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

Problem is, South Station is going to be basically full once SCR comes online. Maybe you could fit in some quick-turn-around Indigo; but that's about it.

Thats what South Station Expansion (SSX) is for... https://www.mass.gov/south-station-expansion Unfortunately its tied up in legal and regulatory hell with removing and relocating the post office building and with South Station Tower and Tower 1 coordination...
 
All the Greenbush line did is reduce the amount of people taking the Hingham Ferries.
 
Thats what South Station Expansion (SSX) is for... https://www.mass.gov/south-station-expansion Unfortunately its tied up in legal and regulatory hell with removing and relocating the post office building and with South Station Tower and Tower 1 coordination...

It's more like the Post Office doesn't want to move.

South Coast Rail is going to be a bust. It's too far to think people will actually ride it.
 
It's more like the Post Office doesn't want to move.

South Coast Rail is going to be a bust. It's too far to think people will actually ride it.

95 min travel times from New Bedford. So about 5 mins shorter than the trip to Wachusett.

But Wachusett is only averaging 132 boarding's a day, so it's basically a bust (they were forecasting 400 a day).

It's 100 mins from Wickford Junction to South Station. They built a 4 story parking garage with 1.1k spaces there, but it only gets 292 passengers a day.
 
95 min travel times from New Bedford. So about 5 mins shorter than the trip to Wachusett.

But Wachusett is only averaging 132 boarding's a day, so it's basically a bust (they were forecasting 400 a day).

It's 100 mins from Wickford Junction to South Station. They built a 4 story parking garage with 1.1k spaces there, but it only gets 292 passengers a day.

Good examples of projects that really dont make sense. Hundreds of millions that could have impacted tens of thousands in the CBD sent away to 2 busloads of people.

Wachusett is a head scratcher in every way. Its a lightly populated area and the tracks take a much longer route than the highway.

Wickford Junction makes sense in the context of long-term Rhode island plans, but their 1 new station every 10 years approach doesnt quite make sense.
 
Wachusett is a head scratcher in every way. Its a lightly populated area and the tracks take a much longer route than the highway.

Wasn't the main point of this the ability to have better layover space?
 
95 min travel times from New Bedford. So about 5 mins shorter than the trip to Wachusett.

But Wachusett is only averaging 132 boarding's a day, so it's basically a bust (they were forecasting 400 a day).

It's 100 mins from Wickford Junction to South Station. They built a 4 story parking garage with 1.1k spaces there, but it only gets 292 passengers a day.

The difference is both Wachusett and Wickford Junction stations are located pretty much in the middle of nowhere (and Wickford only gets 10 inbound trains per 24 hours compared to say Providence getting 20 inbound per day.). SCR serves fairly densely populated areas. Distance away from the city is only one of many factors at play in how much ridership a station gets. I could point to Kendall Green Station or Waverly or Belmont which all offer short rides to the city and average less than 50 people per day... SCR also services lower income areas traditional more reliant on transit than higher income areas.
 
Wachusett is a head scratcher in every way. Its a lightly populated area and the tracks take a much longer route than the highway.

For people coming from Route 2 as a park and ride, it's much quicker to go to North Leominster and park there.
 
I would say in regards to SCR its critical to get to Taunton first, and then see if anything further is needed. 95 minutes is a long commute. However I'm familiar with the region and for both the north end of Fall River and the north end of New Bedford which are the more suburban parts of each city, its not a bad ride at all up 24 or 140 respectively to get to Taunton. That should be the main driver of ridership.
 
Wachusett is a head scratcher in every way. Its a lightly populated area and the tracks take a much longer route than the highway.

I kind of got the impression that Wachusett was more about mass transit access to Wachusett Mountain than anything else.
 
Good examples of projects that really dont make sense. Hundreds of millions that could have impacted tens of thousands in the CBD sent away to 2 busloads of people.

Wachusett is a head scratcher in every way. Its a lightly populated area and the tracks take a much longer route than the highway.

Wasn't the main point of this the ability to have better layover space?

For people coming from Route 2 as a park and ride, it's much quicker to go to North Leominster and park there.

Wachusett was designed to be a Pn'R with surrounding TOD located at a spot where commuter buses from Gardner could transfer faster to train via a straight section of Route 2 than the train could ever make going direct to downtown Gardner over the hideous grades and curves in Ashburnham. Thus, it was a compromise location but one that supposedly had a good enough mix going for it.

It was also meant to complement ramped-up reverse commute frequencies on the Fitchburg Line for reaching the strong jobs market out near Ft. Devens, which would in turn goose the TOD around the station and encourage enough patronage to run a biz shuttle around the area.

The increased reverse-commute frequencies haven't happened at any serious level, and without that being a key driver in the mix it's very premature to give pass/fail grades for the build. Call it a head-scratcher if it still underperforms with its intended schedules, but y'all are doing NIMBY Lord's work for himself getting in a race to call it a write-off when the study-backed intended service levels have yet to be implemented there, barely 2-1/2 years in.
 
I would say in regards to SCR its critical to get to Taunton first, and then see if anything further is needed. 95 minutes is a long commute. However I'm familiar with the region and for both the north end of Fall River and the north end of New Bedford which are the more suburban parts of each city, its not a bad ride at all up 24 or 140 respectively to get to Taunton. That should be the main driver of ridership.

Well SCR will bypass Taunton entirely and go straight to Fall River/New Bedford via M/L & Myricks so sorry about that... Won't actually in Taunton for at minimum a decade if ever. However it will have a station at the North end of New Bedford and Fall River (relatively) soon so they can skip the drive entirely.
 
I would say in regards to SCR its critical to get to Taunton first, and then see if anything further is needed. 95 minutes is a long commute. However I'm familiar with the region and for both the north end of Fall River and the north end of New Bedford which are the more suburban parts of each city, its not a bad ride at all up 24 or 140 respectively to get to Taunton. That should be the main driver of ridership.

They probably should think about how much screwing up the Taunton station siting with this asinine Phase I is going to hurt the cause, then. What was originally supposed to be a TOD-integrated station behind the Taunton Depot shops has now been kicked down the road to the end of a desolate factory driveway with the other side of the tracks fronting a teeny-tiny cluster of about 2 dozen single-family homes sitting on the Berkley side of the town line. There's no potential for mixed-use anything anymore; it's just a parking sink for the 24/140 interchange to be 'blessed' with the worst headways on the system, meaning it will probably be very underutilized. And it won't be reachable by most of the buses in Taunton, which were to cluster to the downtown station on the Stoughton Line. The interplay between the two Taunton stops was one of the strengths of the Stoughton Alternative.

They've succeeded wildly in basically zeroing out Taunton transit--no mean feat considering how much it used to anchor the project's ridership--in their zeal to build an arse-end-first route to the cities for purposes of saying "we gave you a train...you were never specific about stating it had to be a usable one!" Phase I's stop isn't even a good Pn'R stop at those service levels...but since else that was good about the original Taunton Depot site has been chucked away it's now got no other means of keeping its own lights turned on and snow plowed than raw lot utilization numbers. The very same thing we just spent pages talking about is such an awful metric for trying to stake a commuter rail stop's viability atop!


In all this discussion the last few pages on what does/doesn't make for a good station, "It's the frequencies, stupid!!!" comes up #1 with a bullet and good mixture of location + surrounding dev + supporting transit vs. asphalt wasteland on an offramp comes in #2. ¡Frequencies! is where you have to seriously look at how much "transit orientation" the TOD at these new stops will actually have, when there's barely any usable transit in the schedules being proposed. Land might fill up around a Freetown or Kings Highway station after they open, but will it be redev that drives any new transit riders when the service levels and schedule lengths are so beyond-horrible? Or will it just be a few more unsustainable big-box stores to throw on an already big, run-down pile of 'em littering K Hwy.? The value recapture (or lackthereof) of service-just-to-say-you-have-service-and-nothing-more vs. service that's actually USEFUL is where those sites can either hit paydirt or sputter endlessly. Right now pretty much every one of the extension stops save for maybe downtown New Bedford is staring into that abyss of "Where's the transit orientation around near-nonexistent transit?". The very same stuff that is trying to re-pivot the Greenbush Line stops around greater transit orientation--and struggling through a mixed bag because the train frequencies just aren't very good--, only from-scratch and with a much more pessimistic service outlook. And I also count Fall River Depot in that "abyss" category too despite the surrounding downtown density because the rail line is askew from the city's central bus depot at City Hall Plaza...and no incarnation of SCR has ever so much as paid lip service to how multimodal connections would ever usefully be made with the transit centers being that far apart.

When everybody clamoring for a train-for-trains'-sake has crawled back into a hole, these municipalities are going to be struggling mightily to hold to the transit orientation of the surroundings when the stops themselves host so little transit.
 
Wachusett was designed to be a Pn'R with surrounding TOD located at a spot where commuter buses from Gardner could transfer faster to train via a straight section of Route 2 than the train could ever make going direct to downtown Gardner over the hideous grades and curves in Ashburnham. Thus, it was a compromise location but one that supposedly had a good enough mix going for it.

It was also meant to complement ramped-up reverse commute frequencies on the Fitchburg Line for reaching the strong jobs market out near Ft. Devens, which would in turn goose the TOD around the station and encourage enough patronage to run a biz shuttle around the area.

The increased reverse-commute frequencies haven't happened at any serious level, and without that being a key driver in the mix it's very premature to give pass/fail grades for the build. Call it a head-scratcher if it still underperforms with its intended schedules, but y'all are doing NIMBY Lord's work for himself getting in a race to call it a write-off when the study-backed intended service levels have yet to be implemented there, barely 2-1/2 years in.

Ehh, there isn't really many areas outside of 128 where many people will reverse commute to using commuter rail. The economics of it don't work. A transit pass is often as expensive as driving, and driving (using a reverse commute) is usually faster. Reverse commutes don't see the congestion that regular direction commutes do.

Although I think the MBTA should lower the cost of reverse commutes like they did with weekend service. That would convince more people to use the MBTA for reverse commutes.

As a stopgap measure i'd propose charging inter-zone fares for all trips that aren't peak hour regular direction trains.
 
Although I think the MBTA should lower the cost of reverse commutes like they did with weekend service. That would convince more people to use the MBTA for reverse commutes.

As a stopgap measure i'd propose charging inter-zone fares for all trips that aren't peak hour regular direction trains.

Can't happen until AFC 2.0 just not technically feasible but post AFC 2.0 the current goal of the team is to implement off-peak/reverse direction commuter rail fares. Much easier to do correctly with a tap on/tap off fare system.
 
Wachusett was designed to be a Pn'R with surrounding TOD located at a spot where commuter buses from Gardner could transfer faster to train via a straight section of Route 2 than the train could ever make going direct to downtown Gardner over the hideous grades and curves in Ashburnham. Thus, it was a compromise location but one that supposedly had a good enough mix going for it.

It was also meant to complement ramped-up reverse commute frequencies on the Fitchburg Line for reaching the strong jobs market out near Ft. Devens, which would in turn goose the TOD around the station and encourage enough patronage to run a biz shuttle around the area.

The increased reverse-commute frequencies haven't happened at any serious level, and without that being a key driver in the mix it's very premature to give pass/fail grades for the build. Call it a head-scratcher if it still underperforms with its intended schedules, but y'all are doing NIMBY Lord's work for himself getting in a race to call it a write-off when the study-backed intended service levels have yet to be implemented there, barely 2-1/2 years in.

A quick google search led me to the following.

Project cost: $63 million
Current ridership: 132
Expected ridership at "intended service levels" = 400

Thats not good math.
 
Can't happen until AFC 2.0 just not technically feasible but post AFC 2.0 the current goal of the team is to implement off-peak/reverse direction commuter rail fares. Much easier to do correctly with a tap on/tap off fare system.

How is it not technically feasible? It seems like something very easy to implement with the current payment system. You don't need to wait for AFC 2.0 to adjust the fares.

On the weekend they have special fares, $10 round trip to anywhere inside of zone 8.
 
How is it not technically feasible? It seems like something very easy to implement with the current payment system. You don't need to wait for AFC 2.0 to adjust the fares.

On the weekend they have special fares, $10 round trip to anywhere inside of zone 8.

Because the current system doesn't distinguish between inbound and outbound tickets in any way. A Zone 6 ticket is a Zone 6 ticket and can be used in any direction. To change that would add whole levels of complexity. The weekend passes work because its only time based. They can only be activated on weekends and only remain active during weekends but during that time are good for travel anywhere in any direction. Different proposal.
 
Because the current system doesn't distinguish between inbound and outbound tickets in any way. A Zone 6 ticket is a Zone 6 ticket and can be used in any direction. To change that would add whole levels of complexity. The weekend passes work because its only time based. They can only be activated on weekends and only remain active during weekends but during that time are good for travel anywhere in any direction. Different proposal.

A zone 6 ticket could be used in any direction or any time. A zone 6 inter-zone/off peak ticket could be used at any off peak direction, or off peak time.

Very easy to implement under the current system.
 
Because the current system doesn't distinguish between inbound and outbound tickets in any way. A Zone 6 ticket is a Zone 6 ticket and can be used in any direction.

I don't ride CR often, but that doesn't sound right at all. You mean it costs the same to ride 1 stop into Worcester as it costs to ride from there all the way to South Station? I don't think so.

EDIT: In fact, I just checked that on the MBTA CR app and you are quite mistaken.
 

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