F-Line to Dudley
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- Nov 2, 2010
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Re: Silver Line to Chelsea (Study Meeting)
Space is a little tight there for fitting tracks + busway + station platform + ramps to street + those giant power line poles: http://goo.gl/maps/JFcfK. It probably wouldn't be a problem with LRT or if there were an obvious place to move the power lines that didn't put a gigantic-ass pole in somebody's backyard, but it's tight. And the commuter rail station relocation definitely wouldn't be able to go there at a combo stop, so they focused their energy at a site where both could go.
Also...somebody believes awfully hard in the TOD fairy at Mystic Mall's immaculately manicured asphalt expanses.
Easy access to the 111, 116, and 117 bus transfers loses out to the 112 and 114 at the Mall. In the real world the 111 (#7 in systemwide daily ridership), 116 (#17), and 117 (#26) outslug the 112 (#91) and 114 (#142) by a cosmically large margin. If the neighborhood had its druthers Washington-Broadway would be the preferred stop location hands-down. But the political interests behind it don't match up with the neighborhood's Yellow Line bread-and-butter, and ultimately the party that controls the money gets their way.
If LRT conversion happens in the future with a real Urban Ring, then Washington-Broadway is a pretty obvious infill stop. There's just a little too much engineering difficulty and short-attention-span political difficulty working against it for this relatively quick build. I'd roll eyes a little at the latter issue of bad habits being hard to break, but the former issue does have a legit impact on project costs...and thus, whether the project is viable to happen at all. In the end, building it at all does more good. There's nothing preventing them from figuring out infill stop scenarios at Washington-Broadway when they've got the service well-established and have the bandwidth to consider future tack-on improvements.
Space is a little tight there for fitting tracks + busway + station platform + ramps to street + those giant power line poles: http://goo.gl/maps/JFcfK. It probably wouldn't be a problem with LRT or if there were an obvious place to move the power lines that didn't put a gigantic-ass pole in somebody's backyard, but it's tight. And the commuter rail station relocation definitely wouldn't be able to go there at a combo stop, so they focused their energy at a site where both could go.
Also...somebody believes awfully hard in the TOD fairy at Mystic Mall's immaculately manicured asphalt expanses.
Easy access to the 111, 116, and 117 bus transfers loses out to the 112 and 114 at the Mall. In the real world the 111 (#7 in systemwide daily ridership), 116 (#17), and 117 (#26) outslug the 112 (#91) and 114 (#142) by a cosmically large margin. If the neighborhood had its druthers Washington-Broadway would be the preferred stop location hands-down. But the political interests behind it don't match up with the neighborhood's Yellow Line bread-and-butter, and ultimately the party that controls the money gets their way.If LRT conversion happens in the future with a real Urban Ring, then Washington-Broadway is a pretty obvious infill stop. There's just a little too much engineering difficulty and short-attention-span political difficulty working against it for this relatively quick build. I'd roll eyes a little at the latter issue of bad habits being hard to break, but the former issue does have a legit impact on project costs...and thus, whether the project is viable to happen at all. In the end, building it at all does more good. There's nothing preventing them from figuring out infill stop scenarios at Washington-Broadway when they've got the service well-established and have the bandwidth to consider future tack-on improvements.
