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

[Equilibria]

Re: North-South Rail Link

"Haha, we destroyed all the alternative methods of transportation that existed, so now if you don't support highways everywhere you're being hypocritical!"

Hardly. Trains? Still there, still carrying goods. Ships? How do you think all of those products produced in China get here? Cars have replaced trains in many cases for carrying goods because they are significantly cheaper, and for passengers, well, they're just better. I'm not saying everyone has to agree with me on that, but I don't own a car and walk/ride transit everywhere I go. Cars are better. They are usually faster, far more comfortable and private, and give you total control and flexibility as to departure time and route. When feasible as a transportation mode (and there are places like Manhattan and San Francisco where they really aren't) they provide the preferred mode of transportation for most people.

My question for you is: why do you hate them? If we could make them all electric, which we should, with renewable sources of power, would you still hate them? If we charged congestion taxes in every city center, would you hate them? Most car-haters, I think, are transit fanboys and fangirls who prefer to live and travel in a way that most Americans would and do find onerous.

On the actual subject of the thread, my confusion about the N-S Rail Link has always been how you can build it without a "Central Station." If the tunnel approaches have to be beyond North and South Station, then you can't stop at one of the two existing stations, so either you relocate the Boston station to above-ground platforms somewhere else (South Bay or Charlestown) or you build new ones underground. Is it less expensive to simply add them under South Station, since it would be shallower?

I still just don't see why this project is such a big deal anyway. Lots of highly successful Commuter Rail services exist without through-routing, and most CR trains would likely still terminate at North or South. Really, this only seems useful for Amtrak connecting NY to Maine and perhaps future DMU through service, though in that case why not just build it for DMUs and probably save some money? If Amtrak really wants a connection through Boston, let them build it.

 

[Matthew]

Re: North-South Rail Link

Can't speak for everyone, but I don't hate cars -- big improvement over horses, after all. What I don't like is paving over the city turning it into a parking lot and forcing everyone to live in sprawl, that's all. And unfortunately that's the direction that automobile-centric policy takes us, due to basic geometrical reasons. Besides that, there's safety issues with speeding traffic that still need to be dealt with. Carnage is bad.


Anyway, I think it's vastly easier to carve a cavern under the existing stations then it would be in the middle of Atlantic Ave, which is why Central Station is a boondoggle.
What makes everyone excited about through-routing is the example of the RER. Of course there's more to it than that, but still... that would be pretty transformative if done right.

 

[Arborway]

Re: North-South Rail Link

The Central Station component always seemed to be ridiculously unnecessary. It's like someone rode the B Line and thought "This station spacing is impeccable!"

 

[MBTAddict]

Re: North-South Rail Link

The Central Station component always seemed to be ridiculously unnecessary. It's like someone rode the B Line and thought "This station spacing is impeccable!"

+1

 

[BostonUrbEx]

Re: North-South Rail Link

The Central Station component always seemed to be ridiculously unnecessary. It's like someone rode the B Line and thought "This station spacing is impeccable!"

This.

I would imagine you could just have some sort of pedestrian tunnel to the Blue Line, as I think the primary reasoning for it was that connection.

 

[BostonUrbEx]

Re: North-South Rail Link

Don't bother. You just frustrate yourself and piss them off. Some people think that cars are a species of animal, competing with us humans for the good stuff.

Some day I'd like to see the anti-highway, anti-auto crowd swear off the benefits of both for a year. By the end of the first week, they'd start going hungry. By the end of the first month, they'd be dying. Or would the supplies for their hospital treatment come by public transportation?

Talk about absurd.

 

[underground]

Re: North-South Rail Link

Some day I'd like to see the anti-highway, anti-auto crowd swear off the benefits of both for a year. By the end of the first week, they'd start going hungry. By the end of the first month, they'd be dying. Or would the supplies for their hospital treatment come by public transportation?

Before Henry Ford and the interstates, people were born and then promptly died.

 

[Commuting Boston Student]

Re: North-South Rail Link

why does the NS rail link have to go underground under the central artery? Could a tube in the harbor do the same thing for substantially less money?

It has to go under the Central Artery because the curve geometry to shunt it out to the harbor and then swing it back in to where North Station is would be way too severe otherwise.

Although... speaking of alternative routings... why wouldn't this work? It's a bit twisty, but then again, so is the 'under Big Dig' alignment. It has plenty of room for 1% grades on either side even if you constrain the portals to the points where I placed them (and in so doing, assure that you can get every Northside line on the same portal and the NEC/B&A lines sharing a portal, and even if you need to incline the Link itself to ensure sufficient clearance of the various obstacles, it works fine. The Link itself would be all deep-bore, and ~25' or more feet underground should leave us well below the range where utility surprises might spring up.

As an added bonus, if we later go back and decide that we absolutely must have a Boston Central Station, this alignment lets us work such a station into State rather than creating Aquarium Under.

On the actual subject of the thread, my confusion about the N-S Rail Link has always been how you can build it without a "Central Station." If the tunnel approaches have to be beyond North and South Station, then you can't stop at one of the two existing stations, so either you relocate the Boston station to above-ground platforms somewhere else (South Bay or Charlestown) or you build new ones underground. Is it less expensive to simply add them under South Station, since it would be shallower?

All you really have to do is dig out South Station's basement again, and then knock down a couple of walls to enable access between that and the lobby of South Station Under. Toss in a couple of elevators and escalators to move people between the two rail mezzanines and you're good to go. Same deal on the other side at North Station.

I still just don't see why this project is such a big deal anyway. Lots of highly successful Commuter Rail services exist without through-routing, and most CR trains would likely still terminate at North or South. Really, this only seems useful for Amtrak connecting NY to Maine and perhaps future DMU through service, though in that case why not just build it for DMUs and probably save some money? If Amtrak really wants a connection through Boston, let them build it.

Through-running is not the point. I'm going to take the unpopular stance here and say that, far from being 'transformative' in any way, trying to shoehorn a Boston RER in here is going to accomplish all of nothing, because there's really absolutely no demand for a single-seat ride from Stoughton to Swampscott or Readville to Rockport. Sorry. There just isn't.

The actual benefits to completing the Link are being able to quickly and efficiently dead-head trains off of platforms at South Station to the underutilized Northside yards, and to free up the Grand Junction for development (remember, it's the only way we've got to move trains between Southside and Northside, making it absolutely untouchable). Accomplishing the former nicely torpedoes the capacity problems South Station is having right now (all of which can be attributed to having several platforms at any given moment occupied by dead trains that can't go anywhere because there's no room in the yards for them) as well as in the future (adding another 8 tracks worth of platform space at North and South Station render these non-issues as well) and accomplishing the latter is more or less a requirement if we ever want to have a serious discussion about the Urban Ring.

Any and all through-running moves that become possible due to the completion of the Link are tangential benefits and most of those are tied up in the insistence that Boston needs RER-style services inside of 128, which I don't think it does. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that any through-running which did occur would be completely coincidental and the MBCR would happily charge you twice - once for your ride into South/North Station, and once again for your ride out in the other direction.

 

[Arlington]

Re: North-South Rail Link

Central Station is least-necessary of the 3 (North, South, or Central) and whatever its transport benefits were, they're either being done now by the Silver Line, or could be achieved from SS via the Red-Blue connector and further grade-separating the silver line's access to the TWT.

 

[cden4]

Re: North-South Rail Link

Well one big benefit would be for Amtrak trains. You could go from NYC to Portland for example.

 

[Commuting Boston Student]

Re: North-South Rail Link

Central Station is least-necessary of the 3 (North, South, or Central) and whatever its transport benefits were, they're either being done now by the Silver Line, or could be achieved from SS via the Red-Blue connector and further grade-separating the silver line's access to the TWT.

In theory, the actual benefit conveyed by Central Station is direct access to the Blue Line the same way there's direct access to the Red Line at South Station and the Orange/Green Lines at North.

This, of course, falls apart completely unless you run all of your services through to terminate at the opposite station - i.e., all Southside services now terminate at North Station and all Northside services terminate at South. That's obviously not going to happen.

Well one big benefit would be for Amtrak trains. You could go from NYC to Portland for example.

As I said previously, that's a tangential benefit at best - it's hardly big, nor should it be treated as a headlining reason for Why We Should Complete The Rail Link.

Besides, NYC - NHV - SPG - WOR - POR is a far more likely routing for any such potential service, even if the Rail Link gets completed.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Re: North-South Rail Link

In theory, the actual benefit conveyed by Central Station is direct access to the Blue Line the same way there's direct access to the Red Line at South Station and the Orange/Green Lines at North.

This, of course, falls apart completely unless you run all of your services through to terminate at the opposite station - i.e., all Southside services now terminate at North Station and all Northside services terminate at South. That's obviously not going to happen.



As I said previously, that's a tangential benefit at best - it's hardly big, nor should it be treated as a headlining reason for Why We Should Complete The Rail Link.

Besides, NYC - NHV - SPG - WOR - POR is a far more likely routing for any such potential service, even if the Rail Link gets completed.

I don't know about that. It's going to be hard to make the Pan Am Worcester Branch move at acceptable speed. Even if rehabbed from its currently abominable track conditions it's so insanely curvy from the northern tip of Worcester where it crosses Route 12 to the southern tip of Fort Devens in Lancaster that you'd be hard pressed to get 60 MPH sustained speeds through all the sharp bobbing and weaving. It was never a particularly strong passenger route compared to some of the other defunct N-S lines. The reason why it hung around so long is because it was just mediocre enough that B&A, B&M, and NYNH&H could barter joint-run passenger services and freight interchange rights over it that they were too competitively nervous to do on their "preferred" branches. So...just useful enough to linger. Not useful enough to ever be anyone's priority. It is the most recent host of a NY-Portland train, the "State of Maine", so it's the most obvious reference point. That doesn't mean it's got sky-high future upside.

Don't get me wrong...it's a someday-viable route when Worcester gets more hub traffic, but "just useful enough" is its utility. If you're talking full-blown HSR speeds NY-POR anything through Boston--NEC or B&A--is going to beat the Worcester County bypass hands-down with the higher speed ceilings, track capacity, and grade separations those trunks have. You can push the NH Main or B&A east of Worcester to 125 MPH under wires. You're not doing that through the Worcester hills without dropping a billion dollars on all-new ROW construction along the 190 median. And there's no need to do that when developing high speeds on the north and west trunks out of Boston satisfies all conceivable capacity needs for another half-century. Worcester Branch has commuter rail-speeds viability, and maybe some short-term intercity viability until the Link gets built*. It's always going to be a big f'n deal freight interchange between CSX, Pan Am, and P&W. But..."just useful enough" for 60 MPH pretty much captures its ceiling.


(*Although I tend to doubt even that much. Grand Junction + NS reverse + consistent 80 MPH or better on the B&A/NH Main/Western Route is ballpark-enough on the stopwatch to the Worcester hills bypass that the extreme ridership advantage of adding NS + Anderson tips the scales decisively. And can happen much, much sooner at much more gradual capital investment to much much better aggregate benefit.)

 

[Equilibria]

Re: North-South Rail Link

Accomplishing the former nicely torpedoes the capacity problems South Station is having right now (all of which can be attributed to having several platforms at any given moment occupied by dead trains that can't go anywhere because there's no room in the yards for them) as well as in the future (adding another 8 tracks worth of platform space at North and South Station render these non-issues as well) and accomplishing the latter is more or less a requirement if we ever want to have a serious discussion about the Urban Ring.

Ok, how about simply cut-and-cover tunneling the N-S Rail Link under the Grand Junction? That way, you can build the approaches within the existing ROW. Alternately, you could build a cut-and-cover LRT or HRT Urban Ring tunnel underneath that same ROW and simply continue shifting trains as they do now. I know that doesn't really handle the deadheading at South Station, but that could be handled more cheaply in several ways, I think, not least of which is gathering some actual political willpower to evict the USPS out to Chelsea or Framingham or some other less valuable land and simply adding more platforms. This tunnel is both the geographically shortest and most financially unfeasible solution to this problem.

I get the RER comparison (or S-Bahn, if you prefer), but I've been on those trains and it doesn't seem like people are riding them through Paris very much. Between suburbs and smaller centers, perhaps, but generally you'll live along that line somewhere else on the same side, for the same reason that people from Peabody probably don't often work in Braintree and commute on I-93. Those trains happen to go through, and it certainly makes a pretty map, but I don't think it's a primary reason why the system is successful.

 

[davem]

Re: North-South Rail Link

My question for you is: why do you hate them

In rural areas cars are great. They are hands down the best mode of transportation we have invented for those who live on farms, in the woods, or other areas where travel is greater than one or two miles to your basic needs. They allow us to live in even more remote areas, and open up more areas for recreation then have ever been possible before.

They even kind of work in the suburbs, in which zoning allows an artificially low density to be maintained that restricts the number of residents, and therefore in theory should allow the space allotted for roads to be sufficient to move the volume of cars that exist. This however results in a disproportionate amount of land being designated for transportation compared to population size. But with such low density cost of land stays low, so it works. Sort of.

The issue is that the overwhelming success of the automobile in the country was taken and superimposed into the cities. It's like trying to shove a square block in a round hole, it just doesn't work.

At first Model Ts and such were direct replacements for horse and buggys, so they actually took up less room and were cleaner without having feces and stables everywhere. However even in the pre-auto era you had smaller buggys you would use to zip around town, while larger stagecoaches and wagons were used outside of city limits. This kind of specificity is just not starting to take hold in the US, and only just barely.

For the same reason we build multi-story multi-unit buildings in the city and not in the middle of a farm field we should be using more efficient modes of transportation in the city. One size does not fit all, and using cars as a primary or even secondary mode of transportation in a city where space is at a much greater premium just doesn't make sense.



I don't hate cars because I hate cars. I hate cars because they are an inefficient use of space. No one here would argue that one story ranches are the best form of housing for downtown. So why then are personal cars the best form of transportation?

 

[Kahta]

Re: North-South Rail Link

I don't hate cars because I hate cars. I hate cars because they are an inefficient use of space. No one here would argue that one story ranches are the best form of housing for downtown. So why then are personal cars the best form of transportation?

Because it doesn't take an hour and a half to drive by car from brookline to the seaport.... or 40 minutes to govt center

 

[Matthew]

Re: North-South Rail Link

Through-running isn't about Readville to Rockport (although if it were possible, it might get some use...) but rather about quickly moving across the densely populated urbanized area.

The biggest, most obvious beneficiaries are North-side riders who now get easy access to South Station, which is far better located than North Station. As it is, North-side ridership is artificially depressed by the way North Station is very far from the CBD or just about anything other than the Garden. Not to mention the overly long walk to transfer to the subway (what were they thinking?!).

The next level would be stations like Back Bay, Yawkey, Ruggles, Columbia, Porter, future Brighton, etc, which serve smaller but still significant districts.

There's other benefits too, operationally and other. How much is all this worth? Well I don't know. But it's worth keeping in mind for the future. I don't really expect it to be done anytime soon.

 

[Matthew]

Re: North-South Rail Link

Because it doesn't take an hour and a half to drive by car from brookline to the seaport.... or 40 minutes to govt center

This is only possible for you because so many other people ride the T.

 

[Kahta]

Re: North-South Rail Link

I'm not convinced that the Central Artery necessarily did good for Boston. Change, yes. Good? Well, Boston peaked in population in 1950, and thereafter saw double-digit percentage losses until 1990. Economies don't grow when people leave. Then there's the 1970s, a period of recession which lasted for most of the decade, not to mention all the civil strife.

Things are better now, population is slowly growing, and it's hard to project alternate histories. But just think about how much of Boston's heritage was destroyed by urban renewal and highway building gone mad. It was a social experiment of a vast order -- to replace the traditional form of urban economy with a new one of concrete and scattered people. But the funny thing is that the sectors for which Boston is known today -- education, tech, medicine, finance -- were already in place back before the 1950s. They were just ahead of their time, and not considered as important as they are now. They were looking to jumpstart the economy back then by doing all that urban renewal, but in the end we just came back to what we already had.

The rise and fall of urban economies in the northeast has a lot to do with the aging population that remained in cities during the baby boom years. It's also a major reason why the economy grew so much from 1980 to 2005, baby boomers were passing through their years of spending the most money.

http://www.newstrategist.com/store/files/Spend12.SamplePgs.pdf

Old data but still relevant:

http://www.ibrc.indiana.edu/ibr/2006/spring/article1.html

edit: I've seen other data on this that gets much more granular for work, but I can't share it here-- this is just the tip of the iceberg and explains the cycles of the economy in the 50s and 60s (parents raising children spending more money + population growth + huge productivity boost) 80s+90s (baby boomers who were born 20-30 years ago now having kids) and now the lack of growth today, which is facing both lower productivity gains (covered here: http://papers.nber.org/papers/w18315), lower birthrates (especially at higher income/education levels), and of course, global competition.

 

[Commuting Boston Student]

Re: North-South Rail Link

Don't get me wrong...it's a someday-viable route when Worcester gets more hub traffic, but "just useful enough" is its utility. If you're talking full-blown HSR speeds NY-POR anything through Boston--NEC or B&A--is going to beat the Worcester County bypass hands-down with the higher speed ceilings, track capacity, and grade separations those trunks have. You can push the NH Main or B&A east of Worcester to 125 MPH under wires. You're not doing that through the Worcester hills without dropping a billion dollars on all-new ROW construction along the 190 median. And there's no need to do that when developing high speeds on the north and west trunks out of Boston satisfies all conceivable capacity needs for another half-century. Worcester Branch has commuter rail-speeds viability, and maybe some short-term intercity viability until the Link gets built*. It's always going to be a big f'n deal freight interchange between CSX, Pan Am, and P&W. But..."just useful enough" for 60 MPH pretty much captures its ceiling.

Uh, excuse me? The Downeaster isn't even operating at 90 mph, and you're using HSR speed metrics to shoot down the Worcester Branch as unviable? Seriously?

The necessary track improvements to the Worcester Branch that get it up to 60 MPH also probably buy us some more good will with Pan Am, which is valuable, and the 'gradual investments' you mention are going to be happening anyway. Investing in the Worcester Branch now gives us a viable route to NYP now, and it's the only part of the route down that can't piggyback on investments aimed at some other service. It's more than worth doing, and also doesn't preclude a shift over to Link usage later once the Link gets built.

(*Although I tend to doubt even that much. Grand Junction + NS reverse + consistent 80 MPH or better on the B&A/NH Main/Western Route is ballpark-enough on the stopwatch to the Worcester hills bypass that the extreme ridership advantage of adding NS + Anderson tips the scales decisively. And can happen much, much sooner at much more gradual capital investment to much much better aggregate benefit.)

Unless you're arguing that there cannot possibly be a Downeaster run into New York without eliminating one or more Downeaster runs into Boston (which is a stupid argument on its face), there's absolutely no ridership advantage to be garnered from screwing around with a reverse move on top of whatever speed limit the Grand Junction's locked down to now. NS or Anderson riders going to Portland are going to hop on any of the BON - POR Downeasters, and NS or Anderson riders going to New York are going to make their way into South Station, Back Bay, or Route 128 and take any Regional or Acela Express train down.

Ok, how about simply cut-and-cover tunneling the N-S Rail Link under the Grand Junction? That way, you can build the approaches within the existing ROW. Alternately, you could build a cut-and-cover LRT or HRT Urban Ring tunnel underneath that same ROW and simply continue shifting trains as they do now.

Great, except you can't cut-and-cover tunnel underneath the Charles River, the approaches for the Rail Link proper are all going to be built within the existing ROWs anyway, and the Grand Junction is literally crumbling.

I know that doesn't really handle the deadheading at South Station, but that could be handled more cheaply in several ways, I think, not least of which is gathering some actual political willpower to evict the USPS out to Chelsea or Framingham or some other less valuable land and simply adding more platforms. This tunnel is both the geographically shortest and most financially unfeasible solution to this problem.

Having more platforms available to be occupied by out-of-service trains at any given time doesn't really solve the root cause of the problem - lack of yard space. It's sort of like if you were a farmer and animals ate 50% of your crop every year - so you decide that, rather than throw up fencing or some other kind of animal deterrent, you're just going to double your crop to make up for the half that gets eaten.

But, you know, something tells me that gathering actual political willpower to evict USPS and build another train yard is a far less attractive proposition than adding more platforms...

 

[massmotorist]

Re: North-South Rail Link

I think the Big Dig is a big part of the reason Boston is doing so well right now while Route 128 is just doing okay. Lots of people take transit, but if you make a place practically inaccessible to cars in the way Boston was pre-Big Dig, you're going to exclude a significant segment of the population. Companies that moved out to Route 128 in the 1990's are now moving back in, and the previously poorly accessible waterfront is now very accessible both by cars and by transit

Some people like using transit, walking, bicycling. Personally, I would never use transit on a regular basis and I consider bicycling and walking to be recreation, not transportation. People have different preferences, and none is necessarily superior to any others. But you definitely have a higher proportion of people who work in higher-end industries, where Boston excels, who are drivers.

Having the benefits of an urban city that accommodates everyone is the best of all worlds. World-class, grade-separated interstate-grade highways to whisk cars and trucks around the city, dense enough areas to allow businesses to cluster and people to get around walking and bicycling, and mass transit for those who want or need it.

I'd be a clown if I said the city would be better off with the elimination of the T, but people here who advocate dramatic reductions in roadway capacity or speed (and therefore throughput capacity) are equally nuts. People have different preferences, and transportation policy needs to take all of them into account if we are going to accomodate growth. There's lots of problems with dumb mass transportation policy that I won't detail here, but in the broadest sense, Fred Salvucci had it right - highway expansion and transit expansion, if done properly and in conjunction with each other, is the best prescription for growth. 25 years later we're reaping the benefits of all the work they did back then.

In rural areas cars are great. They are hands down the best mode of transportation we have invented for those who live on farms, in the woods, or other areas where travel is greater than one or two miles to your basic needs. They allow us to live in even more remote areas, and open up more areas for recreation then have ever been possible before.

They even kind of work in the suburbs, in which zoning allows an artificially low density to be maintained that restricts the number of residents, and therefore in theory should allow the space allotted for roads to be sufficient to move the volume of cars that exist. This however results in a disproportionate amount of land being designated for transportation compared to population size. But with such low density cost of land stays low, so it works. Sort of.

The issue is that the overwhelming success of the automobile in the country was taken and superimposed into the cities. It's like trying to shove a square block in a round hole, it just doesn't work.

At first Model Ts and such were direct replacements for horse and buggys, so they actually took up less room and were cleaner without having feces and stables everywhere. However even in the pre-auto era you had smaller buggys you would use to zip around town, while larger stagecoaches and wagons were used outside of city limits. This kind of specificity is just not starting to take hold in the US, and only just barely.

For the same reason we build multi-story multi-unit buildings in the city and not in the middle of a farm field we should be using more efficient modes of transportation in the city. One size does not fit all, and using cars as a primary or even secondary mode of transportation in a city where space is at a much greater premium just doesn't make sense.



I don't hate cars because I hate cars. I hate cars because they are an inefficient use of space. No one here would argue that one story ranches are the best form of housing for downtown. So why then are personal cars the best form of transportation?

Because unless you're in Manhattan, they are the fastest way by far to get from "here" to "there". Virtually always. Try some Google Maps scheduling. There's no excessive waiting or walking, no transferring from one line to the other. You can get from anywhere to anywhere in a car, at any time. You don't have to worry about train schedules. For the most part, roads don't close. You depend far less on the competence of the government (or a company, for that matter) to run a system. It's easier and faster to get from one place to another off-peak, while with transit, off-peak scheduling can actually make it slower. You can bring lots of stuff with you, and shop at Costco and spend half or less what you'd spend to get the same stuff at a neighborhood supermarket. You get your own personal climate-controlled space. You can make pit stops at the cleaners and pick the kids up from the babysitter. As of right now I have yet to have a homeless person expose himself in my car, or get mugged in it.

Seriously, are you really going to try to make this case? Because it's not a good one. Saying that cars "kind of" work in the suburbs is crazy. They completely work, and transit is very obviously inferior in suburban areas. I live in a highly congested, dense suburb, and a trip that would have been 30 minutes round trip took me two hours by bus the last time I had to use transit. And the bus went basically took me door-to-door with no transfers!

The most realistic benefit of transit is to permit households with two spouses to own only one car, and to allow those without licenses (kids, elderly, etc) some means of getting around on their own. The fixed cost of owning a car is huge, and most two-spouse, two-car households have at least one of their vehicles unused the vast majority of the time - but they need two vehicles because during peak hours they both need to get to work. If one can use transit, that's a huge savings at little cost. You still get the enormous benefits of car ownership, but at a much lower cost.

The one thing I'd agree on is the buggy vs stagecoach/wagon point. I could envision a pretty sensible world where people used much smaller vehicles in the city. Thank NHTSA for that one.