What would you do to get the T out of its financial mess?

Data, as I said, why not consider separating the ROW for trolleys all the way out to Heath Street (or even beyond)? This could be done at the expense of street parking and an outbound travel lane.

Yes, this section of Huntington is narrow, but we're not talking about North End narrow here.
 
Shepard said:
Data, as I said, why not consider separating the ROW for trolleys all the way out to Heath Street (or even beyond)? This could be done at the expense of street parking and an outbound travel lane.

Yes, this section of Huntington is narrow, but we're not talking about North End narrow here.
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Because Huntington past Brigham Circle is a major auto-corridor whether we like it or not. Making the road even smaller will only amplify the problems of the current traffic situation from Brigham Circle to Brookline Village on Rt 9.

This response also works in response to F-Line's post. Trolleys should not be involved with the incredibly dense Huntington Avenue traffic. I get at least 5 T-alerts a day on my phone saying that the E-Line is delayed due to traffic, emergency vehicles, accidents, etc. Nearly all of them are consistently in regards to trains that are past Brigham Circle.
 
Well, my crazy transit pitch has been to turn the E at Brigham Circle onto far-less-busy Tremont Street (cut and cover or street running), OL connection at Roxbury Crossing, and then in a median on Malcom X to Dudley.
 
Shepard said:
Well, my crazy transit pitch has been to turn the E at Brigham Circle onto far-less-busy Tremont Street (cut and cover or street running), OL connection at Roxbury Crossing, and then in a median on Malcom X to Dudley.
Click to expand...

I would totally be on board with that. Street running would be fine on Tremont. Malcolm X is the prime location for a ROW because it is ridiculously wide.

I'm all for transit-oriented urbanism, but in Huntington's current state, it needs to only have auto traffic running on it after the Brigham Circle ROW ends. It is sadly a road that transit has lost the battle with.
 
http://mbta.com/uploadedfiles/About... 2012 Fare and Service - RecommendationV2.pdf

Looking at the PowerPoint, these are the ones that don't pass the smell test:

-- Citing one-man Red Line operation as staff reducer. This was proved bunk when Orange did it last year. Carmen's Union nullifies this. All staff reduced off trains work the same shifts as roving inspectors. Permanent reductions from doing OPTO 7 days a week including rush hour has in real-world terms meant mass promotions for a number of excess operators to become better-paid inspectors. Which ends up COSTING more money. While in theory this ought to allow them to reduce headcount, THEY CAN'T DO IT WITH THESE SUFFOCATING UNION CONTRACTS. So they bleed more money. Legislature!...this is your charge! Structural reform or the staffing flab just gets worse.

-- "Projected savings in MBCR contract." WTF does that mean for 2012-2013 when the contract doesn't expire until 2014??? Does this mean they're promising to not look the other way while MBCR bilks the contract for extra incentives, or are actually going to start fining them for doing a shit job with maintenance and on-time performance? Oh yeah, real golf-clap there. I totally expect that inside ball to be played totally voluntarily honestly now...8 years into that disaster of a contract. Borderline insulting to list this in the plan.

-- Ridership increases. I think no weekend service on 3 CR lines, a ferry, 5 E stops, and reduced runs elsewhere is going to add up to >$1.8M in FY2012 revenue reductions, so that line item is a wash. You can't base it on service levels today unless you expect that growth to outstrip the cuts (which calls into question the rationale for the $0/zilch/nada savers like the E).

-- Gas/electricity/jet fuel. This is flukey-warm winter savings...the jet fuel is the giveaway there because the beastly rail snowblowers are the only equipment requiring those. Electricity = above-ground 3rd rail, switch, and Blue Line trip-arm heaters that operated well under-load this winter. Gas = snowblowers. Much like Patrick's somewhat sad cure-all of scraping the MassHighway snow plow surplus and transferring it over, it's not sound fiscal strategy to bank on Mother Nature to get you out of debt. Who cares if next winter in 9 months away. Remember the tornadoes...the flooding rains...the unprecedented number of downed trees during warm months last year? Heat waves...delay-city on continuous welded rail with the heat kinks that surface and require the track gangs to be ready on a moment's notice to fix one. You guys really gonna bank on fluffy fair-weather clouds and balmy winter begetting cool summer as your path to FY2012 salvation? Folly. Don't ever wager against New England weather.

-- Commuter rail extra work and CSX. OK...I'm not real sure what both have to do with each other. Cutting back extra work = deferred maintenance. FAIL. Proceed immediately to the principal's office for detention...today's assignment will be a book report on the D'Alessandro Report. And CSX track workers belong to the same exact unions the MBTA's do...because BOTH railroads' union contracts descended from the same original private RR (Penn Central/NYNH&H). Outsourcing to them saves nothing over their own internal track gangs. And the Haverhill and Fitchburg projects are stimulus-tied and time-limited per the terms of the stimulus, so they don't have the option to go any molasses-slower than they already are.

-- The RIDE, one of the biggest money pits needing intensive structural reform, gets no service reductions or basic fare increase and only a surcharge for far-flung commutes on the district fringes. That's not a lifesaver when the city is the densest coverage. Legislature...outside help, please.



I still don't see a list of the bus routes, and as I noted in previous posts the Route 128 construction that rips the living shit out of the Needham stretch and accelerates during off-peak is a short-term blocker that may well force them to pull that service reduction off the table. And that's not going to go over well with Rozzie and West Rox. What else can they substitute? Not Fairmount...that craps all over an even bigger urban minority community during a time when the line was supposed to be expanding. Not Rockport/Newburyport...there's money in those towns. And beaches. The other 7 mainlines + Stoughton Branch have too much ridership. I would also argue that running the Hingham ferry on weekends instead of a very limited-schedule Greenbush probably cancels out a lot of the supposed savings here.

Sorry...there's not a panacea here. Especially when they're dumb about shortening off-peak consists. 1 conductor per 2 cars @ 5 open cars = 3 conductors on a light-use train. They would be able to do this if they capped every weekend train at 4 cars and assigned the bi-level coaches to the hilt on Providence, Worcester, etc. to keep the high-ridership lines lean on staff. But they DON'T do that. I watch the Fitchburg go by on the other side of Danehy Park several times a day when I'm out and about...Sunday consists are usually 5 (very empty) cars. Everything's all locked in and cookie-cuttered. They don't save if they don't mind the ops efficiency at BET, and they won't give a crap about ops efficiency until somebody slaps them. This is MBCR, remember! This problem ain't going away until there's structural reform on the labor contracts, incentive to mind their P's and Q's, and an operator who's not got a singular goal of bilking the contract for all the extras they can wring.

Seriously...the inefficiencies that add up blunt most of the supposed savings from closing the lines. Nothing anywhere near as egregious as the $0 E kneecapping, but I'm thoroughly unconvinced that they're going to recover what that PPT says they will with the chronic overstaffing on weekend trains and the operator's track record for honest business practices.
 
datadyne007 said:
Because Huntington past Brigham Circle is a major auto-corridor whether we like it or not. Making the road even smaller will only amplify the problems of the current traffic situation from Brigham Circle to Brookline Village on Rt 9.
Click to expand...

Getting rid of parking here would not interfere with traffic at all. It would probably improve traffic, and make the trolleys run better.
 
Ron Newman said:
Getting rid of parking here would not interfere with traffic at all. It would probably improve traffic, and make the trolleys run better.
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He also proposed removing an "outbound travel lane."
 
Respectfully, Data, I suggest that you spend some time in other cities that run light rail in mixed traffic without incident. The area around the Bahnhofquai in Zurich makes Huntington look like a country lane, and the Zurich trolleys manage to arrive and depart and criss-cross according to a posted schedule even during rush hour. I don't disagree with your conclusion that E line service isn't great ... reflecting the fact that the T is inept, but the question is, should we accept incompetence as a given and reduce our ambition? Or should we instead insist that our transit authority figure out how to operate a piddly half mile section of trolley line in mixed traffic, since other cities seem to manage much more difficult light rail configurations with fewer problems? I vote for the latter. Frankly, the more densely packed B and C lines are far less reliable than the E during busy periods as it is.

And as F line notes, there's no savings here. As with the single-man operations and many other issues, the T's first response is "can't be done!" when, in fact, it is done all around the world. The T's vision extends no further than Worcester, and its ambition doesn't even get that far. "Bus substitution" is their mantra and solution for every problem, big or small.
 
http://www.boston.com/Boston/metrod...GuO/index.html?comments=all&plckCurrentPage=0

Newspaper article comment sections are generally not a source of much rational thought (and this certainly isn't), but it's telling that it took 5 comments and 8 minutes after the story was first posted for someone to cut right to the chase. I think they're dangerously misreading the public discontent. They seem to think that negotiating down from the apocalypse placates the public as if its only aim was to have its cake and eat it too. That was never the vibe behind the Occupy-ish level of uproar here. People generally didn't have a problem with the fare increases. It's the accountability. There is nothing here compelling them to clean up their own act. It's an insurance/tax adjustment, lucky weather circumstances, and...a service plan with so many $ leaks in it the waste will instantly regress back to mean, coupled with some of the same political obsessions of theirs (Kill the E, short-shrifting the outer neighborhoods and South Shore, gerrymandering to protect the money 'burbs) that are broken-record by now and predictable from miles away. Nada about how they'll overcome the institutional resistance to pull this off, whether they feel compelled to expend any effort to doing so, where the shared sacrifice is for cronies, or what the segue is going to be into structural reform that engages the Legislature and Governor in...something?

It's the same "you suck on this/I got mine...my special interests > yours" song and dance that is...well, very Occupy-ish in the type of resentment it fuels. People aren't going to care that it's less punitive...they're not going to care if Version 3.1a of the plan is less punitive either. It's the same exact parlor trick. People are rebelling against the parlor trick. The state thinks they're tribally rebelling against the individual route numbers or whining about fares. That's not it at all. It's either very disingenuous, very naive, or both to pretend this is about anything other than truly toxic levels of mistrust in the political and bureaucratic leaders ready to boil over. Can that not have possibly been made any clearer at all these community meetings? The usual script to distract the rabble isn't working...it's focusing the vitriol even more. This is different than before.

I guess we'll see how many times they can call a press conference to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic before people rush the stage and start grabbing and breaking chairs. And we'll find out if they react amongst themselves with a knowing sigh or a total deer-in-headlights blank stare. So be it. I think the public's patience is shot and they're provoking something ugly by doubling down on these same ineffective memes that long ago stopped evading anyone's BS detector.
 
Completely agreed, F-Line.

High time to face this ugly mess head on. When you think about a 23 percent increase in something, you usually expect something in return. Even with this fare hike we're still looking at a hopelessly inefficient and delay prone rapid transit network. When you're operational expenses are ballooning due to debt servicing, deferred maintenance and outrageous compensation/benefits plans, there comes a point where you simply cannot extract more from the customer.

It makes me sick to my stomach to think that I will be paying $11 more a month just for the pleasure of experiencing the daily luxury of perpetual delays, vehicle malfunctions and surly employees on the Green Line.
 
Here's some food for thought on where this will hands-down regress back to the waste mean. . .


OK, you're cutting 3 weekend commuter rail lines. That means all those conductors don't work, right? Perfectly balanced net hourly pay reduction?

Well...you know how that last train of the night on a Sunday from Haverhill is guaranteed to only have 12 people on it so they isolate the last 2 cars and pack everybody up front for only 1 on-duty conductor (because, remember, the labor deal says it's gotta be 1 conductor for every 2 cars). Wouldn't it be odd if that deadest run of the night suddenly stopped having its cars isolated and a second conductor started showing up for work where there was none before?

Drip, drip. . .


OK, so that's 1 conductor for 2 cars, remember. And for technical reasons (locomotives, braking, etc.) a train's got to have minimum 4 cars to go full-speed, or else it's a 30 MPH light engine move (this is why they don't break the dead-of-night 4-car consist, they just close the rear 2). Wouldn't it be odd if trains that normally break on even-numbered consists start appearing with a lot of 5th cars? Like that crack-of-dawn Fitchburg inbound I see when I'm walking around Danehy Park. It's 5 on a weekday, 5 on a Sunday...always 5. Why can't it be more efficient than that? And moreso, wouldn't it be a shame if it were less efficient? What would be the possible explanations for that? Certainly nothing along the lines of "we've always done it that way", "it's too disruptive not to", "the roster is set in stone by God himself", "take it up with my rep", or [*silence*].

But MBCR said "cross my heart, I swear my days of abusing the incentives are done!"

Drip, drip. . .


They say they're going to make up the fare loss from service reductions by policing a lot tighter fare evasion. Meaning more on-duty cops. Salaried on-duty cops.

Drip, drip. . .


...but don't worry, all those bus drivers and Green Line drivers who are in such a rush to close the doors and get on with it are going to start being extra careful waiting patiently to collect each and every fare. Because we asked them nicely.

Drip, drip. . .


Say, Week 1 of OPTO on the Red Line is going off without a hitch, eh? Of course, there's been 2 inspectors on every platform signaling the all-clear to the operators so that helps. Inspectors are low-level managers, BTW. They're a pay grade or more above operators.

Drip, drip. . .


If it's like Orange OPTO, a lot of displaced operators are going to get very well-deserved promotions soon to inspector. Because you need a lot of inspectors if you're going to maintain 2-per-station for the long haul.

Drip, drip. . .




And it just keeps going like this until they're drowning again and very thick individuals in front of a podium are wondering why all the savings didn't materialize. Except maybe that they didn't cut enough.

MOAR DOOMSDAY PROPOSALS, PLZ! And community hearings where we will furrow our brows and look very concerned, then propose eliminating the E as a compromise.

Drip, drip. . .
 
The whole Greenbush debacle is really troubling to me. All said in done, didn't it total up $1 billion? Not to mention that the towns put up a significant fuss over it. And ferry service was just fine with most folks (actually, they liked it even better).

So now they have no ferries OR trains on weekends. So they could probably still have their ferries if it weren't for the train that they didn't even want!
 
datadyne007 said:
Because Huntington past Brigham Circle is a major auto-corridor whether we like it or not. Making the road even smaller will only amplify the problems of the current traffic situation from Brigham Circle to Brookline Village on Rt 9.

This response also works in response to F-Line's post. Trolleys should not be involved with the incredibly dense Huntington Avenue traffic. I get at least 5 T-alerts a day on my phone saying that the E-Line is delayed due to traffic, emergency vehicles, accidents, etc. Nearly all of them are consistently in regards to trains that are past Brigham Circle.
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Your argument only makes sense in a world where motor vehicles are the number 1, 2 and 3 priorities.

How very selfish.
 
bbfen said:
Your argument only makes sense in a world where motor vehicles are the number 1, 2 and 3 priorities.

How very selfish.
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The traffic isn't going to go away. Roads exist and people are going to drive whether there is transit or not. It's reality. Nothing else. We need to make both means more efficient in the city. Simply neglecting auto traffic doesn't make it go away. With the GL off the road, it would hopefully free up some space for the 39. They would no longer have to compete.

Also, InTheHood, I am going to Zurich at the end of my trip at the end of April. I will check out that situation. My guess is that they run many more trains on the system. Berlin's MetroTram doesn't have any issues either. What specifically is it that you noticed about the Zurich system that makes it work so well in mixed traffic? Could those same points be applied to Boston's system?

Also, why does Fenwood Rd. even exist? It is one block from Brigham Circle.
 
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Matthew said:
Making roads wider just invites more traffic to drive on them. Perhaps when you're in Zurich you can take note of the pedestrian-friendly methods they employ.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/27/science/earth/27traffic.html?pagewanted=all
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Who said anything about widening roads?

Also, the article points out traffic is mitigated by closing streets completely to auto traffic. I agree, if Huntington was closed to auto traffic, the Heath St. nub of the line would run fine, but is that really realistic for this road in particular? In general, the article seems to simply say the only way to deal with traffic is to close streets to cars.
 
BostonUrbEx said:
The whole Greenbush debacle is really troubling to me. All said in done, didn't it total up $1 billion? Not to mention that the towns put up a significant fuss over it. And ferry service was just fine with most folks (actually, they liked it even better).

So now they have no ferries OR trains on weekends. So they could probably still have their ferries if it weren't for the train that they didn't even want!
Click to expand...

I think we need a Taxpayers Law Foundation modeled after the Infernal Conservation Law Foundation to start suing everyone to get some relief

As a Globe Story of a few years ago related to the topic of T Finances pointed out: since the mid 19880's the T has expanded faster than any other Metro Transit system, despite the fact that the population in Metro Boston has hardly increased at all -- a lot of that expansion has been deals cut between the State DOT and the CLF related to the Big Dig

I'd bet if we could collect some damages from those fat-cat "feel Green" lawyers that the T's budget might be balanced this year without any other changes

But - put that down to a Crazy Transit Pitch along with any thought of revamping the T's contracts
 
Matthew said:
Making roads wider just invites more traffic to drive on them. Perhaps when you're in Zurich you can take note of the pedestrian-friendly methods they employ.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/27/science/earth/27traffic.html?pagewanted=all
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Mathew -- that's just a statement ignorant of reality

Look down a surface water drain some time -- you'll not see the surface water sewer full of water unless a torrential downpour is in progress

There is demand for a road because there are drivers who wish to go from Point A to Point B and Road Z provides a segment of that journey. Yes, certainly creation of another route between A and B might displace some traffic from Road Z if the alternative is shorter, less annoying / more pleasant -- But the total traffic on Road Z and the alternative will be no more than the original traffic on Road Z as the same number of people still want to go from A to B -- make all the roads wider -- you get Less Traffic on each -- not more
 
No, we need a Conservation Law Foundation with some sensible technical people who can shoot down idiotic ideas like Greenbush. All of the expansion since the mid-80s has been commuter rail. Meanwhile, transit projects serving the most densely populated regions in the state get delayed endlessly.
 
Hingham never had a regularly scheduled weekend ferry service. I recall they tried it one summer, but didn't get enough customers to continue the experiment.
 
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