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

[tangent]

Re: North-South Rail Link

SSX takes about half of ground level space on the first floor of tall and very tall towers. Think of it as ground level retail that activates the development. Yes, it takes space, but in that space it does everything and more that ground level retail would do--bring people, facilitate exchanges.

Nothing is lost by SSX. Think of the platforms as taking space that piled up shelving and invetory would in retail. Its still a great urban space at the base of tall towers. I can't think of a better use for it, can you?

It is a train platform, basically a parking garage.

 

[tangent]

Re: North-South Rail Link

Tell us what you read in the official NSRL proposal that set off your BS alarm. Not the .org advocacy site full of misinformation...the Major Investment Study from 2003 on Web Archive which you can drill down to from the footnotes on the Wikipedia page EGE artfully curated on the subject.

Go ahead. You just staked yourself to having read the thing. Explain to us what you read--because you said you read it--that is such contradictory bullshit viz a viz South Station Expansion and real estate development therein. Because I hope you're not claiming you actually read it if that's not true. That would put one's behavior in this thread in a suspect light...perish the thought.

I think the crux of the disagreement without the puerile ad hominem attacks is that the NSRL you envision still uses South Station and North Station instead of completely bypassing them and thus making them largely obsolete for commuting purposes. I think there is plenty of room for respectful disagreement on that because, as you say, there is no official plan.

But to me it comes down to why would you ever want to dead end commuter trains at North or South Stations when you can run through? It doesn't make any sense whatsoever because that is the problem you are trying to solve with NSRL. Making people wait for the right indigo train or transfer perpetuates that problem and makes NSRL a very expensive exercise in futility. You just have to build enough platforms at the new underground station to handle the frequency.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Re: North-South Rail Link

It is an interstate highway, basically a parking garage.

See...two can play this game.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Re: North-South Rail Link

I think the crux of the disagreement without the puerile ad hominem attacks is that the NSRL you envision. . .

Stop right there. Who envisions the NSRL using both? The state does. You know this, because you read the study.

. . .still uses South Station and North Station instead of completely bypassing them and thus making them largely obsolete for commuting purposes. I think there is plenty of room for respectful disagreement on that because, as you say, there is no official plan.

Stop right there. Who is saying there is no official plan? You posted depth renders in #610 of the "official plan". Nobody at ArchBoston drew that schematic to deceive. There is an official plan: the 2003 Major Investment Study. Which you claim to have read...correct?

There has been no official follow-up study since '03, which is why politicians are pushing them to pick it back up as they were originally scheduled to have done a DEIR by now. Next steps would be that more more formal DEIR picking up where the Major Investment Study left off. Not start from scratch...Step 2 of the official plan.

But to me it comes down to why would you ever want to dead end commuter trains at North or South Stations when you can run through?

Stop right there. Why propose building an underground stub-end to do exactly the same thing like you do in #617. Is it running thru or is it air rights that uses the bottom-level? What is your argument? You're all over the map on this.

It doesn't make any sense whatsoever because that is the problem you are trying to solve with NSRL. Making people wait for the right indigo train or transfer perpetuates that problem and makes NSRL a very expensive exercise in futility...

Stop right there. What Indigo transfers? The only Indigo runs NSRL is going to conjoin are north-to-south. If you want to get from Salem to Waltham, you are jumping platforms at North Station. If you want to get from Readville to Riverside you are jumping platforms at South Station. Run-thru Indigo slots--of which there are 30 pages of thread here highlighting the importance of--are for spanning opposite quadrants of the 128 region that are physically hardest to drive. But NSRL is not everywhere-to-everywhere because you can't do a Reading-Waltham one-seat in the tunnel any more than you can do it on the surface.

I'll say it again:

#ItsTheFrequenciesStupid

You can't run breakneck frequencies A-N-Y-W-H-E-R-E without doubling up the terminal district. No run-thru everywhere through just a tunnel, no transfer-everywhere on the surface. Not enough capacity. If you want an Indigo network that can get you a one-seat from Salem to Riverside every 15 minutes AND serve up enough Readville-Waltham or Riverside-Woburn or Readville-Woburn frequencies that your have cross-platform options...you better damn well have the surface terminals still absorbing most of the conventional Greenbush, Rockport, Wachusett, Hyannis schedules.

You just have to build enough platforms at the new underground station to handle the frequency.

Now's the part where you...who read the study...need to explain exactly how one does that with what the study plainly says about the underground space constraints. Where's the space come to build more platforms? Please...proceed. Tell us what the study says and why you conclude the study you read is wrong.

 

[tangent]

Re: North-South Rail Link

See...two can play this game.

Unless you agree with Arlington that it "does everything and more that ground level retail would do--bring people, facilitate exchanges.". Then no... highways, train platforms, roads, parking garages are transportation infrastructure and not the equivalent of ground level retail.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Re: North-South Rail Link

Unless you agree with Arlington that it "does everything and more that ground level retail would do--bring people, facilitate exchanges.". Then no... highways, train platforms, roads, parking garages are transportation infrastructure and not the equivalent of ground level retail.

What does this have to do with your argument that we should not build transportation capacity in square footage that could be used for retail? Originally you were concerned about the 2D footprint and saying air rights were irrelevant...then it was all about forsaking one floor of three dimensions...now it's not at all about 2D or 3D but tenancy.

Were the Pru and Copley Place mistakes because they forsake a floor? Justify your own logic for a change instead of rapid-fire switching between 5 different ongoing thread-pollution sidebars.

 

[tangent]

Re: North-South Rail Link

What does this have to do with your argument that we should not build transportation capacity in square footage that could be used for retail? Originally you were concerned about the 2D footprint and saying air rights were irrelevant...then it was all about forsaking one floor of three dimensions...now it's not at all about 2D or 3D but tenancy.

Were the Pru and Copley Place mistakes because they forsake a floor? Justify your own logic for a change instead of rapid-fire switching between 5 different ongoing thread-pollution sidebars.

I was just responding to your and now Arlington's assertions that ground level train platforms on the waterfront were equivalent to ground level retail commercial space and that somehow the loss of a large chunk of waterfront space to transportation infrastructure wasn't really a negative. Which is plainly absurd which is why I am pressing the point. It is one thing to say it is a worthwhile trade and just needs to be there for regional transportation needs, it is another level to just go off and say that a train platform is equivalent to the type of ground level activation that is commonly agreed to be a good thing, especially along the waterfront.

Trying to say a negative of SSX is actually a positive

 

[citylover94]

Re: North-South Rail Link

Why is that absurd if you actually look at the plans every air rights building has the ability even with the expanded South Station to have retail lining Dorchester Ave. It isn't a negative because as has been explained with the increase in people needing to get downtown both NSRL and SSX will be needed to handle the increase in passengers.

To frame this argument differently if we don't do both NSRL and SSX but keep developing and bringing more people downtown without SSX at some point in the next 50 years NSRL would hit capacity and with your plan we would have developed the space for SSX to go and would be stuck with an overcapacity transit system without a cost effective way to redistribute the load.

 

[tangent]

Re: North-South Rail Link

Bottom line is that you need a maximum of 6 tracks and three platforms to accomplish South Station expansion. Maybe it is too difficult to do 6 tracks underground at the new NSRL station. Maybe you can do 4 tracks and two platforms. It is worth considering.

Because doing both SSX (at a billion dollars) and NSRL are simply not in the realm of possibility under any scenario in the next 30 years.

 

[whighlander]

Re: North-South Rail Link

I think the crux of the disagreement without the puerile ad hominem attacks is that the NSRL you envision still uses South Station and North Station instead of completely bypassing them and thus making them largely obsolete for commuting purposes. I think there is plenty of room for respectful disagreement on that because, as you say, there is no official plan.

But to me it comes down to why would you ever want to dead end commuter trains at North or South Stations when you can run through? It doesn't make any sense whatsoever because that is the problem you are trying to solve with NSRL. Making people wait for the right indigo train or transfer perpetuates that problem and makes NSRL a very expensive exercise in futility. You just have to build enough platforms at the new underground station to handle the frequency.

Tangent -- Ok don't dead-end them at the stations -- let them run empty to where?

You are letting your ideological bent -- Public transportation versus cars -- lead to your private reality

Daniel Patrick Moynihan — 'Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.'

Turn on a Local News program in Boston some weekday morning when they are showing not just the maps [some of which are high enough res to let you even see the semi-permanent bottleneck at the base of Rt-2] but also high resolution digital imagery from strategically sited cameras located on the major arteries -- compare density of cars heading in -- to density of cars heading out

Why do you think that replacing the few cars heading out with empty to near empty trains heading out is beneficial to anything. Note that many of the cars heading out are traveling to non-commuter and even vacation destinations -- while the trains currently departing the stations and the future ones running through wont be going to the Cape or the Berkshires or the White Mountains. As a result not only will the the thru-running trains be empty -- you probably wont even appreciably affect the flow of cars heading out.

This entire N-SD link is all Dukakoid illogic about phantom "Reverse Commute" , illusory "One Seat Rides" and Soviet-style "Economic Justice" -- every bit of it is Bogus

The only benefit is for Amtrak trains and for that its hard to justify spending $10B+

 

[tangent]

Re: North-South Rail Link

Why is that absurd if you actually look at the plans every air rights building has the ability even with the expanded South Station to have retail lining Dorchester Ave. It isn't a negative because as has been explained with the increase in people needing to get downtown both NSRL and SSX will be needed to handle the increase in passengers.

To frame this argument differently if we don't do both NSRL and SSX but keep developing and bringing more people downtown without SSX at some point in the next 50 years NSRL would hit capacity and with your plan we would have developed the space for SSX to go and would be stuck with an overcapacity transit system without a cost effective way to redistribute the load.

Yes there is a capacity limit no matter what you do. Adding 3 platforms for 6 more trains is not adding unlimited capacity either. We could just say we are near or at that limit now and plan accordingly.

Bringing more people downtown is just considerably less important, than addressing the network effects of reducing transfer times to enable greater development and quality of life outside of downtown.

NSRL simply has more benefits than SSX and financially, politically I agree with the Duke and Moulton and others on this one. You aren't going to get to do both. The current SSX study should be pushed to consider NSRL at the very least. They were allocated 10X the money that NSRL was.

As it stands now SSX is a glorified way to get Federal dollars to displace the post office to make way for the tower development, it is way overpriced for just adding a few platforms.

 

[tangent]

Re: North-South Rail Link

Tangent -- Ok don't dead-end them at the stations -- let them run empty to where?

You are letting your ideological bent -- Public transportation versus cars -- lead to your private reality

Turn on a Local News program in Boston some weekday morning when they are showing not just the maps [some of which are high enough res to let you even see the semi-permanent bottleneck at the base of Rt-2] but also high resolution digital imagery from strategically sited cameras located on the major arteries -- compare density of cars heading in -- to density of cars heading out

Why do you think that replacing the few cars heading out with empty to near empty trains heading out is beneficial to anything. Note that many of the cars heading out are traveling to non-commuter and even vacation destinations -- while the trains currently departing the stations and the future ones running through wont be going to the Cape or the Berkshires or the White Mountains. As a result not only will the the thru-running trains be empty -- you probably wont even appreciably affect the flow of cars heading out.

This entire N-SD link is all Dukakoid illogic about phantom "Reverse Commute" , illusory "One Seat Rides" and Soviet-style "Economic Justice" -- every bit of it is Bogus

The only benefit is for Amtrak trains and for that its hard to justify spending $10B+

I didn't say to do NSRL at any cost... Quite the opposite. I think you need to run the numbers to justify the ROI on NSRL. But to do that you need to plan it out and right now SSX has the planning money and NSRL does not.

I am not a train geek by any stretch of the imagination. And yes on day 1 you would be running 75% empty trains on NSRL. But we do have a tangible North South commuting divide that is limiting development outside of downtown. When you introduce that new capacity development and transportation patterns will follow.

 

[CSTH]

Re: North-South Rail Link

You aren't going to get to do both.
As it stands now SSX is a glorified way to get Federal dollars to displace the post office to make way for the tower development, it is way overpriced for just adding a few platforms.

This.

 

[Arlington]

Re: North-South Rail Link

It is a train platform, basically a parking garage.

Actually, we like street level retail wrapped around parking garages, and office stacked above, don't we? Basically this whole forum likes Assembly Row, which does just that: about 50' of interesting stuff between sidewalk and a core of parking.

Except that SSX is way better than Assembly Row!
1) SSX is only one level (the "back office" of ground level)--unlike Assembly Row where the parking structure is multi-story and often takes an outer wall, SSX stays fully "at the core" and would immediately start piling occupied floors on top of just 1 level of platform.
2) SSX is magnet/source of way more people per hour than parking. Like an order or two of magnitude better at delivering and wisking people away
3) and for more hours of the day. Yes, it has a commuter rush peak, but less peaky than garage parking, and facilitating intercity stuff that will run all day long.

The people of SSX will come, go, sit, eat, wait, work, & enliven way more intensly and diversely than car parking. So let'm have the 50% of interior ground floor space. It'll be great.

 

[JeffDowntown]

Re: North-South Rail Link

Actually, we like street level retail wrapped around parking garages, and office stacked above, don't we? Basically this whole forum likes Assembly Row, which does just that: about 50' of interesting stuff between sidewalk and a core of parking.

Except that SSX is way better than Assembly Row!
1) SSX is only one level (the "back office" of ground level)--unlike Assembly Row where the parking structure is multi-story and often takes an outer wall, SSX stays fully "at the core" and would immediately start piling occupied floors on top of just 1 level of platform.
2) SSX is magnet/source of way more people per hour than parking. Like an order or two of magnitude better at delivering and wisking people away
3) and for more hours of the day. Yes, it has a commuter rush peak, but less peaky than garage parking, and facilitating intercity stuff that will run all day long.

The people of SSX will come, go, sit, eat, wait, work, & enliven way more intensly and diversely than car parking. So let'm have the 50% of interior ground floor space. It'll be great.

Exactly. All the plan options I have seen for SSX have ground floor retail lining DOT Ave., and further development above.

http://www.mbta.com/uploadedfiles/About_the_T/Board_Meetings/South-Station-8-1-16.pdf

 

[whighlander]

Re: North-South Rail Link

I didn't say to do NSRL at any cost... Quite the opposite. I think you need to run the numbers to justify the ROI on NSRL. But to do that you need to plan it out and right now SSX has the planning money and NSRL does not.

I am not a train geek by any stretch of the imagination. And yes on day 1 you would be running 75% empty trains on NSRL. But we do have a tangible North South commuting divide that is limiting development outside of downtown. When you introduce that new capacity development and transportation patterns will follow.

Tangent -- that is just wishfull? thinking

We already have the ability of people to travel from Lowell to Devens by Train changing once in North Station or from Plymouth to Worcester changing once in South Station

There is no evidence for either of those commuting patterns which do not require the N-S

All the N-S would do is enable you to change trains once in either North or South Station to reach places where you today need the intermediary of the Orange Line [North Station to Back Bay] or in the cases of Old Colony you need two subway intermediaries

However, the dominant commuting pattern is either circumferential on Rt-128 or radial on the spoke highways and the commuter rail. Note that in most cases the suburban destinations are not near to the suburban rail lines so a bus would be needed on the destination end. In addition most people drive to the commuter rail departure point so they have a car available.

Unless and until you build large housing complexes within walking distance to the commuter rail stations and also large scale development of employment within walking distance of the commuter rail stations -- you will just be shuttling empty trains on the outbound pass through legs in the AM and empty trains on the inbound legs before the pass through in the PM

A collossal waste -- and so Dulakis-like

 

[Transitmass]

Re: North-South Rail Link

I'm in the NSRL camp here. I've read all the posts and I am firmly in the camp that SSX and NSX are essential for capacity reasons. The cases made on their behalf by F-Line are pretty ironclad. Moreover, we obviously cannot do what Philadelphia did and eliminate the terminal stations and replace them with through-running stations (nor would we want to). To the extent that proponents of NSRL like Moulton and Dukakis give the impression that we no longer have the need for terminal stations or they maintain that SSX and NSX are simply no longer necessary, I find their statements wholly disingenuous and as someone who likes to get deep in the weeds about transportation policy and planning I tend to have the same gut reaction as F-Line.

That being said I disagree with F-Line insofar as I interpret his posts to mean he thinks that we should go full speed ahead on SSX because we need it ultimately anyway and it will be completed sooner while at the same time we leave NSRL for down the road because it will take so long to complete (even if we decided to move forward on it tomorrow) and we have capacity issues right now. I think this position might be a perfect is enemy of the good scenario.

The reason for my disagreement is that this is ultimately a political question; not a technical one. We aren't talking about these projects in a technocratic vacuum. The reality is that there are political considerations and I'm in the camp that believes you push NSRL because- even though in a perfect world we'd start expanding south station post haste while at the same time moving deliberately forward on NSRL- in this real world it is sadly one or the other (at least for the next few decades) and NSRL is so substantially better and more necessary for long-term growth it wins by a mile. Now others might disagree and say the public will get behind a well-articulated vision that includes SSX followed by NSRL but I'm more cynical than that. I think we only have it in us for only one big push in any give 15-20 period.

In short, while these projects should be complements they are instead mutually exclusive. If we do SSX that will be our attempt to address the capacity problems and lack of effectiveness of our commuter rail/regional rail system for the next 25 to 30 years. We will not have the collective willpower to take another stab at that issue until the latter part of the century. However, if you complete the NSRL and punt on SSX for the same timeline that will be an appreciably better situation for the Commonwealth.

With that in mind I say to Hell with SSX and full speed ahead with NSRL. Some may take umbrage with my political conclusion but that is the tawdry logic of it laid bare.

Furthermore, I'm of the same mind as tangent that in this hobbesian world where SSX is NSRL's adversary rather than its partner the reason it is being promoted by Baker is not that it is objectively better; it is because of lack of vision, lack of concern about the long-term and- as tangent suggests- as a sop to real estate development interests (one that is more tangible than the "we can develop all those rail yards sometime in 2027" hogwash that is being promoted by Dukakis and Moulton).

Now if this were our one and only chance to do SSX I might feel differently. However, the post office isn't going to move unless MassDot pushes like crazy for them to sell. So we don't lose the chance to do SSX anytime soon. If I'm wrong and at some point the Post Office does try to sell the State is going to be right there to be able to take advantage of the sale. In effect, I see SSX as a fait accompli. The same can't be said of NSRL.

So if we can only muster one major transportation initiative in the Commonwealth every generation then I would rather we do NSRL because if we go SSX first then we consign the Commonwealth to two separate commuter rail systems that can't address the regions' growth needs for another 25-40 years.

 

[Arlington]

Re: North-South Rail Link

We already have the ability of people to travel from Lowell to Devens by Train changing once in North Station or from Plymouth to Worcester changing once in South Station

Three things:
1) NSRL is not about your ridiculous straw men of 495-to-495 commutes. If you can't flush that thought from your mind, seek medical attention.
2) NSRL is about (a) 128 to 128 commutes, and about (b) regular CR commutes going a stop or two more or one connection fewer. South Shore to Haymarket. North Shore to Logan/Seaport.
3) #It'sTheFrequenciesStupid A HUGE part of transit usability is frequency of connection, particularly for SHORT trips (not your long-trip straw men), where a long connect time ends up imposing a huge/impractical % of trip delay.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Re: North-South Rail Link

Tangent -- that is just wishfull? thinking

We already have the ability of people to travel from Lowell to Devens by Train changing once in North Station or from Plymouth to Worcester changing once in South Station

There is no evidence for either of those commuting patterns which do not require the N-S

All the N-S would do is enable you to change trains once in either North or South Station to reach places where you today need the intermediary of the Orange Line [North Station to Back Bay] or in the cases of Old Colony you need two subway intermediaries

However, the dominant commuting pattern is either circumferential on Rt-128 or radial on the spoke highways and the commuter rail. Note that in most cases the suburban destinations are not near to the suburban rail lines so a bus would be needed on the destination end. In addition most people drive to the commuter rail departure point so they have a car available.

Unless and until you build large housing complexes within walking distance to the commuter rail stations and also large scale development of employment within walking distance of the commuter rail stations -- you will just be shuttling empty trains on the outbound pass through legs in the AM and empty trains on the inbound legs before the pass through in the PM

A collossal waste -- and so Dulakis-like

Ah...and here's where we pretend to be deaf/dumb/blind and kerfuzzled at the last-mile problem in networking to tee up a dated Duke zinger. Poster will spin you a yarn that runs a page-long wall of text and JPEG's when last-mile is applied to telcoms. But transpo? Dragons!...thar be dragons as far as the eye can see!

I wonder how aliens in parallel universes manage to do this every single bloody day without their autonomous personal flying pods taking them to a pod-and-ride lot?

http://mapsof.net/long-island/long-island-bus-map

+

^^(Don't forget to change at Jamaica!)



One more time:

#ItsTheFrequenciesStupid

Frequent on the trunks begats frequent on the transfers begats frequent on the last-mile feeders. We have had various permutations of 128 Business Shuttles for years now, paid for mostly out of private money from the office parks. They were never utilized because the train schedules suck and there's a carvernous Needham-to-Woburn gap--the 40% length of the beltway where traffic is worst and employment is thickest--where there are no stations whatsoever. Do you really think there's not going to be a healthy market for an armada of public and private last-mile shuttles if Westwood Landing, Dedham Corporate, Riverside IndigoGreen, Polaroid-Waltham, Anderson RTC, Quannapowitt Industrial Park, and North Shore Mall and/or North Beverly all had frequent service chained in spokes on the trunks?

If this concept is too foreign to grasp, Metro North, LIRR, and NJ Transit riders can provide a practical edjumication from about 150 years of feeder-spoke commuting that does not all land in a singularity at the Manhattan terminals.

^^Not a foreign country. Not a new practice. Yankees Suck, etc. etc.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Re: North-South Rail Link

I'm in the NSRL camp here. I've read all the posts and I am firmly in the camp that SSX and NSX are essential for capacity reasons. The cases made on their behalf by F-Line are pretty ironclad. Moreover, we obviously cannot do what Philadelphia did and eliminate the terminal stations and replace them with through-running stations (nor would we want to). To the extent that proponents of NSRL like Moulton and Dukakis give the impression that we no longer have the need for terminal stations or they maintain that SSX and NSX are simply no longer necessary, I find their statements wholly disingenuous and as someone who likes to get deep in the weeds about transportation policy and planning I tend to have the same gut reaction as F-Line.

That being said I disagree with F-Line insofar as I interpret his posts to mean he thinks that we should go full speed ahead on SSX because we need it ultimately anyway and it will be completed sooner while at the same time we leave NSRL for down the road because it will take so long to complete (even if we decided to move forward on it tomorrow) and we have capacity issues right now. I think this position might be a perfect is enemy of the good scenario.

The reason for my disagreement is that this is ultimately a political question; not a technical one. We aren't talking about these projects in a technocratic vacuum. The reality is that there are political considerations and I'm in the camp that believes you push NSRL because- even though in a perfect world we'd start expanding south station post haste while at the same time moving deliberately forward on NSRL- in this real world it is sadly one or the other (at least for the next few decades) and NSRL is so substantially better and more necessary for long-term growth it wins by a mile. Now others might disagree and say the public will get behind a well-articulated vision that includes SSX followed by NSRL but I'm more cynical than that. I think we only have it in us for only one big push in any give 15-20 period.

In short, while these projects should be complements they are instead mutually exclusive. If we do SSX that will be our attempt to address the capacity problems and lack of effectiveness of our commuter rail/regional rail system for the next 25 to 30 years. We will not have the collective willpower to take another stab at that issue until the latter part of the century. However, if you complete the NSRL and punt on SSX for the same timeline that will be an appreciably better situation for the Commonwealth.

With that in mind I say to Hell with SSX and full speed ahead with NSRL. Some may take umbrage with my political conclusion but that is the tawdry logic of it laid bare.

Furthermore, I'm of the same mind as tangent that in this hobbesian world where SSX is NSRL's adversary rather than its partner the reason it is being promoted by Baker is not that it is objectively better; it is because of lack of vision, lack of concern about the long-term and- as tangent suggests- as a sop to real estate development interests (one that is more tangible than the "we can develop all those rail yards sometime in 2027" hogwash that is being promoted by Dukakis and Moulton).

Now if this were our one and only chance to do SSX I might feel differently. However, the post office isn't going to move unless MassDot pushes like crazy for them to sell. So we don't lose the chance to do SSX anytime soon. If I'm wrong and at some point the Post Office does try to sell the State is going to be right there to be able to take advantage of the sale. In effect, I see SSX as a fait accompli. The same can't be said of NSRL.

So if we can only muster one major transportation initiative in the Commonwealth every generation then I would rather we do NSRL because if we go SSX first then we consign the Commonwealth to two separate commuter rail systems that can't address the regions' growth needs for another 25-40 years.

Then what do you tell the Providence Line riders at 5:00pm who can't get a seat in FOUR years, not twenty? #ItsTheFrequenciesStupid isn't a concept rooted in any one project. It's the portfolio of mobility improvements we have to pursue to keep economic growth moving along. NSRL means nothing if you don't run the frequencies through it. That .org site conveys nothing if it buries the lede on what frequencies run through it. You need short-, medium-, long-, and ultralong-term efforts pounding relentlessly at that hashtag of be-all frequency demand: terminal capacity, fleet capacity, state-of-repair, service streamlining, transfer convenience, and more last-mile opportunities. That means tackling the mundane, the near- shovel-ready, AND getting that Vision Thing in motion for what the encore to New Boston is going to look like when the first act has run its course. All in continuous forward-moving effort across the spectrum. Name one project that's going to be a killshot for all of that. Not NSRL; run the same shit frequencies through the tunnel and all that's accomplished is proving the SEPTA Fallacy all over again.

Frequencies are where commuters are feeling the pinch now. It's a pinch that's going to turn critical in months you can count off in double digits and subsequent Presidential election years you can count off by 1. It resonates with them every day. They are willing to vote right now, and in any 2-year election, for a coherent no-bull effort at addressing that. The politics is not just local, it's mano e mano.

Just eavesdrop on conversation any rush-hour train every day of the week and you will hear a din of discussion about daily mobility challenges: the stress of finishing up work in time for the right train, the proverbial repetitive motion injury of peeking at that paper schedule umpteen times a day, gripes about the crowding or that morning train that died, hopes/dreams about how much easier and more flexible life would be if they only had better frequencies. The conversations are incredibly incisive. Strip out the ponderous arch-urb Interwebs detail and this same AB thread can be conducted live with any Joe Blow commuter in 140 characters at a time or in 5 minutes of shootin'-the-shit facetime in the vestibule between stops. Any day of the week, any time of day. With complete understanding. Nobody knows the issues better than the people who live it, and they speak the same language. I bet you'd find that the Legislators most on-point with these issues overwhelmingly draw from the pool of ones who themselves are daily train commuters to the State Capitol. #ItsTheFrequenciesStupid is that universally resonant.


Advocacy is dead-on-arrival if the first words out of an advocate's mouth are about technocratic political science abstractions. All these commuters hashtagging #ItsTheFrequenciesStupid with their daily lives are going to draw from that is "You're telling me government is permanently inept at walking and chewing gum at the same time and unable to change. So I have to change to suit the lesser-evils polluting my election ballot by lowering my long-term economic and lifestyle expectations because I won't get more frequencies while I'm still in the workforce? And this is somehow better for my wellbeing to wait patiently? Man...fuck this political bullshit! I'm pushing 50, got no cartilage left in my knee, and am going to be doing this routine for another 15 years. Tell me how I'm going to get a seat on this sardine can?"

Fatal. Full-stop fatal. The advocacy is lost before it ever leaves the terminal. It's lost before you ever get around to straightening out the pols on what the hell this thing is supposed to do, because it's already lost and diluted the only people with any quasi-effective power to push their pols bottom-up. It's lost because #ItsTheFrequenciesStupid is the driver for everything, and the advocacy is slipping off-target with message pollution about political abstraction and steel-and-concrete triangulation. Look at what taking eyes off the frequency prize for political expediency and steel-and-concrete target fixation has gotten us so far:

• "BRT: It's like a train with rubber tires! Slow, disconnected, without direct transfers, without traffic separation and a dangerous-ass traffic light on the Transitway, but. . ."
• "Indigo is a DMU line, and running DMU's through West Station means Indigo." [*voice trails off at "How often?" question...vehicle RFP gets canceled when question doesn't go away*]
• "SSX is first and foremost a headhouse and real estate gateway! Which we can't afford to do in-full, so let's stop having meetings with USPS."
• "South Coast Rail is economic salvation under totes kewl electrification at 10 unidirectional trains per day skip-stopping half the intermediates, 2 hour off-peak frequencies, and no last-mile feeder improvements. And takes a steaming shit all over port freight revenue we're hoping to grow the economy with, and now may take a steaming shit all over Middleboro, Cape, Plymouth, and Greenbush frequencies because reasons. But trust me...Fall River and New Bedford are ghost towns without it."
• "Salem and Beverly downtown parking garages are offsets for GLX delays. No...stop laughing! They might hit league-average occupancy in 10 years or so! Also...we didn't bother to double-track the Salem platform so no additional Newburyport/Rockport peak trains. I can't explain how that'll help fill the underutilized garages, but oh well...sunk cost."
• "Yard capacity? Some place that can send out 60-foot buses onto five-alarm overcrowded routes? How banal; I don't hear the works 'headhouse' or 'parking garage' in there."

I know politics are what they are, and have twisted themselves into such a pretzel over the last 20 years that limited single-tasking incrementalism is one of the few ways to move a backlog of initiatives through the paralysis. But how does one expect that to change? By watering down the value proposition of one's own advocacy with wonkish abstraction? No. The public's got a single mind of #ItsTheFrequenciesStupid, and that bullet list above underscores the same exact trap of plot being totally lost because the framing became all about steel-and-concrete, political expediencies leading to singular focus on monument-building at the expense of public service, and mass confusion about what the hell the project was supposed to do. You may think it's acknowledging political reality. I think that's working within a trap that leads to nowhere but murk and atrophying momentum.

If things are to change it's going to take lots of pressure-and-time, and enforcing a mantra that's so universally resonant bottom-to-top that it drives action "borderless" of project boundaries. #ItsTheFrequenciesStupid is what's on every voter's brain. Focused and cranked up to fever pitch it's what voters are going to put on the Legislative critters' brains. It creates the pressure-over-time to work the gears on the necessary political triangulation. And it's universal and all encompassing enough to avoid putting the blinders on for one steel-and-concrete project area to exclusion of others, avoiding a lot of the short attention span temptation to forsake walking and chewing gum at the same time.

I don't know how to construct such an advocacy that delivers results across multiple projects through pressure and time. I'm not a community organizer nor have I had enough facetime with them to get much picture of how it goes in the trenches. We probably need more resident experts on AB and other places offering that perspective, because it's lost in our own arch-urb abstraction (see: Dev. Forum, SUPERTALL, obsession with). But I've seen--we've all seen--the wreckage of too many advocacies that fell into a triangulation trap and took eyes off the prize. And seen Greater Boston struggle as a region to overcome that trap on a few too many of its advocacies. On transpo alone the 25-year casualty list is way longer than that bullet list above.

The common thread with it all is #ItsTheFrequenciesStupid was the initial taut and universal value proposition, and it got polluted to distraction by other abstractions. Many of those distractions self-justified by the advocates as the unavoidable cost of doing political business. Laser-like focus on the hashtag doesn't even begin to describe how disciplined the messaging is going to be if we truly want RER-style mainline rail mobility in this region with development of all the last-mile coattails and all the 50-year economic growth that secures. Whatever magic tricks it takes to sell that while dealing with political realities...but it is O-V-E-R before it begins if attention wavers one micron off the universal truth. History has proven that too many times over to convince me otherwise. We're going to have to up our game on keeping that focus on the universal value proposition in spite of the political realities, not shaped by and inevitably diluted by them.

We're getting the teachable moment right now this week with all the SSX vs. NSRL confusion erupting in every forum from top-level political to Interweb wonks to Joe Citizen. We have a shitload of work to do top-down and bottom-up focusing the laser on that value proposition as Job #1 above all else. If #ItsTheFrequenciesStupid is the hashtag we're trying to bullseye, then first act is cleaning up #ImConfusedWhatIsThisThing and getting everyone on the same page. Before thinking through the political abstractions. There's no abstraction to wade through without a clear value proposition; abstraction before proposition is the death of any advocacy.