The Hub on Causeway (née TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

markhb said:
The T wanted the connection to be external??? Do they (at the upper management levels) spend their time conceiving new ways to torture people? Or do they own ad space between the Garden exit and the existing subway entrance?
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I heard that they wanted an outdoor connection a couple years ago during the Draft Environmental Impact Report review process - I have no idea where or who I heard it from.

I assume that they wanted to enliven the street by adding foot traffic, or they didn't see a way of doing it at-grade given the floor plans - at least those a couple of my best, and least evil, guesses.
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

Randomgear said:
I heard that they wanted an outdoor connection a couple years ago during the Draft Environmental Impact Report review process - I have no idea where or who I heard it from.

I assume that they wanted to enliven the street by adding foot traffic, or they didn't see a way of doing it at-grade given the floor plans - at least those a couple of my best, and least evil, guesses.
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Randomgear -- No -- it was all about Idiots who have been leading the T during the past decade who believed their Pravda-like babble about the "End of Winter as we've known it". Last winter proved to even the hardest core "True Believer" that there might occasionally be a benefit to having a climate-protected connection between the T and some of its major customer bases.

Without getting into the flip-side of the Climate Discussion that we should prepare for another Little Ice Age [mostly promulgated by Solar Astrophysicists] -- We should take advantage of all these Big New Projects to connect to the T wherever possible --we do live in New England after all.

In fact as part of the review process -- it should be the responsibility of the developer to make the case as why they should not connect their project into the Boston Pedestrian & T network

Boston should make Downtown Crossing with its coming next round of development to become Ground Zero for introducing an organized Montreal-like connectivity [RÉSO ou La Ville Souterraine]

montreal-reso-metro-stations.jpg



All of the core T Stations should be linked by pedestrian tunnels [longer runs with moving pedestrian walk ways] -- in addition to the weather proofing the pedestrian links would help to load balance and provide core redundancy at a small fraction of the cost of new T line tunnels
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

Nobody take the bait please. Thanks in advance.
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

Randomgear said:
I heard that they wanted an outdoor connection a couple years ago during the Draft Environmental Impact Report review process - I have no idea where or who I heard it from.

I assume that they wanted to enliven the street by adding foot traffic, or they didn't see a way of doing it at-grade given the floor plans - at least those a couple of my best, and least evil, guesses.
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One other not-evil guess came to me today: I could see them wanting the outside entrance if for some reason it were an either/or situation. I have no idea why it would be an either/or situation (inside or outside entrance but not both), but if it were then keeping the outside connection for the sake of visibility makes some sense.
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

This would probably finally be a game-changer for such a disappointing area.
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

Hopefully the line up at that T entrance isn't too bad after a game
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As is, the stairwells seem to funnel people pretty smoothly out of the building. And that's with the current configuration of having to go outside and go back into the subway.
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

underground said:
As is, the stairwells seem to funnel people pretty smoothly out of the building. And that's with the current configuration of having to go outside and go back into the subway.
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I disagree.

I've had Bruins season tickets for the better part of 20 years now and I take the Green Line for just about every mid-week home game. The route out of the East side of the Garden is a total cluster, starting from the bottom of the escalators down from the second level to the first floor. You fight through people coming down the east stairwells and heading towards the commuter rail, down the stairs and out to Legends Way where the concrete bollards create major obstructions to clean pedestrian traffic flow.

Then, once you fight through the phalanx of people who can't wait to light up their cigarettes as soon as they get outside, you have to fight through crowds of people either 1) Waiting for friends 2) Watching people drum on plastic buckets 3) Looking confused as to where to go for the trains.

Then, once you reach the GL/OL headhouse, you go down the stairs or escalator and immediately get funneled to the right because of the guy who's selling cheap crap in front of the elevator and people exiting the station.

And then you get stuck in a massive queue of people because people lining up for the CharlieCard machines back out into the lines waiting to get through the turnstiles. And of course, there's always people who don't have enough value on their cards that further delay the process. And if you're looking to make the incredibly infrequent outbound train to Lechmere, you're SOL more often than not because you're stuck 10 people deep and the one train that goes through North Station isn't going to wait for you. So it's another 20 minutes before you can get out of there.

Long story short, the new T connection is going to be great, particularly in inclement weather. But if the bottleneck downstream doesn't get rectified as well, it's just going to back up after major Garden events.
 
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Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

I just heard through the grapevine that the current North Station Head house might be demolished by christmas.
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

North Shore said:
I disagree.And then you get stuck in a massive queue of people because people lining up for the CharlieCard machines back out into the lines waiting to get through the turnstiles. And of course, there's always people who don't have enough value on their cards that further delay the process. And if you're looking to make the incredibly infrequent outbound train to Lechmere, you're SOL more often than not because you're stuck 10 people deep and the one train that goes through North Station isn't going to wait for you. So it's another 20 minutes before you can get out of there.
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I've wondered before why Fenway and the Garden don't have Charlie Card machines in the concourse the way Logan has them in the Terminals. I mean, the whole point of a electronic fare system with vending machines is that you can place them arbitrarily.

In fact, any business (hotels, movie theaters, etc.) should be able to host Charlie Card machines in exchange for covering the maintenance on them. It would make a huge difference at constrained stations like Central and Kendall.
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

Equilibria said:
I've wondered before why Fenway and the Garden don't have Charlie Card machines in the concourse the way Logan has them in the Terminals. I mean, the whole point of a electronic fare system with vending machines is that you can place them arbitrarily.

In fact, any business (hotels, movie theaters, etc.) should be able to host Charlie Card machines in exchange for covering the maintenance on them. It would make a huge difference at constrained stations like Central and Kendall.
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You'd think this would be the case (it should be the case), but God... you have no idea how much of a headache those FVMs are, even when they're going in actual T stations! The issue of who buys them, installs them and maintains them is always a sticking point during construction.
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

datadyne007 said:
You'd think this would be the case (it should be the case), but God... you have no idea how much of a headache those FVMs are, even when they're going in actual T stations! The issue of who owns them, installs them and maintains them is always a sticking point.
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For what it's worth (and to close this diversion from the thread) - there's an issue for Baker's financial committee. Contract the fare system out. The MBTA shouldn't be a financial institution or a vending machine company.
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

Equilibria said:
For what it's worth (and to close this diversion from the thread) - there's an issue for Baker's financial committee. Contract the fare system out. The MBTA shouldn't be a financial institution or a vending machine company.
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Hopefully I can close the loop on this aside...

The current fare system is at its halfway mark; the MBTA/MassDOT ultimately plan to join the rest of the modern world in another 7 years when the system is replaced. The hope is that 7 years down the road, contactless payment systems with smartphones and bank cards will have continued their harmonisation around a smaller number of proprietary and open standards. They can then approach someone like Cubic to buy off-the-shelf generic fare terminals that simply take your bank card. CharlieCards would then still only circulate as branded stored value debit cards for riders who can't otherwise open a bank account (or have fundamental issues with data anonymity and don't want to use their personal bank card to pay for fares).

This also liberates the T from effectively acting like a bank without necessarily having to completely contract out fare collection. Equipment also theoretically becomes cheaper and allows us to do things like putting readers on all Green Line train and bus doors for all door boarding and equipping commuter rail conductors with mobile POS devices unlike those in modern retail shops.

It then becomes arguably less important for FVMs to be more readily available across the city. We can argue that in the MBTA Customer Service thread... Though, I really like what Chicago was doing with the ChicagoCard (pre-Ventra) where you could walk into a supermarket and buy one pre-loaded with $20 for $25 and they'd rebate you the $5 onto the card as fare if you registered the card online; unsure if they're still doing that with Ventra - I'll find out next month when I visit.


More on-topic: if they're demoing the head house this early, surely they'll be opening the underground connection first or at least within a year of closure? What's a realistic time frame for that to open? There's still a lot of chaos with the Connect Historic Boston construction project. You're asking for a mess of trouble with hordes of people who now have to cross the Causeway Street construction zone during rush hour.
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

DigitalSciGuy said:
Hopefully I can close the loop on this aside...

The current fare system is at its halfway mark; the MBTA/MassDOT ultimately plan to join the rest of the modern world in another 7 years when the system is replaced. The hope is that 7 years down the road, contactless payment systems with smartphones and bank cards will have continued their harmonisation around a smaller number of proprietary and open standards. They can then approach someone like Cubic to buy off-the-shelf generic fare terminals that simply take your bank card. CharlieCards would then still only circulate as branded stored value debit cards for riders who can't otherwise open a bank account (or have fundamental issues with data anonymity and don't want to use their personal bank card to pay for fares).

This also liberates the T from effectively acting like a bank without necessarily having to completely contract out fare collection. Equipment also theoretically becomes cheaper and allows us to do things like putting readers on all Green Line train and bus doors for all door boarding and equipping commuter rail conductors with mobile POS devices unlike those in modern retail shops.

It then becomes arguably less important for FVMs to be more readily available across the city. We can argue that in the MBTA Customer Service thread... Though, I really like what Chicago was doing with the ChicagoCard (pre-Ventra) where you could walk into a supermarket and buy one pre-loaded with $20 for $25 and they'd rebate you the $5 onto the card as fare if you registered the card online; unsure if they're still doing that with Ventra - I'll find out next month when I visit.


More on-topic: if they're demoing the head house this early, surely they'll be opening the underground connection first or at least within a year of closure? What's a realistic time frame for that to open? There's still a lot of chaos with the Connect Historic Boston construction project. You're asking for a mess of trouble with hordes of people who now have to cross the Causeway Street construction zone during rush hour.
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Digi -- I'd argue that we've seen the near-term high-water mark for linking your global finances to a easily accessible card account -- too too many high-profile compromises

I suspect that what will happen is more Charlie with wide transit/transport utility
e.g.:
  • T all modes,
  • T and Logan Parking,
  • Turnpike and other future tolls
  • perhaps the DD's and other T shops and vending
but with limited access to the rest of your financial existence -- so that When not if the card system is compromised all that the bad guys will have is Charlie
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

whighlander said:
Digi -- I'd argue that we've seen the near-term high-water mark for linking your global finances to a easily accessible card account -- too too many high-profile compromises

I suspect that what will happen is more Charlie with wide transit/transport utility
e.g.:
  • T all modes,
  • T and Logan Parking,
  • Turnpike and other future tolls
  • perhaps the DD's and other T shops and vending
but with limited access to the rest of your financial existence -- so that When not if the card system is compromised all that the bad guys will have is Charlie
Click to expand...

I'm not stating conjecture, Whig - the T/MassDOT are actually formulating their strategy for what will come next after CharlieCard as they plan for the second half of the current system's lifetime. Those plans explicitly include moving to an open or more widely used proprietary payment standard, not continuing the expansion of a closed, expensive, bespoke payment system. Ventra in Chicago, TfL's acceptance of chip-enabled contactless bank cards in London, etc - these are all examples the T is planning to follow after. The standard is proprietary and bespoke, making equipment expensive to procure - CharlieCard will most definitely sunset and the powers that be want to divest themselves from the functions of a bank by moving to proliferating payment standards. For those concerned about privacy (or otherwise unable to open a bank account), a standalone pre-paid debit card will still exist in the place of today's transit agency-issued fare card. End of discussion.

If you want to chat more about the implications of a new fare system, I'd be happy to engage in the MBTA Customer Service thread.

To make penance for my transgression of further derailing the thread, I'll stop by during lunch and take photos.
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

Not the North End, boston.com
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

When in doubt, just say no to fat rectangles
 
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