: NYC-Philly and Philly-Harrisburg commuter schedules were shotgun-married under an Amtrak quasi-commuter umbrella, and the Trenton and Paoli locals were walled-off from them within district borders.
- The diesels routes under Conrail all got booted out of the terminals and moved to outer transfers because of unresolvable labor and trackage rights incompatibilities with Conrail.
Boston couldn't be any more different.
- Northside has always been about due-north. Pre-1900 the competing railroads on the northside all impaled themselves trying to get in on the NYC intercity market with inferior gimmick routings. Post-1900 when Boston & Maine consolidated all it they put an end to those follies and went about cementing their geographic monopoly; all roads to Northern New England went through them. It's no coincidence that both of Boston's first two rapid transit lines were built to North Station in the same 5-year span that B&M cemented its monopoly.
- Southside is a very clean geographic split: Boston & Albany/New York Central had just the due-west Worcester Line and all intercity traffic therein. New York, New Haven & Hartford had everything else due-south and southwest. One owned all traffic to Springfield, Albany, Buffalo, and Chicago. One owned all traffic to NYC except for some 'coopetition' on the Springfield Line to keep antitrust forces at bay. Nothing running north out of the CBD, nothing in each other's grill running out of the CBD. Shoreline vs. Inland Route remains the #1 and #2 dominant travel corridors in MA on both rail and the highways that were built alongside.
- Boston's sharp geographic transit split developed from very different competitive practices than Philly. In Philly the Reading and PRR were competing for each other's territory life-long, as well as competing with other carriers in New Jersey. In New England there was outright collusion between monopolists. NYNH&H bought all all competition in CT, RI, and southeast MA; B&M bought out all competition Boston to Portland. NYNH&H briefly took control of B&M and controlled everything up the coast until getting in hot water and backing off. The gentleman's agreement forged between monopolists was this:
- B&M got its all-roads-north monopoly
- New Haven got its all-roads-south monopoly
- B&A/NY Central got the middleman's position with the premier east-west finger that set the proverbial '49th parallel' the other two didn't cross. They were the party the other two always had to (*wink-wink*) cut a deal with, and the party that kept the illusion of direct competition intact.
- There was zero route cleanup that had to happen when the public subsidy era began here, because there was never a Competition Era to begin with. Zero out-of-district messes to clean up: Rhode Island said 'yea' on self-subsidizing continuing service, New Hampshire said 'nay'. Zero routing anomalies to clean up. Zero operational anomalies to clean up. Zero that had to be laundered through Amtrak or third parties. It was so clean a handoff that B&M just stayed on as the system's first hired-gun operator running its old stomping grounds. Then bid on the southside contract too, because they didn't need to re-integrate anything to take on new territory foreign to them.
- Our system has bounced right back on the same footprint as old, re-filling out the same terminals with the same routes as before run the same way as before. Local, hyper-local, Massachusetts intercity, and Amtrak intercity. It is not the same as Philly, where intra-district SEPTA demand has re-grown like gangbusters but the out-of-district Jersey routes re-trenching in Hoboken/Penn and elimination of head-to-head competition left behind slack that will never need filling and an imbalance that needed immediate correction. Our terminals didn't undergo any territorial and competitive realignment. It changed radically and irrevocably in Philly.
- Because territory passed intact there were no major functional deficiencies threatening our system's long-term survival. No "brokenness" like Philly's terminals after the great realignment. North Station and South Station need lots of augmentation...but they need it because they're doing their jobs well enough to stimulate endless demand and don't have enough extra frequencies to give the demand they're generating. NSRL does not propose retiring either terminal...even in the underground portion. South Station and North Station are still the anchors of the CBD.
- ^^THIS NEEDS REPEATING.^^ Nobody is replacing NS or SS even with the tunnel. Philly replaced its terminals in one big killshot because of their systemic brokenness as destinations. We are augmenting ours because they're so very not-broken they're oversaturated as destinations and getting bigger each year as gravity wells.
Also...WE WERE NOT PANTS-ON-HEAD STUPID ENOUGH TO CUT SERVICE to the bone as a "feature" of our terminal 'enhancements'. If you think traffic's bad getting in here from I-495, at least you can hashtag your Legislator with #ItsTheFrequenciesStupid and get them retweeting it up the chain with some consistency like the MetroWest bloc is on behalf of the Worcester Line. Philly's 495'ers are never getting their diesel routes back. They're all gone, and it took until 2008 for ridership to recover to 1979 levels because of that "feature".
Caveat emptor to anyone who thinks the conceptual integrity of obsessive target fixation on steel-and-concrete triumphs over #ItsTheFrequenciesStupid. SEPTA is the #1 all-time blunder in the transpo history books when it comes to the real-world consequences of planners telling their riders: "It's politically and ergonomically in your best interests, says I, to have an immediately shittier commute for greater triangulation's sake." Philly felt the economic drag of 30 years of tanked ridership during an era where everyone else's ridership was trending back up. All because their management thought they were playing a clever game of eight-dimensional chess sweeping every unsexy-solve problem on their transpo network under the rug and re-branding the whole shit sandwich of cop-outs as Progress and Reinvention™.
Buying into the SEPTA Fallacy that "tunnel is superior to surface terminal because concept, therefore we should do what SEPTA did because reasons" tosses aside all the other network considerations for a bad case of target fixation. It doesn't do shit for mobility and doesn't satisfy shit for demand if you don't run the frequencies, or if the frequencies never graduate from studies to reality. SEPTA set the all-time high achiever mark by taking a fairly logical and straightforward steel-and-concrete build that should've solved the brokenness of their network for adding frequencies...then CUTTING frequencies permanently in a pique of political sandbagging and trying to paper it over by saying "Look! A run-thru tunnel!" The T's never going to self-harm to that extreme a degree, but it has racked up a long rap sheet of taking eyes-off-prize re: #ItsTheFrequenciesStupid with excessive steel-and-concrete target fixation confusing the issues. The more anyone's own sense of conceptual perfectionism or political triangulation forces them to bargain away the bottom line of that value proposition before advocacy has even begun, the more likely this is to just be another muddled mess that lands on the pile of missed opportunities.
That's the enduring lesson from SEPTA. It wasn't the frequencies. It wasn't the network. It was too much the political rationalizations. It was too much the target fixation and conceptual perfectionism. And they can never undo the full scope of damage they brought on themselves by letting it go down that hole. Learn from it; don't repeat it. Because it's all about the frequencies, stupid.
citylover94
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Re: North-South Rail Link
I would say that is just the MBTA being ridiculous in the assumptions they make about the reasons people use commuter rail and missing that increasing off peak frequencies would increase ridership. I could be wrong but I see that as just another sign of their over stressing of the number of people that would only use commuter rail to go to work versus other non-work trips.
I would say that is just the MBTA being ridiculous in the assumptions they make about the reasons people use commuter rail and missing that increasing off peak frequencies would increase ridership. I could be wrong but I see that as just another sign of their over stressing of the number of people that would only use commuter rail to go to work versus other non-work trips.
JeffDowntown
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Re: North-South Rail Link
A big part of the problem is the very name Commuter Rail. It basically denies that there could be any other use but 9 to 5 city-bound commuters.
A big part of the problem is the very name Commuter Rail. It basically denies that there could be any other use but 9 to 5 city-bound commuters.
citylover94
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Re: North-South Rail Link
+1^
+1^
SouthEnder88
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Re: North-South Rail Link
I always thought the UK's National Rail service rolled off the tongue nicely. New England Rail? Maybe wait to have it actually extend up to NH so we have a bit more credit with that moniker?
I always thought the UK's National Rail service rolled off the tongue nicely. New England Rail? Maybe wait to have it actually extend up to NH so we have a bit more credit with that moniker?
JeffDowntown
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Re: North-South Rail Link
We could borrow from the French and have a Regional Express Rail (RER) [actual translation is regional express network].
We could borrow from the French and have a Regional Express Rail (RER) [actual translation is regional express network].
whighlander
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Re: North-South Rail Link
Citylover -- its the problem of the T being the government
They just would never think of something like cutting parking feets on weekends so that Alewife is full not just the 1st parking level and only the spaces within a 1 min walk of the entrance
For example my wife and I used to park at Alewife to go to the MFA -- but no longer do because as Members we can park in the MFA lot or garage for $14 -- parking at Alewife and taking the T round-trip for two = $7 [parking] + $4.50 + $4.50 == $16
Drop the parking at Alewife to $2.00 on a Saturday and except for weekends we'd take the T
I'd also do a once a quarter free day for the full system [modelled after the free day to make up for the Snow Cancellations] -- do it on a Saturday when everyone could use the T to go someplace just on a whim
These kind of innovations would cost very little because the facilities are in-use and the service is being provided so the costs are already there -- but the existing weekend revenues are mostly not there
Citylover -- its the problem of the T being the government
They just would never think of something like cutting parking feets on weekends so that Alewife is full not just the 1st parking level and only the spaces within a 1 min walk of the entrance
For example my wife and I used to park at Alewife to go to the MFA -- but no longer do because as Members we can park in the MFA lot or garage for $14 -- parking at Alewife and taking the T round-trip for two = $7 [parking] + $4.50 + $4.50 == $16
Drop the parking at Alewife to $2.00 on a Saturday and except for weekends we'd take the T
I'd also do a once a quarter free day for the full system [modelled after the free day to make up for the Snow Cancellations] -- do it on a Saturday when everyone could use the T to go someplace just on a whim
These kind of innovations would cost very little because the facilities are in-use and the service is being provided so the costs are already there -- but the existing weekend revenues are mostly not there
F-Line to Dudley
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Re: North-South Rail Link
It's not a frickin' branding thing. Jeez...you'd think from this line of talk that the word "commuter" was like hanging a "No Irish Need Apply" sign on the side of every car. No one cares. It got a birth name in 1973 from its hippie parents the MBTA and Penn Central that sounded like a good idea at the time, that's what generations of people know it on the street by, and it would be too confusing to be worth it to go in front of the court and ask for a name change to something generic like...I don't know, "Steve Rail" or "Jennifer Rail". Come on...it's the Purple Line! Are we seriously having that much trouble picturing how the earth successfully completed a spin on its axis in the days before the Cambridge Seven Associates design motif existed???
This doesn't matter. Metro North has the stupidest, clunkiest name in the world for any large-scale RER-esque system. And they've never been able to stop fidgeting with the brand since the day it was introduced to blank stares 33 years ago. "Metro North Railroad", "Metro-North Commuter Railroad", "MTA Metro-North". And all kinds of reversals on whether it's spelled with a dash or not. Sometimes it's sub-branded with a State of Connecticut moniker...sometimes not, because they can't decide from one year to the next how to apply it. The Port Jervis Line is sometimes branded under MNRR, sometimes NJ Transit, always with a hodgepodge of equipment that's got some MTA-logoed cars and some NJT-logoed cars. The branding confusion will probably get way worse in Connecticut when the Hartford Line opens and extracurricular Shore Line East trains start running on Metro North-branded EMU's. And all of this compulsive brand fidgeting was pre-dated by a 15-year span where it drifted between such catchy placeholders like "Penn Central Metropolitan Region" (is that supposed to be a mode of travel that moves, or a static census region?), "Conrail Commuter Services", or an unofficial "Conrail Metropolitan" when they couldn't be arsed to change signage any further than stickering over the Penn Central logo.
Nobody in the Tri-State area gives a shit or ever has, because service is frequent as all hell on the mainlines out of GCT and tens of thousands of daily commuters are transferring to other branch trains or last-mile buses. It's just "take the train" to them. It's always been "take the train" after 50 years of constant branding changes. Having a train frequent enough to take is the only thing that matters to them.
Jesus Christ...are we just throwing diversions all over this thread, no matter how inane, to avoid addressing the elephant in the room? There is no mobility solve without frequencies. No steel-and-concrete transit build works if it isn't fed with frequencies. No cool branding or catchy name works without frequencies. No ID'd demand produces the riders without frequencies and a service plan to achieve them. No so-called fixed route produces the riders unless it's got a service plan that treats it like a fixed route and not the next rug to pull out (see: weekend service, neverending jerking-around of service levels). And definitely letting it degenerate into modal warfare or sports rivalries between one city's shitty across-board system frequencies and another city's shitty across-board system frequencies ever goes anywhere productive.
We won't have a useful mainline rail network without frequencies. We won't have useful last-mile feeders without trunkline frequencies. We can build whatever the fuck we want--an $8B tunnel, 4 infill stops in Dorchester, a parking garage in the 'burbs, another bus line with a special coat of paint--and it won't usefully justify its cost or hype without frequencies. TOD won't get built without frequencies. The private sector won't lend a hand without frequencies. People won't change their commute patterns--or trust that they have wherewithal to change their commute patterns--without frequencies. The biggest transit policy or transit build tactical mistakes made in this region--and yes, in the world as that ^last^ SEPTA post illustrates--have been the ones that tried to make it all about something other than frequencies or which overtly hurt frequencies. We know that because unrealized frequencies are where expensive whiffs have hurt the most and worsening frequencies the places where systemic decay has hurt the most (e.g. subways chronically under-performing their peak headways from overload).
It's...the...frequencies...stupid. That is nearly always the root issue when you boil away the layers of abstraction and extraneous BS, including this branding irrelevance. The harder one tries to change the subject, the more it becomes a useless time-waster making the frequencies elephant in the room loom larger. Do we want to sustain another New Boston's worth of economic growth? Yes?...we're in agreement that's a good thing, right? Better get cracking on how you plan to move more people more frequently in/out/all-around the region so they can pursue more economic opportunity, and do so such that network growth sustains its own momentum out to the last mile. You won't address that by arguing all day about the color of the drapes and "branding" that irrelevant argument as Innovation™.
It's not a frickin' branding thing. Jeez...you'd think from this line of talk that the word "commuter" was like hanging a "No Irish Need Apply" sign on the side of every car. No one cares. It got a birth name in 1973 from its hippie parents the MBTA and Penn Central that sounded like a good idea at the time, that's what generations of people know it on the street by, and it would be too confusing to be worth it to go in front of the court and ask for a name change to something generic like...I don't know, "Steve Rail" or "Jennifer Rail". Come on...it's the Purple Line! Are we seriously having that much trouble picturing how the earth successfully completed a spin on its axis in the days before the Cambridge Seven Associates design motif existed???
This doesn't matter. Metro North has the stupidest, clunkiest name in the world for any large-scale RER-esque system. And they've never been able to stop fidgeting with the brand since the day it was introduced to blank stares 33 years ago. "Metro North Railroad", "Metro-North Commuter Railroad", "MTA Metro-North". And all kinds of reversals on whether it's spelled with a dash or not. Sometimes it's sub-branded with a State of Connecticut moniker...sometimes not, because they can't decide from one year to the next how to apply it. The Port Jervis Line is sometimes branded under MNRR, sometimes NJ Transit, always with a hodgepodge of equipment that's got some MTA-logoed cars and some NJT-logoed cars. The branding confusion will probably get way worse in Connecticut when the Hartford Line opens and extracurricular Shore Line East trains start running on Metro North-branded EMU's. And all of this compulsive brand fidgeting was pre-dated by a 15-year span where it drifted between such catchy placeholders like "Penn Central Metropolitan Region" (is that supposed to be a mode of travel that moves, or a static census region?), "Conrail Commuter Services", or an unofficial "Conrail Metropolitan" when they couldn't be arsed to change signage any further than stickering over the Penn Central logo.
Nobody in the Tri-State area gives a shit or ever has, because service is frequent as all hell on the mainlines out of GCT and tens of thousands of daily commuters are transferring to other branch trains or last-mile buses. It's just "take the train" to them. It's always been "take the train" after 50 years of constant branding changes. Having a train frequent enough to take is the only thing that matters to them.
Jesus Christ...are we just throwing diversions all over this thread, no matter how inane, to avoid addressing the elephant in the room? There is no mobility solve without frequencies. No steel-and-concrete transit build works if it isn't fed with frequencies. No cool branding or catchy name works without frequencies. No ID'd demand produces the riders without frequencies and a service plan to achieve them. No so-called fixed route produces the riders unless it's got a service plan that treats it like a fixed route and not the next rug to pull out (see: weekend service, neverending jerking-around of service levels). And definitely letting it degenerate into modal warfare or sports rivalries between one city's shitty across-board system frequencies and another city's shitty across-board system frequencies ever goes anywhere productive.
We won't have a useful mainline rail network without frequencies. We won't have useful last-mile feeders without trunkline frequencies. We can build whatever the fuck we want--an $8B tunnel, 4 infill stops in Dorchester, a parking garage in the 'burbs, another bus line with a special coat of paint--and it won't usefully justify its cost or hype without frequencies. TOD won't get built without frequencies. The private sector won't lend a hand without frequencies. People won't change their commute patterns--or trust that they have wherewithal to change their commute patterns--without frequencies. The biggest transit policy or transit build tactical mistakes made in this region--and yes, in the world as that ^last^ SEPTA post illustrates--have been the ones that tried to make it all about something other than frequencies or which overtly hurt frequencies. We know that because unrealized frequencies are where expensive whiffs have hurt the most and worsening frequencies the places where systemic decay has hurt the most (e.g. subways chronically under-performing their peak headways from overload).
It's...the...frequencies...stupid. That is nearly always the root issue when you boil away the layers of abstraction and extraneous BS, including this branding irrelevance. The harder one tries to change the subject, the more it becomes a useless time-waster making the frequencies elephant in the room loom larger. Do we want to sustain another New Boston's worth of economic growth? Yes?...we're in agreement that's a good thing, right? Better get cracking on how you plan to move more people more frequently in/out/all-around the region so they can pursue more economic opportunity, and do so such that network growth sustains its own momentum out to the last mile. You won't address that by arguing all day about the color of the drapes and "branding" that irrelevant argument as Innovation™.
JeffDowntown
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Re: North-South Rail Link
F-Line, I think you are missing an opportunity here. Names do matter. They define the psychology behind the purpose of an enterprise.
You want more frequence (and we all should), then it would help to define the service in a way that implies its mission is frequency. That was what was being said.
Branding does in fact matter. And doing it right can help you get what you want from the service.
F-Line, I think you are missing an opportunity here. Names do matter. They define the psychology behind the purpose of an enterprise.
You want more frequence (and we all should), then it would help to define the service in a way that implies its mission is frequency. That was what was being said.
Branding does in fact matter. And doing it right can help you get what you want from the service.
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Re: North-South Rail Link
F-Line? If you believe in the power of your own hashtag #ItsTheFrequenciesStupid, then you've already stipulated the power of concise textual handles. Declare victory. We are in such violent agreement that we want to change CR's branding. Frankly, there's a signage budget but not a hashtag one. Make sure it is well spent.
F-Line? If you believe in the power of your own hashtag #ItsTheFrequenciesStupid, then you've already stipulated the power of concise textual handles. Declare victory. We are in such violent agreement that we want to change CR's branding. Frankly, there's a signage budget but not a hashtag one. Make sure it is well spent.
F-Line to Dudley
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Re: North-South Rail Link
You are mistaking branding for execution to a degree that's setting an inevitable trap. There are big trust issues in the service levels the T can deliver because the T has broken so many promises about service levels. The Silver Line was "Equal or Better" replacement for Orange. Fairmount was built...but the Indigo Line service plan for clock-facing frequencies in the scoping study got its goalposts moved to "The DMU Is The Service", then nothing. We don't need the E Line back; the 39 doesn't get stuck in traffic and we can throw some artics out there without ticketing double-parkers! And now years of underinvestment in the base system is lowering rush hour frequencies as Red and Orange choke on their own overload.
There was never any confusion about the mission statement on those corridors. The El needed equal-or-better replacement for its frequencies. JP Center needed frequencies and taming of all the blocked traffic. Fairmount needs to have frequencies well under a half-hour at clock-facing intervals to work as an intra-city corridor in its own right. The subway needs state-of-repair and dwell management so peak loads can sustain peak headways. There was no more-perfect branding framing the need. What we got were evaporating plans, half-assed execution, and broken promises being papered-over with more branding-as-deflection. And somehow this mentality that branding harder was a key plank in breaking the vicious circle.
This is that same trap acting as temptress here. "Oh...we can't call it Commuter Rail; it has to be something else." Why? What follow-through is prompting that? I see SEPTA being brought up yet again as an aspirational example. They rebranded from "commuter rail" to the "Regional Rail" moniker in 1982 as a pivot to the Center City era...so shouldn't they be a case study? How about:
You can't do a better branding job on non-execution. It is the absence of execution. You either do it to address the need or don't and don't. This is the same reason why nobody gives a crap that Metro North has never not had a clunky-sounding brand name. It's just "the train" you take because "it's there" and its feeders "are there" whenever you need "to get shit done": access to the job you need for the career or income you want, access to the places you want to live relative to the job you have to go to, and all mundane getting-around in between. LIRR's East Side Access is nearing construction completion and still doesn't have a "brand" other than that project-placeholder name that's been around since 1968. It'll probably be called nothing whatsoever other than "the LIRR concourse" at Grand Central, but everyone in the whole Tri-State area knows how their lives are going to be changed by the new mobility and breakneck frequencies it brings.
It's not a branding problem if the proposed solution doesn't address an identified need, has no follow-through, and falls prey to ulterior motives. It means there wasn't execution. You can't make a better Silver Line by rebranding the broken thing into a snappier-sounding broken thing. It's broken because they never finished it in the first place and its value proposition was never fulfilled. You can't pitch a better North-South Rail Link absent a bottom line rooted in service levels. And you most definitely can't toss around sports-rivalry comparisons with the SEPTA tunnel and namesake absent a bottom line rooted in service levels and how they do/don't fulfill the mobility needs of their respective regions.
Are we or are we not going to give people enough train frequencies to better their economic prospects, and secure the region's economic prospects: Yes or No? There is nothing in the upselling effort effort that's going to build an advocacy while dodging that point-blank Y/N question. You just answer the damn question. It's a fallacy that being smarter at irrelevant framing is going to make that which is irrelevant suddenly start being relevant. People will get behind it if has a clearly-articulated plan to address their mobility-needs, and the plan has toothy follow-through to deliver to completion. But better branding and re-stenciling the words "Regional Rail" on the sides of every Purple Line car isn't going to paper over weak execution and dodging the demand question. We're well into "fool me sixth..." territory there.
You are mistaking branding for execution to a degree that's setting an inevitable trap. There are big trust issues in the service levels the T can deliver because the T has broken so many promises about service levels. The Silver Line was "Equal or Better" replacement for Orange. Fairmount was built...but the Indigo Line service plan for clock-facing frequencies in the scoping study got its goalposts moved to "The DMU Is The Service", then nothing. We don't need the E Line back; the 39 doesn't get stuck in traffic and we can throw some artics out there without ticketing double-parkers! And now years of underinvestment in the base system is lowering rush hour frequencies as Red and Orange choke on their own overload.
There was never any confusion about the mission statement on those corridors. The El needed equal-or-better replacement for its frequencies. JP Center needed frequencies and taming of all the blocked traffic. Fairmount needs to have frequencies well under a half-hour at clock-facing intervals to work as an intra-city corridor in its own right. The subway needs state-of-repair and dwell management so peak loads can sustain peak headways. There was no more-perfect branding framing the need. What we got were evaporating plans, half-assed execution, and broken promises being papered-over with more branding-as-deflection. And somehow this mentality that branding harder was a key plank in breaking the vicious circle.
This is that same trap acting as temptress here. "Oh...we can't call it Commuter Rail; it has to be something else." Why? What follow-through is prompting that? I see SEPTA being brought up yet again as an aspirational example. They rebranded from "commuter rail" to the "Regional Rail" moniker in 1982 as a pivot to the Center City era...so shouldn't they be a case study? How about:
- 150+ route miles and 42 outer stations cut between 1981 and 1996.
- 4 of 13 lines left that never leave Philly city limits.
- 51 of 154 stations left that are within Philly city limits.
- 61% of trips that never leave Philly city limits.
- 8 of 13 lines running 20 miles or less.
- 4 of 5 remaining lines that do exceed 20 miles getting partial subsidy from outside SEPTA to operate: DelDOT (Wilmington), NJDOT (Trenton, West Trenton), PennDOT (Paoli + Amtrak Keystone).
- 50% ridership lost between 1981-85. 30 years for it to return to 1981 levels.
You can't do a better branding job on non-execution. It is the absence of execution. You either do it to address the need or don't and don't. This is the same reason why nobody gives a crap that Metro North has never not had a clunky-sounding brand name. It's just "the train" you take because "it's there" and its feeders "are there" whenever you need "to get shit done": access to the job you need for the career or income you want, access to the places you want to live relative to the job you have to go to, and all mundane getting-around in between. LIRR's East Side Access is nearing construction completion and still doesn't have a "brand" other than that project-placeholder name that's been around since 1968. It'll probably be called nothing whatsoever other than "the LIRR concourse" at Grand Central, but everyone in the whole Tri-State area knows how their lives are going to be changed by the new mobility and breakneck frequencies it brings.
It's not a branding problem if the proposed solution doesn't address an identified need, has no follow-through, and falls prey to ulterior motives. It means there wasn't execution. You can't make a better Silver Line by rebranding the broken thing into a snappier-sounding broken thing. It's broken because they never finished it in the first place and its value proposition was never fulfilled. You can't pitch a better North-South Rail Link absent a bottom line rooted in service levels. And you most definitely can't toss around sports-rivalry comparisons with the SEPTA tunnel and namesake absent a bottom line rooted in service levels and how they do/don't fulfill the mobility needs of their respective regions.
Are we or are we not going to give people enough train frequencies to better their economic prospects, and secure the region's economic prospects: Yes or No? There is nothing in the upselling effort effort that's going to build an advocacy while dodging that point-blank Y/N question. You just answer the damn question. It's a fallacy that being smarter at irrelevant framing is going to make that which is irrelevant suddenly start being relevant. People will get behind it if has a clearly-articulated plan to address their mobility-needs, and the plan has toothy follow-through to deliver to completion. But better branding and re-stenciling the words "Regional Rail" on the sides of every Purple Line car isn't going to paper over weak execution and dodging the demand question. We're well into "fool me sixth..." territory there.
Re: North-South Rail Link
Why do you keep confusing what the SEPTA planners want, and what the idiots in Harrison let them do?
And then you pull in stupid comparisons like this:
That means nothing!
Philadelphia: 141.6 sq mi
Boston: 48.42 sq mi
No shit.
And last I checked the 1980s were an era of massive abandonment over at the MBTA as well.
The SEPTA folks did their job. They gave it a good name. They gave it a good tunnel. Its not their fault that the bright red state government couldnt give less of a shit about the 40% black city.
Saying "we cant adopt best practices because of this completely unrelated issue" is embarrassing. And quite frankly, unexpected from you.
Re-branding commuter rail will not cause Baker to cut the MBTA budget by 40%. But it will have a positive effect on how people view the system.
WTF do you think advertisers and consultants get paid so freaking much to brand things? It important!
BTW, our premier northeast corridor line to Providence sees an entire 7 trains on weekends.
Their NEC line to Trenton sees 19 on weekends.
Thats almost the same as weekdays on the Providence line which gets 20 trains.
BTW, they get 31 on weekdays.
The MBTA commuter rail system is a regional embarrassment.
The SL has a lot of problems. But ridership isnt one of them. Do you really think "Bus 207" would get as much ridership from Logan as the SILVER LINE? All else being equal?
Fuck no.
Why do you keep confusing what the SEPTA planners want, and what the idiots in Harrison let them do?
And then you pull in stupid comparisons like this:
That means nothing!
Philadelphia: 141.6 sq mi
Boston: 48.42 sq mi
No shit.
And last I checked the 1980s were an era of massive abandonment over at the MBTA as well.
The SEPTA folks did their job. They gave it a good name. They gave it a good tunnel. Its not their fault that the bright red state government couldnt give less of a shit about the 40% black city.
Saying "we cant adopt best practices because of this completely unrelated issue" is embarrassing. And quite frankly, unexpected from you.
Re-branding commuter rail will not cause Baker to cut the MBTA budget by 40%. But it will have a positive effect on how people view the system.
WTF do you think advertisers and consultants get paid so freaking much to brand things? It important!
BTW, our premier northeast corridor line to Providence sees an entire 7 trains on weekends.
Their NEC line to Trenton sees 19 on weekends.
Thats almost the same as weekdays on the Providence line which gets 20 trains.
BTW, they get 31 on weekdays.
The MBTA commuter rail system is a regional embarrassment.
The SL has a lot of problems. But ridership isnt one of them. Do you really think "Bus 207" would get as much ridership from Logan as the SILVER LINE? All else being equal?
Fuck no.
Re: North-South Rail Link
I got this from Seth Moulton's site. He seems to be a little optimistic about increasing Northern lines while not doing anything to the Southern lines but he does represent Essex County.
I got this from Seth Moulton's site. He seems to be a little optimistic about increasing Northern lines while not doing anything to the Southern lines but he does represent Essex County.
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