The new line is the typical MA thing of spending 75% of the money of doing it right, to get 25% of the value of doing it right. And likely poisoning the well for ever doing it right.

It's going to be an incredibly long ride, service levels are shit, and the routing/scheduling requires a ton of wishful thinking to think it's not going to collapse the entire Old Colony lines into delays in reality - since, among other problems, they have single-track chokepoints and the proposed schedule basically requires everything to be perfectly on time to not have cascading delays. Good luck with that.

And for the limited service they're going to run - they really ought to have picked just one endpoint for now rather than splitting frequencies by branching. One big city with tolerable service > 2 with shit service.

The "full-build"/Phase II (PDF warning) - which would go to Stoughton and inbound from there, is a fine enough concept and could be a useful service. This half-assed one is not. And when the ridership is utter shit, it's going to kill the chances of actually finishing the project properly.

What should be happening is building SCR to Stoughton from day 1 and extending the Middleborough line to Buzzards Bay - with a couple a day over the bridge like the Cape Flyer does seasonally. That would actually be useful and effective. This is not.

Anyway, back on topic.

Middleborough can't even plan for developing at the new station either, because if the full-build/"Phase II" gets built, they'll likely switch back to the old (current) station site instead and the new station will be abandoned. If they actually follow the rules and rezone around the new station....they're risking creating this whole situation again in 10 years for a different set of lied-to people.