Multiple options for street run to Sullivan. They should be talking about dedicated BRT lanes for the grounding the McGrath highway planning.
McGrath/O'Brien isn't much of a bus corridor. The 87 out of Lechmere makes only 2 stops on it before turning out at Somerville Ave. to Union; 80 and 88 out of Lechmere make only 3 stops on it before turning out at Medford St.. And those are the routes that are going to see the biggest changes in ridership away from that corridor when GLX Union and Washington open.
The Sullivan routes all intersect it at Washington or Broadway. McGrath doesn't interface with Sullivan at all or trap any of those routes into an effective conduit, because McGrath doesn't connect any square-to-square travel patterns. The whole parkway is strictly a creation of the auto era for reaching the suburbs nonstop; it was proto- I-93. There's no BRT corridor to make of it because GLX immediately paralleling it, and Washington and Broadway intersecting it are the sum total of square-to-square routes. It doesn't go where the transit trips go.
Just because it's wide doesn't mean it's a ready-made transit corridor in the making. If the MDC hadn't mistaken itself for a highway-building agency in the 1930's it's a road that wouldn't exist in any way, shape, or form because 93 would've come along all the same 20 years later as the much better means of skipping over Somerville to get in/out of Boston.
Too many at grade crossings and too expensive to do a trolley. How many decades has GLX taken and still counting? Another GLX branch to West Station would take 40 years to work out.
And defeatism makes a BRT Urban Ring happen faster...how? Hate to break it to you, but they already pulled the cut-and-run on both the Crosstown bus network that was Phase I of the UR and further planning on Phase II. It's not proceeding at all. Silver Gateway is not an intended first step on the UR, as much as it should be. It's only happening because Eastie Haul Road was pre-built for trucks with all-Massport money doing the more expensive half the build work to the Mall, so the modest construction cost is low-hanging fruit for improving access to nearly inaccessible Chelsea. If it were intended as a down payment on the UR they wouldn't have stuffed the whole rest of the study in a file cabinet, taken down the UR website, left it off the TIP, and forgotten that the CT4 thru CT9 implementation plans that should've been implemented 12 years ago ever existed on paper. They put their head firmly in the sand on phasing the UR. Just because that head is twitching here doesn't mean it's coming out of the sand as far as corridor-wide planning is concerned.
Also, don't bet on this busway ever being extended 1 inch further west into Everett. That's where construction gets even more expensive with the flyover ramps required to get around the freight junction. Not even the casino has enough juice to push that along.
A bit of asphalt, a few traffic lights and a few buses and you have yourself a critical segment of the urban ring in three years partially funded by MIT and Kendall businesses. And you can still run your trains at night like they do now. The Urban ring is getting built... It is just being done in phases as BRT.
See above. That's not what's happening at all, and not how this is being pitched. The Urban Ring isn't spoken of by name any more.
The grade crossings can technically stay and not have a huge impact on service especially if signal priority is used as you say it would be for BRT on the same route. Also the stations can be simpler if they decide that is feasible and just use a POP system instead of prepay and again provide equal service to the other light rail branches. It just makes a lot more sense especially since the upper capacity limit of BRT would become an issue since the Kendall/MIT area is Cambridge's downtown and is becoming denser.
This is correct. The problem with the Grand Junction right now, and why the Indigo plan for it is such a nonstarter, is that traffic priority can't be shared between modes: the railroad gets 100% of the crossing priority. On LRT or BRT you can tie the transit line into the roadway signal cycle. For Main and Broadway, since it's at an existing signal, that works perfectly. Mass Ave...still some disruption...but not the same as with a train. With a RR the inability to share imposes a sharp upper limit on frequencies before it starts doing more harm than good to overall congestion (e.g. with the 1 and CT1, which carry more riders than Indigo ever will). And that ceiling gets hit well before the frequencies can get high enough to make that big a difference around Kendall.
What they studied for Worcester Line-North Station commuter rail is pretty much the only thing that would work on the current mode. 5 rush hour trips in the commute direction the hours Red out of SS and Orange out of BBY are at their most congested were the only times of day it made sense. Every other hour of the day when the subway wasn't suffering under load the travel times on a subway transfer out of BBY and SS were nearly equal to the one-seat and demand ended up being worse diluting CR service with a fork at West to 2 terminals vs. keeping the stiffest possible off-peak headways to 1 terminal only.
That's going to end up ringing true on an Indigo branch when that branch is probably going to fall a lot closer to 25-30 min. frequencies through those gates than the 15-20 doable on the higher-capacity lines. They end up better off keeping stiffer BBY/SS-only frequencies to Allston and fixing @#$% Orange and Red so their performance stops collapsing under load. Frequencies matter, and on that corridor you can't hit the frequency threshold without conversion to LRT or BRT mode. Beware any statements from spokesflaks who try to pitch Indigo as some sort of "good enough" analogue for the Ring. The best headways they can do within the constraints of not being able to share signaling is nowhere near good enough for more than a drop in the bucket and useful niche for its low cost. It doesn't save a single Red Line or bus trips; those keep growing much too fast for any permutation of Grand Junction choo-choo to have an effect. You would only see real load-shifting movement and some semblance of a 'corridor' take shape with a total change in modes off the RR.
Why can't you keep the rail? Just build the busway around the rail. There has to be a good/better way for tracks and road to commingle where there isn't room to have them side by side. Grand Junction is currently only used at night for moving trains around.
CSX runs to Everett mid-afternoon 6 days a week. The T's north-south equipment swaps happen any hour of the day on-demand, but usually during daytime off-peaks when BET is fully-staffed. I don't known when Amtrak does Downeaster equipment moves these days. For at least a couple years you could always walk to Kendall after work and see Amtrak go by at 6:00pm Friday on-the-dot. Nighttime moves are rarest. What staff is assigned to the graveyard shift is at premium for track work out the field or repairs indoor in the shop, not shunting stuff around or making dispatch work non-revenue hours. There's good reason they set their equipment balance in the daytime and evening off-peaks and not overnights.
The tracks provide the only North South link through the city, so they need to stay. But trolleys have been sharing roads for a century. I know there are maintenance issues with tracks embedded in roads, but having dual mode rail/road infrastructure gives us the flexibility to utilize either type of vehicle depending on needs and resources available.
Are you talking paving the Grand Junction for street-running RR tracks? That doesn't work. Under FRA regs it stops being a branchline under those circumstances and gets grouped under the same regulatory authority as industrial tracks. Limits to what it can carry, limits to speeds, etc. And regulations that the train must constantly be blowing the horn while it is in mixed traffic, which puts a giant damper on any chance of segregating train traffic through the heart of Cambridge to the graveyard shift. The only place in the country that has an exemption to the regs on this is the South Shore Line's hundred year old street-running segment in Michigan City, IN which officials have desperately been trying to get rid of for decades. Everywhere else street-running RR's are something you only see in industrial parks, ports, and really short-length anachronisms. It's not practical to do. Functionally it seals any chance of that "only North South link through the city" ever being used, and boots the equipment swaps out to Worcester County all the same.
There's no dual use to be had with the current mode. The ROW isn't wide enough for busway next to rails, and paving means the rails are gone...functionally or literally. You're either building the Urban Ring or you're not. There's no half-step or RR mode sharing as far as the Grand Junction is concerned.
You
can absolutely share modes between BRT and LRT. That's exactly what the Transitway was envisioned for. The UR was never envisioned to be a route mixer of diverging routes...just a single ride tying together all of the critical transfer points on the system with quadrant-to-quadrant turnover in the ridership. So you really wouldn't approach the build as a "we need both BRT and LRT to share". There aren't any plausible scenarios where it would need to share that end up juicy enough to spend even more on a dual-mode Ring. That said, for the very short length of busway they're building in Chelsea it's no big deal to lay tracks if they choose to make the rest of the circuit rail. And yes, you could keep the existing pavement too if not ripping it up for future Chelsea bus considerations was worth doing. It's not going to weigh into the Ring-wide modal decision at all; it's simply too short a construction length to tangibly influence that future decision.
But you'd never build new for both modes elsewhere. And that means the mode you do choose has to have choice shaped by capacity and frequency...as we found with the Silver Line. If an articulated bus can't be packed on tight-enough headways to handle the ridership loads at Kendall, you better strongly consider whether 2-, 3-, or 4- car trolley lashups are the flexibility you need to scale to any per-headway demand. I don't think we've studied well enough here to peg that demand to anywhere near enough accuracy to make that call, so it's still a wide open question which mode fits better. But BRT is not "like a trolley but on rubber tires" as if that's the safety blanket to cling to in any situation. That myth has unfortunately been bitterly disproven in this very same city. Know thy ridership projections, and get it right the first time.
(To do that, of course they first have to pull the UR studies out of the file cabinet and give them a second, more thorough, pass.)
I'm not saying don't look forward to rail service and stations on Grand Junction, but that is likely decades out at the rate new lines get planned and built in this system. Better to fill the gap than hold out.
See all above. There's no gap-filling choice to make here. You can't provision for dual RR use, and there is no further planning being done for the UR or down payments therein. They
are holding out. That's the entire problem. They have to stop holding out, because there's no gap-filler that addresses the UR need as long as they're holding out.
Keep in mind...the totally on-street boring old CT# express bus network
IS Urban Ring Phase I. And they're holding out on that. CT1-2-3, the only ones that ever did get implemented, are half-assed and buried in wayfinding literature like a shameful secret. The whole city was supposed to be blanketed with CT routes. And the CT routes were supposed to interact with each other at transfer points for fast CT-to-CT trips corridor-to-corridor. That's just how extensively they're holding out on the Ring. The express bus system alone would've been a big f'n deal at tying stuff together that's just not reachable today. We're at a way more rudimentary Square One with gap-filling than worrying about dual-use dedicated ROW's if the dual-use streets can't even get something as basic as an express bus network standard-issue for nearly any city this size.
