Urban Ring

[tangent]

You do realize that the CT#'s are the Urban Ring Phase I. And are not a ten-billion dollar project, like CT1, CT2, and CT3 weren't ten-billion dollar projects.

So when's the next CT5 coming? Inquiring minds in Chelsea want to know.

You do realize that is what I have been saying.... Urban ring done in segments as a bus route and a suggestion to use a barely used right of way to provide a bussway while retaining the existing rail.

You seem to have been arguing on the one hand that the Urban Ring is dead and anything short of a full rail build out is unworthy of discussion.

I think you are probably partly right. Urban Ring isn't ever going to get South of West Station

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

You do realize that is what I have been saying.... Urban ring done in segments as a bus route and a suggestion to use a barely used right of way to provide a bussway while retaining the existing rail.

You seem to have been arguing on the one hand that the Urban Ring is dead and anything short of a full rail build out is unworthy of discussion.

I think you are probably partly right. Urban Ring isn't ever going to get South of West Station

No.

1) We were talking about about your proposal to build bits and pieces of busways for cheap and do some sort of blended system. Quite a bit more than bits and pieces are needed before they can fashion any sort of route to run on it. It doesn't work dipping and diving on/off the street grid and re-purposing McGrath Highway, which isn't a transit corridor at all and doesn't bring you to any transit nodes. If you're going to build more segments of busway, the build to get a usable segment of busway for a consequential down payment on the Ring off- street grid is a megabucks project. Otherwise the totally on-street express bus is going to go faster every time vs. constantly back-tracking on/off little bits and chunks of discontinuous busway.

They studied every way to slice-and-dice the busway construction into smaller chunks. It's not implementable without real big chunks.


2) That pave-the-GJ-but-keep-the-tracks idea of yours. It doesn't work. Impossibly. It changes the track classification. The thing is used more than once a day every day, mostly in the daytime. It can't be used at night when street-running means blowing the horn at 5 MPH for 20 minutes straight. And federal regs are federal regs. You can't ask pretty please and "oh, do be reasonable" and walk out with an exemption. You have to prove a case against more than a half-century of caselaw. And that's not going to happen here because the corridor doesn't have any special characteristics that a federal regulatory body would deem has just cause for any sort of exemption.

You don't have to like that. You do need to acknowledge how infinitesimally small...to distraction...the odds are that a strictly national, strictly regulatory body is going to buy that argument. On the list of things the FRA needs to be more flexible on for encouraging first-world rail ops, street-running track is about #578. It's an ugly kludge, and first-world rail networks avoid new street-running mainline rail installations like the plague if it's not inside enclosed property like a shipping port or industrial park.

You can claim the Grand Junction whole for BRT without building the N-S Link if southside commuter rail is beefed up enough to live independent of equipment swaps more frequent than once or twice a week via Worcester-Ayer. But you can't split the difference.


^^These are the points that don't work. And they are all exclusive to Phase II. There is nothing preventing the Phase I rollout of the Crosstown buses--and their frequencies--to completion. But they canceled that. As an ops-only project entirely on-street...they canceled it all the same. CT1-2-3 are orphaned at far less than intended frequencies, with no inter- express network linkage. Ask them about it, they say it's dead. Until they start saying it's not dead, there is no more progress on the Urban Ring. Any aspect of it.

SL Gateway isn't CT5. It's not the start of an eventual Ring route. It's an independent project that just happens to scrape off the floor the only 1 mile of recyclable busway planning from the shelved plan that you can do something else with on short money. Picking up any other segments of Phase II busway is a megaproject. The on-street CT#'s? Not a megaproject at all...but just as dead, per the powers that be.

 

[tangent]

This is off topic somewhat, but from I've read FRA needs to reconsider more than the street running regs, but also the DMU regs which are preventing us from buying less expensive DMUs from outside the US because it isn't worth complying. DMUs/DEMUs would probably be an agreeable option for Grand Junction with a route from North Station to the new West Station with stops at Kendall and West MIT.

 

[Arlington]

I just want the SLX to keep being extended from Chelsea to Wellington or Sullivan Sq.

 

[cybah]

I just want the SLX to keep being extended from Chelsea to Wellington or Sullivan Sq.

I second that.. I am *always* going in that direction not the other. I swear I ride the 112 or 110/111 at least twice a week cuz I'm going to Wellington.

I still support SLG anyways, but I hope ridership goes up so they will considering in the near future. But as several people on here have already stated, the work that needs to be done in Everett along 16 is big $ !

 

[BostonUrbEx]

Too many walls of text here, but here's my take on things here:

North-of-the-Charles Urban Ring *at this time* must be a DMU and South-of-the-Charles Urban Ring pretty much has to be a subway. This is the ideal balance of current operational ability and capital investment. BRT applications are incredibly limited, particularly in Boston. SLG in Chelsea is a great starter, but again, a limited application. Widespread use of "BRT" will be anything but the "RT" portion -- it will kill off the project, "See, look how poorly it performs and it doesn't meet ridership expectations!"


North-side is easiest to tackle. Why use a mode which has to be segregated? If you're going to have a four-track ROW from Sullivan Sq to Chelsea, imagine the flexibility of mixing DMU's with commuter rail on four tracks versus commuter rail limited to two tracks and subway limited to two tracks. It also doesn't screw with the Coke Works freight in Everett.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Too many walls of text here, but here's my take on things here:

North-of-the-Charles Urban Ring *at this time* must be a DMU and South-of-the-Charles Urban Ring pretty much has to be a subway. This is the ideal balance of current operational ability and capital investment. BRT applications are incredibly limited, particularly in Boston. SLG in Chelsea is a great starter, but again, a limited application. Widespread use of "BRT" will be anything but the "RT" portion -- it will kill off the project, "See, look how poorly it performs and it doesn't meet ridership expectations!"


North-side is easiest to tackle. Why use a mode which has to be segregated? If you're going to have a four-track ROW from Sullivan Sq to Chelsea, imagine the flexibility of mixing DMU's with commuter rail on four tracks versus commuter rail limited to two tracks and subway limited to two tracks. It also doesn't screw with the Coke Works freight in Everett.

1) Because on RR mode the train--any train--gets 100% of the priority through grade crossings, and this is what kills the frequencies on the Grand Junction. If you had BRT or LRT, anything you run on the ROW can share traffic light cycles with the cars. This is perfect for Main and Broadway, because you just re-time a pre-existing light to insert a transit cycle and there is no adverse effect whatsoever to cars. On Mass Ave., still some problems, but enough of an improvement that you can hedge.

You can't do that as long as it's RR mode. Every movement along the tracks--a freight, a DMU, a T non-revenue lash-up--induces one full set of gate timings that can't be shortened or interrupted. At every crossing. So there's a sharp upper limit to frequencies before the effect on car--and bus on the 1 and CT2--queues becomes a worse side-effect than the cure. And it's probably a lot lower a frequency than they can run on any other Indigo branch. Which makes integration with the rest of the Indigo network at West and North Station dodgy because the frequencies are likely to trail all other Indigo routes by such a wide margin.




2) The interface around Boston Engine Terminal for north-to-south isn't equipped to handle this. You can't just take a bypass around the freight tracks and speed right onto the Eastern Route off the Grand Junction. It makes a royal mess of ALL northside rail operations to foul that many tracks. Not only does it maim commuter rail service reliability on all lines, but it imposes an even more uselessly steep cap on maximum DMU frequencies.

I suggest checking out the shouty RR.net thread on the Amtrak subforum about batty, foam-covered New York-Portland Downeaster routings that did exactly this around-the-horn dance of BET to skip North Station. And how many ops people chimed in detailing every single interlocking that would fuck up to impossibility. Impossible for ONE Amtrak round-trip per day.

There's a reason why nobody's studied exactly this type of intra-city use of track despite contiguous lengths of connecting track existing in the barest physical sense. It's the ops nonstarter of all ops nonstarters.




3) The key finding that came from the Worcester-North Station study on the Grand Junction was about frequencies, and while that was a conventional commuter rail study there's some conclusions in there applicable to Indigo frequencies and any notion of using Indigo on this particular corridor as a UR starter kit.

-- In the Worcester study travel time from to North Station with intermediate stop at Kendall on upgraded track was more or less a draw vs. to South Station with intermediates at Yawkey and Back Bay. Couple minutes longer on average. Grand Junction's sharpest curves and extra coasting time required in the northside terminal district for the funneling into the drawbridges gives southside a slight advantage.

-- The NS direct generated its most demand at peak hours when Orange from BBY-NS and Red from SS-Kendall were at their crapshootiest and most unreliable. That's probably even more true today than it was 5 years ago. Demand was pretty convincing.

-- Demand fell off the table at all other hours when Red and Orange were no longer under load. Travel times BBY-NS and SS-Kendall on the subway were within the +/- 2-5 min. margin of error vs. a commuter rail direct (margin of error particularly coming into play at Kendall because Red and GJ are far enough apart for walking distance to vary person-by-person). Riders preferred to pool towards the subway frequencies the hours the subway was functioning like it should.

-- (This is where it starts to matter for Indigo...) Demand on the Worcester Line at all off-peak hours was maximized by keeping the highest possible frequencies confined to a single routing, and let the highest-frequency transfers--Orange and Red--distribute the passengers. Rather than diluting inferior frequencies with one-seat forks.


What does this mean for Indigo?

-- If you're going to have a connecting leg on the GJ serve as a shuttle, mixer, distributor or alt. route scheme...it has to match the frequencies of what you're running on all the Indigo pieces it's connecting together. Otherwise passengers will opt every time for the subway transfer. So if the grade crossings impose a 22-25 min. ceiling on bi-directional frequencies vs. 15-18 minutes on the mainlines, that's 'THE' demand killer. Outside of peak Red/Orange rush hour despair people will opt for going straight to the terminal for nearest subway transfer, or (for Chelsea) straight onto SL Gateway via South Station.

-- It is worse to dilute anyone's frequencies for the sake of shivving in alt routings, so if some thru-routing from Allston to North Station dilutes to any degree service from Allston to South Station, the net result is going to be worse than if you just did all-trunkline, zero-diverging service. For same reason: Orange, Red, and Silver draw more all-day ridership the more they're all-day fed. Diverted trips to the northside hurt more than they help if frequencies aren't 1:1 compensated.

-- If the intent is to string it all together with thru-running on some northside routes for the 2024 map, the BET situation is a triple-whammy. Let's say for argument's sake that routing is even possible some of the time. Or reversing on-platform at NS is possible more-than some of the time. What's that peak headway going to be for "Indigo as proto-UR"? 30 minutes? 35 minutes? Now throw that on the pile of what we already know about frequencies GJ < mainline and see how this ends up answering a question no one is asking.


Frequencies matter. And that's why if the GJ isn't up-to-snuff on the RR mode for even providing the baseline frequencies all other mainline Indigo schedules can...it's going to be the very first cut from that 2024 map.

Also...fix Orange and Red, fix Orange and Red, fix @#$% Orange and Red. Because all the data points to doing THAT as the #1 "Indigo"-related investment that blows the roof off Indigo demand and utilization on the Worcester corridor and has the biggest cascading effects to all the other Indigo lines via Orange to the northside. Transfers that work are where you get it hauling some real butts in seats.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

I second that.. I am *always* going in that direction not the other. I swear I ride the 112 or 110/111 at least twice a week cuz I'm going to Wellington.

I still support SLG anyways, but I hope ridership goes up so they will considering in the near future. But as several people on here have already stated, the work that needs to be done in Everett along 16 is big $ !

Wellington or Sullivan is going to be a pain any which way even as an on-street routing off the busway @ Mall because it's a pick-your-poison of Broadway/Alford or Santilli/Route 16 and that's going to introduce so much variability in the schedule to Silver Line dispatch out of South Station that it'll probably end up harming headways on SL Gateway.

That's one of the reasons why this just can't approximate any portion of the UR...even "CT5"...well enough without the compromises starting to distort what Gateway does do well.


That said, Everett Casino is definitely a reasonable route extension or fork if the bus can exit the loop and shortcut its way past a couple traffic lights through the back of the Mall to hit Spruce then Beacham. Beacham is a straight shot to Broadway a block from the casino, and it's an empty truck route of a road. Up Broadway to downtown Everett or Santilli or down Broadway/Alford to Sullivan might be a stretch for dispatch, but you can definitely chain the "official" one-seat casino ride out of South Station and Airport Station on a bootstrap with this route. All comfortably within Silver/Transitway dispatch's margins. The collateral benefits to boosting the Chelsea headways for that are pretty nice. Solidifies the backbone of the service a bit more when the time comes, not to mention giving Chelsea's biz leaders a nice brainstorming assignment on how best to trap some tourists just passing through on a day at the casino to take a pit stop to explore Chelsea while they're in the neighborhood.

I think the only bit of planning required to make that happen when the casino opens is to square permission with the Mall owners for the shortcut around the back, because you really do want to pare down a couple traffic lights on Everett and Spruce with a shortcut for getting to Beacham. That shouldn't be hard to negotiate because the Mall has an absolutely absurd 7 egresses spread evenly all around the block.

 

[Blackdog]

Pretty new to this forum so sorry if these have already been asked.

How much would it cost to eliminate grade crossing on the GJ? I'm assuming the acceptable decline/incline for CR vs Subway is different, but by how much does it differ? Would this eliminate a lot of the problems with running the DMU's at a higher frequency and/or enable the Worcester line to run more frequently to North Station? Would eliminating the grade crossing be worth the investment?

Sorry for all the questions. Getting rid of the grade crossing seems like a no-brainer but I am sure I don't know the full picture!

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Pretty new to this forum so sorry if these have already been asked.

How much would it cost to eliminate grade crossing on the GJ? I'm assuming the acceptable decline/incline for CR vs Subway is different, but by how much does it differ? Would this eliminate a lot of the problems with running the DMU's at a higher frequency and/or enable the Worcester line to run more frequently to North Station? Would eliminating the grade crossing be worth the investment?

Sorry for all the questions. Getting rid of the grade crossing seems like a no-brainer but I am sure I don't know the full picture!

At maximum RR grades it's probably not possible to eliminate the ones that matter: Mass Ave., Main, and Broadway. The air rights building over the tracks on the Mass Ave.-Main St. block and the Red Line tunnel underneath Main are the limiters to going up or down.

The power plant overhang halfway between Mass Ave. and Main is only 350 ft. from the grade crossing, and because Mass Ave. is state Route 2A an overpass would have to be 16 ft tall per regulations for new installations on MassHighway roads. It would take a grade >4.5% to rise/fall 16 ft. in that span, which is more than 1% worse than the worst current grade any grade on any commuter rail line (Neponset River bridge on the Old Colony). 4.5% is hella steep, and the FRA isn't going to allow a new installation that does that. Mass Ave. overpass is out for a RR installation.

Main wouldn't be able to be eliminated at all because of the air rights overhang immediately at the crossing. Main elimination is out. Broadway is ~750 ft. from Main. That's within limits of worst grades on the commuter rail, but having the un-eliminable grade crossing on Main at the bottom of a steep grade up to a Broadway overpass is way too dicey on safe braking distance. FRA's extremely unlikely to allow that as a new installation, so Broadway elimination is out.

The other crossings at Binney, Cambridge, and Medford would all be eliminable, but they are least concern traffic-wise and will never be worth the money for such marginal benefit. So if you can't do anything about Mass Ave., Main, or Broadway there's no reason to allocate any resources to the others. Binney, though, you could probably just close outright, make into a pedestrian-only brick plaza, and only allow delivery vehicle access across.


The other option--going under--has its own fatal problems. . .

The Red Line tunnel passes directly underneath Main St. Trenching below it requires a very deep tunnel, probably >30 ft. deep to underpin Red. Maybe more. That's a very expensive dig because of the diesel ventilation issues of going that deep in a RR tunnel, and the taller height required of a RR tunnel vs. a subway tunnel. But worst of all are the waterproofing issues with tunneling in this specific location. Until the 1910's the Charles Basin's shoreline was Vassar St., and the Grand Junction ran its whole distance between the Charles River bridge and Main on a riverbank embankment. It was as close to the water as the Memorial Drive sidewalk is today. All of the MIT campus is landfill, and the Red tunnel more or less traces what was safely a few dozen feet into 'high and dry' territory back then, since it was built just a few years before the landfilling started.

So to trench the Grand Junction open-air under Mass Ave. then in a deep tunnel under Main and Broadway has serious waterproofing costs attached to it. Especially in an era where sea level rise impacts on the Charles Basin have to be pre-built into any new-construction subsurface engineering in the landfill zone. It runs the risk of the portals acting as a giant storm drain if the Basin is breached, and an inundated Grand Junction tunnel underneath the Red Line tunnel tunnel (which otherwise would stay dry because its Longfellow portal is pretty high up) puts Red at extreme risk of a breach where they cross. So the flood-proofing measures have to be very stringent indeed, and that's such a cost burden it kills any hope of affording any permutation of the tunnel option.


You'd spend a billion dollars less just beefing up southside commuter rail's equipment and maintenance independence from north-south swaps and grabbing the Grand Junction outright off the RR network with a straight conversion to BRT or LRT.

Switched to BRT or LRT you can share traffic light cycles with the roadways, something you can't do on a RR-based mode where the train has 100% of the right of way every time. On the RR the gate timings can't make any distinction between a big cumbersome freight, a passenger push-pull, or a small DMU. And that imposes the biggest traffic penalty at the crossings. With bus or trolley being able to share a cycle you can just tweak the traffic signals at Main and Broadway to insert a transit phase; the impact to existing traffic is near-nonexistent. Mass Ave. you could also insert a signal phase. It would still have some negative traffic impacts at the crossing, but not nearly as severe as with a RR that has 100% priority. Probably tolerable enough that you don't have to get rid of the crossing to run full Urban Ring frequencies as long as you're careful about how that light cycle is timed to clear out the traffic queue after a bus or trolley passes.

On trolley but probably not bus you could eliminate the Mass Ave. crossing with an overpass. They can climb much steeper inclines much faster, and since overhead clearance is shorter than what needs to be reserved on the RR it can start its ascent before it even exits the power plant overhang. It only takes the Green Line at Science Park 800 feet to come from underground to way up in the sky on the SP platform, and the B Line's incline only 500 ft. to shoot way up from level with the Kenmore platforms to daylight. So to rise only 16 ft. from ground level at the power plant overhang (or beginning inside of the overhang) to over Mass Ave. ends up less steep than those 2 other examples, and you're fine for outright eliminating that crossing. I'm not sure you'd be able to eliminate Mass Ave. crossing on BRT because bus ramp steepness--especially on a narrowish ROW--has to take into account safe grades for icy conditions. But as mentioned as long as it's a mode you can share traffic light cycles with--which BRT and LRT are, and RR is not--you can make it work in do-no-harm fashion to Mass Ave.

 

[bigeman312]

F-Line, I love the write-up. Very informative. It leaves one question un-answered, though, to my knowledge:

• Would it be possible to eliminate any of those grade crossings by altering the road, rather than the rail, grades?

Take Broadway, for example. Could the road be trenched (possibly in combination with a slight incline approach on the Grand Junction) to eliminate the grade crossing? Alternatively, could the road incline to a bridge over the Grand Junction (which might have a slight decline approach)?

Same question for Mass Ave.

Also, Main Street has the Red Line tunnel underneath, so that seams like the most difficult to do anything with at all. These may be undesirable outcomes, but I'm wondering about their technical feasibility.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

F-Line, I love the write-up. Very informative. It leaves one question un-answered, though, to my knowledge:

• Would it be possible to eliminate any of those grade crossings by altering the road, rather than the rail, grades?

Take Broadway, for example. Could the road be trenched (possibly in combination with a slight incline approach on the Grand Junction) to eliminate the grade crossing? Alternatively, could the road incline to a bridge over the Grand Junction (which might have a slight decline approach)?

Same question for Mass Ave.

Also, Main Street has the Red Line tunnel underneath, so that seams like the most difficult to do anything with at all. These may be undesirable outcomes, but I'm wondering about their technical feasibility.

Broadway...no. Tall buildings on all 4 corners would have their access screwed up by that. Especially Draper Labs which has a service driveway right at the intersection. Roadway's not wide enough to drop in a Storrow-style underpass with frontage roads for the turns unless you eat too much sidewalk space in front of these buildings to spread the frontage bow-legged for the middle-lane inclines. And doesn't take much thinking to know what a nonstarter that's going to be for MIT and the tech tenants.


Mass Ave.? Well...MIT thought of this. One of their campus master plans had a Crazy Campus Pitches proposal flung out there to sink Mass Ave. under a pedestrian plaza from Amherst St. to the other side of Albany St. with single-lane frontage ramps popping from underground up after the great big campus ped crosswalk for the turns onto Vassar and Albany. Then main roadway re-surfacing right after Albany. A me-too re-creation of the Broadway/Cambridge St. plaza at Harvard. That would eliminate the grade crossing for all but the low-volume frontage ramps popping back up for Vassar/Albany, eliminate 3 sets of lights for all thru traffic, and serve up an easy UR stop on the plaza. And they would bulldoze whatever they have to bulldoze like the short street-facing X dozen feet of the brick storage building to fit the frontage roads + ramps and the Paradise building on the corner of Albany to make the surface pop-up fit. Otherwise they have enough room for it all with their buildings set back enough from the street.

You can probably find this on Google or archived on MIT with pretty concept drawings. Would be pretty well buried on the site because this was like 8 or 10 years ago. But it was a Crazy Campus Pitches proposal they just flung out there as a concept with a few pretty renderings and no statement on feasibility. The expense for a 1300 ft. tunnel + pop-up ramps would be heinous. As would the EIS'ing for water intrusion from the Charles basin (though not nearly as much gets affected by drainage into a roadway as would if you tried to do the same on a much longer and deeper GJ cut and tunnel slipping underneath the Red Line with a likely station underground). And clearly they don't expect to pay for all or most of this, and expect MassHighway to be picking up a hefty chunk of the bill on this.


So in reality it was little more than throwing a wild-and-crazy concept out there for deep-future master plan brainstorming fodder. Chances of it actually happening are...maybe not zero-point-zero, but close enough. Nothing you would ever want to hang your hat on for UR planning timetables. Or even UR Crazy Pitches.

Go digging and check it out. It's interesting to imagine. But imagination is about all it is.




The Main/Broadway tunneling no-go and new sea level rise provisions that would have to be baked into a re-study seals the deal on ever doing an HRT Ring for Phase III with absolute 100% grade separation the whole way around. But that was probably impossible to begin with and begging for a not-recommended rating given the chances of the cross-Brookline tunnel passing muster and the lack of acceptable tunneling options on the south half of the Ring. LRT handles crossings, LRT can do 4-car lash-ups, Main/Broadway have pre-existing signal cycles to inocuously share, and every other crossing can be grade separated eventually for trolleys as described for Mass Ave. in the last post and Binney with an outright closure. Medford and Cambridge are ones you can do several years later on one-by-one basis as later, easily digestible funding shots come available. Why they would ever need heavy rail to run this thing is an existential question that really isn't being asked. So I bet any future re-study that scratches past Phase II into the ultra-deep future Phase III concepts is going to pitch the HRT alternative as a reeeeeeeeeal stretch with self-evident not-recommended rating, since LRT can cover 100% of the 50-year growth no problem.

 

[Blackdog]

Thanks F-Line, you the man. Couple follow up questions.

Is LRT fast enough for a full blown Urban Ring? Also could a DMU act a LRT, as in stopping to wait at mass ave? Or are DMU's acceleration not good enough to start and stop like LRT?

 

[bigeman312]

Existing Green line vehicles are all rated to a top speed of 50 mph or above. Track conditions, curves and stop spacing would be the limiting factor here. LRV itself is inherently "fast enough."

 

[JeffDowntown]

Thanks F-Line, you the man. Couple follow up questions.

Is LRT fast enough for a full blown Urban Ring? Also could a DMU act a LRT, as in stopping to wait at mass ave? Or are DMU's acceleration not good enough to start and stop like LRT?

I think the bigger problem with DMU is that they trigger the FRA regulations at crossings, so you get much less potential for signal coordination, etc.

 

[Semass]

In related news, a 16 mile segment of circumferential light rail project in the Maryland burbs of DC is advancing:
http://www.bizjournals.com/washington/news/2015/06/25/the-purple-line-is-a-go.html
http://www.purplelinemd.com/en/

 

[fattony]

I think the bigger problem with DMU is that they trigger the FRA regulations at crossings, so you get much less potential for signal coordination, etc.

Right. As I understand it, DMUs are railroad vehicles, subject to the rules and regs of railroads.

Trolleys, subways, etc are not connected to the common railroad network and therefor have completely separate rules and regs.

 

[BostonUrbEx]

1) Because on RR mode the train--any train--gets 100% of the priority through grade crossings, and this is what kills the frequencies on the Grand Junction. If you had BRT or LRT, anything you run on the ROW can share traffic light cycles with the cars. This is perfect for Main and Broadway, because you just re-time a pre-existing light to insert a transit cycle and there is no adverse effect whatsoever to cars. On Mass Ave., still some problems, but enough of an improvement that you can hedge.

You can't do that as long as it's RR mode. Every movement along the tracks--a freight, a DMU, a T non-revenue lash-up--induces one full set of gate timings that can't be shortened or interrupted. At every crossing. So there's a sharp upper limit to frequencies before the effect on car--and bus on the 1 and CT2--queues becomes a worse side-effect than the cure. And it's probably a lot lower a frequency than they can run on any other Indigo branch. Which makes integration with the rest of the Indigo network at West and North Station dodgy because the frequencies are likely to trail all other Indigo routes by such a wide margin.

Alright, we're going to get into Crazy Pitch levels here now. Put the tracks in a trench. Sure the real estate in Kendall Sq is worth trenching this corridor, particularly if the rail line is going to be a high-use, moderate-speed artery.

2) The interface around Boston Engine Terminal for north-to-south isn't equipped to handle this. You can't just take a bypass around the freight tracks and speed right onto the Eastern Route off the Grand Junction. It makes a royal mess of ALL northside rail operations to foul that many tracks. Not only does it maim commuter rail service reliability on all lines, but it imposes an even more uselessly steep cap on maximum DMU frequencies.

I suggest checking out the shouty RR.net thread on the Amtrak subforum about batty, foam-covered New York-Portland Downeaster routings that did exactly this around-the-horn dance of BET to skip North Station. And how many ops people chimed in detailing every single interlocking that would fuck up to impossibility. Impossible for ONE Amtrak round-trip per day.

There's a reason why nobody's studied exactly this type of intra-city use of track despite contiguous lengths of connecting track existing in the barest physical sense. It's the ops nonstarter of all ops nonstarters.

I honestly doubt the UR would be much damage considering the damage GLX is already doing. GLX is already hamstringing the place. However, let's say this (again, Crazy Pitch time in here!): Sullivan is redone (it needs it) and has three (or more) tracks for commuter rail and DMU UR. Let's also theorize that most north-of-Reading trains will be rerouted to the Wildcat by the time this comes to fruition. Let's also suggest we extend the Kendall trench all the way up to Swift, where the Grand Junction would pass *under* swift, then rise up to grade where the Willey Track currently lies (will be gone soon, anyway) and then proceeds to FX. Incredibly minimal damage to any ops with a trench under Swift.

 

[cybah]

Wellington or Sullivan is going to be a pain any which way even as an on-street routing off the busway @ Mall because it's a pick-your-poison of Broadway/Alford or Santilli/Route 16 and that's going to introduce so much variability in the schedule to Silver Line dispatch out of South Station that it'll probably end up harming headways on SL Gateway.

That's one of the reasons why this just can't approximate any portion of the UR...even "CT5"...well enough without the compromises starting to distort what Gateway does do well.


That said, Everett Casino ....

A couple of things.. As I've said in another thread, to build out the busway to third/2nd/opposite end of MB as an exit isn't a stretch. There was a graphic about it in the SLG meeting:

Just to the left the loop is 3rd street (or what's left of it). You could have the buses end there and use those side streets (with little traffic) to get the buses to 16. Once on 16, you could take a lane of 16 and run a busway up median of 16. Maybe put median-based stops at 2nd street @ RBP, and reconfigure Santilli for another median-based stop. (or create a flyover to the existing bus stop area by BestBuy). Of course this would require a rebuild of that section 16 probably (but it's very much due anyways!), and require it to become more pedestrian friendly (which it isn't even close to being one now).

This would avoid all the mess that costs $$$ associated with re-configuring the CR and Freight tracks. And yeah I know 16 would have some issues, but it's 3 lanes with zero parking on either side, so it can afford to give up one lane for a busway. And I think if was a dedicated lane with separation (pickets), it would help mitigate some of the headway woes.

And again the idea here is to build something with short money to provide service where there's limited or no service. (and on a off topic note, I've never understood why buses DONT run up and down 16 in a bus lane. It's perfect for a bus lane) PLus if ridership supports it, they can proceed with the more expensive option (via the RR line) in the future.

As far as the casino while I agree with much of what you say, I think if it ever gets built we are more likely to see a CR stop added than a UR stop. Mostly because of what you said (and of course the UR is just dead dead dead).

But one thing the T could do is add a bus lane to Alford Street from the rotary to Sullivan. Alford Street is already served by 3 semi-frequent bus routes, by adding a lane, it could improve these bus routes's headways and help service the casino (along with a CR stop)

(yeah yeah a little off topic but..)

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Thanks F-Line, you the man. Couple follow up questions.

Is LRT fast enough for a full blown Urban Ring? Also could a DMU act a LRT, as in stopping to wait at mass ave? Or are DMU's acceleration not good enough to start and stop like LRT?

Diesel DMU's never going to beat an electric vehicle--any electric vehicle--period, simply because it's diesel and has to carry the weight of fuel tanks and 2 internal combustion engines. The FRA-compliant ones the T would have to buy are heavier still with all the additional nimbleness penalties that entails. It's modestly better than a push-pull commuter rail set, but still in a different universe of bulkiness compared to a bus or LRV.

As noted, 50 MPH is the top speed for a Green Line trolley but you'll never get that fast out of a dead stop from Kendall before arriving at Mass Ave. station so it's moot here. Those speeds only get achieved on the outer D where the stops are far apart.

I think the bigger problem with DMU is that they trigger the FRA regulations at crossings, so you get much less potential for signal coordination, etc.

Yes. The only way around that is a time-separated operation like the RiverLINE, which can obey light rail traffic-sharing rules during the day when it's in "LRT mode". You would never be able to do that anywhere in Boston, though. One end of the Grand Junction interfaces with the Worcester Line, one end interfaces with the whole of the northside terminal district. One end of Fairmount interfaces with the whole of the southside terminal district, one end of Fairmount interfaces with passing freight traffic at Readville Yard. And you can't gerrymander it like "OK, when we're on the Grand Junction it's LRV rules and when we're off it it's RR rules." Traffic separation means the segment gets isolated from the RR network and nothing crosses between realms.

Alright, we're going to get into Crazy Pitch levels here now. Put the tracks in a trench. Sure the real estate in Kendall Sq is worth trenching this corridor, particularly if the rail line is going to be a high-use, moderate-speed artery.

Already covered that. It's impossible with the diesel ventilation and flood mitigation in an all-landfill zone in the Charles Basin floodplain, with the risk it would bring of a water breach in the GJ cut breaching the Red Line tunnel. At the extra $B-plus it would cost less than if you beefed up southside commuter rail equipment ops to independence from using the GJ and just took it for the Ring. Trying to tunnel that one against the obvious alternative is Transit OCD at its most unhinged.

I honestly doubt the UR would be much damage considering the damage GLX is already doing. GLX is already hamstringing the place. However, let's say this (again, Crazy Pitch time in here!): Sullivan is redone (it needs it) and has three (or more) tracks for commuter rail and DMU UR. Let's also theorize that most north-of-Reading trains will be rerouted to the Wildcat by the time this comes to fruition. Let's also suggest we extend the Kendall trench all the way up to Swift, where the Grand Junction would pass *under* swift, then rise up to grade where the Willey Track currently lies (will be gone soon, anyway) and then proceeds to FX. Incredibly minimal damage to any ops with a trench under Swift.

Did you consult the RR.net thread I pointed to? Listen to it straight from the ops guys' mouths how much it would fuck up FX and Swift. It's the nonstarter of all nonstarters. See also above on the Kendall trench. Wanna spend twice as much as the actual UR price tag? Keep target-fixating on this DMU scheme. It can't be done. It's so impossible they didn't study it at all for a reason.

As far as the casino while I agree with much of what you say, I think if it ever gets built we are more likely to see a CR stop added than a UR stop. Mostly because of what you said (and of course the UR is just dead dead dead).

Can't do this unfortunately. The casino's on the steep downgrade off the Mystic River Bridge, the second-steepest grade on the commuter rail system. Not a safe location for a station because of braking safety and the curve in the middle of the bridge obstructing the outbound view of anyone who may be wandering in the track area at the casino platform. There's also the issue of the bridge being a freight clearance route until the Everett Terminal trains turn out, so you would only be able to install a low platform with 1-car mini-high here. Which is too dangerous on an incline for passengers being able to wander into the track area. And awkward for ADA compliance because the slight slant makes it ham-fisted to line up the mini-high level with car #1's doors.

For these safety and awkwardness reasons it would never get approved. First available opportunity to stick a CR station is going to be way out by Santilli, which defeats the purpose of a casino stop. At that distance you're better off just going to Chelsea and taking the casino bus extension of SL Gateway. Or just picking up some Wynn private shuttle right at North Station.

Unfortunately proper casino stop is one of those nice things you can only get with the real Ring.