I've never disagreed with your arguments about all-day demand, but I do believe that a large number of people get screwed here. Commuting by GL from Needham to Downtown Boston simply is not an option most Needham commuters will abide, and they will drive. That result flies in the face of a lot of what transit extensions are meant to achieve, particularly as Roslindale and W. Roxbury residents probably commute largely by transit (bus and CR) as is.
This might be the rare transit project that results in a net increase in driving across the system, which just seems silly to me. You're sacrificing the survival of a genuine suburban transit success story for the convenience of inner city residents or the operational efficiency of the resulting service. That's just not a case I'd like to have to make to Needham residents.
Now, there's all sorts of benefits to doing these conversions, no doubt. Making Highland Ave/Needham St. a genuine Light Rail transit-oriented corridor is frankly far more important than 128 park-and-ride. Providing connections between neighborhoods in a fairly linear town is another. The benefits to Rozzie and West Roxbury have been covered to death. I'm just not willing to rob thousands of commuters of their transit options without at least considering what can be done to keep them served (the Great Plain stop would accomplish this...)
Which is why I said: study it. But understand that there is real iffiness in the all-day utilization that could result in an untenable lead weight on operating costs if they cannot attract OL riders west of W. Rox for more than the 2 commute peaks.
Take all the rapid transit stops that have >500 parking spots and count the number of bus transfers:
-- Alewife (2733 spaces; 9 buses)
-- Quincy Adams (2538 spaces; 2 buses)
-- Wonderland (1862 spaces; 12 buses)
-- Braintree (1322 spaces; 2 buses + Logan Express)
-- Wellington (1316 spaces; 10 buses)
-- North Station (1275 spaces; 1 bus, 2 rapid transit lines, CR/Amtrak terminal)
-- North Quincy (1206 spaces; 3 buses)
-- Quincy Ctr. (872 spaces; 15 buses)
-- Riverside (925 spaces; 3 buses + various 128 corporate shuttles)
-- Oak Grove (788 spaces; 4 buses)
-- Wollaston (550 spaces; 2 buses)
-- Woodland (548 spaces; 1 MWRTA Framingham shuttle)
For potential rapid transit extensions likely to have Top 10 parking capacity: Lynn has 965 spaces and 10 buses, and Needham Highlands/128 has 1 bus + a 128 business shuttle. Your likely Great Plain/128 OL stop almost certainly will have no fewer than 1200 spaces and potentially close to 2000 given the agency's extreme tilt to parking capacity. But 0 buses...0 potential buses because of the street grid orientation...and likely not even a 128 business shuttle because the stop would be significantly further from the exit than all other rapid transit and CR stations on 128 and the only station in the bunch that's on a signaled ramp instead of a free-flowing cloverleaf/merge.
It is THE outlier. Even when lumping Westwood and Anderson CR stations in the mix + potential Waltham/Exit 26, Quannapowit/Exit 39, and Peabody/North Shore CR infills: all of those have at least 1 T, regional RTA, and/or Logan Express bus serving them. Dedham Corporate and itty-bitty Hersey (which would be displaced by this OL stop) are the only ones currently without connections. You have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt with numbers that this stop is going to get boardings more than three dozen hours a week when it has zero outside transit connectivity and zero TOD potential to anchor it the other 100-something service hours of the week where it's getting trains once every 10-15 mins. on average. If it's not there, and Junction is going to be a primary N-S, > three-quarters Green-oriented station from lack of parking...how can the T afford to run empty trains on 4 miles of track, run the extra equipment required, and staff/maintain one supersize parking sink that is making back only a nickel on the dollar that much of the time? They can't. There is no stretch of track on the system that would be in the same universe as an ops cost sink.
We criticize the south-of-Taunton South Coast FAIL stops for their abysmal cost recovery and service that doesn't fit those cities' natural travel patterns. And that's CR, where the mode primarily serves the peak. This is rapid transit, where the mode primarily serves all-day density. How do you justify one loss-leading anvil on the mode but not the other? The only argument that keeps either afloat is convenience for a small subset of riders valuing the one-seat, some sort of nebulous 'manifest destiny'. They each fail their mode for the same general reason of not conforming to the ridership profile that justifies each mode.
I will gladly be proven wrong on this if new study numbers show something different that all the decades prior in-depth study numbers don't show. The time to do that is after a Phase 1 OL to Rozzie/W. Rox + Green to Junction w/the Highlands park-and-ride cements service for the frequency-serving-density need that has been justified for 70 years by hard numbers. Then wait and see if that spurs demand in the gap before making a further commitment. It absolutely might be there, and we just can't tell yet because the all-important frequencies don't yet exist in the densest areas to tease out every indirect consequence.
But you can't commit without numbers strongly and unequivocally supporting how THE system outlier will overpower its isolation to all-day connections and perform in spite of those limitations. You can't float that commitment on anecdoteal hypotheses, and a lot of "I think. . ." or "This would be nice to have. . .", or "People might prefer this". Those hypothesis can't be substantiated by the "convenience" of the CR system's single most limited schedule, car traffic that skews far away from there, and a century of bus/streetcar service around the city has never produced a route through there or a peep about demand for one. Those are the hard empirical facts that justification for this build has to OVERPOWER with some new finding that has changed in the last couple decades since this was last studied in depth. And the one-of-these-is-not-like-the-others profile of that 128 stop's connectivity isolation is what that evidence has to overpower.
If it's there, awesome. But it would be a disaster to hedge on anecdotes and "I thinks. . ." for a loss leader that bleeds the OL dry on the ops side. That is anything but low-hanging fruit. And it would be a travesty to hold up the 7-decades-proven demand for the W. Rox and GL flanks over Transit OCD completism for that connecting flank. De-couple it entirely from the neighborhood extensions, build those two highest-demand flanks, then study and see what's there. Anything better in the dense neighborhoods is a net-gain for all not worth holding up for net-gainier-for-some completism. The ones who "think" they prefer a fast downtown one-seat over all else are probably in large numbers going to be pleasantly surprised when they no longer have to plan their lives around a CR train that only runs every 45 minutes to 2 hours a paltry 5 days a week. Being able to show up any time they please without a care or thought in the world and catch a train at Junction, Center, Heights, Highlands/128 every 7-20 minutes, 19 hours a day, 365 days a year has--in the studies to-date--far outstripped the demand for equivalent express travel time vs. the shitty CR schedule. If there is more to that story...prove it with the same data-collecting comprehensiveness as demand for frequency has been proven.
There's nothing controversial about that. If the demand is there, it's self-evident that they should go to 128. But find the demand...find it where it hasn't shown itself before...before fretting about those extra 4 miles of OL track and that massive parking garage in Cutler Park. That's the difference between smart growth and Transit OCD.
