Urban Ring

[quadratdackel]

This is the rapid transit project that will form a ring around downtown, connecting the various spokes of our hub-and-spoke system slightly outbound, improving connectivity between the various neighborhoods, opening up new areas for development, and relieving transit congestion downtown. Providing better access to Longwood is a key driver right now. The plan is to phase this all in over the next decade or two, adjusting the plan as need be. Its current form is the Crosstown Bus routes. The route's supposed to look something like the thick white line in this:

http://bostonforum.com/images/urbanring.jpg

with grade-separated (above or below ground) rapid transit approximately from Dudley to Sullivan. Here's the MBTA's page (http://www.mbta.com/projects_underway/urbanring.asp).

There's also an upcoming meeting:

The Urban Ring Citizens Advisory Committee will hold its next meeting on

Tuesday, July 25
4 to 6 PM
State Transportation Building, 10 Park Plaza
Conference Rooms 2-3, Second Floor

At this meeting, we will discuss the status of the Revised DEIR/DEIS, the process for selecting a consultant, issues and priorities that should guide consultant selection, and potential CAC subcommittees.

We appreciate your interest in this important project, and we look forward to your continued participation.

Thank you.

Ned Codd

Ned Codd, P.E.
Manager of Plan Development, Executive Office of Transportation
10 Park Plaza, Room 4150, Boston, MA 02116
Phone: 617-973-7473 Fax: 617-973-8035
Ned.Codd AT state.ma.us



I have very mixed feelings about this project. I agree with the intention to expand rapid transit, especially perpendicular to our current routes, but I don't think this is being implemented properly. However, a loop is not the right shape for a transit line. For example, we do not need a new high speed connection from Ruggles to Community College- the Orange Line already does exactly this. I think we should be more focused on making straighter lines that will get people places faster. So, something that runs through Cambridge just north of MIT (the Grand Junction right of way) should continue through Charlestown, stopping at the Navy Yard before going straight to Chelsea. Also, the phase-in of this project involves lots of short, disconnected lines, like the current CT busses. This setup pretty much guarantees that trips along this corridor will not be very fast due to the frequent transfering required.

[prescott]

I can't speak for the routing, but here's the CLF's take on why we need it:

http://www.clf.org/programs/cases.asp?id=240

[ablarc]

The rumblings are ominous. I think we can trust them to blow it. They will labor mightily and bring forth...a bus.

[justin]

This is a pie-in-the sky project. I don't think anybody seriously expects it to happen in the next 30-40 years.

justin

[vanshnookenraggen]

It's this or the NS Link. We can't pay for both. My hats with the NS Link.

[briv]

The NS link couldve been done cheaper than it will ever be back when a ditch from S. Station to N. Station was opened up for the Big Dig. It didnt happen then. Shamefully, it will never, ever happen.

[vanshnookenraggen]

What's stopping us from getting a couple of deep bore drills and going under the highway? We dont NEED a Central Station. We need to get people from one side of Boston to the other without using cars.

[KentXie]

If the Urban Ring ever do get underway is it going to be BRT or light rail or heavy rail?

[justin]

vansh., I think the whole point of the rail link is the Central Station. Commuter rail serves to bring suburbanites to work downtown, and the biggest benefit of NSRL would be to distribute them more evenly and get them off the subway system. This is not such a huge benefit, relative to the cost; neither is the operational improvement of not running two separate CR systems, and the market for suburb-to-suburb trips just isn't big enough. So, while a nice idea, I wouldn't put it on top of my priority list.

As for not building it with the Dig, they actually started making provisions for it in the norther part of the tunnel, but then decided it would indeed be cheaper to bore it. Can't blame them for some cost-cutting.

CR will never be the main mode of suburban travel; the subway can at least aspire to be that in the urban context. That's why I'd go with the Urban Ring. It connects major centers of activity and remedies the biggest structural problem of the present system, its hub-and-spokes design. From the studies I've heard about, the demand on the Urban Ring would be so high that it would have to be heavy rail, at least the Wellington-Dudley segment, which is why it'll never be done.

justin

[TheBostonian]

If the Urban Ring ever do get underway is it going to be BRT or light rail or heavy rail?

In phases, starting with the CT1/2/3 buses, then BRT, then LR or HR. The proposals are somewhere online.

[ckb]

Some people have noted that the N-S rail link may be more closely related to the Urban Ring in another way ... note that the Urban Ring plans all involve something like crossing the Charles on the rail bridge below the BU bridge, and following the train tracks known as the Grand Junction, which travel through cambridge behind MIT. As many of you may know, this section of track is the only link between the North and South sides of the commutter rail system (and is also used by Amtrak to get Downeaster trains to and from the north side to its facilities near Southampton St., as well as a small amount of freight (notably, refrigerator cars going to the Chelsea Produce Market).

For the Urban Ring to work as planned, using the Grand Junction corridor, some alternate route has to be created to link the two systems.

If busses are used, I suppose some sort of street running could be acceptable (especially in a restricted right of way) but you won't see light rail.

Despite the appeal of the existing Grand Junction ROW, I've never been a fan of that routing for the Urban Ring, anyway -- it is way too close to the center of the system. The transfer at Kendall is only 2 stops away from Park St! Instead, it should go through Lower Allston (new Harvard Campus) across to Harvard, down Kirkland/Washington to Union Sq. Someville, and onwards. I don't know how far onwards, though -- do we really need another bus/LRT system to the airport? Do Everett and Chelsea need a connection to the airport?

[vanshnookenraggen]

My biggest beef with the UR is the BRT. I understand and agree that there should be improved bus transit around the city but I think that the T is relying too much on busses for the UR. Instead of 3 phases, maybe combine the first two. Atleast then you could get around the city on a bus while the politicians argue about who's gonna pay for the tunnel.

I also think that the current alignment may not be the best and I would love to see some studies with the UR connecting to Harvard, Allston, and South Boston. Maybe even build a line to the Airport. That would take a lot of traffic out of downtown.

[quadratdackel]

I think us Boston people have an overly negative opinion of BRT due to how poorly the Silver Line functions. True, BRT has very real limitations- the vehicles don't run on tracks, so they must traverse narrow paths (read: tunnels) much more slowly than rail, and the busses generally have lower capacities than heavy rail (i.e. Orange/Red/Blue). However, BRT can work, and work well. See for example Curitiba, Brazil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curitiba). But in order for BRT to work well, it needs sufficiently wide paths (unlike Silver Line Waterfront) and its own path, free of traffic and traffic lights (unlike Silver Line Washington Street).

Doing this along the Urban Ring would probably be a lot cheaper and faster to build than even above-ground rail. However, it would require commandeering a whole chain of roads, including their traffic lights, for the better part of the day. (During off-peak hours, congestion is less important, and roads could be shared with little cost to the BRT service.) It's hard to imagine us pulling off such a stunt. I think we're more likely to see another fragmented, slow-moving service like the Silver Line (or portions of the Green Line) unless we go all out and dig a huge tunnel and make the whole trip transfer-free.

...I went to an Urban Ring Citizens Advisory Committee meeting a while back. I felt a sense of inevitability in the room for the proposed routing. Whatever route brainstorm process (hopefully) occurred happenned long ago and doesn't look likely to be revisited, much like no serious rethinking of Silver Line Phase 3 (the tunnel connecting the two portions) seems to be taking place.

[quadratdackel]

The Urban Ring Citizens Advisory Committee will hold its next meeting on

Tuesday, September 12
4 to 6 PM
State Transportation Building, 10 Park Plaza
Conference Rooms 2-3, Second Floor

At this meeting, we will introduce the designated consultant team for the RDEIR/DEIS, present the study approach and schedule, and discuss next steps in the study process.

We appreciate your interest in this important project, and we look forward to your continued participation.

Thank you.

Ned Codd


Ned Codd, P.E.
Manager of Plan Development, Executive Office of Transportation
10 Park Plaza, Room 4150, Boston, MA 02116
Phone: 617-973-7473 Fax: 617-973-8035
<Ned.Codd@state.ma.us>

[vanshnookenraggen]

Anyone go to this meeting?

[quadratdackel]

The next Urban Ring Citizens Advisory Committee meeting will be held on
Tuesday, October 24th at 4 pm, 10 Park Plaza, Conference Rooms 2-3 on
the Second Floor.

Closer to the meeting, I will send out a draft agenda. Please call or
e-mail me if you have any questions.

Many thanks,


Regan Checchio
Public Affairs Manager
Regina Villa Associates
51 Franklin St., 4th floor
Boston, MA 02110
Ph: 617-357-5772 ext. 14
Fax: 617-357-8361
E-mail: rchecchio@reginavilla.com

[Charlie_mta]

On another thread, the Harvard Univ. plan for development in Allston is being discussed.

In the Harvard plan, a light-rail Urban Ring route is being proposed, as shown on the following drawing as the heavy green route. It would basically go from the B.U. area up through the new Harvard development, on to Harvard Square, mostly in tunnel. I've added an extension to continue it on to tie into the proposed Green Line extension at Union Square, Somerville. I also show a dashed green line as a possible spur to Watertown Square, via Mt. Auburn Street and then following the Watertown Branch RR right-of-way to Watertown Sq.

The beauty of this proposal is that it could utilize the abandoned Red Line tunnel from Harvard Square to the old Bennet Street car barn (now Kennedy School of Government) at Mt. Auburn Street. It would also utilize the existing bus tunnel and station at Harvard Square, operating jointly with buses in that tunnel.

This route would also link the new Harvard campus with the old one in Cambridge, provide light rail service to Allston, and link Harvard Square directly to Longwood and B.U.

I think this is a better route than the one currently being proposed along the Grand Junction railroad. That route is too close in to really serve as an urban ring.

http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b66/karlgame/Urban_ring-1.jpg

[justin]

The 'abandoned Red Line tunnel' is pretty much a phantom crossing the air of the present Harvard station lobby. Even if there are a few yards of it left by KSG, you'd be hard-pressed to extend it under Harvard property.

If this tunnel is ever built (not in my liftetime), it will probably have to be bored from the other side of the river, under Boylston St. to a new deep station at Harvard Sq,

The two possible routings for urban ring aren't an either-or proposition; they would serve completely different markets. For a good time into the future, Kendall will be a bigger employment center than Harvard Sq. and, especially given the nature of the businesses there, needs a direct connection with Longwood at least as much. The tight urban ring will also do a much better job of relieving downtown congestion: someone going from MIT to Longwood, wouldn't use the outer routing and would keep going through Park St. instead.

A more feasible, medium-cost proposal to serve the new Harvard campus would start in a new tunnel at Harvard Sq., cross the river, stopping by the new campus,maybe in the neighborhood at N.Harvard & Cambridge, and continue underground to a tunnel portal by the rail yards south of the turnpike (where there's room for such a thing). Then it would join the existing Framingham tracks, cross the Green Line at Comm. Ave, the urban ring at Yawkey, Green Line again at Mass Ave., Orange at Back Bay, make another stop in Chinatown and then fly over the SS tracks and join the Fairmount line, connecting with the Red Line at Broadway (either a short tunnel or a long walkway). Either end of the line could also see some service terminating at S.Station, In fact, the demolition of the postal annex would present an opportunity to build a dedicated station for this service with a direct connection to a new Red Line headhouse at FPC. The new terminus could even be put underground as part of the redevelopment of the site, in anticipation of NSRL...

Fantasise on!

justin

[Beton Brut]

The neighborhood meeting I alluded to in the "New Blue Line Cars" thread featured a piss-poor presentation about the Urban Ring by two rubes from the Executive Office of Transportation...They couldn't get their laptop to work, and the guy who spoke was about as convincing as a fifth-grader reading a shoddy book report after huffing rubber cement...I asked a couple of questions about the plans to tunnel under the LMA (deep-bore, possibly Dudley/Ruggles to Allston) and the alternative (running heavy-rail on the D-Line and extending the Orange Line out to 128)...Some "Errrrs" and "Ummms" and then they beat a retreat, due to the issues with the AV support for their presentation...

If these are the clowns responsible for carrying out public policy, I oughta move to Uganda...

[underground]

The ch 5 6pm ran a teaser for the 11pm that included a story about the Urban Ring. Did anyone happen to catch it?

[vanshnookenraggen]

Yeah, it didn't tell you anything you didn't know, bus ring around the city. God I hate the T.

[whighlander]

While rail has capacity and frequency advantages -- it suffers from a major disadvantage -- the need to plan the route for the long term

Usually, by the time all the impact statements are filed, designs completed and construction begins -- a decade has passed from the concept.

In the mean time, things change. For instance, while Harvard was secretly buying up Alston and planning a new Kendal Square - -the Urban Ring was being conceptualized. Of course no self respecting planner would have imagined the need to get to Alston as all that was there was warehouses.

So now there is a plan for an Urban Ring that doesn't bother to acknowledge the multi B$ development that Harvard is working on.

On the other hand Buses can be used to identify the routes that need and can justify the investment for tunnels and underground stations.

If I was planning Transit Investment today -- I'd start by fixing the problems with the existing Silver-Line to make an easier connection from Logan to the BEC, Fan Pier and South Station

The first project needed immediately is to grade separate at D Street just after leaving the World Trade Center Station.

The next one is more grade separation or protected right of way to allow the Silver-Line to get to/from the Ted Williams Tunnel without going on the city streets.

The Urban Ring, N-S Rail-link and probably even the Green-line to Medford and the rest is mostly pipe dreams

Westy

[justin]

Urban ring and Allston are apples and oranges. Even if Allston becomes a major employment center, I doubt it will rival Kendall's combination of unversity campus and commercial office space hub. Moreover, Allston is too far out to usefully serve one of UR's main goals, which is providing for trips around the inner core without a transfer downtown.

By all means, provide rail access to Allston in the next 50 years, but by its own rail line. Urban ring was never meant as the single solution to all of Boston's transportation problems.

Of course, we're too busy civilising the Middle East and pampering the old and the lazy to make such useful investments.

justin

[underground]

^Just to make a quick point about the importance of Harvard's Allston Campus vs. Kendall Sq., Harvard is the 6th largest employer in the state of Massachusetts.

[czsz]

I don't understand why a ring around the core as close in as Kendall saves unnecessary transfers. The closest station to me is Harvard; if I wanted to go to Longwood via the Urban Ring I'd just be transferring at Kendall vs. Park St. Is that so much better?

[justin]

The point isn't to make your particular commute easier; it's to better disperse transfering passengers.

[czsz]

So all this does is make Park Street slightly less crowded?

[vanshnookenraggen]

It would take more pressure off the Green Line if anything, which I think is the big selling point given the graphs I've seen.

[ablarc]

Of course, we're too busy civilising the Middle East and pampering the old and the lazy to make such useful investments.

justin
justin = Ron Paul ?

[justin]

^Dang, there goes my cover... I've been to busy with the debates lately to post much here.

Rjustin

[dshoost88]

There was an article today in the Boston Metro about the Urban Ring... apparently it's gaining more momentum from gov't officials, and they're talking about initialiazing Phase II... I'll look for the article online and post later.

[dshoost88]

http://www.metrobostonnews.com/us/article/2008/06/12/04/2148-66/index.xml

Urban Ring project is no urban legend
Officials unveil vision for Phase II of the rapid transit service


Urban Ring stops

COMMUTER RAIL, GREEN LINE STOPS?
The Urban Ring plan also calls for a new commuter rail stop in Sullivan Square, where currently there is only an Orange Line stop and area buses. Officials are also considering adding an underground station on the Green Line?s D branch between Kenmore and Park Street as part of the project.



BY THE NUMBERS
40,000 Number of vehicles the Urban Ring is expected to take off the road.

174,300 Number of daily boardings on Urban Ring bus service in 2030.

36 The approximate number of stations along entire Urban Ring service.

PROJECTIONS: TRAVEL TIME
(All projections based on 2030 population estimates)
Sullivan Square to Kendall Square
Without Urban Ring: 27 min. with: 19 min.
Kendall/MIT to Longwood Medical Center
Without Urban Ring: 33 min., with: 26 min.
BU Medical Center to Longwood Medical Center
Without Urban Ring: 25 min., with: 18 min.
Downtown Chelsea to Wellington Station
Without Urban Ring: 24 min., with: 6 min.

State transportation officials have unveiled their vision for Phase II of the ambitious Urban Ring project that would create rapid transit MBTA bus service they hope will connect neighboring communities, lower commute times and link with the T?s existing system.
After 18 months of narrowing down route options, transportation officials have settled on their recommendation. The 25-mile corridor would run between Chelsea, Everett and Somerville, continue south to Cambridge, the Fenway and Roxbury and complete the ?ring? through South Boston, Logan Airport and East Boston.There would also be spurs to Allston and South Dorchester.
Recently, project leaders have held public meetings in Chelsea, the Fenway and Cambridge (with another slated in Roxbury on Monday) to brief residents on their recommendation for the $2.2 billion rapid bus service ? which includes a $1.5 billion underground tunnel between Ruggles Station and the Landmark Center.
?The existing MBTA rapid transit system does a good job of connecting to downtown Boston,? Ned Codd, the Urban Ring project leader for the state?s Executive Office of Transportation, told residents this week during a community meeting. ?However, once you start getting outside of downtown, the radial transit lines start to spread out, leaving gaps in between.?

The Urban Ring project is years in the making. Phase I added crosstown T buses in 1994, and Phase III would add either light or heavy rail service in some parts of the corridor. Officials hope to break ground for Phase II of the ring by 2015, though many hurdles still remain.

The goal of the Urban Ring?s proposed Phase II, officials say, is to connect communities north of Boston that are growing rapidly with the major business, education and medical centers in and around the city.
Many of the major stops will connect largely to major universities (Harvard, BU, MIT) and medical centers (BU Medical Center, Longwood Medical Center) in the area. ?There are very important sectors to the state and regional economy,? said Ned Codd, the Urban Ring project leader for the state?s Department of Transportation.
Population estimates for the Urban Ring corridor suggest a 26 percent increase to 495,100 people between 2000 and 2030, and they say the Urban Ring is necessary to help relieve the increased congestion and traffic problems over the next few decades.
But many challenges remain, especially from a financial standpoint.
Phase II?s price tag is $2.2 billion, based on 2007 dollars. Later this year, state officials will submit a funding request to the federal government?s New Starts program, which officials estimate could be as high as $800 million. But project officials also say the Urban Ring?s estimated $14 billion to $18 billion ?cost-effectiveness ratio? puts it in a competitive range for these funds. The state would also have to match millions of dollars in funding.
However, the project comes after a stirring report last year from the Transportation Finance Commission, which estimated that in 20 years, there will be a $15 billion to $19 billion shortfall in funding to maintain the state?s current transportation system.

PROPOSED TUNNEL
Another concern is the proposed $1.5 billion, 1.5-mile tunnel between the Fenway and Roxbury.
During construction, interim surface bus service will run throughout the heavily-traveled Longwood Medical area, primarily on Brookline, Longwood and Huntington avenues, and residents expressed concern about the issue at a community meeting Monday.
State officials also admit they don?t know how long interim surface bus service would last, but Codd called the Longwood Medical area?s transit needs ?immediate, growing and considerable.?

[jaggedbagpipe]

I think that rapid transit buses are a poor excuse for a rapid transit system and should not be labeled "rapid transit". There is nothing rapid about buses, especially ones that travel on the road.They're about as rapid as green line trains past Kenmore and Symphony. Also, the name "Urban Ring" i think sucks. They should name it something dumb like "Ring Around the Proper" or "the Charlie Loop".

[Beton Brut]

I've been to a couple of these meetings. It's half-assed in concept. By the time it's built, it'll be quarter-assed.

[vanshnookenraggen]

What. The. Fuck.

Ok, first off, fuck the T and their love of bus tunnels. For a budget driven agency they sure do like to come up with ridiculously expensive nonsense.

Secondly, I LOVE how they grandfathered in the Crosstown buses as "Phase I", saying they already completed it years ago, making it look like they've made progress. Anyone who has seen the plans (that have been available for years) knows that Phase I was adding about 5 more Crosstown bus routes to the ones we already have.

But wait, why spend money when we can just change the name?! It worked for the Silver Line and this time they don't have to spend any money! Genius.

Thirdly, this will not take 40,000 cars off the road, it will add hundreds of buses to them. The only thing that will take that many cars off the road is rail, which the T seems to be deathly afraid of expanding (which, given how there is no funding isn?t surprising.)

The role of transportation planning for the T needs to be done by another agency.

[caravaggiste]

going along with the general need for infrastructure repairs and improvements. I'd still like to see a new green line tunnel constructed underneath the existing for express trains for Red Sox games. Also perhaps for express trains to and from BC to Downtown. Oh, and who did the consulting and data for this? Seems a little overstated. 40,000? I think they should scrap the BRT as well. Money down the drain.

[cden4]

Hey MBTA, stop wasting money on more buses and build rail that people will actually ride!

[Charlie_mta]

A bus tunnel offers only slow, bumpy and tortuous rides which attract less ridership than light rail. Also the cost of a bus tunnel is outrageous, considering the lousy service and lower ridership, compared to light rail in the same tunnel.

Why is it that other US cities in Boston's size category are planning light rail lines, but Boston is opting instead for expensive and ineffficient bus tunnel systems? Is Boston that provincial and out of touch?

[caravaggiste]

Is Boston that provincial and out of touch?

uh generally, yes.

[Chris]

Where is the governor in all this? Why can't we get some strong leadership on him to fix this. He's made public comments on commuter rail but anything on the Urban Ring?

Not only is it BRT, but the map seems to be highly redundant with existing stations. Should use this opportunity to expand coverage.

[ablarc]

Officials are also considering adding an underground station on the Green Line?s D branch between Kenmore and Park Street as part of the project.
What's this?

[vanshnookenraggen]

I think that is a reporter who doesn't know what they are talking about.

[briv]

A $2 billion bus route. Pathetic.

There is a total absence of vision, leadership, and competency when it comes to our public transit. I don't know why people put up with it.

[Suffolk 83]

I don't get it, if you're gonna build a tunnel, why not have rails in it? Seems like a giant waste of money. Several people have stated bus tunnels are more expensive than underground rail. any proof on that one? Seems like busses in the tunnels are still cheaper, and its gotta be why they'd do that.

[Beton Brut]

Briv -- Putting up the meeting & event info for us has become really important. We need to have a presence at the T's public comment meetings and tell Grabauskas and his minions they need to try harder. If our pal Neddy and a few neighbors could give the Heisman to Columbus Center, then perhaps a few of the folks here can at lest discredit the T's ill-conceived plans publicly (and hopefully the cameras will be rolling).

[Beton Brut]

^ And they're popping the tunnel up at Fenway/Longwood because they don't have the will for fight to go under Brookline. It would make sense to push this tunnel all the way to Harvard's new Allston campus, creating a direct connection to the LMA/Harvard Medical School.

[chumbolly]

I'm honestly surprised that the experience and cost of the Silver Line does not preclude any future bus tunnels or BRT again in Massachusetts, ever. The buses are better than the average bus, but it is not rapid and it was absurdly expensive. It's a failure, res ipsa loquitur. I honestly think that any politician or bureaucrat that would promote a similar project must be mentally defective or corrupt.

[underground]

Briv -- Putting up the meeting & event info for us has become really important. We need to have a presence at the T's public comment meetings and tell Grabauskas and his minions they need to try harder. If our pal Neddy and a few neighbors could give the Heisman to Columbus Center, then perhaps a few of the folks here can at lest discredit the T's ill-conceived plans publicly (and hopefully the cameras will be rolling).
I made it to the interview round of the selection process for the Citizens Advisory Council to the MBTA. Wish me luck!

[jass]

Why is it that other US cities in Boston's size category are planning light rail lines, but Boston is opting instead for expensive and ineffficient bus tunnel systems? Is Boston that provincial and out of touch?

And I wonder if those in other cities planning at-grade light rail are wishing they could be more like Boston and get awesome tunnels.

Why is it that other US cities in DCs size category are planning tunnels, but DC is opting instead for expensive and ugly elevated rail systems? Is DC that provincial and out of touch?

Why is it that other US cities in Miami's size category are planning tunnels, but Miami is opting instead for expensive and inefficient streetcars with tons of grade crossings? Is Miami that provincial and out of touch?

[vanshnookenraggen]

Each city is different, each has different transportaiton patterns. Also funding is hard to get for certain things. The last point is why the T is doing BRT like crazy, cause it's what the Feds will pay for. It's a terrible system that needs to be fixed at the top.

Conversely, the state needs to find a way to pay for transporation projects as well. How are we supposed to expand our systems when what we have is falling apart?

[jass]

Conversely, the state needs to find a way to pay for transporation projects as well. How are we supposed to expand our systems when what we have is falling apart?

Expansion projects and maintenance come from different budgets. Building a new tunnel will not take away money to fix a bridge elsewhere. It's stupid, but that's how it works.

[vanshnookenraggen]

Expansion projects and maintenance come from different budgets. Building a new tunnel will not take away money to fix a bridge elsewhere. It's stupid, but that's how it works.


I don't think it's stupid, I think neither are properly funded.

[dshoost88]

And I wonder if those in other cities planning at-grade light rail are wishing they could be more like Boston and get awesome tunnels.

Why is it that other US cities in Miami's size category are planning tunnels, but Miami is opting instead for expensive and inefficient streetcars with tons of grade crossings? Is Miami that provincial and out of touch?

I'm sorry, I've gotta call B.S. on this one. Being from South Florida, and being very aware of SoFlo politics, I insist on shedding some light to you about Miami's dilemma. If Miami was able to, they would install a subway system. It obviously makes the most sense for heavy transit in a developed area because you don't need to worry so much about land acquisition for your system like you would for other modes of transit (i.e. elevated rail, monorail, etc.).

Unfortunately, Miami's geography prohibits subterranean construction. For the entire state of Florida south of Lake Okeechobee, the water table from the Florida Aquifer is literally 3-4 feet below the surface (which is already at sea level). This is why you don't find basements in much of the state, along with a number of reservoirs/retention ponds in suburbanized development built to strengthen the foundations for buildings.

Miami's only refuge for the foreseeable future is to bring back streetcars and install BRT at grade and on roads. It requires the least amount of land acquisition and is not nearly as expensive as extending the current Metrorail system (*which they have allotted funds to expand, BTW).

Sorry for digressing off from the real topic, though: Boston's Urban Ring.

I don't remember who said it, but they're right: if they're going to tunnel between Ruggles and Kenmore, they may as well install rail service. Just 20 minutes ago I was eating at a sidewalk cafe @ NU and counted the number of people getting off green line trains vs. the 39 bus.

Between 5PM and 5:30PM @ the Huntington Ave. Northeastern University T stop:
4 green-line trains ==> 46 total passengers getting off trains.
6 T Busses (RT 39) ==> 18 passengers getting off busses.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that Bostonians (and the masses for that matter) prefer rail-oriented travel over bus.

[jass]

Then how would the transbay tunnel to Miami Beach work?

Anyway, replace tunnel with elevated rail. Miami is planning a streetcar, which is a huge waste. Either elevate it (extend the awesome people mover) or use trackless trolleys. Actually, scratch that, how is any overhead power system for trains or buses a good idea in Miami?

And while I hate to go offtopic, I hope the moderators here can allow for a free flowing discussion which will eventually return to Boston Urban Ring unlike the lock-monsters at the other forum.

[dshoost88]

Then how would the transbay tunnel to Miami Beach work?.

It won't work! That's why they haven't built one yet! Currently, while the demand exists for better mass transit between downtown Miami and Miami Beach, there is no need for a tunnel. They're better off building elevated rail along one of the causeways connecting the two cities.

I think they tunnel you're thinking of is the Port of Miami Tunnel they're building... that's not a rail tunnel, though. They're building a tunnel that goes from the Macarthur causeway north of the port and connecting it to the port via a tunnel that goes under the cruise ship channel. The whole goal of this is to relieve downtown congestion from port traffic because currently about 36,000 trucks a day drive from the port through downtown and over to I-95. The tunnel to Macarthur causeway will provide a direct link for these trucks, freeing up noise and air pollution in downtown Miami and making it a more pedestrian friendly atmosphere. (Think of it as South Florida's Big Dig)

The link below takes you to the port tunnel website:

http://www.portofmiamitunnel.com/

[jass]

Youre right, I was confused with the truck tunnel. I think the planned rail project to Miami Beach is also elevated (and wont be happening in our lifetimes)

[belmont square]

Between 5PM and 5:30PM @ the Huntington Ave. Northeastern University T stop:
4 green-line trains ==> 46 total passengers getting off trains.
6 T Busses (RT 39) ==> 18 passengers getting off busses.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that Bostonians (and the masses for that matter) prefer rail-oriented travel over bus.

Out of curiosity, how do you think these numbers might change if passengers could board the 39 bus in East Cambridge, the West End, Bulfinch Triangle, Government Center, Downtown Crossing, and the Theatre District before reaching its current point of origin in Copley? And what if that 39 bus also operated in an exclusive grade separated right of way for the entire trip from Lechmere to Northeastern? And what if the E train only started at Copley Station and ran in mixed traffic on surface streets (as it does beyond Brigham Circle) from Copley to Northeastern? Would people still choose the train over the bus? If they would, I would suggest they have an unhealthy fixation with rail.

[commuter guy]

^^
Good point - exclusive right of ways are probably of paramount importance.

[Charlie_mta]

If an exclusive surface right of way or tunnel is going to be built, then light rail is a better use of that facility than a bus. Light rail has a much higher passenger capacity, is smoother and less polluting. Also, tunnels and elevated structures for light rail are narrower than those required for buses, offering some cost savings there.

The only segment of the Urban Ring requiring busses is the section going through the Ted Williams tunnel. The rest should be light rail.

[AdamBC]

I think that is a reporter who doesn't know what they are talking about.

It's Park Drive that runs over the Fenway stop. It would be nice if they built the stop so that after a Sox game it was a bit easier to get through the area.

[12345]

Longwood residents could face new bus fee

A long-planned project to connect the spokes of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority system may require private financial support from the universities and hospitals connected to the Longwood Medical Area.

Construction could begin as early as 2015 on the so-called Urban Ring ? a chain of five new bus routes linking outlying neighborhoods and inner suburbs of Boston ? to enable riders to go cross-town without heading into the city center to transfer.

But the project is not likely to be built without financial contributions from Harvard University, Boston University and the Longwood-area hospitals, which the proposed new lines would serve, say officials in the state?s Executive Office of Transportation. The Urban Ring is seen as vital to expansion of the Longwood-area life sciences sector.

A 2007 estimate priced construction at $2 billion and annual operating costs at $30 million. Project planners are applying for federal funds that could cover up to half the construction costs.

One proposal would cover part of the cost by levying a 10 percent surcharge on commercial parking spaces around the Longwood area and assessing institutions $100 for each private, nonresidential parking space they maintain. Combined, the parking taxes and fees could raise $44 million annually, enough to service $555 million in debt, according to a Boston Redevelopment Authority analysis obtained by the Boston Business Journal.

The analysis was undertaken for the Executive Office of Transportation on request, said BRA spokeswoman Jessica Shumaker. State officials cautioned that parking fees and taxes are among several ideas now under discussion, and the state has not asked institutions for any specific contributions.

Three-quarters of the estimated construction costs are slated for a $1.5 billion bus tunnel under the Longwood area.

Without the tunnel, the Urban Ring service may not be viable because roadways in Longwood are too narrow and congested, said Wendy P. Stern, the state?s undersecretary of planning and program development.

Stern said the federal government is likely to kick in less than half of the project?s estimated $2 billion cost.

?We have not figured out specific percentages,? Stern said, ?but the point that we really have to get into ... is what?s not able to be financed by the state as the local share has to be financed elsewhere.?

Most of the proposed route, which includes Cambridge, Somerville, Everett, Chelsea, East Boston, South Boston, Dorchester, Roxbury, the Fenway, Allston and Brighton, would be served by buses on a dedicated right-of-way.

The three Urban Ring routes serving the Longwood Medical Area are expected to carry 135,000 passengers daily, said Ned Codd, manager of plan development at the Executive Office of Transportation. The three routes connect Sullivan Square to Ruggles Station via Cambridge; Harvard Square to the University of Massachusetts-Boston via Allston-Brighton; and Kenmore Square to Chelsea via South Boston and East Boston.

The Medical Academic and Scientific Community Organization represents the medical schools and hospitals in the Longwood area. Sarah Hamilton, the group?s executive director, said it is too early to say whether institutions in the area are willing to financially support the Urban Ring.

?Of course everyone?s interested in trying to be collaborative,? she said.

The current proposed route through Allston to Cambridge would connect Harvard University?s Cambridge campus with its planned campus expansion in Allston and its medical school and teaching hospitals in the Longwood area.

?We?re on board with being a member of the process,? said university spokesman Joe Wrinn. He declined to say whether the university is considering a financial contribution. The Allston expansion plans can go forward with or without improved public transit service, he said.

However, better public transportation is essential to any expansion of the life sciences economy centered in the Longwood area, said Arthur Mombourquette, vice president of support services at Brigham and Women?s Hospital.

?If we?re going to grow we need to get more people here,? he said. ?And I think it?s unreasonable to expect that we?re going to be able to pump more vehicle traffic in here.?

As it is currently proposed, the Urban Ring would also support a transit hub proposed by Boston University at the intersection of Commonwealth Avenue and the BU Bridge. The proposed transit hub is part of the school?s plan to revitalize its campus center.

http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/stories/2008/08/25/story4.html?b=1219636800^1688521

[Beton Brut]

It's must be a slow news day if we're talking about this foolishness.

I work in the LMA, and this concept is worthless from the get-go.

Wanna fix the problem, here you go:

Run heavy-rail on the D-Line (connect the Orange Line to Kenmore / Yawkey via the existing ROW)
Construct a version of these silly musings (http://www.archboston.org/community/showthread.php?t=2389) from a bunch of amateurs

[Arborway]

I don't think many people are eager to fork over more money to go from one overcrowded bus to another.

And if the Silver Line is any indication, the buses will travel more slowly in the tunnel than they will on surface streets.

[PaulC]

I would much rather see them relocate the Riverside line under Brookline Ave from Kenmore to Brookline Village. This would better sever the LMA and the existing rail bed can be converted to park land. That area is already served by the Beacon line.

Long before I would want to see a full Urban Ring I think we need more 'spokes'. There are a lot of high population areas that are not served by the subway(Roxbury, Chelsea, Everett, Lynn, Watertown) and there is a good reason the MBTA lines are Boston centric, that's where most people want to go.

[Beton Brut]

I would much rather see them relocate the Riverside line under Brookline Ave from Kenmore to Brookline Village. This would better serve the LMA and the existing rail bed can be converted to park land.

Not a bad idea at all. Would help out with Sox games as well. Would you try to reconnect to the existing D-Line ROW at (or near) Pearl Street? Or at the junction of Rt. 9 and Washington Street? It may be pretty tricky (http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=brookline+village&ie=UTF8&ll=42.333264,-71.116991&spn=0.008597,0.017574&t=h&z=16&iwloc=addr)...

That area is already served by the Beacon line.

By "that area," I assume you mean the Fenway and Longwood stops. It's sort of true that the service is replicated at St. Mary's (Audubon Circle) and Hawes Street. But consider, St. Mary's to Landmark Center is a soul-robbing walk in the winter -- we'll need a stop there.

[PaulC]

If achievable it would be good to go all the way to Brookline Village before joining the old tracks. The only stations that would be moved would be Fenway and Longwood. If needed then you could keep Fenway and then shift under ground to Brookline Ave. I believe there has been a regular problem with crime and sexual assaults at Longwood

[el raval]

And if the Silver Line is any indication, the buses will travel more slowly in the tunnel than they will on surface streets.


Has anyone figured out why MBTA Silver Line buses can blast down Washington St at 45mph with traffic, pedestrians and local kids play ball, but can only drive 15mph through a tunnel where there's little unexpected urban life that might jump out in front of the bus?

[Arborway]

The tunnel dimensions don't allow for speeds faster than 25 mph, but that doesn't explain why they usually go well below the speed limit.

[found5dollar]

I just found a new "Fact Sheet" on the Urban Ring. It has a very detailed map.

https://www.commentmgr.com/projects/1169/docs/URnews0105c.pdf

[czsz]

Not many dedicated busways on that bus "rapid transit" line.

Worse than Silver Line?

[ablarc]

Sux.

[Arborway]

Assuming for a moment that BRT is even close to being acceptable for the passenger loads of a major arterial line, the three biggest problems with the proposed implementation as I see it:

- The buses will run on diesel, not electric power. This is insane.

link (https://www.commentmgr.com/projects/1169/docs/Urban_Ring_Public_Mtg_Notes_Chelsea_Jun0508.pdf)
Mr. Mahoney asked if EOT had considered trackless trolley technology. Mr. Codd said that trackless trolley had been evaluated, but the catenary and power system would have significant cost and visual impacts. Instead, the project recommendation is for diesel-electric hybrid 60 foot articulated buses, which have limited emissions.

- Limited use of busways. BUS LANES IN KENMORE SQUARE. Read that again. The $1 billion+ bus tunnel will end just before Kenmore and dump the vehicles into Sox traffic with "Bus Lane" painted on a patch of roadway before reentering a dedicated busway on the other side of BU. I'm sure this will end well.

- The bus tunnel will likely allow the vehicles to operate at lower speeds than in mixed traffic or surface busways. Again, this is insane. The B line goes much, much faster when it heads below ground for a reason. It should never be the other way 'round.

[cden4]

If they're going to use bus lanes, maybe they'll learn a lesson from Washington St and separate the bus lane from the other lanes with a narrow island/curb, like most other cities with BRT do. They probably won't, and then they'll be shocked that lots of non-buses are driving in the bus lane.

[jass]

- Limited use of busways. BUS LANES IN KENMORE SQUARE. Read that again. The $1 billion+ bus tunnel will end just before Kenmore and dump the vehicles into Sox traffic with "Bus Lane" painted on a patch of roadway before reentering a dedicated busway on the other side of BU. I'm sure this will end well.

.

This is the worst part. The tunnel should start with the grand junction, under comm ave and mass pike, not later by longwood.

Better yet, put the B underground too and have a big connection station.

Oh also, note they refer to the proposed B line BU bridge station. Hilarious.

[kennedy]

While we're digging tunnels for buses, why not just screw it an make them light rail?

[jass]

While we're digging tunnels for buses, why not just screw it an make them light rail?

Because the project will cost 2.5 billion, not 25 billion

[found5dollar]

if anyone is looking for some light reading, here is a full copy of the preliminary plans for the urban ring I found on its web site.

https://www.commentmgr.com/projects/1169/docs/Plan%20and%20Profile%20Drawings.pdf

[vanshnookenraggen]

Jesus Christ. I really hope this economy kills this. I'm not against improved bus transit but this is idiotic.

[jenkins]

Because the project will cost 2.5 billion, not 25 billion

I doubt light rail would cost THAT much...according to the 2003 PMT, electrifying the entire commuter rail system would only cost 2 billion--even less than the Urban Ring. Considering how much the commuter rail is used now, I'd say it's a worthy investment.

[jass]

I doubt light rail would cost THAT much...according to the 2003 PMT, electrifying the entire commuter rail system would only cost 2 billion--even less than the Urban Ring. Considering how much the commuter rail is used now, I'd say it's a worthy investment.

A large portion of the project is street running. You will not get a street running train in this state. As such, making it light rail would increase the cost exponentially do to ROW or tunnels.

[jenkins]

A large portion of the project is street running. You will not get a street running train in this state. As such, making it light rail would increase the cost exponentially do to ROW or tunnels.

True, street running is unpopular--but if it were rail being built, maybe it could be done in segments. The first segment could be, say, Airport (Blue Line) to Kendall, since that uses an existing ROW. With that first step done, work could begin on tunnels into Boston and a tunnel to Logan Airport. From there, more tunnels could be built, one at a time, to gradually bring the Urban Ring to completion.

Also, how much more expensive is a rail tunnel than a bus tunnel, if they're essentially of the same dimensions? Not only that, but rails carry far more people--it would be a better cost per rider, if not necessarily a better cost overall.

[jass]

True, street running is unpopular--but if it were rail being built, maybe it could be done in segments. The first segment could be, say, Airport (Blue Line) to Kendall, since that uses an existing ROW. With that first step done, work could begin on tunnels into Boston and a tunnel to Logan Airport. From there, more tunnels could be built, one at a time, to gradually bring the Urban Ring to completion.

Also, how much more expensive is a rail tunnel than a bus tunnel, if they're essentially of the same dimensions? Not only that, but rails carry far more people--it would be a better cost per rider, if not necessarily a better cost overall.

That IS what theyre doing. You cant build a 1 mile tunnel and run a train back and forth on it. Theyre building portions of tunnels. And then in 50 years, theyll build more tunnels. Eventually, there will be a full ROW and you can simply lay track.

[GW2500]

Currently this thing completly sucks. It goes on way too many roads and highways that are already clogged up. During rush hour going from Everett to Cambridge will take way too long.

[jenkins]

That IS what theyre doing. You cant build a 1 mile tunnel and run a train back and forth on it. Theyre building portions of tunnels. And then in 50 years, theyll build more tunnels. Eventually, there will be a full ROW and you can simply lay track.

I never mentioned laying a "1 mile tunnel," I'm talking about building on an existing ROW--one which, I might add, already has track down (although it would need a bit of upgrading). Something like this:

http://i539.photobucket.com/albums/ff354/34chan/UpgradedUrbanRing.jpg

The yellow follows a ROW with track down, and the light green follows a ROW with no track but no other development either.

This could be built fairly quickly and cheaply, and would serve more people more efficiently than BRT. With such a large chunk out of the way, work could begin on a tunnel under the Charles, and then on cut-and-cover tunnels running across Boston to JFK.

[cden4]

It is critically important that we have dedicated bus lanes ESPECIALLY where there is congestion now. This is where it is most important. To cave in and say "oh there's too much traffic to do a bus lane" defeats the whole point of BRT in the first place. Of course some people won't be happy, but it's ultimately for the benefit of everyone to have a faster more efficient option for traveling these routes.

[Arborway]

It is critically important that we have dedicated bus lanes ESPECIALLY where there is congestion now. This is where it is most important. To cave in and say "oh there's too much traffic to do a bus lane" defeats the whole point of BRT in the first place. Of course some people won't be happy, but it's ultimately for the benefit of everyone to have a faster more efficient option for traveling these routes.

Exactly. If you're going to go with BRT at least make it real BRT, not some half-assed version that isn't really different than a regular bus line.

If you read the government and industry planning documents for BRT systems you will see the problem is BRT is very vaguely-defined, and planners are encouraged that it can be implemented with a mix-and-match approach. There is no minimum standard for what constitutes BRT. It's very much "You could build an electric line running 60' articulated vehicles in a dedicated busway operating at 50 MPH, or run a 40' diesel bus in mixed traffic with a few less stops than a normal bus line."

While there are very good reasons for this, it ultimately cheapens the concept and leaves you with the same kind of transit line you're trying to replace. The much-touted "flexibility" of BRT lets you save money, but also do some crazy things that ultimately negatively impacts service.

The connected Silver Line for example will start at either Logan Airport or the Seaport and travel block after block in mixed traffic under diesel power as a normal bus line, travel to Silver Line Way where the buses will shut down completely, start up again under electric power, then run at 12 MPH through a dedicated tunnel until Charles St. where they will stop, shut down again, restart the diesel engines, travel in a dedicated lane that disappears after a few hundred feet and becomes a normal bus line again.

The Urban Ring will be another amalgamation of half-baked ideas that won't get remedied for decades to come, if ever. Look at how design decisions made in the 1900s are still haunting the Central Subway.

[found5dollar]

One thing I do not understand is how BRT, like the future Urban Ring and current Washington street Silverline, are on all of the MBTA maps and counted as main transportation routes, while none of the trackless trolley routes are. Both of these forms or transport are very simmilar. Infact isnt trackless trolley alot more perminant in the way it is built than BRT is?

[Lurker]

Sssh, the Feds might catch on and stop the gravy train for SL3.

[greenpoint0]

Well, we can keep talking about looping 'round the city and such forever and ever just to bypass some god forsaken tunnels and crap... or we can talk about the joke that was 695.

[Charlie_mta]

I never mentioned laying a "1 mile tunnel," I'm talking about building on an existing ROW--one which, I might add, already has track down (although it would need a bit of upgrading). Something like this:

http://i539.photobucket.com/albums/ff354/34chan/UpgradedUrbanRing.jpg



I like it! The surface LRV line could be continued down Mass. Ave to connect with the Green Line at Huntington Ave. This part could be on a separate reservation down the middle of Mass Ave, as it currently has two lanes of traffic in each direction. No "street running" issue that way.

[czsz]

^ There'd be all kinds of angst over screwing up traffic, though. I know cars = bad, but we do need SOME arterial streets...

As to the map: why not a station at Main St. that's connected via tunnel to Kendall? Two MIT area stops without transfer points to the Red Line doesn't make as much sense...

[Charlie_mta]

As an alternative to running the west leg of a light rail vehicle (LRV) urban ring down Mass Ave, the line could instead continue down the Grand Junction railroad to the BU Bridge. As this bridge is old and structurally deficient, replace it with a wider bridge having a light rail reservation down its center, to continue the Urban Ring across the Charles River. A new BU bridge that carries traffic as well as the Urban Ring would cost less than a tunnel under the Charles serving the Urban Ring only.

Then the urban ring could merge with the Green line, where the BU Bridge intersects Comm Ave.

[czsz]

Wasn't this one of the original proposed alignments?

[erikyow]

Isn't that the track to be used for the proposed Framingham/Worcester trains to North Station?

[found5dollar]

So apparently the Urban Ring isn't as dead as we though.... brand new website http://theurbanring.eot.state.ma.us/index.html and new, albeit smaller, ideas. There was apparently a meeting on November 22 where alot of stuff was talked about. all the documents can be found at http://theurbanring.eot.state.ma.us/documents.html under meeting 31.

The big ideas/ projects i see are the following:

Massport?s East Boston ? Chelsea Bypass Road project http://theurbanring.eot.state.ma.us/downloads/CAC_East_Boston_Chelsea_Bypass_Presentation.pdf

Silver Line extension to to Chelsea http://theurbanring.eot.state.ma.us/downloads/CAC_SilverLineExtensionOptions.pdf

Upgrading Yawkey Station and Ruggles Station

Other uses for the Grand Junction - "Wig Zamore suggested that deisel locomotive commuter rail service stopping in a dense urban environment like Cambridge was not a very sustainable proposal. He also proposed that any ridership analysis look at the potential for light rail service running between Sullivan Station and Allston. He explained that this would effectively create an ?urban ring? of Green Line/light rail service around the city. Mr. Ciborowski agreed that the Grand Junction is a vital corridor with a great deal of potential for use. He reiterated that MassDOT must maintain rail service along the corridor under an agreement with CSX to serve customers in Chelsea." http://theurbanring.eot.state.ma.us/downloads/CAC_31_Notes.pdf


there is more stuff, but you can just look yourself.

[BostonUrbEx]

This BRT bullshit is really pissing me off. First off, most of it isn't even real BRT, and second, there's nothing "rapid" about any part of the entire thing.

[jass]

Chelsea needs and orange line branch, not BRT.

However, the proposed bus route isn't terrible, Im sure the area is full of airport employees. But there is NO need to brand it as the silver line.

[PaulC]

My problem with the urban ring is that they should build all the spokes before they build the ring.

[found5dollar]

I personally thing expanding the silverline to the airport T-stop makes alot of sense. The T can retire it's fleet of shuttle busses with out any change in service.

The downside is they will have to make new maos, again, and take another 2 years to put them all up.

[BostonUrbEx]

I personally thing expanding the silverline to the airport T-stop makes alot of sense. The T can retire it's fleet of shuttle busses with out any change in service.

The downside is they will have to make new maos, again, and take another 2 years to put them all up.

There's no need to update maps for every little thing. There's tons of reallyyyyy old maps around, and there's also still maps showing SL to Andrew Square within the SL system.

[TMcLaughlin]

I personally thing expanding the silverline to the airport T-stop makes alot of sense. The T can retire it's fleet of shuttle busses with out any change in service..

Those buses are Massport's, and they'll still need them for inter-terminal travel, economy and employee parking, and Harborside Drive.

[ant8904]

You know, expanding the silver line to chelsea isn't that bad of an idea if it was actually light rail (or heavy rail). An actual line.

[Arborway]

Two things:

- I keep seeing "no signal prioritization for buses" and "no bus lanes" in the documents.

- The Silver Line from Airport station will not get you to the airport? Tourists will be... confused.

[JohnAKeith]

This is a "Circumferential transit report" from the Boston Transportation Planning Review, appears to be circa 1970, regarding a transportation system around (and through) Boston. Haven't seen this mentioned before?

http://www.archive.org/stream/circumferentialt00mass#page/n7/mode/2up

[dshoost88]

I made my own map/vision for the Urban Ring & (mostly) Logan Airport improvements. You can check it out at this link. Feedback is greatly appreciated:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=200912762090942381293.0004b2f78b86237f5a8f 5&msa=0&ll=42.368184,-71.055622&spn=0.084214,0.160503

[armpitsOFmight]

hahahaha....none of that will ever happen!!!

We don't have 10 billion dollars for rail....

[dshoost88]

Two words:

Higher
Taxes

[BostonUrbEx]

Three better words:

Cut wasteful programs.


Plenty of money to take from shitty things.

[Lurker]

Must resist desire to rant to avoid irking Statler & exciting TheRifleman................read post in General Forum about off topic ranting.......

I've become of the opinion that the Urban Ring really is a semi-useless expenditure of funding on studies for projects which will never come to fruition. It would be better for the state and MBTA to spend the money on fixing the Red Line signals and upgrading the Green Line's pathetic signal and traffic light priority system. Providing better service with existing lines should be taking priority over wasting money on what is generally expected to never be built.

If the MBTA wants to spend money on studies the only ones that really matter right now are the Blue Line extensions to Lynn & Charles MGH.

[HenryAlan]

Three better words:

Cut wasteful programs.


Plenty of money to take from shitty things.

I read this morning that we spent $800 billion on the Iraq war. Surely a country that can do that, can find a measly $10 billion for an important transit project in one of its leading cities.

[statler]

Lurker gets it...

[F-Line to Dudley]

Must resist desire to rant to avoid irking Statler & exciting TheRifleman................read post in General Forum about off topic ranting.......

I've become of the opinion that the Urban Ring really is a semi-useless expenditure of funding on studies for projects which will never come to fruition. It would be better for the state and MBTA to spend the money on fixing the Red Line signals and upgrading the Green Line's pathetic signal and traffic light priority system. Providing better service with existing lines should be taking priority over wasting money on what is generally expected to never be built.

If the MBTA wants to spend money on studies the only ones that really matter right now are the Blue Line extensions to Lynn & Charles MGH.

Agreed. But choosing self-defeating incompatible modes also scuttles things that should be buildable. Case-in-point: the UR has a leg out to Logan using the hardly ever used freight storage tracks next to Sullivan, 2 of the 4 former Eastern Route tracks, the abandoned south leg of the Chelsea wye, and the abandoned East Boston branch to Logan. If they did the smart thing and made it light rail from the start the GLX extension puts the storage yard and lead tracks smack on alignment to those Sullivan tracks. The only major new infrastructure required to get out there is either a new Mystic River crossing in the Assembly area or widened crossing along the Eastern Route, then putting back the rail drawbridge bridge that used to be next to the Chelsea St. bridge. Rest is track, overhead, and 2 quick underpasses of other track at BET and getting on the other side of the Eastern Route. Otherwise the service runs off Lechmere as another branch and costs less than the current extension due to fewer stations and no disruption to commuter rail vs. the total rebuild of the Lowell corridor. That's buildable now without dependencies on any other piece of the UR puzzle (like figuring out how to displace the RR on the Grand Junction).

So why's there the BRT Phase II that paves a road over the whole damn thing, including a bunch of ramps and on-street dives around spots the RR ROW doesn't support. THEN specs a conversion to rail in Phase III that renders both II and III monuments to senseless waste?

A whole extra phase for a wholly incompatible mode for something they can build for billions less as an extra branch off an existing mode! That's an insta-kill. Nobody in their right mind would waste the only shot at building transit with intentionally bad transit. Then do it twice...because? It's worse than Silver Line Phase III, another project that could've been built for a billion or two less if they didn't plan to totally duplicate infrastructure for an incompatible, clumsier mode that the designers themselves implicitly didn't trust long-term.

Stupid, insincere, or both? You have to wonder with how patently ludicrous the designs were for each of the 1990's-proposed transit megaprojects. Not saying they would've been built, but if Captain Obvious were drawing them up they at least would've passed the laugh test and still been on some long-range plan.

Blue Line you can at least say was designed by Captain Obvious (i.e. BERy, in 1945, back when we still knew how to design straightforward transit) and know with dead-on certainty that it'll work as intended. Straight-up if/how fast can we afford, not "Will this turkey even fly?" UR, SL III, and N-S Link are vitally important 21st century projects. And I wouldn't spend one second's more thought or money planning them from the current designs unless they stopped dicking around and totally re-drafted them as something that makes basic-most conceptual sense.

[Arlington]

Massport has said they've broken ground converting a section of CSX track immediately east of the Airport to serve shuttles, taxis and freight that would otherwise be using East Boston streets. This below-grade right-of-way is usually included in Urban Ring concepts as the section that connects the Airport to Chelsea.

http://www.massport.com/news-room/News/MassportBreaksGroundonEastBostonBypassRoad.aspx

Plans and schematics here: http://www.massport.com/environment/environmental_reporting/Documents/Environmental Filings/EastBostonChelseaBypassENF.pdf

In this case they're taking out the tracks to put in two 12 foot asphalt lanes with 4 foot shoulders from near the Blue Line and the Airport Station to the Chelsea

[Charlie_mta]

A two-lane paved road is not a deal killer for a future light rail line. If they were putting in a trail, I'd be worried because then you would have NIMBY's and 4F park preservation laws to battle when/if an LRV line were to be proposed. But a two-lane road can be removed much more easily than a trail, especially an unimportant road such as this one.

[BostonUrbEx]

A two-lane paved road is not a deal killer for a future light rail line. If they were putting in a trail, I'd be worried because then you would have NIMBY's and 4F park preservation laws to battle when/if an LRV line were to be proposed. But a two-lane road can be removed much more easily than a trail, especially an unimportant road such as this one.

MassPort is the literal definition of government evil. They have their own agenda and have no regard for other agencies, entities, or people. They're only out for their own bottom line and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if they just blockaded an Urban Ring to Airport until Logan moves (if ever).

[F-Line to Dudley]

Pretty sorely needed as a Haul Road. That neighborhood's suffered enough; getting the trucks off Bennington and Chelsea near the residences is worthy of it as an environmental justice project. I think it's a good project.

Doesn't eat up very much ROW, though, since it starts south of Curtis St. and ends under 1A at the corner of Frankfort and Lovell. 3+ blocks. Any UR build--bus, rail, dune buggy, whatever--uses the ROW from Broadway in Chelsea to Curtis for almost 4x the length of this, plus another 1/3 mile to Airport station hugging 1A next to the East Boston Greenway. The Eastern Route used to go all the way to the docks as a 4-track mainline prior to elevated 1A's construction, so that embankment fill is for the most part postwar. In the Haul Road design they re-landscape it rather than get rid of it. Doing retaining walls, scooping out the fill, and widening the Bennington and Saratoga overpasses nets a full 4-lane roadway if they choose to go there later (plus similar space under elevated 1A deck for the truck turnout where they diverge).

I don't think even in a bus configuration they wanted total 1:1 intermixing with trucks on the Haul Road because of the sharply diverging traffic at Frankfort and Chelsea. That would've sharply constrained speeds and headways and have been ill-advised for CNG buses running Airport expresses in merging single-lane traffic with tankers full of jet fuel. Unless, of course, they made a compromise where no traffic on the road was allowed to go more than 10 MPH and there was a pointless stop signal in the middle of it. But they'd never do that on a shiny BRT crown jewel, would they? :rolleyes:


This doesn't preclude any option, as by design Phase III had to allow for light- or heavy-rail conversion on the same exact ROW as the "intermediary" BRT phase (*cue hysterical laughter*). So if they wanted to follow their own plans, they widen the cut for BRT Phase II. And get full traffic-separated, rumble-strip buffered bus lanes that are pre-existing wide enough to later slap down a fence and put rail behind. Riiiiiight?


Of course, if they were honest about following their own plan, and honest about making the investment to widen the road...they'd also have to be honestly questioning about "Why the hell are we building a Phase II when we can skip right to Phase III?"



Yeah, er...so 10 MPH stop-and-go crawl behind exhaust-belching gas tankers it is. Oh, and Fat Tony is real sorry for the rough ride in the Transitway. He promises to maybe try harder, maybe, on this pavement bid we also gave him.

[whighlander]

MassPort is the literal definition of government evil. They have their own agenda and have no regard for other agencies, entities, or people. They're only out for their own bottom line and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if they just blockaded an Urban Ring to Airport until Logan moves (if ever).

Urb -- that sounds like someone's campaign rhetoric from a few decades ago -- i.e. when 4,5,7 used to congregate on Neptune Road to shoot B-reel on 747's landing on the roofs of houses.

Since then -- Massport has become a creature of the Governor, the DOT and to a lesser extent the legislature (since Massport is self-funding the tie to the legislature is not as strong).

"Massport is governed by a seven member Board, six members are appointed to staggered, seven-year terms by the Governor of Massachusetts. The seventh member is the Secretary of Transportation and serves ex officio. All members serve without compensation."

Massport now coordinates to a significant extent wih the MBTA and the Highway Department especially after transfering the ownership of the Tobin bridge under the DOT unification legislation.

http://www.massport.com/news-room/News/MassportBreaksGroundonEastBostonBypassRoad.aspx

“This is a major investment and we look forward to a new two-lane bypass road 12 months from now when we officially open it leaving the East Boston community improved traffic flow as well as improved air quality with the removal of a significant amount of airport-related commercial traffic from local streets,” said Massport Interim CEO David Mackey.

The two-lane roadway will be used by airport-related commercial traffic only and will consist of Massport shuttle buses which transport airport workers to and from a 1,500 space garage in Chelsea, taxis and MBTA buses serving Logan Airport and cargo vehicles.

“I am very pleased to be here today at this groundbreaking ceremony and I thank Massport for advancing the bypass road, which will provide such a benefit to the community. The bypass road will take trucks off residential streets, improve air quality and enhance local neighborhoods. I have been fighting for this project since I took office and although it took a long time to get to this day, I look forward to the completion of the bypass road,” stated Congressman Mike Capuano.

As Coughlin envisioned, the road will run along an abandoned CSX rail corridor between Frankfort Street and Lovell Street where a traffic light will be placed. The northern end of the bypass, which will run about one-half mile in length, will split with northbound traffic intersecting Chelsea Street via a former rail spur slightly north of Beck Street. Southbound traffic will enter the bypass roadway at Beck Street.

“I am very excited about this long-anticipated project because of the positive, measurable benefits that will be realized for our environment and residents,” said Senator Anthony Petruccelli. ”It is very appropriate that the road be named in honor of Marty Coughlin.’’ City Councilor Salvatore LaMattina agreed saying he worked with Coughlin to promote the idea in the 1980s. The bypass road “has been a long time coming,” LaMattina said.

Other local amenities include landscaping along Frankfort Street and a bicycle and pedestrian path linking the East Boston Greenway through Breman Street Park with the Bennington Street Neptune Road area. The project will create 46 construction jobs and is expected to be complete in October 2012."


As for moving Logan -- when the glaciers next advance to the NH border they'll start thinking about moving the runways to the Cape

[vanshnookenraggen]

The only way building a section of the Urban Ring through Everett and Chelsea would make sense would be if those two towns created large redevelopment plans for that industrial no-man's land with plans for thousands of new residential units, parks, and commercial/hotels. Hong Kong does this as a way to pay for extensions of it's subway.

It's not a bad idea but one that would need to jump through a lot of hoops and planning would have to start tomorrow to even think about breaking ground when the economy is better. Given how fast the Assembly Sq project has taken and the fact that development at Wellington Station never took off doesn't bode well for such a proposal.

So basically... it's probably best that they just create a haul road.

[HenryAlan]

If not through Chelsea, then what route would make sense? I've always been concerned about that stretch, but figured it could be designed as a high speed express section, stopping only at the Chelsea commuter rail station, before beginning a more local type service as it heads into Somerville.

[F-Line to Dudley]

Bus route connectivity makes Chelsea the best fit for UR. 6 routes pass through there, fed from Maverick, Community College, and Wonderland. Then the would-be Everett stop catches 8 more routes out of Sullivan and Wellington/Malden Ctr. (route convergence point there residue from when the Orange Line used to terminate at Everett). Plus 3 Maverick-originating As that's a hodgepodge of Orange and Blue routes terminating at 5 rather varied rapid transit stops the load-spreading justification for a radial line starts to reveal itself. Look at it on the system map with all the bus routes and it's a lot more self-evident.

Of course, only 1/5 of the Ring's total length covers this one segment, so can't look at that in a vacuum beyond it's the easiest of the grade-separated segments to tackle first were construction ever a temporal possibility. Rest of the route is more where this came from on tying big bundles of transfers together the rest of the way around the horn. There's no question the ROUTE is exactly as useful and bullish-ridership as advertised. It's only the choice of mode and two ungodly expensive duplicate phases for quadruple the price that once again beg the question, "Stupid, disingenuous, or both?"

[bigeman312]

Bump

http://www.wickedlocal.com/cambridge/blogs/charles_river_white_geese_blog/x181547828/Cambridge-City-Council-Committee-defers-action-on-Grand-Junction-Highway-Proposal-very-destructive-to-Charles-River-White-Geese

The City Administration once again gave the impression that the Grand Junction corridor is the only alternative under consideration for the Urban Ring rail transportation concept. This is not only false, but is directly contradicted by funding provided by the State Legislature.

To express the situation in the nicest possible light, the City Administration’s position is that the only route being considered for the Urban Ring is that route now called the BU Bridge crossing. At absolute minimum, this position is 20 years behind the times.

Also under consideration is the Kenmore Crossing, an alternative I first proposed in a public meeting in 1986 concerning the Urban Ring because of the environmental and Cambridge destructiveness of the BU Bridge Crossing. The Kenmore Crossing was independently picked up by the state in 1991 and has, ever since, been considered, along with the BU Bridge Crossing, as one of two alternative Charles River crossings for the Urban Ring rail proposals.

The BU Bridge Crossing pushed by the Cambridge Administration would be Green Line / streetcar technology. It would cross the Charles River east of the BU Bridge and east of the Grand Junction railroad bridge with major environmental harm and harm to resident animals.

The Kenmore Crossing would use Heavy Rail / Orange Line technology. It would travel a considerable distance in the Grand Junction right of way, constructed underground. It would turn off the Grand Junction and travel under the MIT playing fields and then under the Charles River to a station between and connected to Kenmore Station and Yawkey Station. It would be constructed under the Brookline Avenue bridge over I90, the Massachusetts Turnpike.

This station combination would create one megastation which would provide excellent connections to Fenway Park, to the three Green Line branches to Brookline, and to the Framingham / Worcester Commuter Rail, all with covered walkways.

By contrast, the BU Bridge Crossing alternative would require moving Yawkey station and the Commuter Rail stop to Mountfort Street and St. Mary’s Street a half a mile to a mile west of Fenway Park. Commuter Rail passengers would be connected to the Green Line / Boston College line ONLY rather than to all three branches.

Connection to the Green Line would be made by a tunnel under St. Mary’s Street ending at the south sidewalk of Commonwealth Avenue across from Boston University’s Marsh Chapel. Commuter rail passengers would walk across traffic in all kinds of weather to the already overloaded Boston College line in the median of Commonwealth Avenue.

The legislature has subsidized the reconstruction of Yawkey Station in place to the tune of millions of dollars. This subsidy also constitutes a subsidy for the far superior Kenmore Crossing of the Urban Ring with its excellent Kenmore - Urban Ring - Yawkey megastation.

The Yawkey / Urban Ring / Kenmore megastation would be an ideal terminus for First Stage construction on the Urban Ring as an Orange Line spur. This First Stage would function as a spur coming out of Ruggles Station on the Orange Line with an intermediate Harvard Medical Area stop at Longwood Avenue and Louis Pasteur. Such a First Stage route would provide the Harvard Medical Area and Fenway Park with direct excellent connection to Boston’s downtown over the Orange Line. This connection would function in the same manner as the Quincy / Braintree branch provides Quincy and Braintree with downtown connection on what was a Dorchester - Cambridge Red Line heavy rail subway.

And, as I said, the legislature has subsidized the Kenmore Crossing with the millions of dollars it is spending upgrading Yawkey.

With that money put into upgrading Yawkey Station, Yawkey Station WILL NOT BE MOVED, and the Kenmore Crossing would appear to have a very major leg up on the Cambridge Administration’s favored BU Bridge Crossing.

And, somehow, the City Administration still communicated in that meeting the very clear message that the Kenmore Crossing alternative does not exist.

[Commuting Boston Student]

An Orange Line spur? Seriously?

I'm struggling to think of a more efficient way to choke the Orange Line to death than by causing 50% of its trains to miss Back Bay, Tufts Medical, Chinatown, DTX, State, and Haymarket. (I'm assuming that, since the Grand Junction is being used, the spur would at least rejoin the line at North Station. If not, add that and Sullivan Square to this list.)

If the Kenmore Crossing is inextricably linked with splitting the Orange Line (and I see no reason why it SHOULD be), than this man made his own argument against it.

[HenryAlan]

An Orange Line spur? Seriously?

I'm struggling to think of a more efficient way to choke the Orange Line to death than by causing 50% of its trains to miss Back Bay, Tufts Medical, Chinatown, DTX, State, and Haymarket. (I'm assuming that, since the Grand Junction is being used, the spur would at least rejoin the line at North Station. If not, add that and Sullivan Square to this list.)

If the Kenmore Crossing is inextricably linked with splitting the Orange Line (and I see no reason why it SHOULD be), than this man made his own argument against it.

I think the proposal is the opposite of what you suggest, which is to say splitting off half of the outbound traffic from having Forest Hills as a destination. Personally, I like the idea you've proposed. The utility of either an urban ring or some sort of cross town service is that it serves trips that otherwise need not pass through the core. If I get on at Forest Hills and want to go to Kenmore or Longwood, right now, I have to be part of the downtown congestion. The ideal should be that I not have to pass through that area at all. The urban ring idea recognizes this issue, but in my opinion applies the wrong solution. Instead of a fix it all at once with a single and omnipresent solution, why not just build a few cross town branches as money and opportunity permit.

[underground]

Isn't the thinking behind doing it as an Orange line addition that the spurs already exist from Sullivan up through Chelsea and from Community College out past Union? Not sure why that means the entire thing needs to be Orange (maybe because it's the easiest type to build?) but I think that was the reasoning. I can't even remember at this point though; it's been so long since the topic's come up.

[ant8904]

The blog you link to is claiming hard that the administration is trying to bury the Kenmore crossing option.

So does the option really exist (as in geologically possible manner, but also ask in they actually gave the option thought before)?

If everything said is true, why are they insisting the BU Bridge idea? My gut say it is just costs, but I want to fact check his claims.

[bigeman312]

Does anyone know if there are serious plans to include any connections to the Green Line with the new Yawkey construction?

[underground]

I think the only thing that amounts to a serious plan for MassDot et al at the moment is to try as hard as possible not to talk about the Urban Ring.

[Matthew]

I find the Urban Ring idea to be questionable anyway. Does it really save time except for a small number of trips? It turns a one transfer trip into a two transfer trip unless your origin or destination lies along the Ring. And by nature it avoids the heaviest demand areas. Most trips would be along a small arc; anything further and it's faster to connect downtown. Improved bus service would go a long way to obviating the Urban Ring.

[bigeman312]

I find the Urban Ring idea to be questionable anyway. Does it really save time except for a small number of trips? It turns a one transfer trip into a two transfer trip unless your origin or destination lies along the Ring. And by nature it avoids the heaviest demand areas. Most trips would be along a small arc; anything further and it's faster to connect downtown. Improved bus service would go a long way to obviating the Urban Ring.

If this were true the 66 bus wouldn't have the ridership it does.

[Max Power]

I find the Urban Ring idea to be questionable anyway. Does it really save time except for a small number of trips? It turns a one transfer trip into a two transfer trip unless your origin or destination lies along the Ring. And by nature it avoids the heaviest demand areas. Most trips would be along a small arc; anything further and it's faster to connect downtown. Improved bus service would go a long way to obviating the Urban Ring.

I think that an urban ring was projected to have >300,000 riders/day.

[Matthew]

Well, first, the 66 runs along a route that wouldn't be on the Urban Ring over the Grand Junction. Second, the 66 is what motivates my thinking on this. It is only faster to use the 66 if you are riding between Allston -- Harvard, Brookline -- Allston, Brookline -- Mission Hill, Dudley -- Mission Hill. In other words, small arcs.

Now some of that is due to the slowness of the route. But what possible improvement could you see that would make people suddenly decide that Dudley -- Harvard on the 66 "Ring" is better than the 1, Silver/Red or Orange/Red?

[underground]

But what possible improvement could you see that would make people suddenly decide that Dudley -- Harvard on the 66 "Ring" is better than the 1, Silver/Red or Orange/Red?

If it was a one seat ride in it's own right of way. That's the ultimate plan at least. Projections are also showing downtown will ultimately be completely clogged without it. So if I'm me in 20 years (fingers crossed) and the option is one seat in a dedicated ROW vs two seats through major congestion, I'd probably pick the Urban Ring.

[HenryAlan]

I find the Urban Ring idea to be questionable anyway. Does it really save time except for a small number of trips? It turns a one transfer trip into a two transfer trip unless your origin or destination lies along the Ring. And by nature it avoids the heaviest demand areas. Most trips would be along a small arc; anything further and it's faster to connect downtown. Improved bus service would go a long way to obviating the Urban Ring.

I agree, hence I think the emphasis should be more on certain cross-town corridors, which would be less expensive to build yet probably take the majority of what traffic would have been on the ring. Here's the article that got me thinking in this direction:

http://www.humantransit.org/2010/09/moscow-questioning-the-circle-line.html

[HenryAlan]

If it was a one seat ride in it's own right of way. That's the ultimate plan at least. Projections are also showing downtown will ultimately be completely clogged without it. So if I'm me in 20 years (fingers crossed) and the option is one seat in a dedicated ROW vs two seats through major congestion, I'd probably pick the Urban Ring.

A better way to address downtown clogging is by building more downtown subways.

[Matthew]

If it was a one seat ride in it's own right of way. That's the ultimate plan at least. Projections are also showing downtown will ultimately be completely clogged without it. So if I'm me in 20 years (fingers crossed) and the option is one seat in a dedicated ROW vs two seats through major congestion, I'd probably pick the Urban Ring.

It's own right of way... that will never happen along Harvard Avenue. I don't think we'll ever see -- at least not in my lifetime -- a subway or elevated along that route. It might be possible using the Grand Junction, but that doesn't serve the areas that the 66 does. The 66 has high ridership for the same reason that it's slow: it serves the busiest neighborhoods of the western half of Boston (as well as Brookline).

I'm with Henry. Jarrett's writing got me to question the utility of the Urban Ring in the first place. I think it would be much cheaper to renovate the downtown stations and increase frequency on the existing subways. We're not at capacity by a long shot. Also, a bunch of the 66's ridership comes from the fact that the Green Line and the Silver Line are slow and shitty (technical term!). If those are improved, the Ring becomes even less of a value.

[underground]

Oh, I'm not saying I'm a big Urban Ring advocate; I can think of a lot of other projects I'd rather see. Just saying what the thinking is. That being said, I can imagine a world where it's needed; I'm just not sure that world's coming any time soon.

[F-Line to Dudley]

Look at the blog this is cross-posted from, folks. This is a one-issue advocacy: the Charles River White Geese. The writer has been railing against the UR, commuter rail on the Grand Junction, any increases in freight activity...even concern-trolling bike paths on the empty track berth of the BU Bridge. All over impacts to those morbidly obese/overfed geese who live in their own filth on the tracks and have pooped all the vegetation away on that side of the river. I have no qualms with animal advocacy, but the Friends of the White Geese org are zealots with a capital "Z". Like some PETA caricature from The Onion. If you were ever accosted by one of their pamphleteers when planning for the BU Bridge reconstruction was happening, you know exactly what I'm talking about.


In this case, their blogger has been flogging his own arsenal of Crazy Transit Pitches for over a decade years to keep the geese from having to waddle off the tracks. That is the literal be-all/end-all of this piece. The geese. Drop a billion extra for the geese. Today's entry (http://www.wickedlocal.com/cambridge/blogs/charles_river_white_geese_blog/x181547960/Urban-Ring-Rail-Maps-two-options-Boston-and-Cambridge-MA) has some grainy scans of ancient MBTA documents showing the alternatives. You can see exactly why the "Kenmore" option is a nonstarter with the tunneling involved. Yes, it was studied as an engineering alternative...as in, some alternative had to be studied to fulfill the obligations of the assessment even though practically only the Bridge option would ever work. They quite obviously thought it was a laugher back then, and that there would only ever be one plausible option. It's a big leap to call it a web of "lies!" and a giant gov't conspiracy to keep the Kenmore option off the table in favor of the Bridge. They would be wasting everyone's time x10 if the Kenmore tunnel option were on the table, because it's utterly fricking unbuildable.

I encourage reading some of the old blog entries. This guy is just a wee unbalanced in the head.

[bigeman312]

Look at the blog this is cross-posted from, folks. This is a one-issue advocacy: the Charles River White Geese. The writer has been railing against the UR, commuter rail on the Grand Junction, any increases in freight activity...even concern-trolling bike paths on the empty track berth of the BU Bridge. All over impacts to those morbidly obese/overfed geese who live in their own filth on the tracks and have pooped all the vegetation away on that side of the river. I have no qualms with animal advocacy, but the Friends of the White Geese org are zealots with a capital "Z". Like some PETA caricature from The Onion. If you were ever accosted by one of their pamphleteers when planning for the BU Bridge reconstruction was happening, you know exactly what I'm talking about.


In this case, their blogger has been flogging his own arsenal of Crazy Transit Pitches for over a decade years to keep the geese from having to waddle off the tracks. That is the literal be-all/end-all of this piece. The geese. Drop a billion extra for the geese. Today's entry (http://www.wickedlocal.com/cambridge/blogs/charles_river_white_geese_blog/x181547960/Urban-Ring-Rail-Maps-two-options-Boston-and-Cambridge-MA) has some grainy scans of ancient MBTA documents showing the alternatives. You can see exactly why the "Kenmore" option is a nonstarter with the tunneling involved. Yes, it was studied as an engineering alternative...as in, some alternative had to be studied to fulfill the obligations of the assessment even though practically only the Bridge option would ever work. They quite obviously thought it was a laugher back then, and that there would only ever be one plausible option. It's a big leap to call it a web of "lies!" and a giant gov't conspiracy to keep the Kenmore option off the table in favor of the Bridge. They would be wasting everyone's time x10 if the Kenmore tunnel option were on the table, because it's utterly fricking unbuildable.

I encourage reading some of the old blog entries. This guy is just a wee unbalanced.

Wow. I just skimmed a couple of his entries and you are completely right. Take the blog entry for what it's worth, I guess.

[F-Line to Dudley]

Wow. I just skimmed a couple of his entries and you are completely right. Take the blog entry for what it's worth, I guess.

Upon seeing the original link, I probably said for the first time ever: "Wow...this is way below Wicked Local's standards." :rolleyes:

[Commuting Boston Student]

Upon seeing the original link, I probably said for the first time ever: "Wow...this is way below Wicked Local's standards." :rolleyes:

Is there anything stopping us from, alongside or in place of the BU Bridge crossing, starting a branch or two of the Green Line out of North Station? I agree with Henry that there's a lot more value in building short spurs that could later be connected to each other.

Something like a phase one GLX to Chelsea, phase one Urban Ring over the bridge, then extend Union Square Green Line to Porter, connect Porter to the BU Bridge Spur and reroute those trains over to Chelsea. BLX to Lynn, Urban Ring to Lynn, and presto - you're done.

Absent or independent of that, the Orange Line doesn't need to be spurred. If we're going to do anything with the Orange Line, we should grab another five trainsets and double our headways on that line.

[F-Line to Dudley]

Is there anything stopping us from, alongside or in place of the BU Bridge crossing, starting a branch or two of the Green Line out of North Station? I agree with Henry that there's a lot more value in building short spurs that could later be connected to each other.

Something like a phase one GLX to Chelsea, phase one Urban Ring over the bridge, then extend Union Square Green Line to Porter, connect Porter to the BU Bridge Spur and reroute those trains over to Chelsea. BLX to Lynn, Urban Ring to Lynn, and presto - you're done.

Absent or independent of that, the Orange Line doesn't need to be spurred. If we're going to do anything with the Orange Line, we should grab another five trainsets and double our headways on that line.

The Urban Ring doesn't have a clear integrity of concept. The city needs better radial distribution...great. The city's ideal radial distribution patterns and demand overlap on a map in a distinct ring area around downtown roughly conforming to the UR route...great. But since when did a one-seat radial ride become a necessity? How many people would actually ride this thing nearly end-to-end? That's where this falls part...where it gets force-fitted into the T's everything-must-be-a-one-seat-ride philosophy. People are going to ride this thing in segments, but there won't be much overlap of folks riding the SE quadrant in Southie and the NW quadrant between MIT and Lechmere. A 1-transfer ride on the subway will beat the one-seat roundabount every time. The T is severely overestimating the value of the one-seat and not taking into account that a line that doesn't reach any of the big half-dozen central transfer stations serves a fundamentally different purpose than the 4-1/2 lines that do. That error in logic is driving all the design decisions here.

Same as with the Silver Line. Why do people need rapid transit to Dudley so badly? Because it's the system's largest bus hub. The largest % of users are going to be using it as a radial line, even though it is not ring-shaped and Washington St. does have characteristics of a rapid transit surface branch in its own right. Hardly anyone needs a one-seat direct to Southie on it, but that feature became the unifying concept of the whole SL Phase III boondoggle and all of the project's design features were force-fitted around that.

Keep it simple. If it covers a radial transfer need, then it essentially is fulfilling the goals of the UR. Spurs fulfill those goals.

-- Green to Porter from Union. Red to Green/Orange and commuter rail, links 3 bus routes at Porter (incl. the 77) to 5 more at Union and 3 more at Lechmere.
-- Green to Sullivan stub. 12 bus routes + Orange at Sullivan to 4 bus routes + 2 other GL branches at Lechmere. The Green Line historically used to have 2 branches to Sullivan via Charlestown (albeit on different routings) serving different needs than the Orange Line, so there's not a redundancy here. The tracks to the GLX maintenance yard will also get halfway to Sullivan to begin with, so it's easy to continue. And this is your jumping-off point for Chelsea and Logan.
-- Green on Grand Junction from Lechmere. Pretty obvious why this is needed. MIT/CT2 corridor.
-- Green on Grand Junction via Kenmore. If B is buried underneath the reservation out to BU Bridge to form a connection. CT2 + 47. Reconfigure Kenmore so the B/D sides can loop there and it costs about $1B+ less than the cross-Brookline fantasy tunnel while linking the 66/65/60 at Brookline Village. Add E-to-D connecting track to BV and it links JP. Fistfuls and fistfuls of transfers.
-- Green to Dudley. Of course.
-- Green to South Station via some sanely-dug tunnel (probably under NEC from South End instead of through Chinatown).

And so on. Prioritize as you see fit, but it doesn't need to be a monolith to fulfill its radial transfer integrity-of-concept. And it damn sure doesn't have to be a totally different mode to fulfill its integrity-of-monolith inside a wholly invented one-seat integrity-of-concept.

[dshoost88]

OR in lieu of a publicly financed Urban Ring project, instead an organization pools financing from all the institutions that would benefit from ridership along an Urban Ring heavy-rail corridor and charge a premium for the service. Harvard, MIT, BU, all Longwood Hospitals, NU, WIT, Boston Medical, BCEC, Bio-Tech @ Seaport, Logan, Assembly Row, Tufts, Lesley, and back to Harvard.

Just my stream of consciousness, sorry. One can dream, right?

[F-Line to Dudley]

OR in lieu of a publicly financed Urban Ring project, instead an organization pools financing from all the institutions that would benefit from ridership along an Urban Ring heavy-rail corridor and charge a premium for the service. Harvard, MIT, BU, all Longwood Hospitals, NU, WIT, Boston Medical, BCEC, Bio-Tech @ Seaport, Logan, Assembly Row, Tufts, Lesley, and back to Harvard.

Just my stream of consciousness, sorry. One can dream, right?

Orange isn't well-suited to spurs. Or at least it hasn't been since the Atlantic Ave. El went away and all the original plans for spur Els to Southie, etc. were abandoned. Red can handle branches because they split well outside of downtown and the ridership craters bigtime after South Station, meaning most of the schedule mileage works just fine on branchline headways. Most of the stops Broadway-south have half the boardings of everything north of there, even the Alewife extension stops. I don't know how you'd be able to mix and match it on Orange when stops as far-flung as Malden Ctr. and Forest Hills hang within < 1000 boardings of a State St. or Haymarket. Except for some of the least important SW Corridor stops the boardings stay at a pretty even keel throughout, so branching would unduly punish headways at stops like MC or FH that need the full schedule. Which even with a full fleet and more capable signal system is going to put a crimp in things relative to headways on the rest of the line.

Orange is well-suited to going long-distance in each direction with fairly tight station spacing because of the express tracks in Somerville and Medford. If the Reading extension were to happen Track 3 would take over the commuter rail track and extend to between Oak Grove and Wyoming Hill, and theoretically you could go full quad-track between Sullivan and Malden Ctr. (but not CC to Sullivan because of the flyover over the CR tracks is only a max 3-wide). Forest Hills and Wellington would set up short-turn spots for rush hour extras coming from the terminals, and you could easily do a full-blown Reading-Needham run without overly taxing the line downtown.

[bigeman312]

-- Green to Dudley. Of course.


What could we call it.....

[omaja]

The Urban Ring doesn't have a clear integrity of concept. The city needs better radial distribution...great. The city's ideal radial distribution patterns and demand overlap on a map in a distinct ring area around downtown roughly conforming to the UR route...great. But since when did a one-seat radial ride become a necessity? How many people would actually ride this thing nearly end-to-end? That's where this falls part...where it gets force-fitted into the T's everything-must-be-a-one-seat-ride philosophy. People are going to ride this thing in segments, but there won't be much overlap of folks riding the SE quadrant in Southie and the NW quadrant between MIT and Lechmere. A 1-transfer ride on the subway will beat the one-seat roundabount every time. The T is severely overestimating the value of the one-seat and not taking into account that a line that doesn't reach any of the big half-dozen central transfer stations serves a fundamentally different purpose than the 4-1/2 lines that do. That error in logic is driving all the design decisions here.

I don't think having a disconnected spur routes would necessarily alleviate congestion at the over-saturated Downtown interchanges like a continuous urban loop ring line would. Not to mention branches and varieties of service along the same shared track is always much more complex/prone to operational issues and more confusing for passengers.

Look at the ring lines in places like Beijing, Berlin, Madrid and Moscow - some of the most efficient and reliable rail lines in operation.

[Matthew]

Well the point of the article (http://www.humantransit.org/2010/09/moscow-questioning-the-circle-line.html) that Henry linked to is that Moscow's Circle is too small in diameter, and therefore non-competitive with the radial lines for significant distances. And I think the Urban Ring plans fall in the same boat. Unless your destination or origin happens to lie near the Ring.

[czsz]

Orange isn't well-suited to spurs. Or at least it hasn't been since the Atlantic Ave. El went away and all the original plans for spur Els to Southie, etc. were abandoned. Red can handle branches because they split well outside of downtown and the ridership craters bigtime after South Station, meaning most of the schedule mileage works just fine on branchline headways. Most of the stops Broadway-south have half the boardings of everything north of there, even the Alewife extension stops. I don't know how you'd be able to mix and match it on Orange when stops as far-flung as Malden Ctr. and Forest Hills hang within < 1000 boardings of a State St. or Haymarket. Except for some of the least important SW Corridor stops the boardings stay at a pretty even keel throughout, so branching would unduly punish headways at stops like MC or FH that need the full schedule. Which even with a full fleet and more capable signal system is going to put a crimp in things relative to headways on the rest of the line

Isn't the solution to this simply increasing the number of trains?

[bigeman312]

Orange isn't well-suited to spurs. Or at least it hasn't been since the Atlantic Ave. El went away and all the original plans for spur Els to Southie, etc. were abandoned. Red can handle branches because they split well outside of downtown and the ridership craters bigtime after South Station, meaning most of the schedule mileage works just fine on branchline headways. Most of the stops Broadway-south have half the boardings of everything north of there, even the Alewife extension stops. I don't know how you'd be able to mix and match it on Orange when stops as far-flung as Malden Ctr. and Forest Hills hang within < 1000 boardings of a State St. or Haymarket. Except for some of the least important SW Corridor stops the boardings stay at a pretty even keel throughout, so branching would unduly punish headways at stops like MC or FH that need the full schedule. Which even with a full fleet and more capable signal system is going to put a crimp in things relative to headways on the rest of the line.

I see your point. What about a spur at Ruggles and have the Franklin/Providence/Stoughton trains all stop at Forest Hills. This would at least partially offset the increase in Forest Hills headways. Additional fleet could offset the rest. This would cause a relative increase in headways for Green St, Stony Brook, Jackson Sq and Roxbury Crossing, which is okay. What do you think F-Line?

[bigeman312]

I see your point. What about a spur at Ruggles and have the Franklin/Providence/Stoughton trains all stop at Forest Hills. This would at least partially offset the increase in Forest Hills headways. Additional fleet could offset the rest. This would cause a relative increase in headways for Green St, Stony Brook, Jackson Sq and Roxbury Crossing, which is okay. What do you think F-Line?

By the way, I don't like the idea of a spur at Ruggles to Kenmore or wherever it is we are theoretically discussing. I do think it could be feasible, though. I much prefer the idea of a spur at Back Bay. If a spur at Ruggles were implemented, I would support it going to Dudley.

[F-Line to Dudley]

Isn't the solution to this simply increasing the number of trains?

Demand. Forest Hills currently has about 1000 more daily boardings than State. If you double service at State but leave it the same at FH because some branch forks off en route, the demand for FH trips is going to be more exaggeratedly under-served by the increased hordes flooding State. Or something to that effect. Obviously there are a lot of other variables in play that make it less simple, but FH and MC having near-downtown level boardings at stops near the ends of the line makes load-balancing branches a lot tricker. There's nothing comparable on the Red branches. Even Quincy Center's robust boardings are small potatoes compared to everything north of Broadway.


This is a big reason why the Green Line is so hard to dispatch. Pre-1959 when it was all streetcar-fed, it was a somewhat self-regulating beast where traffic entered the subway first-come/first-served, and the branches didn't have to be dispatched on an "on-time" start-to-finish schedule so much as get managed around the recommended headway. That was because there were no incredibly long-distance branches, and the boardings got much more diffuse after the branches forked. That changed when the Riverside Line was introduced. They thought they were adding a Mattapan-style interurban with light ridership on light enough headways that there'd only be a few cars occupying the branch at any given time, and that service increases at peak hours would loop at Kenmore for transfer Ashmont-style so the streetcar branches still got the lion's share of subway ridership and it could still self-regulate on very inapproximate schedules.

Well, didn't quite work out that way. The boardings on the D were so far above and beyond projections that it instantly became the single busiest and most car-hungry branch. And worse, the boardings were not diffuse interurban-type rides but were instead almost entirely headed downtown. Which means they couldn't regulate it with Kenmore short-turns lest every other branch get screwed up with the dwell times from cross-platform transfers. And with it being such a long-distance line it had to run on a clock...all the way downtown in mixed traffic. Hence, everything else had to get run on tighter schedules based on start/finish clock time instead of spacing behind the car ahead of them, and the signaling (still) isn't up-to-snuff for managing apples/oranges trips with precision.

It wouldn't be exactly the same on a heavy rail line, but you can see that branching gets more difficult the less alike the branches are in ridership/service characteristics and the more high-ridership outliers there are on the outer branch stops. We don't have the alt routes or express tracks downtown to manage that smoothly. Signals can increase capacity on Red/Orange/Blue, but they don't change the very nature of the service patterns you could cram through downtown on those lines. They'll always be end-to-end lines. Green, on the other hand, has been functionally nuked since 1959 and simply festering in its own brokenness for a half-century since. An improvement back to 1959-level relative sanity would FEEL revolutionary just because it's been that long since dispatching worked correctly. Remember, until the early 50's it handled 8 full-time branches and multiple flavors of short-turn service off those branches just fine. It "lost" that capacity because the schedule give-and-take between branches now has to march to Riverside's beat, but on the same first-come/first-serve signal system as before. The only way to kinda sorta make it work was to slash service levels and tie the dispatchers' hands so everything is ruled by per-run on-time performance clock instead of headways. And that's a futile, futile fight when the branches have no signal priority and the subway is all short manual stop-and-go blocks that can't auto-tune the train spacing.

[Max Power]

The Urban Ring doesn't have a clear integrity of concept. The city needs better radial distribution...great. The city's ideal radial distribution patterns and demand overlap on a map in a distinct ring area around downtown roughly conforming to the UR route...great. But since when did a one-seat radial ride become a necessity? How many people would actually ride this thing nearly end-to-end? That's where this falls part...where it gets force-fitted into the T's everything-must-be-a-one-seat-ride philosophy. People are going to ride this thing in segments, but there won't be much overlap of folks riding the SE quadrant in Southie and the NW quadrant between MIT and Lechmere. A 1-transfer ride on the subway will beat the one-seat roundabount every time. The T is severely overestimating the value of the one-seat and not taking into account that a line that doesn't reach any of the big half-dozen central transfer stations serves a fundamentally different purpose than the 4-1/2 lines that do. That error in logic is driving all the design decisions here.

Same as with the Silver Line. Why do people need rapid transit to Dudley so badly? Because it's the system's largest bus hub. The largest % of users are going to be using it as a radial line, even though it is not ring-shaped and Washington St. does have characteristics of a rapid transit surface branch in its own right. Hardly anyone needs a one-seat direct to Southie on it, but that feature became the unifying concept of the whole SL Phase III boondoggle and all of the project's design features were force-fitted around that.

Keep it simple. If it covers a radial transfer need, then it essentially is fulfilling the goals of the UR. Spurs fulfill those goals.

-- Green to Porter from Union. Red to Green/Orange and commuter rail, links 3 bus routes at Porter (incl. the 77) to 5 more at Union and 3 more at Lechmere.
-- Green to Sullivan stub. 12 bus routes + Orange at Sullivan to 4 bus routes + 2 other GL branches at Lechmere. The Green Line historically used to have 2 branches to Sullivan via Charlestown (albeit on different routings) serving different needs than the Orange Line, so there's not a redundancy here. The tracks to the GLX maintenance yard will also get halfway to Sullivan to begin with, so it's easy to continue. And this is your jumping-off point for Chelsea and Logan.
-- Green on Grand Junction from Lechmere. Pretty obvious why this is needed. MIT/CT2 corridor.
-- Green on Grand Junction via Kenmore. If B is buried underneath the reservation out to BU Bridge to form a connection. CT2 + 47. Reconfigure Kenmore so the B/D sides can loop there and it costs about $1B+ less than the cross-Brookline fantasy tunnel while linking the 66/65/60 at Brookline Village. Add E-to-D connecting track to BV and it links JP. Fistfuls and fistfuls of transfers.
-- Green to Dudley. Of course.
-- Green to South Station via some sanely-dug tunnel (probably under NEC from South End instead of through Chinatown).

And so on. Prioritize as you see fit, but it doesn't need to be a monolith to fulfill its radial transfer integrity-of-concept. And it damn sure doesn't have to be a totally different mode to fulfill its integrity-of-monolith inside a wholly invented one-seat integrity-of-concept.

I agree that these spurs will handle the vast majority of the needs of the urban ring. Especially north of the Charles. I like the idea of Sullivan becoming a key transfer point. My only concern is linking Dudley/Ruggles/Kenmore. That's a huge transit gap. I don't think a green line spur to Dudley (I'm assuming it's coming from downtown via washington?) will be enough to handle that in the long run. I think that will cripple the green line going through park/government center. Some of this traffic should be diverted from the downtown crush. Are there any solutions to this problem w/o tunneling deep bore?

[Matthew]

Well, didn't quite work out that way. The boardings on the D were so far above and beyond projections that it instantly became the single busiest and most car-hungry branch. And worse, the boardings were not diffuse interurban-type rides but were instead almost entirely headed downtown. Which means they couldn't regulate it with Kenmore short-turns lest every other branch get screwed up with the dwell times from cross-platform transfers. And with it being such a long-distance line it had to run on a clock...all the way downtown in mixed traffic. Hence, everything else had to get run on tighter schedules based on start/finish clock time instead of spacing behind the car ahead of them, and the signaling (still) isn't up-to-snuff for managing apples/oranges trips with precision.


Couldn't this be alleviated a little bit by using somewhat more dynamic scheduling; for example, by changing destination and sending trains back out on whichever route needs it next, when they reach their downtown terminus and turn around?

[Commuting Boston Student]

Given infinite feddybux, I'd be screaming up and down the Central Subway at anybody who would listen to me that we need express tracks running downtown. As it is, I don't think such a proposal could make it out of cost/benefit analysis, and rightly shouldn't, but maybe 50 years from now?

As for the Urban Ring being a full line instead of several branches - I think that the single-seat ride is a fringe bonus on the real benefit of having the Urban Ring be a complete line. That benefit is, rolling stock distribution. If we have 12 Urban Ring trains and seven or eight short spurs to distribute them between, things are going to get a lot messier than if we can have six trains going one way and six trains going the other way. Very few people will stay on for more than one 'spur' worth of line, but that's okay, because emptying a train only to fill it with new and different people works out great.

[F-Line to Dudley]

Couldn't this be alleviated a little bit by using somewhat more dynamic scheduling; for example, by changing destination and sending trains back out on whichever route needs it next, when they reach their downtown terminus and turn around?

Making everything a run-as-directed only works if all branches have roughly equal fleet needs with roughly equal spread of cars in the outer yards. They don't...the D uses far more cars than any others. More than C+E combined. And the truncated E doesn't have its own carhouse anymore so they have to ration the assignments in tiny Lechmere yard very carefully. This wasn't a problem in the old days when A, B, C, E were all more or less equal-weight and each had carhouses at the ends (BC and Reservoir of course semi-shared), the other former branches (2 South End branches to Egleston and City Point, 2 North Station branches to Sullivan flanking different parts of Charlestown) split up the rest of the pie, and the longest and most schedule-uncertain street-running runs to Arborway and Watertown were backed up at rush hour by short-turns at Heath and one of the loops at Braves/BU Field, Union Sq., or Oak Sq. Just wave 'em in and out at whatever spacing makes them hit that "8 minutes to Park St." sign at the portal at a rate that will get them to Park in 8 minutes, and that's all there was to it.

A super-exaggerated metaphor for what it's like dispatching the GL pre-1959 vs. post-1959: Harvard bus tunnel. Everything for half a century turns there first-come/first-served, and it's all orderly and civilized for the 10 or so routes that use it. But say when the Alewife extension of the Red Line was built it went right through the bus tunnel and every mode had to share the platform. Still first-come/first-served. The effects on RL (a.k.a. the D) schedule-keeping are obvious. But what about the buses? What if, the only way it could ever plausibly work is if they whacked two-thirds of the routes and crippled the headways on the 77 so every single bus was bursting at the seams and choking on its own dwell times? Because that's the only way everything could behave on first-come/first-served basis.

Green's got a LOT of room to grow if it only had signals/dispatching that were actually designed-to-task for mixing the kind of loads and schedule precision the D requires with the headways and schedule fudge factor the streetcar branches (but especially the B) require. But we're now in Decade #6 where it does not.

GLX actually won't complicate things as much as feared because of the conversion of the inner inbound track at Park St. to thru service and the new Innerbelt carhouse. But for damn sure there's going to have to be liberal amounts of short-turning at GC/Brattle Loop at crush load to pad everything that could go wrong getting from Riverside to Route 16 on-time.

[bigeman312]

I have a semi-related question:

What is the most heavily patronized section of the 66?

(i.e. Dudley to Roxbury Crossing, Roxbury Crossing to Brigham Circle, Brigham Circle to Brookline Village, etc.)

If the answer to this question is known, that seems like a very good starting point for an Urban Ring-related spur.

[HenryAlan]

I don't have the stats on this, but I wonder if branching the OL would result in less bus ridership to MC and FH. Couldn't that mitigate against the problem you've described F-Line? I'm assuming a radical redesign of bus routes to go along with the branching, which ultimately results in fewer passengers accessing the system at the heavy use stations, but boarding instead along the new branches.

[F-Line to Dudley]

Given infinite feddybux, I'd be screaming up and down the Central Subway at anybody who would listen to me that we need express tracks running downtown. As it is, I don't think such a proposal could make it out of cost/benefit analysis, and rightly shouldn't, but maybe 50 years from now?

As for the Urban Ring being a full line instead of several branches - I think that the single-seat ride is a fringe bonus on the real benefit of having the Urban Ring be a complete line. That benefit is, rolling stock distribution. If we have 12 Urban Ring trains and seven or eight short spurs to distribute them between, things are going to get a lot messier than if we can have six trains going one way and six trains going the other way. Very few people will stay on for more than one 'spur' worth of line, but that's okay, because emptying a train only to fill it with new and different people works out great.

Well, they did have 4 thru tracks Boylston-Park and GC-Haymarket in the old days. Pre-1941 E's also split off at the old grade-separated portal on Boylston St. instead of needing Copley Jct., and of course pre-'59 loads from Kenmore to Copley were nothing like they are today. And almost every branch had short-turns. There's a number of things beyond signaling they can to do restore lost capacity.

Minor/modest $$$:

-- D to E surface connection at Brookline Village. Pad rush-hour service with this, load-spread away from Kenmore via the E during Sox games. Emergency bypass. Alt peak-hour routing if they ever do the Needham branch.
-- Short-turn on the B. I am hoping like hell whenever MassHighway funds the Comm Ave. reconstruction from Packards to Warren that relocates the reservation into the center that they build a Blandford-style turnback track between Harvard Ave. and Griggs. How much better would that make the school bus if they could augment service without caring about making it all the way up the hill on-time?
-- GC 4-track reconfiguration. It's a shame that on such a humongous platform it can't have a Park-style track layout where thru trains can get to/from the loop platform. Put down a track split on the Park St.-facing side that cuts across the platform straight to the loop platform and segregate branch boardings by track. It would change pedestrian access a bit, but the giant wedge has so much room they can easily do this if they wanted. And may have to think about it if the Park-GC tunnel itself can't be widened to 4 track.

Mega $$$:
-- Widen the Park-GC tunnel for continuous multi-track ops. I have serious doubts they could ever make it 4-track because of the burying ground. But if an engineering assessment says 3-track works, do it. Make it double-track for inbound runs so trains turning at GC or NS can stay on-schedule, leave the lone outbound single for trains beginning their runs.
-- Move the E off Copley Jct. This is a considerable dig...but that branch could split off at Boylston in the old tunnel, hang a left under Marginal Rd. (1965 Pike-cleared fill...they could pretty much dig sideways from the Pike retaining wall), go to Back Bay with a new stop, and then rejoin the Huntington tunnel at the Prudential curve. Run a subset of D service over the D-to-E connecting trackage. As for $$$...remember, 1965-cleared urban renewal land abutting interstate retaining wall, with no spaghetti utilities underground. This will be cheaper than either the SL Phase III tunnel through Chinatown or the billion-dollar UR tunnel through Brookline/Longwood. By a couple $B.
-- Bury the E to Brookline Village, route all D service on it. Eventually think about subwaying to Brookline Vill. and totally bypassing Kenmore with full grade separation and a parallel-load subway. It'll work. Northeastern-Brigham Circle is an easy dig empty of underground construction. Brigham-BV thornier, but worth it for closing that gap. Now you can do full "circuit" service in the subway. Turn at GC or NS, go to BV, back inbound via Kenmore, turn back at GC or NS. Whole second Central Subway for probably the same cost or less than doing the truly impossible Silver Line III dig. There's where all the Urban Ring extra capacity comes from, and if SL Phase III gets grafted on here with a trolley tunnel snaking to SS under the NEC, then you've joined the Transitway to the whole works too.
-- Make the grade-separated branches heavy-rail: D to Blue via "Riverbank Subway" under Storrow, GLX to Red via half of the N-S Link and Columbia Jct. (the "Red X" plan where 2 north and 2 south branches switch off each other every-other-train at JFK on the full grade separated 4-track junction). I think this is a real stretch since Blue would have issues handling that many stops end-to-end unless everything from Lynn and you'd probably have to sacrifice the Needham branch (and its grade crossings). Then, on the remaining GL....back to the future, pre-1958. All branches (including many new routes) as streetcar feeders. Enough other transit systems are building these that clearly there's some lasting modern-era wisdom to what BERy wrought in 1897.


And so on and so on.

[F-Line to Dudley]

I don't have the stats on this, but I wonder if branching the OL would result in less bus ridership to MC and FH. Couldn't that mitigate against the problem you've described F-Line? I'm assuming a radical redesign of bus routes to go along with the branching, which ultimately results in fewer passengers accessing the system at the heavy use stations, but boarding instead along the new branches.

Well, FH is an easier problem to solve because they could always put the trolley tracks back to help serve that need. But also consider that FH boardings are probably lower overall now vs. when it was a major rail transfer stop, so there's an inhibited demand effect from the 39 "temporary replacement". That's a case where I think demand is going to far outstrip supply for a long time, service increases or not. It's got far less service than it had in 1985, and it's grown a ton since 1985. MC I'm less certain about since I don't know what the ridership growth curve has been there from 1975 on. That one would probably have its demand fully-enough satisfied by modest service increases. But I don't know quite how explosively it's growing.

As for bus routes, I don't think a "radical" reconfiguration is possible. At least not with the core roster of downtown routes. Nearly every bus on the system is an old streetcar route, which in turn was an old horsecar route. They follow established square-to-square travel patterns that have been more or less in-place since post-Reconstruction and post-landfilling the city. Relocating an established route to a new path is still a big controversy 25 years later with the El/SW Corridor/Silver Line, and that's at rapid-transit spacing. I don't know how you could do a radical makeover of even more localized bus routes without creating way more problems than it solves. These routes are more than habit...they're DNA after 90-130 years in service. JP, Rozzie, West Roxbury farmland became an extension of the city when they became streetcar suburbs on those same exact routes on same exact streets. We found out the hard way in urban renewal that you can't just tell neighborhoods to be something else because it makes my map look nicer and expect them to adjust healthily. That always ends badly.

[Matthew]

Making everything a run-as-directed only works if all branches have roughly equal fleet needs with roughly equal spread of cars in the outer yards. They don't...the D uses far more cars than any others. More than C+E combined. And the truncated E doesn't have its own carhouse anymore so they have to ration the assignments in tiny Lechmere yard very carefully. This wasn't a problem in the old days when A, B, C, E were all more or less equal-weight and each had carhouses at the ends (BC and Reservoir of course semi-shared), the other former branches (2 South End branches to Egleston and City Point, 2 North Station branches to Sullivan flanking different parts of Charlestown) split up the rest of the pie, and the longest and most schedule-uncertain street-running runs to Arborway and Watertown were backed up at rush hour by short-turns at Heath and one of the loops at Braves/BU Field, Union Sq., or Oak Sq. Just wave 'em in and out at whatever spacing makes them hit that "8 minutes to Park St." sign at the portal at a rate that will get them to Park in 8 minutes, and that's all there was to it.


Well, the Blue Book vehicle count for AM Peak is:

"B" - 20 vehicles, "C" - 14 vehicles, "D" - 21 vehicles, "E" - 17 vehicles, "Run as directed" - 3 vehicles. So I'm not sure what you mean by "D" = "C" + "E" combined there. Plus, the "B" line is easily the most heavily ridden.

I don't know which portal is 8 minutes to Park Street, it's at least 15 minutes from Kenmore normally. That is, if your train isn't held up by the dispatcher for "headway adjustment" which, when they say it, honestly sounds like a load of B.S. to me.

If the branches operated at different headways, then I could see there being an issue. But they don't. They all are supposed to hit 5 minute headways at peak (in theory) with homogeneous equipment. So in an ideal situation (assuming Copley was a flying junction and signalling wasn't shit), they would all be able to interleave in the Central Subway at approximately 1.25 minute headways regardless of the number of cars it takes to maintain that on each branch. Of course, in the real world, there's delays, and the various problems with signals and Copley. That's why they should all run as directed and the dispatcher should choose the next destination based on both the forward and the backward headways of all the branches at that moment in time.

[F-Line to Dudley]

Well, the Blue Book vehicle count for AM Peak is:

"B" - 20 vehicles, "C" - 14 vehicles, "D" - 21 vehicles, "E" - 17 vehicles, "Run as directed" - 3 vehicles. So I'm not sure what you mean by "D" = "C" + "E" combined there. Plus, the "B" line is easily the most heavily ridden.

I don't know which portal is 8 minutes to Park Street, it's at least 15 minutes from Kenmore normally. That is, if your train isn't held up by the dispatcher for "headway adjustment" which, when they say it, honestly sounds like a load of B.S. to me.

If the branches operated at different headways, then I could see there being an issue. But they don't. They all are supposed to hit 5 minute headways at peak (in theory) with homogeneous equipment. So in an ideal situation (assuming Copley was a flying junction and signalling wasn't shit), they would all be able to interleave in the Central Subway at approximately 1.25 minute headways regardless of the number of cars it takes to maintain that on each branch. Of course, in the real world, there's delays, and the various problems with signals and Copley. That's why they should all run as directed and the dispatcher should choose the next destination based on both the forward and the backward headways of all the branches at that moment in time.

That doesn't solve the problem of where the cars are going to come from. To do an all-RAD setup you'd have to have yards with equal supply at the end of each branch. They don't, and haven't had that since pre-'59. Riverside is larger than all other yards/layovers combined. That means all equipment staging moves are at root shaped along on the D's schedule. Which is why the Green Line isn't a free-for-all. They don't even use the Chestnut Hill Ave. tracks between the B and C outside midday shift-changes because of traffic impacts, so tiny Lake St. carhouse has to manage its allotment miserly without being able to phone in reinforcements from down the street. If there's cascading delays on the B, they can't just flush it clean by running as many RAD's as it takes to de-clog...they don't have the equipment for RAD's to begin with. They're dependent on things hitting their schedule slots. The E is the same way. Heath has no storage except for the inner loop only used for disablements, Lechmere is tight on space, and Lechmere is only fed by that line so it does take a schedule change to move stuff from elsewhere. North Station is where shift changes get staged on the inbound side, so while that's got some flex mid-shift about 4 times a day it gets stuffed solid and/or emptied dry by the change on/off-peak. 6 times when there's a Garden or Fenway event, because game-day RAD's get staged from there. Currently Lechmere is the base for the RAD's because it's the one place equally accessible inbound to all branches without truncating any runs, but that does make it more difficult to fire limitless ammo at GC-turning B's consequence-free. GC loop has no storage whatsoever except for disabled trains on the extra track to Haymarket. So there's no secure base where they could fire RAD's at-will at the outbound B. Unless anyone really thinks lengthening that run even further to Lechmere is going to make the school bus run any smoother.

At most, the C is the only line where most hours of the day there's ample space at each end and reassignments can be done without having to abort a revenue run midway through. Most hours. Not 10:00, 4:00, 7:00 or any night there's a game. Not surprisingly, the C is the line that seems to have fewer "standing by for schedule adjustment" pauses...because it already is the path of least resistance for RAD's. It won't work unless all lines have roughly equal flex like that. So do we wage war on land-takings at BC and JP to build more yard space on the B and E, buy an assload more cars, tell every D rider that they're looping at Park St. from now on, and embrace pre-1959 run-as-directed managed chaos? Or do we expend the energy doing some pretty cut-and-dried work to make the trains run sorta more on-time?


This is why expensive-ass GLX has that expensive-ass Innerbelt carhouse attached. They've needed this ever since Arborway and Watertown got cut from the system. But it's still going to be operating a D-centric schedule because that's the only line that'll link it to another carhouse, so in no way does it negate the need to get out of the 19th century with dispatching or put the subway on a more RAD-centric dispatching. It's just bringing back some of what was lost in the 80's.

[Matthew]

Well maybe I'm operating with a different definition of RAD, but I see it as avoiding these issues of where the cars are stored by reassigning them every time they turn around. You don't need extra storage space because you send them right back out on which ever line needs it next. Of course that judgement has to be made based upon what's coming up next in the Central Subway.

I just think a little more flexibility would make these issues go away. And that means losing the adherence to a fixed schedule - in favor of pure headway driven operation.

For example just today I was on a "B" that got held up for "headway adjustment" to let a "D" pass it. Why couldn't that be worked out at Gov't Center, switching destinations if necessary?

[omaja]

Well the point of the article (http://www.humantransit.org/2010/09/moscow-questioning-the-circle-line.html) that Henry linked to is that Moscow's Circle is too small in diameter, and therefore non-competitive with the radial lines for significant distances. And I think the Urban Ring plans fall in the same boat. Unless your destination or origin happens to lie near the Ring.

Seems like that analysis really understates the usefulness of circle lines, though. For one, I'm not sure that it is accurate to state that Moscow's circle is uncompetitive with the radial lines because it serves a unique function. The value of a circle line is its ability to disperse transfer traffic outside of the congested central interchanges - in addition to linking key local traffic points that do not coincide with the radial routings.

Also, in some cases it may be faster or more pleasant (or both) to go a bit out of the way via the circle in a direct, one- or two-transfer routing than to traverse the saturated core stations. The total distance traveled is only part of the equation. Since the line doesn't have the same operational difficulties to overcome as a radial line, a circle can be more efficient and make up the distance differential quite easily.

[Shepard]

Here's an OL question, since the subject was brought up a few posts ago.

I understand the potentially devastating implications for Forest Hills/SW Corridor of branching the OL from Back Bay towards Allston and beyond. But couldn't we, for a not too great additional investment, create a new through line - OL equipment but probably colored a different designation - that essentially runs from Allston through Back Bay to South Station and through to the Seaport? This would share track with today's OL only between Back Bay and TMC and have no headway implications for either Forest Hills or Oak Grove.

Perhaps it's a moot point because this would be better as a DMU/EMU line, although I'm not sure how such an arrangement could continue through into the Seaport using current SL tunnel.

[Matthew]

Any sharing of track leads to headway implications. The merging trains have to fit into the slots between trains. That would at least double the minimum possible headway.

[F-Line to Dudley]

Well maybe I'm operating with a different definition of RAD, but I see it as avoiding these issues of where the cars are stored by reassigning them every time they turn around. You don't need extra storage space because you send them right back out on which ever line needs it next. Of course that judgement has to be made based upon what's coming up next in the Central Subway.

I just think a little more flexibility would make these issues go away. And that means losing the adherence to a fixed schedule - in favor of pure headway driven operation.

For example just today I was on a "B" that got held up for "headway adjustment" to let a "D" pass it. Why couldn't that be worked out at Gov't Center, switching destinations if necessary?

Well, that's why they should've at least studied a platform reconfiguration at GC to allow thru trains to cut across Park-style to the loop track. In combo with the new Park inbound crossovers that would give them 2 consecutive stations to sort out the trains and get everything spaced out on nice, smooth headways. There's more than enough room for it on the wedge if they can sort out how pedestrians would cross over to either side. Would be a lot better to assess feasibility of that BEFORE the station gets renovated instead of finding out in a decade-plus that they're going to need that anyway if they do any more expansion. If Park and GC had better control over spacing, throw on CBTC signaling in the subway, D, and GLX and signal priority on the surface and you could probably up the total capacity of the Green Line by 50%, add even more mixed streetcar or grade-separated branches, and have the whole works operate more smoothly than it does today.

[Matthew]

Do you know why the T cannot fix the scenario I described as things stand, however? If both trains are Gov't Center bound, then why hold up the "B" to let the "D" pass at Kenmore? Why not just switch destinations at Gov't Center? Is that simply inflexibility, or something more fundamental?

[F-Line to Dudley]

Do you know why the T cannot fix the scenario I described as things stand, however? If both trains are Gov't Center bound, then why hold up the "B" to let the "D" pass at Kenmore? Why not just switch destinations at Gov't Center? Is that simply inflexibility, or something more fundamental?

The D's more schedule-sensitive because of the distance it has to run and because virtually the entire GL's car supply is tethered to it. That's the post-1959 state of affairs in a nutshell. The other 3 branches have to play second fiddle for it to work (C somewhat less than the others because it's the only one with an attached carhouse and yards at both ends). This is why they're building the megabucks GLX yard and doing the crossovers at Park inbound so the inner track will be usable for thru trains. They will be able to segregate GC-turning trains and wave North Station/Lechmere-and-beyond trains ahead so they can get to the far end of the GC platform without having to wait behind a looping B unloading at the near end of the platform. This time close to downtown instead of doing that sorting at Kenmore where things usually come out-of-sync again over the next 5 stops. The crossover will make a really big difference. It's been fully-funded by a stimulus grant for over 3 years now, fully-designed, with construction supposed to happen this year. It's a little baffling that they've done absolutely bupkis so far with it, because there's nothing holding them back from getting to work.

[Matthew]

The "D" has to run further but it goes faster, so the overall trip time isn't much different from the sluggish and shorter "B".

I'm not sure I'm making my question understood here. I still don't see why the "B" had to wait for the "D" here, in principle. Both trains went to Gov't Center. I rode the "B" to Park St and it took the outer track. If they needed the "D" to leave before the "B" at Gov't Center, why didn't they just reassign the destination of the first train after it pulled around the loop? The "B" could become the "D" and the "D" become the "B".

The only objection I can think of is shift assignments, but surely that can be worked out.

[F-Line to Dudley]

Here's an OL question, since the subject was brought up a few posts ago.

I understand the potentially devastating implications for Forest Hills/SW Corridor of branching the OL from Back Bay towards Allston and beyond. But couldn't we, for a not too great additional investment, create a new through line - OL equipment but probably colored a different designation - that essentially runs from Allston through Back Bay to South Station and through to the Seaport? This would share track with today's OL only between Back Bay and TMC and have no headway implications for either Forest Hills or Oak Grove.

Perhaps it's a moot point because this would be better as a DMU/EMU line, although I'm not sure how such an arrangement could continue through into the Seaport using current SL tunnel.

Oh, you could definitely do it if you track-split at BB and went into the N-S Link, then merged back at North Station. That would literally restore the Atlantic Ave. El configuration and make all sorts of branching possible, just as they planned when the El was first built. I just think a bi-level Link approach tunnel from the NEC is better-suited for a SL Phase III branch off Green Line to South Station, where it's infinitely more buildable than through Chinatown and would have some economy-of-scale being tethered to the Link approach construction. I sort of prefer Red via JFK and the Cabot Yard leads to N-S Link instead because it wouldn't preclude a buildable Silver Line, and because there'd be no intermixing of ANY branches of the "Red X" because of how Columbia Jct. is grade-separated, which would really make every possible routing on that network a mega-capacity trunk.


Blue might have some either-end expansion potential. Definitely Lynn and South Salem on the north end (both are MPO-rated projects, and the ridership projections for Salem are INSANE), and Storrow trade-in + Kenmore + D. But it would be too many close-packed stops to go 128-to-128. For everything but evenings/weekends you would have to reinstate Maverick loop (still there, but untracked) to turn everything from the west, and Charles MGH to turn everything from the North Shore (the Red-Blue design has tail tracks spread-eagle around the Longfellow and Red Line el abutments, so it'd be pretty simple to make a wide loop under Charles Circle). Basically making it 2 routes with a max-density downtown overlap. But you know how dogmatic the T is about everyone's constitutional right to an end-to-end one-seater.

[Commuting Boston Student]

Blue might have some either-end expansion potential. Definitely Lynn and South Salem on the north end (both are MPO-rated projects, and the ridership projections for Salem are INSANE), and Storrow trade-in + Kenmore + D. But it would be too many close-packed stops to go 128-to-128. For everything but evenings/weekends you would have to reinstate Maverick loop (still there, but untracked) to turn everything from the west, and Charles MGH to turn everything from the North Shore (the Red-Blue design has tail tracks spread-eagle around the Longfellow and Red Line el abutments, so it'd be pretty simple to make a wide loop under Charles Circle). Basically making it 2 routes with a max-density downtown overlap. But you know how dogmatic the T is about everyone's constitutional right to an end-to-end one-seater.

Except GLX, the Central Subway and the entire D branch (obviously) are all built, to my knowledge, with the potential for Green Line Heavy Rail conversion. If you're seriously talking about Blue eating the D branch then you're already 50~70% of the way to Green Line Heavy Rail on the D, which is to me far more valuable as a project than sending the Blue Line that way. Any west Blue extension should either stop at Kenmore or go over Storrow to Soldiers Field to Allston-Brighton-Watertown.

I don't think that restoring rapid transit to Watertown is anyone's idea of a priority job, however, and especially not when put up against Red-Blue or Blue to Lynn, or even Green Line Heavy Rail - wouldn't having heavy rail up and down the Central Subway go a long way towards fixing some of the problems down there?

[F-Line to Dudley]

Except GLX, the Central Subway and the entire D branch (obviously) are all built, to my knowledge, with the potential for Green Line Heavy Rail conversion. If you're seriously talking about Blue eating the D branch then you're already 50~70% of the way to Green Line Heavy Rail on the D, which is to me far more valuable as a project than sending the Blue Line that way. Any west Blue extension should either stop at Kenmore or go over Storrow to Soldiers Field to Allston-Brighton-Watertown.

I don't think that restoring rapid transit to Watertown is anyone's idea of a priority job, however, and especially not when put up against Red-Blue or Blue to Lynn, or even Green Line Heavy Rail - wouldn't having heavy rail up and down the Central Subway go a long way towards fixing some of the problems down there?

Well, except kiss the B and C goodbye if you do that (yes, even BERy's plan for an Allston subway up the A route had the B west of Packards getting abandoned). And prepare for BC's lawsuit. You're not taking a tunnel boring machine through the hills by Coolidge Corner and Allston and building Porter-like bunkers at the intermediate stops until the tunnel grades can catch up with the steepness of the hill. Forget any potential of light rail on Washington St., or through the Transitway on South End branches. Prepare to spend billions more burying the E, burying the B to Packards, building out under Brighton Ave. to at least Union Sq...all at once, just to get starter service. And prepare to build the whole frickin' Urban Ring billion(s)-dollar Brookline tunnel...or nothing at all, because it's a deal-breaker...because there's no way to tie a Grand Junction route with grade crossings into a heavy rail line. Prepare to not be able to manage nearly as many branches because heavy rail signal blocks for 6-car trains are a whole lot bigger than light rail blocks and can't pack trains as close. And prepare to have to build multiple routings like NYC or a Chicago Loop type system if you do want to have 4 branches or something.

I really don't think we want to give up the flexibility of a light rail subway. There's a reason why other cities are building more of these things for multi-branch downtown circulation and leaving rapid transit for straight-line feeders. It works. The Green Line can work just as well as it used to if they did some prudent, not-real-expensive modernizing to the dispatching.


Frankly, I don't think the D is quite heavily-utilized enough to bother heavy-railing. The highest-ridership stop (BV) is still lower than the lowest-ridership Red or Orange stop, and only negligible Blue stops like Wood Island, Beachmont, and Suffolk Downs are comparable to the average D stop. I don't think Waban, Eliot, Chestnut Hill, and Beaconsfield really have an explosive growth ceiling that only heavy rail can tap.

And, the ability to fork downtown trunks at Brookline Village and zigzag the UR through it is capacity they'll want to keep...because the billion(s)-dollar Brookline UR tunnel is one of the most unbuildable fantasies they've ever proposed. I'd rather see them get back to work on the 1945 plan for the other 3 lines (note: heavy-railing the GL is not part of that plan) and at most maybe trade off GLX-Medford to a heavy rail line (Orange or Blue easy, Red possible if the N-S Link it with the "Red X" setup) so Anderson/Woburn is achievable in the future, the Lowell Line gets cleared of all inside-128 stops for HSR and 100+ MPH express-to-495-and-NH commuter rail capacity, and light rail from Lechmere can get freed up to manage branches to Union/Porter, UR-Airport, and UR-Cambridge. The window of opportunity to reboot the Green Line was mid-20th century before the outer neighborhoods and inner 'burbs got totally built out. Too many other fish to fry now.

[Commuting Boston Student]

I really don't think we want to give up the flexibility of a light rail subway. There's a reason why other cities are building more of these things for multi-branch downtown circulation and leaving rapid transit for straight-line feeders. It works. The Green Line can work just as well as it used to if they did some prudent, not-real-expensive modernizing to the dispatching.


Frankly, I don't think the D is quite heavily-utilized enough to bother heavy-railing. The highest-ridership stop (BV) is still lower than the lowest-ridership Red or Orange stop, and only negligible Blue stops like Wood Island, Beachmont, and Suffolk Downs are comparable to the average D stop. I don't think Waban, Eliot, Chestnut Hill, and Beaconsfield really have an explosive growth ceiling that only heavy rail can tap.

And, the ability to fork downtown trunks at Brookline Village and zigzag the UR through it is capacity they'll want to keep...because the billion(s)-dollar Brookline UR tunnel is one of the most unbuildable fantasies they've ever proposed. I'd rather see them get back to work on the 1945 plan for the other 3 lines (note: heavy-railing the GL is not part of that plan) and at most maybe trade off GLX-Medford to a heavy rail line (Orange or Blue easy, Red possible if the N-S Link it with the "Red X" setup) so Anderson/Woburn is achievable in the future, the Lowell Line gets cleared of all inside-128 stops for HSR and 100+ MPH express-to-495-and-NH commuter rail capacity, and light rail from Lechmere can get freed up to manage branches to Union/Porter, UR-Airport, and UR-Cambridge. The window of opportunity to reboot the Green Line was mid-20th century before the outer neighborhoods and inner 'burbs got totally built out. Too many other fish to fry now.

The D is entirely grade-separated and can be forked to Needham - as light rail now, or as heavy rail with grade crossing eliminations. I say convert the D not because the D is the best line to convert, but because it's the easiest - and, as I said, if you're in serious talks about something crazy like "Blue eats D," you're going to be a significant percentage of the way towards Heavy Rail anyway. Why not grab some Blue Line stock and paint it Green?

The B, C, and even E branches don't need to be converted or dropped. B-to-E and C-to-E trains could be turned at Kenmore with zero construction or Copley with minimal construction.

I say convert the D branch because it is the easiest to convert and creates the potential for Heavy Green Line to Needham, plus, as I said, any serious push for Blue-eats-D by nature comes with 70% of the work done anyway. Just paint some Blue stock Green and off you go.

The real benefit of heavy railing Green is getting a heavy rail Central Subway, and a heavy rail GLX with room to grow for Woburn. I agree with you that the D branch is comparatively minor - and I'd lose no sleep if it was left as light rail. In fact, I might push to utilize the four-tracking set up to have two heavy rail tracks, two light rail tracks, a D-branch light rail that turns to E-branch, a C-branch light rail that passes through Boylston and then turns down Washington Street, and a B-branch light rail that passes through Boylston to South Station and points east.

And I would call those light rail branches the Silver Line.

[F-Line to Dudley]

The D is entirely grade-separated and can be forked to Needham - as light rail now, or as heavy rail with grade crossing eliminations. I say convert the D not because the D is the best line to convert, but because it's the easiest - and, as I said, if you're in serious talks about something crazy like "Blue eats D," you're going to be a significant percentage of the way towards Heavy Rail anyway. Why not grab some Blue Line stock and paint it Green?

The B, C, and even E branches don't need to be converted or dropped. B-to-E and C-to-E trains could be turned at Kenmore with zero construction or Copley with minimal construction.

I say convert the D branch because it is the easiest to convert and creates the potential for Heavy Green Line to Needham, plus, as I said, any serious push for Blue-eats-D by nature comes with 70% of the work done anyway. Just paint some Blue stock Green and off you go.

The real benefit of heavy railing Green is getting a heavy rail Central Subway, and a heavy rail GLX with room to grow for Woburn. I agree with you that the D branch is comparatively minor - and I'd lose no sleep if it was left as light rail. In fact, I might push to utilize the four-tracking set up to have two heavy rail tracks, two light rail tracks, a D-branch light rail that turns to E-branch, a C-branch light rail that passes through Boylston and then turns down Washington Street, and a B-branch light rail that passes through Boylston to South Station and points east.

And I would call those light rail branches the Silver Line.

The T is not going to change its one-seat to downtown philosophy. Ever. That's been the governing principle of every not- local bus line they've managed since their '64 founding. Changing that is asking the agency to BE something radically different from the only thing it's ever been. Good luck with that.

It's also not 1932, when Kenmore was designed for heavy rail conversion and the C was to stick around as a loop line. There were over 50 streetcar routes back then, and the Eastern Mass. Street Railway was still kicking around so BERy didn't even have a route monopoly. There was so much connecting trackage that they didn't need a subway to string together a very very robust network. How are you going to operate something like the E as a stub line? You aren't...it goes away. Are they going to bother keeping Reservoir carhouse for the B and C. No. The economy of scale disappears with such a limited network and per-trip operating costs skyrocket.

To do that they'd have to relocate the E to the Tremont subway. Which they should be doing anyway, but dropping close to a $B on a re-route off Copley Jct. doesn't wash when all that economy of scale for streetcars disappears. It does mostly wash if you've got a goal of gradually peeling the D off Kenmore and E off Copley to free up west end subway capacity for the UR. 4-tracking Park-GC may be physically impossible because of how narrow Tremont gets there, the burial ground, and the building foundations on the other side. How are you going to quad up the GL side of North Station? The Garden basement isn't set up for that. There was no trolley service whatsoever between Park and Scollay/GC when the El temporarily ran through there. Everything west of Boylston looped at Park. Everything east of Scollay (and there were many, many branches) looped at Scollay. Because they didn't think it was 4-trackable through the burying grounds in 1901 either.

It's not "significant percentage of the way" to convert the D. Making this all work while retaining some surface streetcar branches will cost more than building Urban Ring Phase II. For moderate improvements on one mode that preclude them from entirely from building something else they need by mid-century. How does that value proposition wash at all?


Priorities. Changing the mode on the Central Subway but trying to have cake and eat it too with surface branches is so far down the list of urgent transit needs and so much expense at the expense of other more-needed projects it ends up doing more harm than good. It misses forest for trees to micro-focus on that.

[Shepard]

Bringing this back to topic again: I think a Mass Ave subway (RL branch?) would achieve 80% of what the UR would in terms of relieving capacity downtown, but would avoid the inefficiencies of a circle.

As youve seen on my fantasy maps I do think a Mass Ave line would link nicely into a converted heavy rail Fairmount Line also, though I understand the trade off there.

[omaja]

The T is not going to change its one-seat to downtown philosophy. Ever. That's been the governing principle of every not- local bus line they've managed since their '64 founding. Changing that is asking the agency to BE something radically different from the only thing it's ever been. Good luck with that.

It's too bad that they can't come to terms with the fact that expanding and optimizing the network will mean that not every line will be able to - or, more importantly, need to - traverse the Downtown core. Transfers are a reality so I'm not sure why they insist on being so delusional all the time.

It's not "significant percentage of the way" to convert the D. Making this all work while retaining some surface streetcar branches will cost more than building Urban Ring Phase II. For moderate improvements on one mode that preclude them from entirely from building something else they need by mid-century. How does that value proposition wash at all?


Priorities. Changing the mode on the Central Subway but trying to have cake and eat it too with surface branches is so far down the list of urgent transit needs and so much expense at the expense of other more-needed projects it ends up doing more harm than good. It misses forest for trees to micro-focus on that.

I completely agree - converting the D to heavy rail and connecting to the Blue Line would only really work with a new tunnel under Beacon or Storrow. Eliminating or severely truncating the B, C or E lines is unfathomable considering they have been in service long before the D ever came into the picture. The Central Subway needs a parallel heavy rail routing to compliment the localized service provided by the Green Line fed by the various current and potential future branches.

Bringing this back to topic again: I think a Mass Ave subway (RL branch?) would achieve 80% of what the UR would in terms of relieving capacity downtown, but would avoid the inefficiencies of a circle.

As youve seen on my fantasy maps I do think a Mass Ave line would link nicely into a converted heavy rail Fairmount Line also, though I understand the trade off there.

While a Mass Ave line would definitely alleviate congestion Downtown, I am thinking it would serve an entirely distinct purpose compared to a circle: primarily it would provide an alternate inner north-south crosstown routing. The local demand between areas along a circle (Dorchester-Roxbury-Jamaica Plain-Brookline-Allston/Brighton-Cambridge-Somerville) would make it a heavily used line. I don't see many people using it to get from Dorchester to Cambridge or any similar variation, but the merit of connecting all of Boston's inner streetcar-era neighborhoods seems relatively high.

[Commuting Boston Student]

I completely agree - converting the D to heavy rail and connecting to the Blue Line would only really work with a new tunnel under Beacon or Storrow. Eliminating or severely truncating the B, C or E lines is unfathomable considering they have been in service long before the D ever came into the picture. The Central Subway needs a parallel heavy rail routing to compliment the localized service provided by the Green Line fed by the various current and potential future branches.

Right, my argument came from the fact that I consider the idea of converting the D to Blue to be insanely stupid - and my 'significant percent of the way' comments come from the idea that any prep work done on the D up to Kenmore for a Blue conversion can just as easily be used for Green Line Heavy Rail instead - right down to the rolling stock.

Let me ask you about the parallel routing, though - could we dig out a heavy rail tunnel underneath the existing light rail trackage?

[omaja]

My guess is that would probably be a lot more complicated and expensive than a simple cut-and-cover along Storrow or even a deep burrow under Beacon.

I would also see there being a lot of value in the parallel route to distribute and serve existing traffic. For example, instead of everyone clogging Copley, passengers on the D-Blue combined line would just use a station between Exeter/Dartmouth or Dartmouth/Clarendon to reach the same area. Likewise, people in the Copley area would choose whether to use the current Green or new D-Blue station based on their final destination.

[F-Line to Dudley]

Right, my argument came from the fact that I consider the idea of converting the D to Blue to be insanely stupid - and my 'significant percent of the way' comments come from the idea that any prep work done on the D up to Kenmore for a Blue conversion can just as easily be used for Green Line Heavy Rail instead - right down to the rolling stock.

Let me ask you about the parallel routing, though - could we dig out a heavy rail tunnel underneath the existing light rail trackage?

Not in Back Bay landfill. The Central Subway has a breathtakingly complicated army of underground pumps keeping the groundwater out. The entire Back Bay is only capable of supporting big buildings because the entire neighborhood is pumped out 24/7/365/year-in-year-out by pumps. The water table there is still very much "tidal flat" even though the surface is dry. I can't imagine how much more complicated it would be to dig even lower into that saturated fill.

Parallel subways work if you do the Riverbank, which was studied to death a century ago. The digging isn't a problem even in the Charles basin if it's a Storrow trade-in. It wouldn't be 20 feet under the street with sewers and utilities on top like a normal under-street cut-and-cover. It would be a shallow box tunnel--almost air-rights style--like the Red Line from Fields Corner to Ashmont (which is literally just a concrete roof thrown on top of a pre-existing RR cut that used to be open-air). Literally recycle the lowest layer of the Storrow EB roadbed, box the tunnel up to the level of Back St., throw 3 ft. of dirt and grass on top, and re-landscape. Recycle the auto tunnel as a rail tunnel; the Copley ramp turnout is space for an Esplanade intermediate stop. The only serious digging is the short deep bore section from Charlesgate E to Beacon St.

That's not hard. A lot more expansive but not engineering-hard is burying the E under the reservation to Brigham Circle, then doing a moderate-hard dig under Huntington to Brookline Village, doing the Prudential-Back Bay-Marginal St.-Tremont re-route, and continuing south from there in an upper-level N-S Link approach bore to South Station, the Transitway, a rapid transit half of the Link, whatever their fancy. But I think that particular dig is waywaywaywaywayway better as light rail for unifying the UR, GL, and SL III into one super-network. If there's going to be any heavy rail bypass, Riverbank's the one that puts the least crimp in the other plans. And, yes, you could always terminate at Kenmore and figure out if the D is a next step later, if a 1:1 trade-in of Storrow becomes that important to the populace. I think that's an alright plan...Blue/Green/UR light rail at one superstation is good enough, and that wouldn't constrain the Blue at all from tapping the massive North Shore ridership to Salem. Converting the D gets dodgy because I think that BU Bridge-Kenmore as subway, then boomerang to Brookline Village is the only way they're getting the UR built...the billion-dollar Brookline BRT tunnel is Looney Tunes. Those are the same uber-rich historical property owners that killed the I-695 tunnel on the same footprint. Been there, FAIL that.

[omaja]

Converting the D gets dodgy because I think that BU Bridge-Kenmore as subway, then boomerang to Brookline Village is the only way they're getting the UR built...the billion-dollar Brookline BRT tunnel is Looney Tunes. Those are the same uber-rich historical property owners that killed the I-695 tunnel on the same footprint. Been there, FAIL that.

For me, "tunnel" and "BRT" are two things that should never be mentioned in the same sentence. Such a silly idea to spend that much money only to throw buses down it.

I wonder, though, if a Brookline Urban Ring tunnel would be more palatable if, say, that was the final piece needed to complete the ring. Perhaps the pressure from the surrounding areas would reach critical mass as the demand for network connectivity skyrockets with each piece that opens. A rapid transit tunnel is so very different from a freeway one, so what's there really to argue about (aside from inconveniences during construction)?

[F-Line to Dudley]

For me, "tunnel" and "BRT" are two things that should never be mentioned in the same sentence. Such a silly idea to spend that much money only to throw buses down it.

I wonder, though, if a Brookline Urban Ring tunnel would be more palatable if, say, that was the final piece needed to complete the ring. Perhaps the pressure from the surrounding areas would reach critical mass as the demand for network connectivity skyrockets with each piece that opens. A rapid transit tunnel is so very different from a freeway one, so what's there really to argue about (aside from inconveniences during construction)?

Because some historical properties are going to be impacted any which way. It's a much shorter run-up from the Grand Junction portal to get into a 75-100 ft. deep-bore tunnel that won't screw up property lines than it is with the Red Line under Beacon Hill or from Porter to Davis. And the counterpoint the neighborhood will surely offer--why not bury the B and tie in to Kenmore?--costs so much less that blowing shit up in the neighborhood is a tough sell. The only way the T can keep that proposal from getting laughed out of the room is to arbitrarily make it a different mode: BRT or heavy rail, so it physically can't coexist with the Green Line. They're going to have a lot of trouble dodging that.

There's also more old money on those several blocks in Brookline than anywhere else the state has tried to build a transit project or highway before. I don't think those homeowners have to care about pressure from anyone. Their opposition is more like Cape Wind's, except the property impacts are real instead of imagined. All it takes is a few calls amongst old money and I doubt someone like John Kerry or (if elected to serve Brookline) Joe K. III are going to vote for an appropriation.


But mostly...they are going to have a devil of a time dodging that the path of least resistance is, by order of a $B or more, a Green Line hookup and under-reservation dig to Kenmore. Which BU would probably cheerlead the crap out of.

[JeffDowntown]

Not in Back Bay landfill. The Central Subway has a breathtakingly complicated army of underground pumps keeping the groundwater out. The entire Back Bay is only capable of supporting big buildings because the entire neighborhood is pumped out 24/7/365/year-in-year-out by pumps. The water table there is still very much "tidal flat" even though the surface is dry. I can't imagine how much more complicated it would be to dig even lower into that saturated fill.

There is nothing overly complicated about deep bore tunneling under the fill layer (down in the Boston Blue Clay). You would have to treat the design as an underwater tunnel, but that is not unreasonable (and should be the case in with any T tunnels in water-table sensitive areas).

The reason why we will never do that in Boston is because local construction contractors do not have deep bore tunneling expertise, so you have to bring in out of town (out of country) experts. And the local trades will never let that happen. This would have been the solution to an easier Silver Line connection across downtown (much less surface disruption). (Not that that connection was a smart idea as BRT!)

[AmericanFolkLegend]

The reason why we will never do that in Boston is because local construction contractors do not have deep bore tunneling expertise, so you have to bring in out of town (out of country) experts. And the local trades will never let that happen. This would have been the solution to an easier Silver Line connection across downtown (much less surface disruption). (Not that that connection was a smart idea as BRT!)

Baloney. No one in Boston had experience with slurry wall tunnel construction prior to the Big Dig so local guys formed JV's with Obayashi, Kiewit, Bechtel, Skanska, etc., etc.
That's how companies like Cashman, JF White, McCourt, etc. got big. By sharing the risk with a large global player.