MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority) discussion

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Tlcooper93 said:
How do you figure? Would this be better or worse for trains in MA if the DOT ran the commuter rail? California is no model state government wise, but they run better trains than we do.
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Just because Commuter and local service is run by the same outfit does not mean things will be coordinated. Exhibit A is NJ Transit. The Rail Division and the Bus Division could really be living in two different planets, they communicate so little with each other.
 
jis said:
Just because Commuter and local service is run by the same outfit does not mean things will be coordinated. Exhibit A is NJ Transit. The Rail Division and the Bus Division could really be living in two different planets, they communicate so little with each other.
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From what I have seen that is correct. NJ politics have made it a sin to coordinate anything. Does Mr. Eng have enough political capital to say to the schedulers get coordination between your divisions or else? We do not know however, there has been some churning in management already. How coordination is handled with the Southcoast service soon to start will be enlightening.
 
west point said:
From what I have seen that is correct. NJ politics have made it a sin to coordinate anything. Does Mr. Eng have enough political capital to say to the schedulers get coordination between your divisions or else? We do not know however, there has been some churning in management already. How coordination is handled with the Southcoast service soon to start will be enlightening.
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Communication and coordination are different things.

Having different groups communicate with each other is an organizational/cultural thing.

Forcing services to coordinate with each other often runs into problems of mathematics and resource utilization.
 
Fenway said:
They need to separate commuter rail from the subway and bus portion of the network.
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It's true that this would take some of the load off of managing the system. There are some commuter rail services though that fit more into a rapid transit model though. I am thinking specifically of the Fairmount line and maybe the Needham line. There has been talk about converting these to rapid transit but nothing definite has come of it. Splitting off commuter rail might make efforts such as this difficult to implement especially if fiefdoms get created
 
NJ is interesting. The light rail in the Newark “City Subway” is run by NJT Bus Operations.
That’s a legacy of the old Public Service Coordinated Transit.
Not sure of who runs the Trenton-Camden line, or the Hudson-Bergen light rail…🤔

PATH is entirely separate, run by the Port of NY and NJ Authority, as is the Philadelphia-Lindenwood line run by the Delaware River Port Authority.

NJT Rail Operations, SEPTA, and Amtrak run the commuter and long distance trains.
 
railiner said:
Not sure of who runs the Trenton-Camden line, or the Hudson-Bergen light rail…🤔
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River Line (Trenton Camden) is run by Bombardier Transportation, a subsidiary of Alstom now.

Hudson Bergen Light Rail is run by 21st Century Rail, a joint venture of AECOM and Kinkisharyo.

Organizationally within NJT both fall under NJT Bus Operations. Both were built as DBOMs.
 
west point said:
NO!! Do not separate. Instead make all fiefdoms coordinate much like southern California does.. 30 years ago SoCal did not . Now what a difference. Look how fast changes were made when the I-10 mess happened.
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The fiefdoms haven't coordinated anything since the MBTA was created in 1964 to salvage commuter rail after the debacle in 1959 that saw the Southeast Expressway open and the Old Colony Lines of the New Haven RR close within days of the highway opening.

The Boston & Maine RR wanted out and many who controlled Boston banking back then used the B&M to travel to downtown.

The Boston & Albany line serving the western suburbs also had influential riders but that wasn't as critical once the Mass Pike was completed in 1964 to downtown.

The legislature just flat out refused to raise fares even modestly in the 70s to keep voters happy and they began to defer maintenance. Restoring the Old Colony Lines in 1997 cost a small fortune and restoring the Greenbush Line in 2007 was another political quagmire.

The MBTA to this day still runs a bus to a hospital that closed in 1999.

https://milesintransit.com/2016/05/24/99-boston-regional-medical-center/
Infrastructure built in the past 30 to 50 years is falling apart - it really is a nightmare.
 
Fenway said:
Restoring the Old Colony Lines in 1997 cost a small fortune and restoring the Greenbush Line in 2007 was another political quagmire.
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Wasn't the Old Colony basically a way of buying off transit advocates so that they could proceed with the Big Dig? They were also supposed to get restoration of the Arborway Line but that got conveniently forgotten.
 
MBTA is closing the Green Line subway between North Station and Kenmore, along with surface mileage on the B and E lines starting today until December 5. I happen to be planning to travel from South Station to North Station today. Fortunately the Orange Line is still running. This is for infrastructure work, presumably to fix the slow zones.

The text of the alert:

B branch: North Station – Babcock Street
C and D branches: North Station – Kenmore
E branch: North Station – Heath Street

November 27 – December 5, all day, every day

Green Line service will be suspended from North Station to Babcock Street on the B branch, North Station to Kenmore on the C and D branches, and North Station to Heath Street on the E branch, from November 27 – December 5. These diversions are to allow for structural repairs, track reconstruction, and work to remove a speed restriction on Commonwealth Avenue.

Alternate routes:

All branches: Orange Line service between North Station and Back Bay
B branch: Shuttle bus between Copley and Babcock (no stop at Blandford) or 57 bus, free between Kenmore and Packard's Corner during the diversion
C and D branches: Shuttle bus between Copley and Kenmore
E branch: 39 bus, free between Back Bay and Heath Street during the diversion
 
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An interesting video discussing the MBTA and his theory as to the origins of the current crisis. He blames it partly on the radial structure of the subway system which causes it to depend highly on commuters into the city and thereby not serving other users as well, exacerbated by the decline in commuting post COVID.

The Most Dangerous Subway in America
 
AmtrakMaineiac said:
An interesting video discussing the MBTA and his theory as to the origins of the current crisis. He blames it partly on the radial structure of the subway system which causes it to depend highly on commuters into the city and thereby not serving other users as well, exacerbated by the decline in commuting post COVID.

The Most Dangerous Subway in America
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I don’t see how a radial network causes massive deferred maintenance stretching back decades. He also somewhat contradicts himself by noting that the commuter rail division has been doing reasonably well, despite its network being equally radial (and, of course, the commuter rail division was even more dependent on commuters than the subway was). MBTA didn’t suddenly get bad during COVID. The problem has been there for a while.
 
Trogdor said:
I don’t see how a radial network causes massive deferred maintenance stretching back decades. He also somewhat contradicts himself by noting that the commuter rail division has been doing reasonably well, despite its network being equally radial (and, of course, the commuter rail division was even more dependent on commuters than the subway was). MBTA didn’t suddenly get bad during COVID. The problem has been there for a while.
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I agree I think the radial thing is a red herring, the examples he gives of other systems such as London and NYC are essentially still radial, it's just that they have enough complexity that there are alternative paths if things go wrong on one line.

I am thinking that in the heady days of the 1970s when they added these new extensions and bought new rolling stock, there was not enough forethought as to how this was all going to be maintained, and the system was starved for operating budgets and thereby slowly deteriorated. Exacerbated by the Big Dig debt ending up somehow on the T's books. A classic problem where politicians are willing to spend on shiny new things to cut ribbons for but funding day to day maintenance isn't sexy.
 
Agreed that the radial argument is a bit of a red herring, but I also think the current service structure (and Boston as a whole, especially in real estate) doesn’t serve the current reality.

The agency as a whole is responding slowly to the paradigm shift after Covid (away from a commuter centric model).
 
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I was also thinking that the development of commuter rail under MBTA is a fairly recent phenomenon. Back in the 1960s and 1970s the plan was to extend rapid transit to the suburbs to replace existing or past commuter rail lines - for example the Quincy/Braintree extension, with plans to possibly extend it as far as Brockton, and the replacement of the north side Orange Line El with the line to Malden using the existing RR ROW, with a third track added for possible express service that would run to Reading. At the time there was no Old Colony service and many of the lines had much less service than today, for example Newburyport had one train that ran inbound in the AM and outbound in the PM. The Worcester line only ran to Framingham and had maybe 4 trains each way per day. It seems at some point the thinking shifted to more commuter rail in lieu of the rapid transit extensions, probably because they realized the cost of building heavy rail transit vs. adding commuter trains to existing rights of way.
 
IMG_6356.jpegSaw this on Reddit - a man can dream…

Fresh pond is in desperate need of a more feasible rail link. Given that it was built before any of the recent development, Alewife is not adequate, especially due to the lack of a cycle/pedestrian bridge over the Fitchburg ROW. The traffic around the area is nearly standstill for much of any given weekday.
 
Tlcooper93 said:
View attachment 35388Saw this on Reddit - a man can dream…

Fresh pond is in desperate need of a more feasible rail link. Given that it was built before any of the recent development, Alewife is not adequate, especially due to the lack of a cycle/pedestrian bridge over the Fitchburg ROW. The traffic around the area is nearly standstill for much of any given weekday.
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Interesting. Although you could do the Fresh Pond branch as an alternative northern destination without doing the whole rest of the new line.

Another proposal I've seen is to turn the Fairmount line to Readville into a heavy rail branch of the Red Line tied in somewhere south of South Station. This might be hard to implement given you would now have 3 branches on the South end of the line and whether the downtown tunnel could handle the traffic.

But given the T's current state I don't imagine we will be worrying about such options for a while.
 
Tlcooper93 said:
View attachment 35388Saw this on Reddit - a man can dream…

Fresh pond is in desperate need of a more feasible rail link. Given that it was built before any of the recent development, Alewife is not adequate, especially due to the lack of a cycle/pedestrian bridge over the Fitchburg ROW. The traffic around the area is nearly standstill for much of any given weekday.
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I have never seen this map before. Is is a new idea or something that has been kicking around for decades?

Central and Harvard are swapped on the map.

I have no idea where Taylor Sq is, despite having lived for the last 25 years about 3 blocks from Fresh Pond.

When the Harvard station opened in 1912, it was supposed to be a temporary terminus until the line was extended to Watertown, presumably along or under Mt Auburn St or Brattle St. Is that the plan for the western end of the Pink line on this map?
 
John Santos said:
I have never seen this map before. Is is a new idea or something that has been kicking around for decades?

Central and Harvard are swapped on the map.

I have no idea where Taylor Sq is, despite having lived for the last 25 years about 3 blocks from Fresh Pond.

When the Harvard station opened in 1912, it was supposed to be a temporary terminus until the line was extended to Watertown, presumably along or under Mt Auburn St or Brattle St. Is that the plan for the western end of the Pink line on this map?
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I also found a Taylor sq station to be quite odd - I live about a 5 minute walk from the fire station.

Completely ignoring the fact that this station would get NIMBY’d half way to China, the station wouldn’t exactly serve a lot of people.

A much better idea is to have a train follow the old Watertown ROW that’s now a bike path. That would serve fresh pond easily, and bring a much needed heavy rail link from Cambridge to North Station. The Fitchburg row is already wide enough and many places to support this.
 
Tlcooper93 said:
much better idea is to have a train follow the old Watertown ROW that’s now a bike path. That would serve fresh pond easily, and bring a much needed heavy rail link from Cambridge to North Station. The Fitchburg row is already wide enough and many places to support this.
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I'm confused. If this extension serves North Station, would this now be a branch off the Orange Line?
 
AmtrakMaineiac said:
I'm confused. If this extension serves North Station, would this now be a branch off the Orange Line?
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It’s possible - I was really just brainstorming alleviation ideas for fresh pond area. Of course, the quickest, and likeliest, fix is to add an infill station at alewife. One used to exist anyways.

The Cambridge Watertown bike path is great. It’s grade separated. It’s also basically a path from nowhere to nowhere (in terms of where people actually go). The fix is to have this bike path actually connected to the old Bedford ROW (a bike path all the way to concord) - and then have a grade separated bike path along the Fitchburg ROW all the way to downtown. Rail would be better, but hey, bikes are good too.
 
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