Re: Silver Line to Chelsea (Study Meeting)
I don't see how any service from South Station was ever going to be 2-4 years away when they aren't actively in the market for new Diesel-Electric vehicles. If you want to point to them not being serious about fast, wouldn't that be it?
Meanwhile, isn't the real fast-and-easy (no build?) trip one that grabbed some conventional-length and diesel-fueled buses to extended the 112 to from Wood Island to Airport+Seaport, or create 114/116/117 "A" variants that took the Eastie Haul Road to the Aiport+Seaport (terminating at Silver Line way...not needing electric...but also not able to be CNG for tunnel-safety)
True. But at least you can do a procurement in 3 years with the T owning the dual-mode design and it being all common-source parts. It is, like you put it, "assembly", not manufacturing. In essence, Neoplan committed honor suicide making the design so the next vendor could
profit on their design.
But the busway build next to an active ROW is still so involved that I have my doubts they could ever do this before the
order-after-next, nevermind the next order. Design, EIS, permitting, property acquisition, abutter mitigation...that's 10 years at minimum if it were funded tomorrow, if CT FasTrak on a ROW with very similar characteristics is any indicator. And they not only can't fund it with their current financial situation, but they have no means of making a reliable estimate of how much it'll cost. The studies will take 5 years to flesh that out, and the CT FasTrak damage bill will be climbing all that time.
Keep in mind, this is almost a straight rehash of the Urban Ring Phase II busway...which was killed before any portion of it proceeded to engineering study. That was realistically a build that BEFORE it was killed wouldn't have gotten underway with shovels in ground on the first small discrete sections of busway until 2020, and take many years of all-out assault and many billions to string into a contiguous network. And now we've lost over half a decade on that schedule. The UR was such an enormous study job unto itself that it was preceded by an entire street-running only express Phase I of express buses before the first stretch of dedicated busway ever opened. And they bailed on it all.
Simply cherry-picking one-half of one Ring quadrant today with 4 instead of 11 full-build BRT stations does not speed up the build by the orders of magnitude you'd think. It requires making up 5 years of lost progress on the UR design all the same. Only instead of getting the full might of study and engineering resources doing an all-out assault for the entire Lechmere-Airport quadrant's design, it's a scaled back and cash-poor fraction of the manpower and study resources that has to fight for drips and dribbles of funding to incrementally advance. Meaning individual steps are going to take a lot longer to do with reduced manpower and require lots of pauses while they seek more funding. The shorter length and not having to design the Mystic crossing, Everett station(s), and Orange/Green transfers doesn't necessarily speed it up when you've got the same busway ROW constraints to solve for as the UR design that would've had an all-out resources assault and easily 3x the personnel and funding working on those same issues in one blast. I doubt the design timetable for a one-eighth Ring Chelsea busway is going to be much different than what it would've been for a one-fourth Ring Chelsea busway given the resource disparity and the lost time that makes the original UR scoping more or less a do-over here.
And there's no UR Phase I equivalent plan to bridge the gap with express street buses here. What does that suggest about its odds and commitment? Very poor before 2025. Majority chance it'll never happen. Without a stopgap, Chelsea's transit problems fester and boil for another open-ended dozen years all the same even if the Transitway gets a badly needed infusion of new equipment by 2017.
As for plain diesels...yeah, that would be a great idea. Unfortunately they're also way short on 60-footers in general with only 69 of them in the fleet and not nearly enough to go around on the crush-load downtown routes. The financial death blow to Neoplan was actually them canceling the remainder of their CNG articulateds order in '04. They ordered another 25 regular-diesel articulateds in 2010 from New Flyer, but that was only a supplemental to approximate what the original Neoplan fleet should've been had they not canceled the order. Everything new they've bought in the last 10 years has just been rolling replacements for the remaining high-floor buses. They haven't really done any fleet expansion since the original 60-footer order, and right now they are sending the 60-footers and CNG buses out for midlife overhaul. They're halfway through their lifespans and will themselves have to be have a programmed replacement by FY2020-2022.
So...where can they find the bodies to loop from Chelsea streets to SL Way? Not with the 60-footers. Definitely not when 44 of them are CNG and banned from riding through the Ted. And how many can the rest of the fleet spare with a decade of completely flat fleet numbers? Probably not enough to put a meaningful dent.
They've kept up on rehab and programmed replacements better with the bus fleet than the rail fleet, but where's the money to expand service? It hasn't been there since the Silver Line opened, and it's not there in the Transportation Bill the Legislature slashed way back when so much of the vehicle money has to get chewed up by the dire Orange and Red Line situations. It wouldn't take much money to add vehicles to serve express buses as a Chelsea Phase I or to substantially increase local bus frequencies...but they have no apparent will to do that. The fleet size is treading water. They're cutting bus service of late--disproportionately on the expresses--not expanding. And bailing in total on the CT4-CT11 rollout that was supposed to be Urban Ring Phase I and letting CT1-CT3 rot into obscurity signals utter indifference to addressing high-capacity expresses on the ops side.
They want to chase shiny things and build monuments, and to not be hard-bound to follow through on them. The complete and total absence of any easy ops-based solutions in easy reach, absence of any effort to bridge the gap before their fantasy builds, and a decade of keeping their bus capacity completely flat signals a lot about their intent. Signals a lot before you even start fingering them for other similar commitments they backed out of. I'm not convinced this is real until it's got supporting evidence of commitment. There is very very little of that to go around. Even the Key Routes project isn't so much of a capacity enhancer as it is warding off more route performance decay on routes that are already suffering from overcongestion. The signs of any will to do a real capacity and service scale-up are lacking. The only reason the Silver Line is getting much attention of late has been almost entirely the BCEC swinging the big stick, and even that has gone almost entirely without comment from the MBTA itself.
