Seaport Transportation

[George_Apley]

Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

That'd be a tall MF'ing monorail...

 

[Semass]

Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

About that monorail drinking game...

 

[AdamBC]

Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

About that monorail drinking game...

I'll only participate if the monorail is built to the new Patriots stadium in the Seaport.

 

[Arlington]

Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

That'd be a tall MF'ing monorail...

Which is why an aerial tram BBY to BCEC/Silver, at $100m is looking pretty good. London's moves 2,500 people per hour...about the equivalent of buses on 1-minute headways (without the bunching), and lower operating costs and 100% electric.

 

[AmericanFolkLegend]

Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

Which is why an aerial tram BBY to BCEC/Silver, at $100m is looking pretty good. London's moves 2,500 people per hour...about the equivalent of buses on 1-minute headways (without the bunching), and lower operating costs and 100% electric.

I actually think Arlington has a great idea. It's cheaper than any tunnel option and could be pitched as a tourist attraction. Probably not practical given NIMBY agita, but more realistic than a deep bore below (Pick Your Downtown) Street.

 

[novitiate]

Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

I actually think Arlington has a great idea. It's cheaper than any tunnel option and could be pitched as a tourist attraction. Probably not practical given NIMBY agita, but more realistic than a deep bore below (Pick Your Downtown) Street.

At the cost of never being able to build anything over the pike east of Back Bay.

 

[George_Apley]

Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

Arial trams make way more sense to me in a city with lots of elevation changes. Like Rio or something. Apparently London's works well, I don't know. I just see an airway that goes from one tidal flat region to another as a waste of a mode.

Again, you don't have to deep bore beneath Downtown streets (in fact, it's an engineering nightmare to even consider DBMs under downtown Boston), just get creative with routings that use cut/covers through areas that already cleared of unmarked utilities and other surprises.

 

[Arlington]

Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

At the cost of never being able to build anything over the pike east of Back Bay.

There's probably going to be some kind of "linear park" parallel to the Pike when the Pike gets eventually decked in that area, just like the Surface Artery and the Greenway, only straighter (because the Pike is straight). I dont see how a few pylons would keep them from doing just about anything they want to.

Again, you don't have to deep bore beneath Downtown streets (in fact, it's an engineering nightmare to even consider DBMs under downtown Boston), just get creative with routings that use cut/covers through areas that already cleared of unmarked utilities and other surprises.

Cut and cover is (apparently) fairly hit-or-miss from a soil standpoint, and one never knows what you're going to hit in the fill or utility-wise.

I recall that the reason they did Slurry Wall on the Big Dig was that Cut-and-Cover doesn't work well. The Dewey Sq Tunnel (build c. 1950? and now the Artery's southbound tunnel) was cut and cover, but given the softness of the fill dirt, required a much wider taking (clearing something like 2x the width of the tunnel...it was more like "trench, and build a box, and cover").

 

[fattony]

Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

At the cost of never being able to build anything over the pike east of Back Bay.

To my mind, that ends all discussion of an arial tram. Unless the poles can be relocated at will to maneuver around future developments.

?.. already cleared of unmarked utilities and other surprises.

Isn't there some public good to sorting out the utility nightmare downtown? Rather than avoiding problem areas, shouldn't we eagerly attack them? Get out in front of future problems lurking under Boston's most valuable properties? Or is there no problem if you never look?

PS. I'm not leading with that question, I honestly don't know much about utilities or the implications of changing or not changing ancient systems. I do know that subways get built in cities far older than Boston.

 

[George_Apley]

Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

Isn't there some public good to sorting out the utility nightmare downtown? Rather than avoiding problem areas, shouldn't we eagerly attack them? Get out in front of future problems lurking under Boston's most valuable properties? Or is there no problem if you never look?

PS. I'm not leading with that question, I honestly don't know much about utilities or the implications of changing or not changing ancient systems. I do know that subways get built in cities far older than Boston.

It's kind of a cost/benefit analysis. Right now it's not worth the disruption of tearing up every downtown street in old boston just to see what they find. As far as I know, utility firms know where all the modern used utilities are (although please correct me if I'm wrong). Old pipes, pilings, landfill debris, errant boulders, etc., would be nice to take stock of, but is it really worth the hassle, and the big big bucks to accomplish?

I would guess that very old cities that are building subways are situated on bedrock and can use a TBM to slide under the complex under-street levels. Most of Boston has no bedrock to be found for hundreds of meters below the surface, so TBMs are a no-go.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

Except in the immediate Back Bay fill landfill zone, it's not so much the soil. It's the totally undocumented crap that's buried in the soil. If there are scads of pre-1950 utilities under there...assume the exact locations of 20% of those lines are completely unknown. That was by far the biggest challenge of the Big Dig's construction. They had to poke around extremely delicately and find all this shit before they sliced it up, cut power or phone service to a street, totaled a 19th century water main or sewer that was still connected, or got a gas line all blowed up. Stuff like active telegraph lines strung at random and still connected to building fire boxes all throughout downtown. The sheer number they encountered for the CA/T was baffling...every worst-case estimate of number of undocumented utilities to ID and relocate was cosmically low vs. what they actually found. Look at how much trouble NStar perpetually has trying to troubleshoot grid issues downtown, or how long it took them to find where their trunkline went after the South End blackout a while back. Difficult enough when you're not sticking sharp objects into the ground to dig a 50 ft. hole under several blocks of street.


Then you have to consider the abutting building foundations and Copley elevator syndrome. Now, obviously 19th c. Back Bay landfill is going to do funkier and more unpredictable things to a dig out of sheer fact that the entire neighborhood is more or less sitting on wood stilts in the soil. But anywhere the tunnel footprint gets anywhere close to filling the road's footprint...watch out for buildings that abut the sidewalk. It's a crapshoot on which ones need to be mitigated and which ones don't. Sometimes it's the ancient masonry. Sometimes it's a tower with deep pilings. Sometimes it's digging by the tower with deep pilings making the seemingly unrelated old masonry foundation 3 doors down develop cracks. It's a virtual lock to blow the entire standard 40% cost overrun contingency and then some on nothing but utilities and shit-happens abutter mitigation. The tunnel itself is almost anticlimactic after all that pain.


That's why it pays to stick to tunneling in urban renewal land. Which can be your usual 1960's razed blocks or highway-cleared land, or just a street (Cambridge St., for instance) that was widened to some absurd degree after the auto era took hold. Those utilities are well-mapped. Chinatown?...I can't think of a single place worse in the entire city for "THAR BE DRAGONS!" surprises lurking below.

 

[wicked]

Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

Wouldn't the city and to some extent the utilities find it beneficial to tackle some areas on a piecemeal basis? Close one lane on a street for a week or two (OK, probably longer) and try to at least tackle some of these issues.

Is that unrealistic? I know the city has an archaeology team.

 

[George_Apley]

Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

Wouldn't the city and to some extent the utilities find it beneficial to tackle some areas on a piecemeal basis? Close one lane on a street for a week or two (OK, probably longer) and try to at least tackle some of these issues.

Is that unrealistic? I know the city has an archaeology team.

Yeah more than a couple of weeks I'd imagine. This would be a multi-decade project to get through all of downtown and document. Plus, a lot of this stuff isn't right under the street level, it's further down. How extensive are these documentation excursions going to be? Then, even if you have managed to document everything going on down there, you still can't do tunneling for a reasonable price. Those things will be known about, but they'll still be there, and you'll still have to mitigate for them when you're tunneling.

So would it be beneficial for the city and the utilities to know where everything is down there? Sure. Does anyone, from the city to the utilities to the state to the citizens want to spend the big bucks, and the inconvenience, to make it easier when there's an outage? No. We humans are very short-sighted with things like that. We put up with the Big Dig, but at least there's something obvious that was achieved from that, which everyone can see for themselves. Years of tearing up streets and covering them up again, with no guarantee that they'll sort anything out at all with the possible benefit of shorter power/phone/whatever interruptions in the future, is not something people notice or think is worth the trouble. It might not be a particularly good instinct, but it's real.

 

[Shepard]

Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

Shot in the dark here: are any of the pike tunnels under Fort Point of the underutilized HOV variety? I seem to recall yes. Could this new service use one of these ramp tunnels that emerge near where Haul Road crosses under Summer to bring it to the NEC? That would certainly be direct...

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

Shot in the dark here: are any of the pike tunnels under Fort Point of the underutilized HOV variety? I seem to recall yes. Could this new service use one of these ramp tunnels that emerge near where Haul Road crosses under Summer to bring it to the NEC? That would certainly be direct...

Same issue as with LRV's or trackless trolleys through the Ted...rails and/or wires on Interstate highways are a nightmare. Wires moreso because of the ventilation requirements. While there is no actual fine print in the Interstate highway standards prohibiting that (because nobody has ever talked about doing it), it's in enough violation of the spirit that the feds are going to take a strong "at your peril" stance against it. And the state won't cross the feds and the fed funding spigot for the Big Dig maint bill by trying their luck here. Theoretically it is possible to operate safely, but it's awfully ops-fugly and the arguments against are legitimate. SL1 is not the perfect mode, but once the transit tube was eliminated early in the Ted's planning it became the only acceptable mode. There are much bigger transit fish to fry than trying to force-feed a very flawed and high-liability application through here.


If you're talking the DMU plan through a highway tunnel...that would probably get turfed in tandem by both USDOT and the FRA. DMU vs. any auto in a rear-end collision on an interstate highway would be...doubleplusbad for the auto. And while plenty of street-running freight track exists in this country as well as some passenger (South Shore Line EMU's in Michigan City, IN)...it's orders of magnitude's difference between city street-running (usually with the tracks dating to the horse-and-buggy era) and state and/or fed highway street-running.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

Yeah more than a couple of weeks I'd imagine. This would be a multi-decade project to get through all of downtown and document. Plus, a lot of this stuff isn't right under the street level, it's further down. How extensive are these documentation excursions going to be? Then, even if you have managed to document everything going on down there, you still can't do tunneling for a reasonable price. Those things will be known about, but they'll still be there, and you'll still have to mitigate for them when you're tunneling.

So would it be beneficial for the city and the utilities to know where everything is down there? Sure. Does anyone, from the city to the utilities to the state to the citizens want to spend the big bucks, and the inconvenience, to make it easier when there's an outage? No. We humans are very short-sighted with things like that. We put up with the Big Dig, but at least there's something obvious that was achieved from that, which everyone can see for themselves. Years of tearing up streets and covering them up again, with no guarantee that they'll sort anything out at all with the possible benefit of shorter power/phone/whatever interruptions in the future, is not something people notice or think is worth the trouble. It might not be a particularly good instinct, but it's real.

Plus, it's not like these are really what-if questions about what's down there and whither "Could it really be that bad?". We did this a dozen years ago with the CA/T. It not only really was that bad, it was worse than anyone ever imagined. They have the random samples from city blocks intersecting the CA/T of what could be under there on any given trajectory. And the takeaway is that it was so non-linear you couldn't map it from point of origin to what they were looking at in the CA/T cut. The assumption is: it's like that everywhere under downtown.

That sets the bar. As the SL Phase III initial studies were largely completed before the Big Dig got the full scope of this mess, the cost bloat for utility relocation sailed and sank the project as the Big Dig was filling in that utility info. It's quite unlikely they ever would've chosen that route or the wider BRT tunnel if they knew that from the start.

 

[davem]

Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

If you look at page 259 of the garden towers PNF it gives a pretty clear example of what a mess just the KNOWN utilities are. And they had causeway dug up to bury the green line too. Essex, being a much older street is likely far, far worse.

I do still think that despite the headaches it would be worth the risk and $$ to dig under it anyway. Also if you look at this atlas which has the outline of the original shoreline, Essex is on the old peninsula, not fill. That would help slightly with stability.

 

[ant8904]

Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

So would it be beneficial for the city and the utilities to know where everything is down there? Sure. Does anyone, from the city to the utilities to the state to the citizens want to spend the big bucks, and the inconvenience, to make it easier when there's an outage? No. We humans are very short-sighted with things like that. We put up with the Big Dig, but at least there's something obvious that was achieved from that, which everyone can see for themselves. Years of tearing up streets and covering them up again, with no guarantee that they'll sort anything out at all with the possible benefit of shorter power/phone/whatever interruptions in the future, is not something people notice or think is worth the trouble. It might not be a particularly good instinct, but it's real.

Not really wanting to go off-topic, but I really like to know. What you just framed was a huge amount of cost and energy to document over decades for the gains of a few shorter power outage a year. That can be imagine hundreds to thousands of hours of collective disruption for decades to save a few hours a year. Unless you left something out, it does sounds like a reasonable calculation that the costs outweighs the gains (sadly).

 

[Shepard]

Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

Same issue as with LRV's or trackless trolleys through the Ted...rails and/or wires on Interstate highways are a nightmare. Wires moreso because of the ventilation requirements. While there is no actual fine print in the Interstate highway standards prohibiting that (because nobody has ever talked about doing it), it's in enough violation of the spirit that the feds are going to take a strong "at your peril" stance against it. And the state won't cross the feds and the fed funding spigot for the Big Dig maint bill by trying their luck here. Theoretically it is possible to operate safely, but it's awfully ops-fugly and the arguments against are legitimate. SL1 is not the perfect mode, but once the transit tube was eliminated early in the Ted's planning it became the only acceptable mode. There are much bigger transit fish to fry than trying to force-feed a very flawed and high-liability application through here.


If you're talking the DMU plan through a highway tunnel...that would probably get turfed in tandem by both USDOT and the FRA. DMU vs. any auto in a rear-end collision on an interstate highway would be...doubleplusbad for the auto. And while plenty of street-running freight track exists in this country as well as some passenger (South Shore Line EMU's in Michigan City, IN)...it's orders of magnitude's difference between city street-running (usually with the tracks dating to the horse-and-buggy era) and state and/or fed highway street-running.

I'm actually talking about taking an entire tunnel just for the transit mode. I can't follow the spaghetti of exits but there appear to be many multiple segmented tunnels down there (does one of them carry and underused HOV lane?) so in that case the transit wouldn't run in mixed traffic

 

[fattony]

Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

Not really wanting to go off-topic, but I really like to know. What you just framed was a huge amount of cost and energy to document over decades for the gains of a few shorter power outage a year. That can be imagine hundreds to thousands of hours of collective disruption for decades to save a few hours a year. Unless you left something out, it does sounds like a reasonable calculation that the costs outweighs the gains (sadly).

Well, you don't dig up the streets just to fix utilities. When you are done you have a subway which:

A) Links green line central subway to SS (CR, Amtrak)

B) Adds a red-green transfer to lighten the load on Park

C) Knits together a zillion of Boston's major business, hotel, tourist and entertainment districts (LMA, Fenway, BB, Theater, FiDi, Waterfront) with a single transfer to absolutely everywhere.

The question is: when you factor the benefits of fixed utilities into the equation, does the price of the subway look more attractive.