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

whighlander said:
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
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People are not water molecules, however. They have minds (presumably) and intentions and the ability to choose what they do.

The notion that widening roads leads to more traffic is not original with me. It's a well studied and continually confirmed principle that was first observed back in the 1960s.

Presentation on 'fundamental law of highway congestion' first proposed by Anthony Downs in 1962, later elaborated in the 90s.

His book Stuck in Traffic (1992), which detailed the economic disadvantages of traffic congestion and proposed road pricing as the only effective means of alleviating it, was denounced by traffic engineers for its insistence on the futility of congestion relief measures. However, enough of his gloomy predictions about congestion were proven right that he successfully published a second edition, Still Stuck in Traffic (2004).
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Lewis-Mogridge position: traffic expands to meet the available road space

Recent paper studying effects on urban roadways:
We investigate the effect of lane kilometers of roads on vehicle-kilometers traveled (VKT) for different
types of roads in the United States (US). For interstate highways in metropolitan areas we find that VKT
increases one for one with interstate highways, confirming the ‘fundamental law of highway congestion’
suggested by Anthony Downs (1962; 1992). We also uncover suggestive evidence that this law may extend
beyond interstate highways to a broad class of major urban roads, a ‘fundamental law of road congestion’.
These results suggest that increased provision of interstate highways and major urban roads is unlikely to
relieve congestion of these roads.
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Matthew said:
People are not water molecules, however. They have minds (presumably) and intentions and the ability to choose what they do.

The notion that widening roads leads to more traffic is not original with me. It's a well studied and continually confirmed principle that was first observed back in the 1960s.

Presentation on 'fundamental law of highway congestion' first proposed by Anthony Downs in 1962, later elaborated in the 90s.



Lewis-Mogridge position: traffic expands to meet the available road space

Recent paper studying effects on urban roadways:
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Mathew that kind of reasoning is why there is nothing really scientific about 'Social Sciences"

Its just a failure to apply network theoretical principles correctly

Outside of a few "hefty teenage boys" -- very very few people jump into a car these days to go joy riding

Once a decision is reached to travel from Point A to Point B -- all that remains in what modes and what route

People make the decision to drive versus the alternatives of walk, bike, T, plane?, etc. -- based on distance, time, burden, general annoyance factor, weather, $

Once they have made the decision to drive -- the total number of cars in the system is then set -- all that then remains is the distribution of the cars among the various branches interconnected in various ways to the end points

Thus for example -- yesterday I traveled from Lexington to MIT and back by a combination of:
1) foot from the front door to my car
2) car on local streets to entrance to Rt-2
3) car on highway until exit at Alewife
4) Red Line to Kendall
5) foot from Kendall to MIT

I made the decision to drive part of the way -- because of the time / annoyance factor of taking the bus and the annoyance factor and possibly the $ of parking near to MIT -- Note that it probably cost me more than any alternative assuming that I didn't have to park in a commercial garage
 
Whig, your comments fly in the face of every modern theory on traffic volumes that I've read/heard. Increase vehicular capacity and people will switch modes to car/bus and people will make more frequent trips.
 
datadyne007 said:
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.
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There is a perfectly viable alternative for cars in that corridor. It's called the Jamaica Way. I say we drop South Huntington to one lane for cars, one bike lane, and a trolley reservation. The cars will go elsewhere.
 
AmericanFolkLegend said:
Whig, your comments fly in the face of every modern theory on traffic volumes that I've read/heard. Increase vehicular capacity and people will switch modes to car/bus and people will make more frequent trips.
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AmFL --- consider the average side street in the average winter -- snow banks -- and narrow -- comes the Spring -- do people suddenly decide to drive when they previously had walked -- I don't think so

Or consider a section of a highway which is narrowed due to construction -- now the barrels and cones are removed at the end of the construction -- traffic congestion increases?

Or simply you drive along a highway and encounter the flashing arrow and beginning of the line of cones -- your 4 lanes shrinks to 3 then 2 perhaps even to 1 -- then after you pass the point where construction is actually supposed to be occurring -- where the cops on detail are drinking the DD coffee -- then suddenly the cones vanish -- and - traffic gets congested?

Adding capacity can not increase congestion overall!

Of course there can be local readjustments of flows which might locally increase congestion in some points and reduce it in others -- this is the well-known effect of putting an interstate though an area where a Rt-1 or Rt-66 type highway has existed - everyone abandons the old road for the new highway
 
Matthew said:
There are many cases where simplistic theoretical models are inadequate to describe real behavior. This is one of them.
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Mathew -- Network Theory is the foundation for our successful water, electricity and communications systems -- it would be totally irrational for it not to apply to another network composed of sources, sinks, capacity limited channels, hubs and flows
 
whighlander said:
Mathew -- Network Theory is the foundation for our successful water, electricity and communications systems -- it would be totally irrational for it not to apply to another network composed of sources, sinks, capacity limited channels, hubs and flows
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Show me an electron that thinks for itself and improvises rather than following a distinct and rigid law, and then you can talk about electrical networks as a model for human traffic.
 
HenryAlan said:
There is a perfectly viable alternative for cars in that corridor. It's called the Jamaica Way. I say we drop South Huntington to one lane for cars, one bike lane, and a trolley reservation. The cars will go elsewhere.
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I totally agree with that in regards to long-term planning. That requires a massive overhaul though.
 
whighlander said:
Mathew -- Network Theory is the foundation for our successful water, electricity and communications systems -- it would be totally irrational for it not to apply to another network composed of sources, sinks, capacity limited channels, hubs and flows
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Funny thing: the usual criticism of social science is that it attempts to apply oversimplified mathematical models to highly complex systems with tricky feedback effects. Here, your criticism seems to be that they aren't using enough of these oversimplified models.

In fact, most traffic engineers are trained with a lot of such theory, queuing models, Markov chains, network flows, etc. The results have been disastrous: continual freeway expansion with no end of congestion in sight.

It's only recently, within the last decade or so, that the road planning community has begun to realize what Anthony Downs and others were pointing out so long ago. It is not possible to build your way out of congestion. Traffic eventually expands until it reaches available capacity. These principles are not intuitive, but they come from years of observation. Mathematical models are important to scientific work, but they are tools used to describe the real world -- not the other way around.
 
Data, let me know if you end up with time to kill and would like suggestions as to a light-rail tour itinerary of Zuri. Obviously lots of other cities in Europe handle streetcars better than Boston does, but in most of the bigger cities like Berlin and Munich it's more of an addendum than the core of the system.

Without meaning to channel Westy's penchant for lists, I think the keys to running efficiently in street are the following:

1) timing and coordination of traffic signals
2) thoughtfully located fixed stops - this may entail fewer stops.
3) creation of "islands" and clearly demarked crosswalks for easier boarding at certain points. This also facilitates disabled access. Executed properly, this doesn't mean that you have to give up all of the parking or sacrifice a lane for the entire length of a roadway, but you need to make some adjustments here and there. Of course, you need to really understand the traffic flow to do this well. The Swiss are masters of tweaking travel lanes and wedging islands into narrow rights of way. If you watch the flow of traffic on Huntington, even during rush hour, you'll note that at some points the traffic is bumper-to-bumper in both travel lanes, but at other points it is mostly single-file. Some people are relatively skittish about traveling on the tracks, and traffic naturally fans out at intersections.
4) maintenance
5) enforcement

The physical capital required to pull this off well isn't that much. To echo a point made often by F-line, you could conceivably clean up the Green Line all the way back to Arborway for not much more than they've spent on some of their Taj Mahal edifices. I'd wager that with a team of Zurich engineers and a budget of $75 million, the results would blow your mind. Fiddling with curbs, paint, signage, and some rudimentary shelters shouldn't require Big Dig style funding. But not in Boston ...

The problem here is that the T has never been able to coordinate with other branches of the public hydra, and maintenance has usually been an afterthought. Worse, the community input process is cynically manipulated to suit their own agenda. There will always be fears voiced about parking slots and traffic congestion, and these will be highlighted or downplayed depending on what the T is keen to accomplish, usually what's easiest. Historically, the agency was about providing lots of steady low-skill jobs first (Mr Bulger's Transportation Authority), and providing construction jobs second. Moving people was a grudging third priority.
 
I really appreciate your post. If you don't mind making a brief list of Zurich highlights, it would be greatly appreciated. Send it in a PM please. I saw some successful islands in Vienna and we even have some here in Berlin. I also agree with signal priority and less stops (like the elimination of Fenwood Rd and Back of the Hill).

You highlighted the key issue in the final paragraph. No one can work together in Boston, so the results never materialize. It's an endless process of "what could be." Over time, I'm sure Huntington and S Huntington could transform itself into a wonderful transportation corridor (LR, bike, and auto proposal), but given the current situation it's really not feasible to continue the wait any longer. How long do we wait? The results need to happen now. With higher fares, I would like my trains to be a bit more on-time. The elimination of the GL on the road requires no physical changes to the road at all (I'm not saying rip up the tracks) and the 39 provides the redundant service.
 
What do you think of the idea that the gas tax would go up a penny a year with the additional money going toward public transportation every year?
 
JohnAKeith said:
What do you think of the idea that the gas tax would go up a penny a year with the additional money going toward public transportation every year?
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Even though my partner and I have to drive sometimes, I totally support it. I would also support paying an even higher fare if it meant that ACTUAL improvements would happen. Like drop-everything-and-build-right-now with a 100% guarantee it will be finished. Heck, I would pay a higher fare just to fund the GLX if it meant the GLX would be finished in 2014.

Given the track record of programs that were supposed to go right to the T (sales tax anyone???), the likelihood of dedicated funding is zilch. The gas tax would rise and the T would never see any of the money.
 
http://www.universalhub.com/2012/mbta-plans-23-fare-hike-far-fewer-service-cuts#comment-217608

The bus reductions are pretty much fluff, BTW. Duplicate expresses that run next to other routes or only a couple times per day. Reducations truncate some express routes that probably needed to be truncated to begin with, curtails hours on a few others, but for the most part it's all collating paper instead of service changes. As these reduced routes are still running, there are no staff reductions at all.

They get most of their rubber-tire savings by whacking subsidies to non-district municipal buses (Lexington/Bedford, Dedham, Burlington, etc.). As if those places weren't big enough transit black holes to begin with. Now those towns will have to cut their routes from their municipal budgets, and make themselves totally car-landlocked. As opposed to nearly totally. But the T doesn't actually have to get its hands dirty reducing the service or reducing its staff, because...hey, Burlington could get all bootstrappy and find a way. Or not. It was quite literally the least they could do.

Not a damn thing about reducing staff. Not a damn thing about curtailing bus garage activity on Saturdays like they do on Sundays when North Cambridge + one other are closed...meaning, every manager and garage staffer shows up to work per usual, as do nearly all drivers. And a loophole big enough to drive an articulated through on whether those handful of extra drivers make up their hours much like the OPTO-displaced Red Line operators by getting cushy inspector assignments.


Heaping serving of bullshit. They're flaunting to the whole state how little they've learned and how little-worried they are about being pressured to shape up.
 
They're throwing it back at the legislature, saying "you fix it, we're done."
 
Apparently a protest outside the State House is happening right now. Just saw WHDH's post on my feed. They are covering it live.
 
whighlander said:
Or consider a section of a highway which is narrowed due to construction -- now the barrels and cones are removed at the end of the construction -- traffic congestion increases?
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I'm not arguing that congestion increases per se (though it certainly may further down the bottleneck). I'm arguing that volume increases (i.e., my post was in response to your "Point A to Point B" post). Increasing capacity changes peoples behavior.
 
I just did a little cost analysis with fares.

A Monatskarte covering zones ABC* in Berlin is 91 Euros = $120.7024 (at the current rates).

The total mileage of the system is as follows:
90.9 mi (U-Bahn)
206.0 mi (S-Bahn)
119.0 mi (MetroTram)
1033.0 mi (MetroBus)
Total milage: ~1448.9 mi.

$120.7024/1448.9mi = 0.0833 $/mi


A Month LinkPass currently costs $59. The MBTA is comprised of 825 mi (accounting for the MBCR not being included in the LinkPass).

$59/825mi = 0.0715 $/mi is what the current situation is.

With the fare increase to $70, the $/mi only rises to 0.0848 $/mi.

*Note: I didn't use the more common 74 Euro AB Monatskarte because it is impossible to calculate the distances for Zone C to subtract.
 
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