Definitely could use more TOD. Are these stations currently used mostly as park & rides? Does the parking availability meet demand?
N. Bev has a decent amount of TOD, but the parking is severely lacking and there's no room to increase it so that's always going to be a square-peg.
Newburyport is a groaner for the sore lack of TOD attention. It sits in a very Anderson RTC-like industrial park, but has no binding energy knitting its surroundings together with any cohesion. There's definitely a troubleshooting project to be had in coming up with a new master dev plan for this stop's environs. The decision to not reinstate service to the traditional downtown/waterfront stop is one the city already regrets even if they still won't cop to it and even if the new stop is technically still salvageable for TOD with a better master plan.
Ballardvale and a relocated North Wilmington on the Wildcat would serve I-93. Not sure what you mean for 128 or 145. 125 terminates close to a relocated N. Wilmington.
Outer Haverhill Line if/when sheared off from the Reading Line is a very interesting case study in reinvention. The much faster Lowell Line routing (and/or any skip-stopping of inner stations covered well-enough by Lowell schedules to not need excessive augmentation) opens up lots of new infill possibilities. And the existing stop mix is pretty tasty: Ballardvale, Andover, and Bradford being nicely dense neighborhood walkup stops while Lawrence and Haverhill are major transportation centers. Salem St. on the Wildcat is superior to N. Wilmington on the Western as drop-in replacement. South Lawrence @ 28/495 (superior quasi-replacement for the pre-1981 Shawsheen stop) anchors the other end of Lawrence as a bus node, highway access point, and TOD catalyst. Ward Hill @ 495 and the industrial park is an ideal highway catchment with adjacent employment centers, and is 1 exit from the 495/MA 213 interchange so effectively siphons I-93 traffic away from the NH border. And Rosemont St. on T-owned station land by the new layover has TOD potential at the junkyard next door, walkup residential that's out of range of the downtown Haverhill stop, and bus access that can loop from MA 125. You can do a very nice "reboot" of Outer Haverhill's mission statement on short money just by tweaking the stop mix in this way off a bootstrap onto a permanent Lowell Line re-route.
And yes...Reading Line screams bloody murder for that Quannapowitt stop, which has a very sweet mix of TOD across the street, expansion TOD on the car dealerships most adjacent to the would-be stop, walkup residential, walkup retail, and bus access. Whereas Anderson will always be a primary parking sink by virtue of land utilization all around, Quannapowitt can be born a lot more "three-dimensional" from the get-go by working the mixture to good effect.
Oh yeah. Replace Kendal Green with "Weston Junction" or whatever.
Thankfully the 128 biz coalitions are ahead of the game with a station concept here at the 128/20/117 interchange. T has got to show a pulse on taking up their offer, but there are so many parties willing to move earth right this second to make this happen that the prospects are excellent.
Not really a good place for this. A reactivated Marlboro Line to Northboro would allow for P&Rs on 495 and 290.
Not Marlboro Branch. The *very* much active Fitchburg Secondary does Framingham, FSU, Pike/MA 9 (a.k.a. TJX & Bose world HQ's), downtown Southborough (MA 30 @ MA 85), 495, US 20 @ downtown Northborough, and I-290. With diverse mixtures at each. Fitchburg Sec. CR is already an arguably underrated one that has the misfortune of being buried in queue behind too many other worthy projects, but in an RER universe that could morph into a very intriguing re-study prospect indeed.
I wonder how able the NEC is to absorb any infills given the jam-packed schedule.
It's absorbing Pawtucket and 4-5 more future RIDOT infills just fine despite that congestion. It needs capacity upgrades to quad-track stations when physically possible and 3-4 running tracks, but MA/RI is a far, far cry from the dizzying congestion levels CT has to deal with. Aside from the unexpandable SW Corridor inside of Boston where schedules have to be judiciously managed (e.g. the Needham/Franklin "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" conundrum)...they're fine. The lack of infill potential in MA is more a function of geography: so much wetlands, so few touches to civilization between Readville and the state line that pretty much the only density catchments it touches are the ones it's already touching. And Mansfield really doesn't need a second stop when the existing one is already very convenient to the highways, so that isn't a driver. East Foxboro was the most recently abandoned stop on the Providence Line, giving up the ghost in 1977. There was damn near nothing next to it 40 years ago when low ridership forced the drop, and literally nothing has changed there today. You'd be hard-pressed to find any infill candidates asking a real demand question until you hit the state line.
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