Riders demand more commuter rail service

[DominusNovus]

I'm not sure about the specifics of how the lots are operated, but could the T just lease them out to whomever?

 

[bigeman312]

Basically, you can penalize suburbanites for clogging up the roads or you can penalize them for clogging up the trains, but you can't do both.

Yes you can. Traveling 100 miles daily is an absurd strain on our infrastructure and the environment (both built environment-geometrically-and natural environment-energywise) and that behavior should not be subsidized, but rather discouraged. It should be prohibitively expensive to live in a mansion in Lunenburg and work daily in Boston.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

I'm not sure about the specifics of how the lots are operated, but could the T just lease them out to whomever?

They have a subcontractor who goes around and collects the day's proceeds for them and does all the maintenance and snow removal at lots they directly control (non-RTA, non-town, non-Massport). That pretty much is shoving what they can off on someone else. If you're talking outright privatization, I don't see how adding another for-profit party into the mix helps their bottom line at all. It most likely hurts it. And not every station is under jurisdiction of a different RTA. With exception of BAT in Brockton that generally only comes into play outside 495.

De-gunking the archaic fare collection system should trim some fat and make it considerably easier for people to pay. But most of the dilemma here is existential: should they be building these humongous lots in the first place and diverting that many resources on the capital side? Is their addiction to suburban concrete and asphalt setting themselves up for unsustainable ops? Take one look at the parking overdose slated for several South Coast FAIL stations on the station renderings and that's a burning question that needs to be answered fast before hundreds of millions more get sunk into adding all-new parking sprawl to the system and adding so much more new parking sprawl to renovated/ADA'd existing stations. They have to be certain the economics of that wash.

 

[davem]

When did maintaining swaths of asphalt and parking garages become the purview of a transit authority anyway? I can't think of a single legacy railroad station that had anything more then a drop off loop and perhaps a token spot or two, so what gives? Did the MTA have garages, or is this strictly something that arose after the MBTA was chartered?

I feel that the mission of a transit authority should be to get people from station to station. How they get to that station is their problem. Demanding construction of car storage is just as asinine as demanding livery service to and from the station. If the local populous lives far from the station and has a need to not just drive to it, but store their vehicle there, they should be responsible for constructing and maintaining the parking. I would argue the same for bike racks. Even though the cost is obviously far less, just to be fair, it is still not the mission of the T to give people a place to store their bikes.

 

[Equilibria]

Yes you can. Traveling 100 miles daily is an absurd strain on our infrastructure and the environment (both built environment-geometrically-and natural environment-energywise) and that behavior should not be subsidized, but rather discouraged. It should be prohibitively expensive to live in a mansion in Lunenburg and work daily in Boston.

You want to make commuting from 495 and beyond to Boston prohibitively expensive? We've been down that road before, in the '40s and early '50s, when the freeways didn't reach the inner city and the commuter railroads were thinning out. That's the era when business fled the city and placed itself where people actually wanted to live and where they could get to easily.

All those businesses in the SPID could just as easily have located in Burlington, but Boston sold them on Pike and South Station access. MIT has some magnetism, as does the airport, but at the end of the day if you tell a big law firm that you're going to penalize their employees for living outside the city, they'll go right out there with them, and you'll be left with a new urbanist paradise of condos, streetcars, coffee shops, and no jobs.

In any case, the role of a Department of Transportation is to make it easier for people to get from place to place. It's about building connections. It most certainly is not social planning and discouraging "undesirable" lifestyles.

 

[bigeman312]

You want to make commuting from 495 and beyond to Boston prohibitively expensive?

No, I don't. It is already expensive, it just happens to be very heavily subsidized so the cost is not paid by the commuter currently.

You are of the mindset that we should continue to subsidize and favor exurban lifestyles. I am of the mindset that DOT should be helping the most people have the easiest travel experience. Given that we have limited resources, this means choosing which lifestyles to subsidize. I would have to say the one that is cheaper and serves the most people (more urban, shorter, effective trips) is probably wiser than the more expensive, less used (will always be less used just simply by the density of people) and frankly more environmentally unfriendly choice.

Yes, it should be prohibitively expensive to commute 100 miles daily. Until we can find a way to provide that service without it putting incredible strain on our system and needing immense subsidies, I stand by my statement. Only then will I entertain thoughts of social engineering. Right now I am mostly viewing this is an improper allocation of resources.

 

[whighlander]

For all the talk about parking costs, that's all extraneous and wouldn't be necessary if stations were the anchor for a walkable community, instead of the T's insistence on surrounding them with deserts of asphalt.

Huh? --- Math -- outside of the core [however so designated] -- you need to draw on a lot more feed area than just your "walkable community" hence the needs for parking of some sort -- garage [Alewife], Big lot [Riverside]

 

[Equilibria]

I would have to say the one that is cheaper and serves the most people is probably wiser than the more expensive, less used...

Ok, I agree. There are 4.5 million people in the Boston Area. Of these, approximately 1.5 million live inside of Route 128. The 2/3 of the population which lives and works outside of 128 tends to work (and travel to work) alongside one of 2 beltways which are connected axially at several points. As long as you provide these people with the barest of paved roads to get from their home to the highway, they pay for the rest. Hell, since the local roads aren't paid for by MassDOT, All you have to do is maintain the network of key highways and the rest of the problem takes care of itself. Of course, that isn't true for the suburban residents, who have to foot the complete bill for acquiring, operating, maintaining and insuring their vehicles often to the tune of thousands of dollars per month.

Let's now look at the 1.5 million area residents inside 128, living without cars. They need the State to provide transit to within 1/4 mile of their house. This means that the state must fund a dense bus and train network, which will perpetually cost more than it makes back in fares. A commuter with a monthly pass pays $70/month for their transportation, assuming they do all of their shopping using transit - a ZipCar adds on a few hundred. That fare is subsidized. It is not sustainable. For a T user to pay off their share of procurement, operations, maintenance, insurance, construction etc. would probably mean jacking up fares by a factor of 3.

The suburban resident's bill to the public is paid in full. They cover their own operational costs, while the capital is paid for by their tolls and taxes, both state and local. The transit user, on the other hand, is being subsidized by drivers' RMV registration fees, gas taxes, Turnpike Tolls, parking revenue, etc, not to mention the other State functions get cut to keep transit solvent - all while transit users complain about every single highway project and every single dollar spent outside the city.

My case is not against transit, nor against urban living. To have a vibrant city you need a vibrant center, and that requires public transit. It's good for everybody. However, if you're going for the "greatest good for the greatest number", your state transportation dollar goes way farther in the exurbs. Spend $300 million on the Canton Interchange, you can serve a million. Spend $300 million on the Green Line Extension, and you can build about 3 stations for a couple thousand people who will never pay their own way once it's finished.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Huh? --- Math -- outside of the core [however so designated] -- you need to draw on a lot more feed area than just your "walkable community" hence the needs for parking of some sort -- garage [Alewife], Big lot [Riverside]

Yes. I don't think anybody can argue a one-size-fits-all solution is going to work for everyone. Some stations do need big lots and garages by purpose and location. Some do not...also by purpose and location. The question is whether they're doing a good enough job evaluating purpose and location before making these spending decisions.

-- Why did a bunch of the Old Colony intermediates and outer Worcester infills move the stations out of their traditional downtown locations for big parking sinks in the middle of nowhere. Do they have compelling evidence that isolating, say, Ashland from its station house right in the heart of downtown for a barren site a mile up the road on a mile-long driveway through wetlands is getting them better utilization solely because it has more quantity of parking spots? Outer Worcester intermediates are a swath of parking underperformers...there's something they need to wrap brain around here as to why.

-- Why does South Coast Rail program a doubling of Stoughton's lot capacity to 900+ spaces when North Easton is supposed to ease the crunch into that station and itself have 500 spots. How in the hell does the heart of Downtown Taunton need 700+ spaces when Taunton Depot is the nearby highway park-and-ride? Is this in any way taking into account downtown congestion management, or are they simply occupying asphalt bubbles? You could ask pointed questions about the Salem and Beverly garages too, since they are short on transit frequency and transit connection improvements, long on raw parking quantity, and generally tone-deaf about how congested the downtowns are that have to absorb all those extra cars. Why does every suburban station renovation floated sink so much more of its budget and energy into parking over station, and to exclusion of better feeder service or more frequent train service?

-- If TOD is the driver of the above strategy of picking more spacious environs away from downtown, who's leading whom by the nose. Newburyport and Cordage Park have been TOD disasters. Forge Park is still kind of treading water 25 years later. MIddleboro...doing well. Kingston...doing decent, pretty well, maybe could be better. Are they learning something from 20+ years of very mixed success with TOD about why/where/how sites succeed and fail or do/don't attract other stakeholders? Or are they still banking on the magic TOD fairy to wave its wand? See above "asphalt bubble" phenomenon for similar insular thinking here.

-- Why are these 'burbs getting such ungodly increases in parking capacity when it is still very difficult to find a park-and-ride on whole large swaths of 128? Fitchburg passes straight underneath the highway at prime locations--Waltham @ Routes 20 & 117 right by the Microsoft campus, the Polaroid redevelopment, and the end of the 70 bus...next stop: rustic Kendal Green. Haverhill/Reading passes under right by the Quannapowitt industrial park with nada. They've lost total interest in Peabody/128 while busting their budget by 8 figures on the Salem and Beverly garages. What mystery ailment is keeping Dedham Corporate from being utilized in anywhere close to the same universe as the other 128 park-and-rides? And why is 495 the total opposite, with such GOOD and frequently placed park-and-rides? How did Boston's beltway become a blind spot?

-- Why is the prevailing theme here seem to be winner-take-all. If parking or TOD potential happens to get plurality share of the priorities for a station configuration, why does that suddenly trump all with the #2, #3, #4, etc. factors like accessibility to the nearest population center, sustainability of the local street grid to feed a large parking facility, feeder transit, and frequency of the trains themselves become such frequent afterthoughts? Are they having trouble making evaluations with nuance or balance? All of the above cases cited would seem to suggest they don't have a firm understanding of how/why their stations perform or underperform, and are having some difficulty making precision decisions.



What all this suggests...what everything in this thread sort of points to...is that they don't know their commuter rail system, its users, and its target audience as well as they probably should. And it's resulting in poorer focus and poorer aim than it should. And they have to sharpen up at this if they're intent on spending more money expanding the system.

 

[bigeman312]

...

Fair points that seem logically sound. Never thought about it that way. You're probably right. Thanks for the legitimate points. Sometimes my disdain for sprawl bleeds into making up my own facts.

 

[winstonoboogie]

When did maintaining swaths of asphalt and parking garages become the purview of a transit authority anyway? I can't think of a single legacy railroad station that had anything more then a drop off loop and perhaps a token spot or two, so what gives? Did the MTA have garages, or is this strictly something that arose after the MBTA was chartered?

I feel that the mission of a transit authority should be to get people from station to station. How they get to that station is their problem. Demanding construction of car storage is just as asinine as demanding livery service to and from the station. If the local populous lives far from the station and has a need to not just drive to it, but store their vehicle there, they should be responsible for constructing and maintaining the parking. I would argue the same for bike racks. Even though the cost is obviously far less, just to be fair, it is still not the mission of the T to give people a place to store their bikes.

For historical context, remember that the transit commitments agreed to with CLF as mitigation for the artery in 1990 included the requirement to build 10,000 more parking paces by 1996 and 10,000 more by 1999. That was amended later to increase another 1,000 spaces by 2011, for a total requirement of 21,000 new spaces from 1990 to 2011.

http://www.epa.gov/region1/topics/air/sips/ma/310CMR7_36_c136.pdf


At the same time, construction of the Old Colony lines, Worcester extension, and Newburyport extension were also required, and parking along those lines did count toward the 21,000 spaces. Meeting those mitigation requirements helped to shape the philosophy of locating stations where the most parking could be constructed.

 

[Semass]

I ride the Old Colony Lines and the parking situation is ridiculous. So many underutilized spaces. Their parking price is damaging ridership. I have spoken to numerous people who have switched to the bus. The pass may be a little more but the parking is free. at $4 per day, that adds about $80/month to the price of a T pass. For a Zone 7 or 8 pass that puts the total price near $400/month. Damn.

 

[EastofEverything]

When did maintaining swaths of asphalt and parking garages become the purview of a transit authority anyway? I can't think of a single legacy railroad station that had anything more then a drop off loop and perhaps a token spot or two, so what gives? Did the MTA have garages, or is this strictly something that arose after the MBTA was chartered?

I feel that the mission of a transit authority should be to get people from station to station. How they get to that station is their problem. Demanding construction of car storage is just as asinine as demanding livery service to and from the station. If the local populous lives far from the station and has a need to not just drive to it, but store their vehicle there, they should be responsible for constructing and maintaining the parking. I would argue the same for bike racks. Even though the cost is obviously far less, just to be fair, it is still not the mission of the T to give people a place to store their bikes.

It became the purview of the transit authority when they realized they were bleeding funding. Parking is cheap to build and maintain and it rakes in revenue. They MBTA needs at least some strategy to soften the effects of their farebox recovery ratio.

Plus, unless the MBTA is going to fix subruban zoning regulations, there is not much they can do to get people to and from stations in the suburbs besides provide places to park cars and bikes. If people can't get to these stations out there by some other means than on foot, the ridership drops off. Combine that with increased zone fares and suddenly it's both more of a hassle AND more expensive to ride the commuter rail than to drive in and park.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

I ride the Old Colony Lines and the parking situation is ridiculous. So many underutilized spaces. Their parking price is damaging ridership. I have spoken to numerous people who have switched to the bus. The pass may be a little more but the parking is free. at $4 per day, that adds about $80/month to the price of a T pass. For a Zone 7 or 8 pass that puts the total price near $400/month. Damn.

Yes. And it's harder for employers to subsidize the parking because it's not on the same fare collection system. Charlie and EZ-Pass are pretty universally available for employers to pick from via their benefits providers, as are commuter rail passes. While some parking subsidies are available much like they are for local garages near a workplace, it's not plug-and-play like the standard pass programs and takes a lot more bureaucracy and negotiated special exceptions to pre-tax compensate an employee for stuffing the honor-system box at their respective commuter rail station every morning. It's not worth it for the employer to do, so they don't do it in large enough numbers and the commuter bears full brunt of the parking prices while getting their discounted ride. The ride no longer matters when the financial burden of parking dwarfs it.

EZ-Pass is such a bleedin' easy solve for this it's infuriating they won't roll it out on a mass scale to every station that has a controlled-access driveway they can plunk a transponder next to. They would recover a lot of their losses and see a substantial bump in parking utilization from that alone, because so many employers offer the pre-tax subsidy for it by default. It exponentially increases the coverage because a majority of CR riders are using it to commute to a bennies-paying employer. It's tailor-made for the audience they built these massive lots for. And yet...it's another blind spot where they don't seem to demographically know their CR riders nearly as well as they do their bus and subway riders.

 

[DigitalSciGuy]

Woah, not so fast. Not quite...

...The 2/3 of the population which lives and works outside of 128 tends to work (and travel to work) alongside one of 2 beltways which are connected axially at several points. As long as you provide these people with the barest of paved roads to get from their home to the highway, they pay for the rest. Hell, since the local roads aren't paid for by MassDOT, All you have to do is maintain the network of key highways and the rest of the problem takes care of itself...

Major road reconstruction and maintenance certainly has happened and I consider the overall cost of the Central Artery Project/Big Dig of $24bn to be part of the overall capital costs of accommodating suburbanite travel within the region, which is really what we're talking about - moving people.

If you want to argue the CAP was to facilitate movement of commerce, taking people off the roads to accommodate more vehicles that rely on them for their line of business could have been done more inexpensively. I'll address your urban vs suburban transport ROI argument later.

Suffice it to say, that $24bn is hardly going anywhere anytime soon and while you can question its necessity, it is endemic of the massive capital costs required to maintain state-owned roads supporting the suburbanites who have no better alternatives.

If you want to talk about ROI here and the number of beneficiaries of the investments for road construction and maintenance: even though 2/3 of the metro Boston region are suburban, they do not necessarily benefit from every network improvement and statistically those road improvements will cost more per user/induce less business than urban transit:

[Smart Growth America] found that every billion dollars spent on road capacity resulted in 2.4 million work-hours, while every billion spent on transit resulted in 4.2 million work-hours.

Overall, the argument that cost of maintenance and construction of state highways used by suburbanites in some way shape form or fashion is paid for entirely by the users and their contribution to the sales tax, gas tax, and registry fees is also almost entirely false since by technicality, most major road reconstruction and expansion is paid out of the capital budget, which is paid for by the operating budget. Now, those contributions do amount to about 55% of the overall operations revenue, but only 25% actually goes to debt service for capital construction costs because of other outstanding MassDOT operations costs. [MassDOT 2012 budget]

The only thing that makes highway projects 'affordable' to those highway users and appears to let the whole thing even out is the federal grants, the source of that 'subsidy' that we're all hopefully on the same page about. This throws the WHOLE game out of whack unless we want to talk about raw costs for the suburban, car-only lifestyle that we're trying to defend or vilify. In this case, time and time and time and time again, tally up all the costs, even in spite of road-happy state DOTs (MassDOT's Davey is decidedly changing that, which almost makes all of this argument moot), we find that it costs more to sustain suburbia than urbia by the sheer effect density has on the number of stakeholders who benefit from transport investment.

Transport dollars at the federal level are done in a 80/20 highway/transit split. This means that in the Boston metro area, where over 32% commute by transit, more money goes toward subsidising a disproportionate share of actual commuters, since not all 2/3 of metro Boston residents outside of the I-95 ring commute exclusively by car. This discrepancy grows even if you look inside the ring at the mode share[url] vs federal level funding priorities/contributions.

Subsidy doesn't even stop at the road costs, but for arguments sake, we'll try to cut it off here so we don't go completely out of scope.

Let's now look at the 1.5 million area residents inside 128, living without cars.

Not everyone is car-free, but on average that number is slightly less than 50% and dropping based on car registration statistics released by MassDOT. Car sharing services and better innercity transit services can bring that down further, by some estimates as much as 70% (based on car ownership reduction studies following car sharing program implementations alone).

They need the State to provide transit to within 1/4 mile of their house. This means that the state must fund a dense bus and train network, which will perpetually cost more than it makes back in fares. A commuter with a monthly pass pays $70/month for their transportation, assuming they do all of their shopping using transit - a ZipCar adds on a few hundred. That fare is subsidized. It is not sustainable. For a T user to pay off their share of procurement, operations, maintenance, insurance, construction etc. would probably mean jacking up fares by a factor of 3.

For the most part, your argument is sound here. Yes, our fares are subsidised and fare contributions to the budget, or farebox recovery is relatively low at ~35% as compared to Chicago's 50+%.

The suburban resident's bill to the public is paid in full. They cover their own operational costs, while the capital is paid for by their tolls and taxes, both state and local.

Nope, as I said before, operational costs aren't fully covered by user fees paid out of pocket, and by proxy through the operating budget's debt service nor are capital expenses. It's slightly more, but by no means 100%.

The transit user, on the other hand, is being subsidized by drivers' RMV registration fees, gas taxes, Turnpike Tolls, parking revenue, etc, not to mention the other State functions get cut to keep transit solvent - all while transit users complain about every single highway project and every single dollar spent outside the city.

Transit users complain because of the real ROI on those investments. Again, not all of those user fees from highways get re-balanced by MassDOT to help the MBTA, but it certainly is in a position to do so because of the massive GDP that the city alone contributes to the region, state, country, and globe. We're also talking about the need to maintain and operate a system that has had decades of disinvestment and decay, leading to much higher capital repair costs than necessary, all at the expense of road investment for those same decades.

However, if you're going for the "greatest good for the greatest number", your state transportation dollar goes way farther in the exurbs. Spend $300 million on the Canton Interchange, you can serve a million. Spend $300 million on the Green Line Extension, and you can build about 3 stations for a couple thousand people who will never pay their own way once it's finished.

I don't know what 'couple thousand' people you're imagining will only use the Green Line Extension and with the targeted development Somerville and Cambridge have planned for those extensions, that number will definitely increase upon completion.

Also, if you want to target the Green Line Extension: a majority of its cost is being paid off not by loans that will need to be paid back, but by state and mostly federal grants, just as many highway projects get away with being funded.

If you want to target those people 'who will never pay their own way once it's finished', we could also factor in the extra money in their pockets from not having to own a car that goes right back into local economies through additional discretionary spending, even if you do assume that housing costs will be marginally higher. These people on average will have more free time than suburban commuters caught in endless traffic that will never be mitigated no matter how many lanes you add onto the highways because of induced demand. That free time amounts to better productivity, more free time for leisure spending. So these people do pay their way - not directly back to the debts, but to the greater society.

Isn't this really what our transport contribution mode share really boils down to? Not how much money can we capture back, but how much industry, creativity, commerce can we induce by the investment? And realisitically, if Cambridge and Somerville wised up, they could implement time-limited value capture taxes on areas around the transit investment to literally capture that more distributed value brought by the transit investment and pay it back. Value capture taxes from road projects is also possible, but does not have the same overall ROI potential.

 

[DigitalSciGuy]

Attempting to re-rail the subject instead of an argument on the merits of transit vs road spending, suburban vs urban living patterns:

Either way you slice it, the commuter rail does contribute to overall regional transport capacity and has the potential to increase that capacity and shift commuter mode-split with better service.

As far as what's in the scope and responsibility of the MBTA/MBCR and what that should be, I think Jay Walder - former MTA CEO, current Hong Kong MTR CEO - makes it clear in this Harvard lecture from operational experience: the reality is clear that the MBTA cannot rely on state and federal funding assistance because the political will says that they will constantly be fighting an uphill battle until hearts and minds are won over.

Hong Kong's model of intense development may not work around exurban and suburban commuter rail stations, but we can certainly take a page from the book the Japanese invented over a century ago [PDF]. As has mentioned here before, building transit communities at stations or strengthening existing downtowns around them builds not only peak direction ridership, but also ridership that is somewhat sustained throughout the day.

MassDOT and the MBTA need to get out of the business of sell-and-lose and start doing more lease-and-earn when it comes to the massive amount of property they own. I've talked to Sec. Davey about this and he seems to be of the opinion that a transit agency should do what a transit agency does best - run trains. However, as I've already stated, this is no longer a sustainable business model. He agrees that the T needs to leverage its partnerships with private companies, but that seems to be limited with respect to unlocking development potential of stations, something DC's WMATA is latching onto.

Should the MBTA keep building parking at stations? Sure.

Should they be built to cater to more people who will park-and-ride at the commuter rail stops? That's subjective. Building a parking structure can bring average per-space costs of $16,000 and don't actively contribute value or activity through the day. That value of transit-oriented development could go right back to the railroad to subsidise operations. Don't forget the RTAs and what they could play in this. There are ways they can be leveraged to improve throughput to commuter rail on limited budgets.

Ultimately, this is all moot without a more solid capital infusion into better service in conjunction with targeted transit oriented development to justify that better service for just a few riders. It could be done line-by-line with some branch other than Fitchburg as a demonstrator to the Commonwealth that it can be done. This shotgun effect of commuter rail investment and continued expansion, stretching the T's and state's resources for minimal ROI, is not helping to prove the point that commuter rail is a valuable transportation option. At the risk of throwing us entirely off-topic, electrification or even the actual purchase of those DMUs that we've been promised as a recommended operational pilot since 2008 would bring us the operational flexibility and reliability people are saying just isn't there.

 

[Matthew]

To keep it simple: the T shouldn't expand commuter rail without legally binding commitment from towns that they will support reasonable TOD. It's the only way to make the expansion fiscally responsible. Put park and ride lots wherever the rail lines cross major highways, not in town centers, because they induce heavy motor traffic.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

I think they have to trim some of the administrative bloat to give themselves a fighting chance.

-- Get their fare collection house in order. Get the Charlie-fication of CR on-track. Get EZ-Pass into the parking lots. Clean up the Zone system for better equitability. Get the conductors those hand scanners. Get those PoP doors on the local runs like Fairmount.


-- Shed additional layers of management obfuscation. No commuter rail of this size continues to contract out ops. All run it in-house. Give MBCR a half-size operating extension of 5 years instead of 10 and start the transition in-house.


-- Shed assets they don't need to have.
** Why does the state have its publicly owned common-carrier railroad ROW's owned by so many sub-agencies like the T, DCR, or even the Water Resources Authority (Fore River freight branch in Quincy)? Every other state in New England puts the ownership at the DOT level. Transfer all line ownership to the DOT, including the abandoned lines they're letting themselves get way too dragged into rail trail politics on (to detriment of sister agency DCR that has to maintain those trails amid NIMBY riff-raff).
** Let them keep only the station properties, the ops-supporting properties like main yards and outer layover yards, and the stretches of ROW shared with active rapid transit. If rapid transit is extended along any ROW's, a simple paper transaction can give the ownership back.
** Sell all the dozens of very random misc. non-RR properties or transfer to the DOT so they don't have to be the administrator of all that excess.


-- Consolidate more planning at the DOT mothership.
** They've proven they can't be trusted to juggle capital investments in ops vs. capital investment in expansion, parking, and station aesthetics efficiently.
** Nor can they manage vehicle procurements efficiently without their compulsive overcustomization hurting them. Lots more oversight is needed.
** And a bigger stick is needed to deal with the NIMBY's and the town ransoms that are eating the T alive. Abolish unaccountable riff-raff like the South Coast Rail Task Force.


-- RE: the above, bend the planning back to fulfilling federally obligated improvements: PTC installations, and ADA. They're fucked on the first because they've done almost bupkis for planning, and progress on the second has almost halted save for these overbudget parking sink stations.
** Get held feet to the fire on other ops efficiency standards like level boarding retrofits, lengthening substandard platforms to the current system specs so all doors can open on all trains, purging all remaining single-level coaches for bi-levels to reduce operating costs while increasing capacity (nearly every CR system in North America not height-restricted by the NEC in New York/Philly/Baltimore has long ago gone full-bi...the T is the last one with no height restrictions still operating majority-singles).


-- Clean up the labor costs. Esp. the bloated conductor ranks.
** If the 1 conductor per 2 cars rule can't be changed (and it probably can't), stop putting together 5-car trains that require an extra staffer and build trainsets with even numbers only. Off-peak and weekends when they close some unused cars, have some conductors on flex shifts so they don't have to be tagging along as onboard extras when a near-empty train only fills the front 2 cars and only needs 1 person. They need to add to off-peak schedules, and off-peaks aren't going to be full...so they have to find better ways to keep it lean and efficient.


-- Get much better at data collection and analysis so they can understand their audience better and understand why some stations are succeeding while others are failing.
** They just aren't wrapping brain around the commuter rail audience with the depth and innateness that they should have.
** They've been shooting clumsily on some big bets like those parking sinks and TOD sites without understanding all the full implications or other stakeholders as well as they should, and the results have been too mixed. They have to be directing their money with a lot more accuracy than this.






As for system expansion, focus the priorities a lot more deliberately instead of trying to do too much at one to woo certain 'burbs:

-- 128 is badly underserved.
** That Fitchburg park-and-ride at Exit 26 is an ASAP priority. So is the Haverhill/Reading one at Quannapowitt.
** The North Shore Transit Improvements study can't make the case any clearer for Peabody.
** Bring the Fairmount Line to Westwood in conjunction with the NEC tri-tracking; it's got room to grow with added platforms as demand increases.
** Figure out what's wrong with Dedham Corporate and why that's lagging despite a decent Franklin schedule. How much better would this station take off if Foxboro service doubled up the headways?
** Throw in the towel on Mishawum; it's had 30 years to prove itself, and has been an abject failure in every respect. First as a park-and-ride, now as a reverse commute.


-- Fix the artificial speed restrictions from deferred maintenance and deferred implementation of PTC.
** The Eastern Route in Chelsea needs those Everett Ave. and Eastern Ave. crossing separations, and needs to be resignaled throughout for 80 MPH. It's got the straightaways and wide station spacing around the swamps to handle it.
** The Lowell Line ditto can do 80 and make Anderson a very very quick trip.
** The Worcester Line is apocryphal because of its ancient signals.


-- Add some badly needed local infills.
** How is it that Woburn has gone 32 years missing a downtown-accessible stop that hits any of their bus routes? Montvale or Salem St. infill...NOW.
** South Salem/Salem State...NOW. That denser area of the city has been missing easy walking access ever since the station relocated north-of-portal in '87, the North Shore Improvements study projected outstanding ridership, and Salem State needs the same kind of transit equity that JFK/UMass, Bridgewater State, and others have gotten.
** The lack of a Newton Corner stop deprives Worcester Line riders of some golden bus transfers.


-- "Fairmountings" rollout.
** Riverside via Worcester Line the most obvious next target. Newton Corner infill after New Balance is built, Riverside cross-platform transfer, fix the awful existing Newton stops. Lots more crossovers so thru Worcester trains get an opportunity to pass a local at least once every 2 local stops. Replace most of the Pike express buses with this; it's more reliable, and more people will flock to the fixed route.
** Waltham/128 via Fitchburg...plenty of capacity to spare on the Fitchburg schedule. Study adding back the old Clematis Brook and/or Beaver Brook stops, study whether a bare Alewife platform is worth it (I kind of doubt it, at least right off the bat).
** Reading. Move Haverhill trains back to the Lowell Line to free up capacity. Fixing the single-track pinch at Reading station and refurbishing the freight track around the Wellington tunnel into a full mile-long passing siding (officially proposed) helps with the headways.


-- Quasi-"Fairmountings" on the mainlines that have to load-balance branches. In some cases DMU's aren't an all-day solution because those 6-7 car monster trains are needed to serve multiple branches, and the schedule slots are predicated on the endpoints limiting the ability to time 'pure' clock-facing. There are ways to work around that.
** Flush the branch schedules fuller on the lines like the Eastern Route (Newburyport/Rockport/Peabody and NH Mainline (Lowell/Haverhill). The frequency at peak ends up being 95% the same as a DMU with only minute variances in headways balancing the branches. These branches do need it. As long as the fare collection for inside-128 boarders is similar to the full "Fairmountings" they get the same quality of service. These schedules need push-pull's seating capacity...DMU's would be woefully adequate for loads. And these are the lines with wide stop spacing where DMU vs. push-pull performance difference is at its smallest.
** Off-peak...that's the time to bring out the DMU's and backstop the 128 short-turn headways to "Fairmounted" equivalent. The branches don't have the demand to run all-day peak service because their 495 constituencies are primarily 9-5'ers. But Anderson, Woburn, Winchester, Salem, Lynn, Peabody do have all-day walkup to tap. So it's not an all-day DMU thing like Fairmount, Riverside, Waltham, Reading...just a targeted booster shot the hours those monster capacity push-pulls don't serve up a de facto clock-facing schedule.


-- Buses need to be better coordinated.
** Hyde Park is all messed up right now with the local buses mostly stopping at Cleary Sq. next to the very light-service HP station on the NEC. Why have they not all been looped down the block to Fairmount where the headways make for better transfers? HP station is only going to get bypassed more in the future as the NEC gets congested. It should be on long-term phase-out in favor of Fairmount.
** When GLX reaches Route 16 it really needs to string together a 16-W. Medford-Wedgemere-Winchester Ctr. high-frequency bus. More Haverhill trains coming to the Lowell Line are going to keep skipping West Med and Wedgemere because that's the best way to keep Haverhill/Plaistow a tight, manageable, and delay-free hour on the schedule. Winch Ctr., Woburn infill, Anderson, and Wilmington are the ones that are going to see 2x headways...not the Medford stops. Those areas actually get better frequency with the bus to GLX augmenting than they'd get through the CR schedules.
** Anderson needs lots more connecting buses as a superstation. 128 expresses are very anemic out there. Burlington especially can benefit not having to take the slow buses or deal with the delays on the Alewife express.


-- Don't forget about the 'tweener destinations a little outside 128.
** Norwood and Walpole are mega-ridership stops, with Norwood being an urban downtown contributing good all-day ridership. Foxboro service 2x'ing Franklin headways pumps a huge amount of ridership into Norwood + Walpole. The benefits of frequent service on the inner mainline are even bigger than the Foxboro branch itself.
** Framingham. One of the biggest reasons to fix the godawful Worcester infrastructure. Another one with all-day walkup. If it's going to be a frequent short-turn, might even make sense peeling out at the junction onto the Fitchburg Secondary to a Framingham State U. +1-stop turnback for the short-turn schedule.
** Brockton. I don't think the Middleboro line needs to short-turn here or have DMU's because the demand extends all the way to M'boro and the Red Line duplication inbound makes inside-128 local service a non-need. This is more like the Eastern Route where those trains need the seating capacity and push-pull does just fine for the schedule. But it's a downtown grower with an excellently integrated bus system. That might be worth a Zone fare tweaking rewarding the city, its car-free accessibility, and BAT to help it add routes to other area destinations. Don't forget about the headway boost places like this get with added Cape Rail service, a la Norwood with Foxboro service. And it's a reason to start chipping away at the single-track pinch points upstream.


-- As mentioned a couple times above, the commuter rail should have a goal of providing transit equity to all the state U and community college campuses rail-accessible or rail+shuttle -accessible in the district. The state's commitment to public higher education should have direct ties to its commitment to public transit.
** The commuter rail has barely even begun to touch its potential student audience, who disproportionately rely on transit. These are all-day riders not bound to 9-5 schedules. They are often priced out of car expenses, and will willingly take the cheapest possible transit option even if it's a really bad bus trip.
** The commuter campuses are a huge untapped resource. Park-and-rides to school are a pain. And for poorer students the expense of driving can be the difference between them enrolling at all. These kids will take the commuter rail if their schools can subsidize fares equitably.
** With the number of campuses within shuttle bus distance of a CR stop, I can think of few more worthy subsidies the state can add to their extremely well-invested state U and state CC system than a good transit pass subsidy program for students, equivalent to the kinds available on the rapid transit system. And to fund free shuttle buses to the nearest stop. Regardless of whether they're inside 128, at one of the 'tweeners, around 495, or way out at the end of the line...students have to be considered a prime candidate for fare relief.
** Here are all the schools affected (CR...not the ones exclusive to rapid transit or city buses). Some with pre-existing access to CR, some that could have their access much-improved, some that need access. Bridgewater State, Framingham State, UMass-Boston, UMass-Lowell, UMass-Worcester Med., Salem State, Fitchburg State, Worcester State, Mass Maritime (Buzzards Bay), Northern Essex CC (Haverhill), Quinsigamond CC (Worcester), North Shore CC (Danvers...shuttle from Peabody?), Mt. Wachusett CC (Gardner...shuttle from Wachusett), Middlesex CC (shuttle from Lowell/N. Billerica), Mass Bay CC (Wellesley), Cape Cod CC (West Barnstable...shuttle from Buzzards Bay and later W. Barnstable when CR comes on-Cape), Bristol CC (Fall River...shuttle from Taunton and later FR), UMass-Dartmouth (shuttle from Taunton and later New Bedford).
** That's just the public schools. The privates can go just as hog wild with better CR access and subsidies too if the state give them the fare control tools to do so and encourages the shuttle bus access. Brandeis is perhaps the biggest of all that can reap the windfall, anchoring the all-day ridership on a Waltham short-turn. Just look at how outsized their stop is already on Fitchburg boardings in the Blue Book.

 

[DigitalSciGuy]

Really really excellent outline of exactly what needs to happen to really make commuter rail a success. I certainly hope you've sent at least a modcum of this to the Secretary. He loves nitty-gritty ops improvements like this, especially if they have the potential to fix things at low cost.

To add to this, I want to latch onto the FRA PTC-by-2015 mandate:

What is preventing the MBTA/MassDOT from getting FRA certification and deploying ECTS, other than GSM frequency requirements, existing deployment of Amtrak's reinvent-the-wheel ACSES along the Providence Line, the sheer capital cost of implementation?

Have there been any recent attempts to even look into signal modernisation studies by MassDOT that have entirely flown under my radar in the past 4 years?

While I think a technical exploration of how signal, train control, and train protection systems would benefit the commuter rail is more suited to a conversation over at the railroad.net forums, I feel like a lot of the conversation gets mired in how it can't happen.

 

[Equilibria]

No commuter rail of this size continues to contract out ops. All run it in-house.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metra, but that doesn't mean I don't agree with you generally

** The lack of a Newton Corner stop deprives Worcester Line riders of some golden bus transfers.
** Riverside via Worcester Line the most obvious next target. Newton Corner infill after New Balance is built, Riverside cross-platform transfer, fix the awful existing Newton stops. Lots more crossovers so thru Worcester trains get an opportunity to pass a local at least once every 2 local stops. Replace most of the Pike express buses with this; it's more reliable, and more people will flock to the fixed route.
** Framingham. One of the biggest reasons to fix the godawful Worcester infrastructure. Another one with all-day walkup. If it's going to be a frequent short-turn, might even make sense peeling out at the junction onto the Fitchburg Secondary to a Framingham State U. +1-stop turnback for the short-turn schedule.

The issue with a Newton Corner stop is going to be similar to the problem at Waltham/128: road access to the site SUCKS. I've always been intrigued by the engineering feasibility of cutting a hole in the floor of the Gateway Center and using the existing hotel lobby as a pedestrian bridge to get people in there from both sides of the highway, since there's really no way to walk across the Circle of Death. That doesn't really address the bus access issue, though. How many buses do you really want flowing through that rotary all the time, pulling over to the curb to access a station?

I actually think a better idea might be to place the station slightly to the west, underneath the Church St. overpass. buses could come down Washington St. from Watertown, stop on an expanded Church St. overpass or on Richardson St, then use Center St. to rejoin the road system. It keeps the buses out of traffic as much as possible.

Frankly, the fact that there isn't a stop at Newton Corner is ridiculous. It not only fails that part of Newton, but prevents rail access to Watertown Square as well.

As for Framingham State, a stop there could also function as a park-and-ride from Route 9. The parking lot at Maynard and Salem End even looks like it was built to be one and is just missing the station. An extension of that service to a park-and-ride at 90/9 might not be a crazy idea, if you're going to use that line at all...