Master_Dogs t1_iydzbqf wrote on November 30, 2022 at 6:15 PM

Reply to comment by CJYP in Finally connecting Red and Blue lines by MDeehan

> IMO the suburban subway extensions are mostly redundant with the regional rail conversion. With regional rail, all those cities will already have subway like frequencies, and it'll even be faster than a subway line. If any currently unserved spot on the line needs service, infill stations can handle it. I realize there are some trips that would be better served by a subway extension, but i doubt it's enough to be worth the cost if you're already doing regional rail.

The Orange Line extension in the 70's single tracked a large amount of the Haverhill Line, so I think it's worthwhile to just run Haverhill Line trains over the Lowell/Wildcat Branch instead and replace the service south of Wilmington with the Orange Line.

The Red Line to Arlington and Lexington has no existing rail either, and would be quite useful to expand our metro a bit. Those towns would hate this but it's a necessary thing to do if we want to provide more space for growth.

The Blue Line to Lynn is certainly redundant, but still quite useful. Connecting Lynn easily to Revere, Eastie and ultimately Cambridge via the Red/Blue connector could be extremely useful for transferring car trips to transit trips. Maybe the North/South Rail Link could work for this too, but it's one of the most costly things I mentioned and I honestly don't know if we're ever actually do it.

> What that lets you do is spend the subway money creating new lines in the city - starting with one on Mass Ave, and another on Washington Street. Then you serve currently underserved areas closer to the city center and the suburban towns, at the same time, with the same amount of money.

Washington St was historically served by the elevated Orange Line, but is already served by replacement service via the Silver Line. We could overhaul the Silver Lane and provide more exclusive ROW via bus lanes, improved stops, etc. I don't know if we really need a subway line there though. The Feds already told us no to any Federal funding back in the 70's and 80's when we moved the Orange Line over to the Amtrak/Rail/almost inner belt ROW. Maybe we could convince them today that we could use more transit service there, or we could commit actual State dollars to it. But I don't know how needed it is when we have transit going there, it's just poorly done.

Not sure what you mean about Mass Ave - like connecting Cambridge/Boston together via a new subway branch? That could be useful to replace the #1 bus that crosses the Mass Ave bridge and often gets stuck in traffic, making it unreliable. But like the Silver Line on Washington St that service could be improved with significantly more exclusive ROW, better stations and more frequent bus headways. Either extension could ultimately be useful though and allow us to redeploy buses to the burbs for better last mile service to other extensions or improvements (like better connections to Regional Rail stations, removing the need for large parking garages at them).

Ultimately I'd say why not all of the above. We dumped $20B into the Big Dig for pretty lackluster return on investment. Dumping $20B into the T could easily let us do most of these things and probably more if we get our costs under control.

CJYP t1_iye2gzk wrote on November 30, 2022 at 6:35 PM

I'm all for doing all of these things. In the end we do have to prioritize which ones have the most value for their cost, if nothing else just to decide what order to do them in. NSRL has extremely high value, but also extremely high cost. I still think it's so important that we should bite the bullet and do it sooner rather than later.

With NSRL, I'd rather double track the commuter rail line from Assembly to oak Grove than extend the orange line. That would provide connectivity to all the southern commuter rail lines. Some of the route (especially the bridge over the Mystic River) already has 3 orange line tracks, so you could turn the third track into a commuter rail track instead of rebuilding the bridge. You'd mainly need new construction from about Wellington to Oak Grove. Still expensive, but probably somewhat comparable to all the grade separations you'd need to build to extend the orange line.

As for the silver line and 1 bus, the main benefit of rail over bus is higher capacity. They could even be light rail lines. Regardless, they both urgently need their own right of way so they stop getting stuck in traffic.

PS - This debate is much more productive than arguing over whether we even should build transit, which is all a lot of people seem to want to talk about. I hope the legislature and Maura Healey are having a similar debate, not the other one.

Master_Dogs t1_iyeemnq wrote on November 30, 2022 at 7:53 PM

> With NSRL, I'd rather double track the commuter rail line from Assembly to oak Grove than extend the orange line. That would provide connectivity to all the southern commuter rail lines. Some of the route (especially the bridge over the Mystic River) already has 3 orange line tracks, so you could turn the third track into a commuter rail track instead of rebuilding the bridge. You'd mainly need new construction from about Wellington to Oak Grove. Still expensive, but probably somewhat comparable to all the grade separations you'd need to build to extend the orange line. > >

The triple tracking was done during the mid 1970's because the Haymarket North Extension had plans to go to Reading. My suggested extension was basically just this old extension proposal. Basically just send Haverhill Line trains up the Lowell/Wildcat Line instead and you can reclaim all of the Haverhill Line ROW to Reading for the Orange Line. Makes a triple track a useful thing for express trains. Grade separations can be handled by small tunnel segments. Fun fact, the OL already does this to pass under the old Medford Branch around here. If only we hadn't let the Medford Branch ROW disappear, because that too could have been a nice 1 or 2 station Branch of the OL. Maybe a Spring St station plus a Medford Sq station. Plus there's an old station from the Medford Branch on Park St though no idea who owns it now.

I wonder which option would be better. I'm pretty sure you could get more capacity and frequency with the OL extension to Reading. Whether we'd ever build up Reading, Wakefield and Melrose enough to justify that... who knows. With a Regional Rail improvement you could always branch up through Wakefield, Lynnfield and beyond via other old rail ROWs that are slowly turning into multi use trails. Though we could even build further OL extensions under those if we ever want/need to.

> PS - This debate is much more productive than arguing over whether we even should build transit, which is all a lot of people seem to want to talk about. I hope the legislature and Maura Healey are having a similar debate, not the other one.

I hope so. I imagine the additional tax revenue from ballot question #1 (the 1% tax to fund education/transit) could help change the equation too. I have to imagine they were previously worried about raising taxes to fund infrastructure improvements. Now that that's partially solved, we could start planning some of these extensions/improvements without worrying as much about funding. But they could always try and use funky accounting to negate that increase in revenue. Or just spend it on highways. 🤡 who knows.