Seaport Transportation

JohnAKeith said:
Exciting news from the mouth of Bev Scott. At tonight's South Boston Waterfront Sustainable Transportation Plan meeting, she told me that the MBTA plans on putting the RFP for the Back Bay / Seaport DMU "on the street" by December - meaning, out for bid. She told me it would take a long time to get the project to completion. When I whined, "Oh, like two to three years??!" she responded, "Oh, no, like four."

Hooray!
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Because, what the convention center wants, convention center gets.
 
Let's hope they actually propose placing the station in front of the convention center, close enough to an existing Silver Line so that there's a connectio... ahahahahha, who am I kidding?

They're going to throw the DMU station on the far side of the convention center as planned, just so no one else in the neighborhood will ever want to use it.
 
Huzzah for b.s. half-measures that will fail by design!
 
Did anyone ... anyone ... ask about the damned D street light?
 
JohnAKeith said:
Exciting news from the mouth of Bev Scott. At tonight's South Boston Waterfront Sustainable Transportation Plan meeting, she told me that the MBTA plans on putting the RFP for the Back Bay / Seaport DMU "on the street" by December - meaning, out for bid. She told me it would take a long time to get the project to completion. When I whined, "Oh, like two to three years??!" she responded, "Oh, no, like four."

Hooray!
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Was she talking about an RFP for the cars, which we know from the Fairmount Line discussion is indeed underway, or was she talking about an infrastructure construction contract for the station, track/signal upgrades, etc?
 
Has a "D Street light" ever been mentioned? Do you mean, light rail?
 
^ Preemptively place your palm in front of your face
 
Matthew said:
Did anyone ... anyone ... ask about the damned D street light?
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This, along with the embarrassing state of the concrete in the tunnel are two subjects that are less likely to be mentioned than rebuilding the Atlantic St. El.
 
A great overview of all current seaport transportation issues:
Oct 16th Globe

I suggest putting a toll on the South Boston Haul Road and opening it up to all traffic. Use dynamic tolling to keep it uncongested. Use the $ from the toll to pay for Seaport Projects (#1 would be SIlver Tunnel Under D)

17waterfront.jpg
 
T under D: why not spend $500 million in tunneling costs to achieve what $5,000 in signal equipment can do?
 
Matthew said:
T under D: why not spend $500 million in tunneling costs to achieve what $5,000 in signal equipment can do?
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I see the point: Organization before Electronics before Concrete, but we also know that the costs aren't quite as divergent as a factor of 100,000x

If quad gates cost $1m (to create quite zones at RR crossings), something tells me that signals are not going to be $5k
 
Fair enough. I believe that the traffic signal already has the modern hardware installed that is capable of signal priority. Unlike quad gates, nobody is going to die if it is not totally fail safe -- plus there's little to no hardware installation needed beyond a bus detector and some wiring.

Let's call it $50,000 perhaps, vs $250 million. Because honestly, I have no faith in the ability of MassDOT to build a simple bus tunnel underneath an active ROW for anything less than an exorbitant cost.
 
How would a d street tunnel connect to the Ted? If it has to come up and loop around to go in via the seaport again I feel like it's literally just kicking the can down the road. The back track in traffic loop is still idiotic.

Also, if people were thinking holistically, a red blue connection at Charles would open up a lot of silver line capacity to the airport, which is currently near crush a lot.
 
Ugh. Red/Blue does all kinds of great stuff for the system. So of course the state has cancelled the project. How long would it take to get it going again if they decided to redo all the studies and actually get this done?
 
choo said:
How would a d street tunnel connect to the Ted? If it has to come up and loop around to go in via the seaport again I feel like it's literally just kicking the can down the road. The back track in traffic loop is still idiotic.
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Mostly folks talk of just enough to tunnel get across D and rise up while under the Manulife building.

The SL still has to dwell someplace to switch from poles-wires to diesel, so some kind of stop-with-changeover is going to be there until bus tech changes.

I wish they would have kept the "off-and-up ramp" exit from the Ted that was there temporarily from 1995 - 2000. A tunnel to exit from there to an underground changeover would be dreamy.

To Matthew's point, signal priority at D is a cheap "virtual tunnel through traffic" and probably what we should be pushing hard for.
 
That graphic is missing 'add a parking garage with 750 subsidized parking spaces in a prominent location in the heart of the district'
 
Dorchester Ave is a no-brainer. Cars from Southie are forced to pass through the Seaport to get to anywhere near Dewey Square if they don't want to detour through the South End.
 
Matthew said:
Let's call it $50,000 perhaps, vs $250 million. Because honestly, I have no faith in the ability of MassDOT to build a simple bus tunnel underneath an active ROW for anything less than an exorbitant cost.
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The Huntington Tunnel under Mass Ave (or if you prefer, the Mass Ave bridge over Huntington) is currently being replaced for <$5M. Why would the D Street tunnel cost 50x as much?
 
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