I love car sharing. I just wouldn’t invest in it.

Posted on by
3

[They say that hindsight is 20/20. So I’ll preface this post with the fact that I was making this argument years ago, as in 2010, well before ZIP ever went public. (A quick search of my Gmail for Zipcar IPO did the trick.)]

Car sharing is great. It’s not applicable to every market (i.e. it works better in Boston than Houston) and in the short term, outside of dense cities with pricey parking it will be a niche product. But its users dramatically reduce the number of cars on the road, and they also reduce the amount that they drive when they pay the full cost of driving, not just the marginal cost after the static costs of insurance, depreciation and parking. From its infancy less than 15 years ago (most large city car sharing organizations—CSOs—launched between 1998 and 2002) it has grown to an almost-mainstream product with close to 10,000 cars and a million drivers in North America.

But I’m not about to invest in it. And Zipcar (ZIP), which went public last year, has promptly lost two thirds of its value.

Zipcar’s aim in an IPO was to both pay back their initial investors and raise money for expansion. However, as they expand, they are not going to be able to exploit economies of scale in the way many growing companies can. They have entered their best markets, and further expansion will be in to markets with lower margins and which require more marketing and long term demographic change (Atlanta instead of Boston). The heady days of the early ’90s, when car sharing organizations in dense cities threw cars on to the streets as fast as they could, have come to a close. The top neighborhoods are well-served. Future expansion will be slow and methodical, and not particularly profitable.

In fact, several successful car sharing organizations don’t really ever intend to turn a profit. The following are major car sharing organizations in the US and Canada:

  • Zipcar, for-profit start-up, founded 2000 in Boston, main vendor in Boston, New York, DC, Portland and Seattle, with a presence in all large markets except Montreal. Bought Flexcar (for-profit) in 2007; Flexcar had originally been formed as a public-private partnership in Seattle in 2000, and bought a Portland-based not-for-profit (Car Sharing Portland) in 2002 before expanding and being bought by Zipcar, apparently close to bankruptcy.
  • Hertz on Demand, for-profit spinoff of car rental agency, founded 2008, New York
  • Mint, for-profit spinoff of parking garage manager, founded 2008, New York
  • City CarShare, independent not-for-profit, founded 2000 in San Francisco (for a couple of years, San Francisco had competition between CCS, Zipcar and Flexcar)
  • I-Go, not-for-profit division of a larger organization, founded 2002, Chicago
  • PhillyCarShare, not-for-profit start-up in 2002 sold to Enterprise in 2011
  • CommunAuto, for-profit start-up in Montreal in 1994
  • Autoshare, for-profit start-up in Toronto, 1998
  • Modo, founded as The Car Coop, cooperative founded in Vancouver in 2000
  • Most smaller CSOs are non-profits (HOURCAR, Ego, Ithaca Carshare, Carshare VT) with a few for-profits (CommunityCar, OccasionalCar) and coops as well.
Interestingly, every city with even a medium-sized car sharing scheme, except New York and Washington D.C., has had, at one point, it’s own homegrown car sharing service. Zipcar only succeeded in using it’s size to run Flexcar in to merging (and this may have been more due to management policies on Flexcar’s part) and PhillyCarShare to a sale (again, quite possibly due to management issues). Washington, D.C. is the only city in which competition has markedly decreased (it and San Francisco had Zipcar-Flexcar competition before that merger; San Francisco retains competition with CityCarShare); the rest of the markets Zipcar has entered it has failed to dislodge the existing player in town. (That being said, with the exception of New York no one has entered a Zipcar market after they had established a presence.)
But look at how the major players were founded:
  • 4 as for-profit start-ups
  • 2 as other for-profits (Both in the New York market)
  • 4 as not-for-profits
  • 1 as a coop
About half of the players in car sharing started off as non-profits, and two (I-Go and CityCarShare) remain non-profit today. I’d be reticent to invest in a business model where nearly half of the original founders didn’t see the opportunity or necessity for profits.

There are three main issues which will keep car sharing from ever being a terribly profitable business. (Yes, it likely will achieve a steady level of profitability in some markets and may pay small returns to investors, but won’t grow dramatically.) One is the issue of car sharing being a capital-intensive business. The second is that, charging by time, CSOs are hamstrung by there being only 24 hours in a day. Finally, for both mission and practical reasons, car sharing organizations are one of very few businesses which often actively encourage their customers to use their product as little as possible. None of these helps the bottom line.

As far as capital goes, car sharing is expensive. CSOs have to buy (generally) new cars, install a couple thousand dollars of hardware, and continually maintain them. Unlike rental car companies, which can sell their fleet seasonally or to adjust to market conditions, CSOs decal their vehicles and install locking mechanisms, relays and mileage tracking devices. These investments raise the barrier to selling capital quickly, and most CSOs keep their vehicles for several years, not several months. Having a lot of capital tied up in depreciating assets encourages stability and slow growth, but not necessarily high profits.

With millions of dollars of capital tied up in vehicles, car sharing organizations are hamstrung by the number 24: the number of hours in a day. This, however, is misleading, because very little car sharing takes place overnight, when many CSOs have reduced rates. In addition, most car sharing organizations have daily rates, which allow consumers to cap the cost of a shared car at around the cost of an 8 hour rental, but this also caps the potential revenue at 8 hours. Since car sharing breaks even with between 5 and 6 hours of use per day, this leaves a small margin for profitability. And even without daily rates, customers become agitated when availability dips, generally around 9 hours a day (50%, assuming the hours of 12 to 6 a.m. rarely see car usage).

Is there room for profitability between the break-even point and the daily rate barrier? Yes, but not much. Usage is lower on weekdays, and if cars saw maximum profitability on weekdays they’d be swamped on weekends. Thus, most CSOs have higher rates on weekends (this is what we call supply and demand). And since the fixed costs of buying, parking and insuring a vehicle is quite high, there is little room to reduce the break-even point. Some cars in high-use areas will always profit, but a CSO will generally have fringe cars in neighborhoods which see less use (but absorb extra demand and expand the geographical market). And cars which do very well in the summer often see usage decline in the winter, but with annual parking space contracts and investments, CSOs can’t change their fleet size based on the season. So making a profit in car sharing is akin to threading the needle of a balance sheet.

Finally, once a member joins a car sharing organization, they aren’t generally encouraged to drive as much as possible. For one thing, some members might find that, by driving a lot, they would be financially better off buying a car, depriving a CSO of a highly-valued member. In addition, non-profit CSOs, and many of their for-profit brethren, are motivated by environmental goals, and find it hard to encourage their members to “drive as much as you can!” So car sharing is one of very few businesses where a consumer is told to buy a product and then use it as little as possible. (Imagine, for instance, McDonalds running ads saying “cheeseburgers are a great alternative to eating at home, but really you should eat our cheeseburgers only when you’re really in a pinch for time.”) CSOs will encourage their members to use the cars, but have to tread a very fine rhetorical line to encourage “exploration” and “new experiences” rather than just driving more.

Put these together, and car sharing is a maturing service which will continue to grow. However, it’s not something that’s ever going to turn a huge profit.

On the other end of the spectrum, current investors, like the esteemed (at least, when he’s getting yelled at by Jon Stewart) Jim Cramer, also have things wrong. They argue against buying Zipcar shares because they fear big car rental agencies are going to push in to Zipcar’s turf and take over its business. If this was the case, it would have happened by now. But car rental agencies have a different business model, and they’re not about to change their stable, successful businesses to jump in to something new, and something which barely makes money.


In other words, Hertz is not about to move their airport-based fleet of rental cars in to the middle of the city and take over Zipcar’s business. Their business model is to buy new cars, drive them for 25,000 miles, park them in big lots at an airport, and sell them within a year. They operate with very low overhead, comparatively few locations, and, outside of airports, limited hours. Some have made feints in to the car sharing market from static locations with limited pick-up times and key boxes; these have been unsuccessful. The only money they put in to their cars are 25¢ key rings, so they can sell off capital at a moment’s notice. They don’t have to invest in parking spaces, signs and space leasing agreements. They play the car market, and, from time to time they rent them out.


The one opportunity for car rental agencies is that the demand for rental cars and shared cars is flipped. Rental cars see low use on weekends, shared cars see low use on weekdays. If Hertz could magically move half their fleet from the airport to the city every Friday and back on Sunday night, they’d have something going. This, however, would mean driving their cars at high revenue and high traffic times, from one central location to dispersed spaces in residential areas. They’d have to install car sharing hardware which would only be used a few days a week, disable and reenable it to meet the whims of the rental car market, and convince traditional renters to drive a moving billboard. The logistical and personnel cost to do this would negate any potential savings. 


There are also reverse opportunities for car sharing organizations: encouraging travelers to rent shared cars during the week—especially in cities with good transit links to airports. Imagine, for example, a business traveler going to the East Bay from SFO. She could get on the BART and ride it through San Francisco and under the Bay, avoid the usual traffic on the bridge and 101, and pick up a car in Berkeley from near a BART station. By the time a traveler bound for a location west of Boston was at the desk after a rental car shuttle trip at Logan, they could take the Silver Line to the Seaport, grab a Zipcar, and jump on the Pike. If anything, I think there’s more of a market for traditional car renters to use shared cars than the other way around, especially as business travelers become more likely to be city-adept car sharing members and less likely to own a car. (Plus, from an expense-reporting standpoint, it’s easier to expense one item, a rental car, than a rental car and gas purchases.) But for the most part I expect car sharing and car rental to remain separate business segments as this would only be feasible in markets with sizable car sharing markets, good airport transit and cross-city reciprocity (right now, only Zipcar).


So, car sharing will continue to be successful, but never wildly profitable. If shares were to fall far enough and Zipcar shows continued profitability, I could see it being a decent investment, but not one that would ever run up Apple- or Google-like returns. For now, I’m staying away.

Hubway Helmet Storage

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been riding Hubway a lot this summer and enjoyed it’s convenience immensely (I’m at 54 trips and counting since April).

One of the issues with bike sharing, however, is helmet use. The point of bike sharing is that you can pick up and drop off a bicycle like you would get on a bus or hail a cab. To a lot of users, having to carry around a helmet is antithetical to these goals. Attempts to solve this abound: Boston sells subsidized helmets across the city (I know; I bought one in a pinch and it currently serves as my “office helmet” which I’ve offered to share with coworkers). DC does too (but they cost a bit more). Melbourne, which has mandatory helmet use, has seen its system struggle, and sells helmets for just $5, which you can return for a $3 rebate. Minneapolis is straight giving away 10,000 bright green branded helmets. Vancouver considered shipping Montreal’s mothballed Bixi system from winter storage out for the Olympics but was stymied by their province’s helmet law. The city still doesn’t have a bike sharing system.

And there’s the cool MIT helmet vending machine. Really cool. And, uh, not in production yet.

Still, all of these ideas are for origin helmet dispensing? What about those of us who have a helmet already?

Riding a clunky, heavy, stable bike for a mile in the city is not prime helmet use territory, and many casual users don’t use a helmet. For those of us who do (perhaps because of prior experience), Hubway becomes an exercise in always having a helmet handy. More than once I’ve been ready to get off the Red Line at Charles (Side note: this station earns a 4.5 star rating on Yelp.) for the four minute jaunt down Charles Street only to realize I’d left my helmet at home and jumped back on the train.

But I’ve gotten better. I almost always have a helmet with me when I want to start a trip. Helmet availability is less and less of an issue. The problem is: what do I do with my helmet when I get to my destination?

I could strap it to my belt or put it in a bag. In my line of work and the circles I travel, wandering around with a helmet is, if not a badge of honor, at least somewhat acceptable. Luckily, on Hubway, it usually stays relatively non-sweaty. But in a crowded bar, having a helmet clipped to your belt looks really dorky, and can get in the way. It’s awkward to say “excuse me” and have a helmet rub up against someone’s thigh. (But maybe it’s a good way to break the ice with the cute cyclist across the room. I digress.) Or, I ride Hubway to the train station, and then wind up taking the train, walking to a meeting, going to the meeting, walking back to the train and riding back to the city, all the while toting my helmet. It doesn’t keep me from riding Hubway, but it’s a nuisance.

So what I think bike sharing needs is helmet storage at racks. More than once I’ve considered not taking Hubway simply because I didn’t want to have to keep track of my helmet while at my destination. (I’ve never actually found an alternative, because Hubway is really damn convenient.) Here’s are a couple scenarios to consider:

  • I leave my office after work and bike a mile across town to meet a friend at a bar. I store my helmet at the bike rack, and when I come back, I grab it and bike to the T, which I take home. With my helmet.
  • I Hubway over to North Station in the morning to take a train to a meeting. I store my helmet at the station. Back a few hours later, I fetch my helmet from the helmet storage, pop it on my noggin, and ride back to the office.
So what I think Hubway needs is helmet racks. Generally, people don’t steal helmets. If you lock your bike and hang the helmet off the handlebars, it will be there when you get back. The front wheel might be gone, but not the helmet. No one steals helmets to resell because no one buys used helmets (because you have no way to know if it’s been in a crash, and it’s all sweaty, too). No one steals helmets to use them because of the aforementioned safety issue and, well, because the population that is in to wearing helmets is generally not that in to petty larceny. I’ve left a helmet unlocked myriad times and it’s always been there later on. And, also, someone else’s sweaty hair. Ew. So no one steals helmets. Except …
Except near a bike share. It’s the only place where helmetless people would think of grabbing a helmet and going. It wouldn’t be their intention to steal it, but to use it and drop it off somewhere else. Which would work great, unless someone else was counting on coming back and finding it there. If you were at a bike share station and saw a helmet just sitting there, would you take it? Quite possibly you would. Even if it quite possibly belonged to someone else. And if there were just helmets clipped to a fence near the rack, they might be seen as a public nuisance and removed and trashed before their users could fetch them. So we need a rack with some sort of security.
The design could take any number of forms. The main hurdle of access can easily be solved by limiting access to people carrying an RFID chip with a unique code, which, very conveniently, is how bike sharing users access the bikes. (Except, of course, for daily users, but they’d be less likely to have their own helmets to store and make up a small portion of the user base. Plus, they could integrate the passcode system in the helmet storage.) It could be a stack of cages with doors which could be accessed by presenting a Hubway key. It could be a set of small U-locks which could be removed, put through a helmet vent (or even strap: cutting a strap to steal a helmet renders the helmet useless) and replaced. It could even be cables which would go through helmet vents or straps. 
Time limits could be enforced: after, say, six hours the user could be charged, or the cage could simply unlock. Rarely am I somewhere for long before I come back to the rack, grab a bike (and my helmet) and go. And it could easily be integrated in to the MIT HelmetHub design. Time to give them a shout, it seems like it would be compatible.
High security would certainly not be needed. No one is going to walk around with garden shears clipping locks and stealing helmets (for the same reason no one grabs helmets off the street; see above). The issue would be keeping the helmets safe from casual, almost accidental thief (“I need a helmet. Hey, look a helmet!”) and providing infrastructure which would say “helmets belong here, don’t mess with ’em.”
I know I’d use this system. I’m not sure how many others would. However, I think the market is there. Whether it’s someone who is already using the system and would wear a helmet if she had somewhere to store it, or someone who is interested in the system but doesn’t use it because they need somewhere to store their helmet. Either way, helmet and system use would rise. Neither of which is a bad thing.
This doesn’t solve the problem. But I think it’s a piece of the puzzle.

Apparently the WSJ hasn’t heard of slugging

Posted on by
Reply

The Wall Street Journal (or, according to Wonkette, the WSJ banking pamphlet) has an article about people who pull over to bus stops to pick up passengers before crossing the George Washington Bridge, saving tolls. They mention carpool savings in San Francisco but miss a bigger point: this is exactly how slugging started in DC, three decades ago!

According to Wikipedia:

The term slug (used as both a noun and a verb) came from bus drivers who had to determine if there were genuine passengers at their stop or just people wanting a free lift, in the same way that they look out for fake coins—or “slugs“—being thrown into the fare-collection box.

The original sluggers would poach riders from bus stops. After a while, slugging queues formed at park-and-rides (on the inbound) and areas with many offices like the Pentagon (on the outbound) and the system became self-reinforcing. Sluggers have an unofficial website now and the system has been around long enough that it is ingrained in a couple of areas. However, one of them may not be New York.

Emily Badger, now of The Atlantic Cities, wrote a long and interesting piece about slugging last year, which outlined several factors that have to be in place for slugging to work:

  • The HOV requirement must be 3. HOV-4 is too cramped, and HOV-2 lacks a sense of security. (With three strangers in a car, even if one is crazy they’ll be outnumbered.)
  • The HOV lane has to be lengthy or have a high toll, and paralleling traffic has to be bad enough that it saves considerable time. In DC, the 95/395 corridor is one of the most gridlocked in the country, while the carpool lane sails along at freeway speeds. And misuse must be enforced.
  • There needs to be a parallel transit system for backup, even if it is slower. Drivers and passengers will not always balance perfectly.
  • Employment needs to be situated in dense urban nodes that draw workers from a highway corridor
  • Some homogeneity in the workforce. For instance, everyone in DC works for Uncle Sam (or so it seems)
I would add that slugging also needs
  • The existence of park-and-ride lots where riders can congregate (preferably with some amount of cover from the elements)
  • Parallel transit can’t be too fast, frequent or reliable, although it’s rare to find fast, reliable and frequent transit in the US. (In other words, if there was a Metro Line along 395 which ran at 110 mph to the District, there would probably be fewer slugs. But since the transit options are a bus with a transfer to Metro, slugging is faster.)
  • The end of the system has to be in a transit-served area; the transit, or even bike sharing, can provide a last mile solution from the slug lines (which are sort of like transit stations).
On the GW, high tolls are certainly in place, and there are savings to be realized with an HOV toll pass. However, the system lacks a few other features. There is no major employment density on the other side of the bridge. Well, there is, but not that many New Jerseyites drive there from the GW. There are no time savings for HOV travelers, either. There’s nowhere to congregate (although this might change, according to the article). Once across the bridge, there is relatively easy access to a subway station, but getting back on the highway requires a couple of zigs and zags on surface streets to the Bronx. Once on the train, however, the A train runs express to Midtown, making the trip in 20 minutes, which is generally faster than driving. Also, there is no toll westbound, so there’s no incentive to pick up a passenger and save.
What would it take for slugging to catch on on the GW? First, the police would have to stop ticketing people for picking up slugs. It would have to be a two-way system, which would require more tolling capacity. A dedicated, easy-on, easy-off slug facility or location would have to be found (in Manhattan, this could be a section of street, but it’s harder on the interstate in Jersey). And to cap it off, I think the Port Authority would have to create free-flowing carpool lanes, to create a time incentive. This, too, would be tricky, because they’d have to extend across the Palisades (which often back up), but in doing so would extend beyond the market of available slugs. So, the GW might not be right for slugging.

Road Width vs Road use

Posted on by
2

When I was researching information about the new green housing development in Brighton I found some interesting numbers regarding the traffic on Commonwealth Avenue. As part of their permitting with the Boston Redevelopment Agency, a big PDF details the traffic patterns in the neighborhood, for both pedestrians and vehicles. Looking at the traffic numbers, I got the feeling that Commonwealth Avenue in Brighton is not equitably sized. In other words: the width of the road is not proportional to the number of users for each segment.

Here’s how the roadway in question breaks down (I measured it online):

The unlabeled gray sections are medians. Here it is simplified by use:

And here’s a pie chart of how many feet (the total width is 200 feet) are used for each use:

About two thirds of the street is taken up by traffic lanes, parking or medians which separate traffic lanes and parking (and provide no refuge to pedestrians and no landscaping). But of people traveling along Comm Av, fewer than two thirds are traveling by car. Many fewer. According to the study, there are, at the peak PM rush hour between 5 and 6 p.m., 1343 vehicles traveling along Commonwealth or turning on to or off of Harvard. Of these, 785 go through, and the rest turn. Counting each turner as half a trip, there are 1064 road users along this stretch of Commonwealth Avenue. Assuming some carpooling, this probably equates to about 1400 people per hour.

There was no count for cyclists. This is a frequented stretch of road by bikes, but it is certainly not bike-friendly. I’d guess that there are 50 bikes per hour in total at rush hour. (There are no marked lanes for cyclists and they have to choose between the trafficked main travel lanes or the carriage/parking lanes which have parked car hazards and more stop signs. Most choose the former.)

For pedestrians the counting is easier: there are about 300 walkers per hour.

As for transit users: the T maintains a six-minute headway along this stretch of street during rush hours. In recent years, they’ve moved from two-car trains to three-car trains, and about half the rush-hour consists along this line have three cars. That’s 25 vehicles per hour in each direction. In the peak direction, the T operates at or near crush capacity in this section, with 150 to 200 passengers per car (specs here). The non-peak direction probably operates at about one third that capacity, with 50 passengers per car (around all-seated capacity). This estimate gives us, conservatively, 5000 people per hour.

So, compare the chart above to this one:

The vehicle right-of-way, which uses the lion’s share of the street’s real estate, sees fewer than a quarter of the street’s users. Transit, with less than a sixth of the street width, carries more than triple that number. Per linear foot, the roadway and the sidewalk come out about the same. By passengers per foot of right-of-way per hour (ppfph) the numbers break down as:

  • Vehicle ROW: 11.1
  • Sidewalk: 12.5
  • Transit: 172.0

Note where the decimal is for the transit. It’s 15 times more efficient for each unit of real estate.

This can be documented for many other streets. Take the main cross street here, Harvard Street. It sees about 900 cars (1200 passengers) at peak hour, 350 pedestrians and (I’m guessing here) 60 cyclists (it was not counted in the bike count database since 1976). The street right-of-way is 78 feet wide, with 22 feet of sidewalk, 10 of bike lane and 46 for vehicles (travel and parking). Of course, the MBTA’s route 66 bus runs every 9 minutes at crush capacity (60 passengers per bus) in both directions, carrying about 800 passengers.

On Harvard, the sidewalks carry 15.9 pedestrians per foot per hour, the bike lanes 6 and the vehicle lanes 43.5. (Not terribly surprisingly, Harvard Street is usually gridlocked between 5 and 6 p.m.) This neglects to account for the efficiency of the buses. Buses demand some real estate, namely a 10-foot-by-50-foot bus stop every 1000 feet or so. That breaks down to one half of one linear foot, but for good measure we’ll assume the buses use that much street real estate during travel, and assign two of the vehicle feet to the buses. That changes the numbers:

  • Vehicle ROW: 27.3
  • Bike lanes: 6.0
  • Sidewalk: 15.9
  • Transit: 400
Does that mean that the 66 bus is more efficient than the Green Line? Certainly not. With 800 passengers per hour, the 66 is stretched to capacity: it gets bogged down in traffic, it frequently runs late or in bunches, and it crawls along its route. To add many more passengers, it would need its own lane. Even still, if, as a bus rapid transit, it took over the parking lanes (note: this won’t happen any time soon) and doubled its ridership (likely, considering how many people take it even despite its slothly pace, it would still be more efficient than the adjacent roadway.
(And one more note: we’ll look at the Red Line on the Longfellow Bridge soon, but the back of the envelope calculation is 15 trains each way carrying an average of 750 passengers each per hour in 30 feet of right of way, giving a ppfph of 750. A New York Subway line running every three minutes with 1000 passengers per train would yield a ppfph of 1333. A highway at peak capacity might be able to attain 2700 passengers per lane per mile—or a bit more with a lot of buses—for a ppfph of 225, but adding any more vehicles quickly decreases the speed and capacity.)

Naming housing developments

Posted on by
Reply

I have an interest in the names that developers give to houses, especially in cities. For instance, older apartment buildings along Beacon Street in Brookline are often named (here’s one: the Metropole) as are newer developments. I plan to explore these further.

But I was biking in Woburn, not way out in the suburbs, but out there, and had to stop and take a picture of a new subdivision going in:

Meadow View Farms. That’s interesting, because as far as I can tell, there is no meadow, there is no view, and there is certainly not a farm. And the web address (the site shows a flowing field of wheat—which we don’t even have in the northeast!) includes estates—there aren’t any of those either. Just McMansions.

Not the worst kind of development in Allston

Posted on by
3

The Boston Globe ran a piece recently about a “green” development in Brighton Allston. The part of Allston it’s in, near the base of Corey Hill, is generally thought of as the epicenter of cheap student housing in Boston: glorified (or not-that-glorified) tenements for $500 a room. A big developer got some nice press for their green housing development, and I began to cringe when I thought of the green-washing possibilities: the token solar panels and patch of grass on the roof paired with a guarantee of free parking with every unit! The thrown-together rain garden to drain the massive surface parking out back. The eminent-domained two family houses razed for a new building with a lower overall FAR and units per acre.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I found out that the development was, overall, not an overall detriment to the area. It’s scale is fitting with the neighborhood—four stories is de rigeur for that area. It has parking, but the variance is stepped down and spaces cost $165 to $200 per month, market rate for the area and 10% or more of the building’s rent (and they’re not bundled). This is my biggest peeve with so-called green projects: they are frequently either built in areas without transportation choices (this one is in a walkable, bikeable and transit-able neighborhood, even if it is on the B line) or, if they are, they either choose or are forced by their lenders to overbuild parking, which they then give away. Even at one space per unit, I think parking is overbuilt in this case. But at least in the case of “The Edge” (warning: big PDF) some of it is outside, and if it doesn’t sell it could be surreptitiously converted to open space.

Here’s the Globe’s map of the development. And a block-scale greening might just be a good investment for the developer, too.

There are other decent green features, at The Element (yes, these are stupid names, and yes there is a blog post about building names to be written), for instance. Like individual water meters: no more long hot showers for your $500 a month. (Can I complain? No, the landlord in my 1885-era house pays to water our garden.) And white roof and rooftop vegetable garden (a great amenity!). And a bunch of other garden variety green cues.

What is this housing replacing? Garages, abandoned light industry and parking. While losing the industrial buildings is sort of a shame, this neighborhood will probably never again have small-scale manufacturing. The project will build or rehab several hundred apartments for a price tag of $125 million, not a bad shot in the arm for the local economy. And since it’s on a streetcar line and a stone’s throw from Harvard Street, it’s a perfectly good place for even higher-density residential.

The site for the Edge is about 200′ by 175′, or about 4/5 acres, with 79 units—about 100 units per acre. With 1.75 people per unit, this is more than 100,000 people per square mile (more than the actual density, since it doesn’t account for nearby infrastructure). It’s not as dense as the grove of three-deckers I lived in on Harvard Ave in Brookline (almost double the density), but it’s not bad. These Allston census tracts clock in at 40,000 to 50,000 people per square mile—some of the densest in Boston (12,000 overall) and nearly as dense as Manhattan (66,000), so it’s about right for the neighborhood.

One qualm I have with most of this new development is that it lacks character, and from the pictures, this seems to be the case. Apparently everyone wants a sleek, modern granite kitchen and bare, white walls. I still think there’s a market for new 1920s-style apartments with accents like built-in pantries and wooden molding, but maybe I’m a crotchety old man who needs his scotch. Who know, maybe people love having everything sleek and white—I understand the ethic but think that it is overused.

And yes, it’s expensive. But every new unit of housing on the market should, if economics tells us anything, bring down prices for everyone (or allow more people to access the market). Economics—supply and demand—tells us that; prices are high in walkable neighborhoods because there is more demand than supply. There’s an ongoing, and well-founded, worry that new development will continue to marginalize low income populations. However, I think that it is more problematic when NIMBYs strike down denser housing because it is “out of character”, constricting supply and driving prices higher. Next: we need sustainable housing for low income residents.

Bike sharing trip lengths

Posted on by
Reply

For a transportation data junkie like me, one of the great things about bike sharing is that the system lets you log in and see your trips. I’ve been riding Hubway for about a month, and I’ve taken 21 trips. Of these trips, 20 have been ten minutes or less. The one longer trip was 13 minutes. At no time have I gotten even half way to the 30 minute cutoff. Over on the right is a chart of the trips I’ve taken. The frequent four-minute trip is when I jump on a Hubway at Charles and ride it across town to my office, docking it outside the building. It’s faster than taking the T another stop, fighting the crowd at Park Street and either walking the Common or taking the Green Line one stop to Boylston.

This will probably change once Hubway launches in Cambridge, especially if they manage to put a station in the park near my house (not that likely, since it’s a mostly residential area, although it is halfway between Central Square and the grocery stores on the river, so there might be good traffic to those areas; I’ve been lobbying Whole Foods by Twitter to sponsor a rack there). I figure a trip on a Hubway from home to work would take about 16 minutes, so I’d still be well within the limit. And if I were taking a longer trip on a shared bike, I’d probably be cognizant of the time limits and swap a bike in and out at a rack (you just have to dock and undock) to reset the clock and get another half hour. Fifteen seconds of my time is certainly worthwhile to save a few bucks, and most trips are bound to pass by a Hubway rack.

Anyway, bike sharing in New York City is getting readier to launch and there’s a bit of a hoo-rah about how high its marginal hourly rates are. It is worth noting that the 97% of rides which are under 30 minutes in DC, as quoted by this article, (and 99+% are under an hour) are rides for frequent users on a monthly or annual pass. Capital Bikeshare publishes a lot of data (*) on their website (from which the chart below was taken) and the number of trips under an hour, for annual users, is pretty staggering. The number of trips under 2 hours—at which point trip costs really get out of hand, is 99.83%.

The main impact of overage costs are on casual users. For casual users, only slightly more than half of trips are completed within the free half-hour time limit, and 25% of trips are longer than an hour. So these folks pay. This is okay with me, for the most part, since they basically subsidize the riders who pay $50 to $100 and ride the bikes for several months. (If I make 20 trips per month of 8 months, my $50 Hubway fee will divide out to about 30¢ per trip.)

There seem to be two types of casual user (someone buying a single- or multi-day pass). One are people who want to try out the system (or use the system) in a similar manner to a frequent user and understand fully how it works. These folks probably fall mainly within the time limit. The second group are the people using shared bikes in place of rental bikes (which CitiBikes encourages on their website for longer-duration trips). This is basically how carsharing and traditional car rental operate. For a short trip (a few hours) a shared car is most certainly cheaper than a rented one. For a multi-day trip, it’s probably cheaper to go with a rental car. Bicycles, not surprisingly, have shorter trip times, and more disparity between low-cost (or no-cost) shorter trips and quite expensive long ones.

And rental bikes aren’t that cheap. The first hour is $14. Half a day is $39. These rates are more expensive than bike sharing for the first 90 minutes, on par from one-and-a-half to three hours, and cheaper beyond that. So if you want to rent a bicycle to roll around Manhattan all day, bike sharing probably isn’t for you. But take a look at the number of trips in DC longer than two hours. It’s only about 5% (and casual users only account for 1/6th of all trips). So the number of users dinged for particularly long trips is rather small.

There’s obviously a learning curve to the pricing scheme, and a number of Yelpers in Boston have apparently not understood it (although, frankly, it’s not that hard to understand). Apparently Hubway could do a better job of communicating this, and maybe CitiBikes should as well. What I really am surprised by is how someone would take bike with no lock and keep it out in a city for five or six hours! It’s not like they’re riding a century on it. I’d have to assume that even an oblivious tourist would get scared off by Boston traffic after a while, or run out of room on the Charles River paths and make for a cafe or museum. And in New York, where most any bicycle parked anywhere is asking to be stolen, having a rental bike is a liability. With a shared bike, all you have to do is find the nearest dock and leave the bike there. No lock required. With well-placed kiosks, this should be relatively easy.

What will be interesting is how this affects revenue from casual users (looking at the data from DC, I doubt that more than a handful of frequent users will ever pay an overage fee). While casual users do not account for much of the ridership, they do provide a good income stream. It’s possible that the higher rental costs will drive away prospective users. Even with higher prices, the drop in ridership will result in less revenue from casual ridership.

However, we’re talking about New York. There are a lot of potential casual riders (tourists), so it might be good to have higher prices as a bit of a barrier to entry to keep casual users from usurping the transportation demand aspect of bike sharing. And New York tourists don’t seem particularly price sensitive. Visitors to the City are paying $300 a night for a hotel room, $150 for tickets to a show and $40 for a pre-show meal at a mediocre Times Square restaurant. At those rates, what is another $25 to ride a bike around Central Park for a couple of hours? The higher rates—especially for casual users—strike me as a good balance between keeping bikes in the system available and maximizing revenue.

* CaBi has CSV files with every trip taken, too. I’m drooling.

How high are MBTA fares? Not.

Posted on by
1

According to the news, Occupy Boston has a new target: the MBTA. This is wrongheaded. They should protest the crawl with which the legislature is able (or unable) to make changes to the T’s funding mechanism, the debt burden shouldered by the agency from the Big Dig and myriad other poor decisions by the state and by the T in the last ten or twenty years. But protesting a modest fare increase? Not helpful.


Back in January, when the draconian proposals came out, my reaction was “well it must not be as bad as last time—then they were threatening to shut down commuter rail at 7 p.m.” Because of intransigence on the part of the legislature, the T has to threaten huge cuts, and then make smaller ones, so it’s a better pill to swallow. This time, at least, people seem to realize it’s a problem. Whether the legislature will act is another question all together.


In any case, the T will be raising fares to $2. Monthly passes will rise to $70. This is what the Occupy folks are protesting. And, well, this is really not a big deal. Look at other cities fares:

(“Lower Fares” are shown where there is are multiple monthly pass levels except those based on peak and off-peak fares. Notes: Houston has no monthly pass system. Boston has a $48 bus-only pass, San Francisco’s higher fare allows in-city travel on BART, Denver sells a year of transit passes for the price of 11 months, Miami gives a 10% discount for group purchases. Washington DC has no monthly passes, but a $15 weekly bus pass and a $32 weekly Metro pass allowing fares up to $3.25, which covers travel within the city limits.)

Only two cities have lower fares than Boston, and neither of these has a comparable level of transit. San Francisco does sell a cheaper pass for non BART-users, but those are confined to MUNI lines which are, well, not particularly speedy (the longest MUNI lines are about the distance from South Station to Alewife, but they take more than 22 minutes to complete the route). If you look at the “Big Six” cities with MSA transit use over 10% and center city transit use over 20% (Boston, SF, Philly, Chicago, DC and New York), the average monthly pass is about $85. DC has no real monthly pass option. And New York tops out over $100. Of course, their trains do run all night.


Here is another way of showing that the MBTA fares aren’t that high—looking at fares for major transit systems through the last 100 years in nominal and current dollars.

{“dataSourceUrl”:”//docs.google.com/spreadsheet/tq?key=0Aq40hr6FfrocdEk4Q21pS3V2eFVGeUw4NXVYdTBOMVE&transpose=0&headers=1&range=E1%3AO102&gid=0&pub=1″,”options”:{“vAxes”:[{“viewWindowMode”:”pretty”,”viewWindow”:{}},{“viewWindowMode”:”pretty”,”viewWindow”:{}}],”series”:{“0”:{“color”:”#1155cc”},”1″:{“color”:”#6d9eeb”},”2″:{“color”:”#cc0000″},”3″:{“color”:”#ea9999″},”4″:{“color”:”#ff9900″},”5″:{“color”:”#f9cb9c”},”6″:{“color”:”#38761d”,”lineWidth”:4},”7″:{“color”:”#00ff00″,”lineWidth”:4},”8″:{“color”:”#999999″},”9″:{“color”:”#cccccc”}},”useFormatFromData”:true,”booleanRole”:”certainty”,”curveType”:””,”height”:333,”animation”:{“duration”:500},”legend”:”in”,”theme”:”maximized”,”width”:600,”lineWidth”:2,”useFirstColumnAsDomain”:true},”state”:{},”chartType”:”LineChart”,”chartName”:”Chart 2″}

I left out DC (which has distance-based fares) and SEPTA (I couldn’t find fare history data for Philly) and threw in gas prices for fun. Note that the T has generally been about the same price as MUNI in San Francisco, and cheaper than Chicago and New York. (Except from 1920 to 1950, when Boston fares were a dime, and New York was a nickel.) The transit agencies all raise their fares to cope with increasing prices. And while the T has never hit the two dollar mark before, unless there’s deflation this year (there won’t be) it’s likely that prices will, in real terms, regress below the $2 mark in the next couple of years. It’s also significantly cheaper than New York and Chicago—especially since Chicago doesn’t have free bus transfers on single fares. And lest we complain further, Boston has had the lowest fare around since MUNI raised fares to $2 a couple years back.

Oh, and unless gas prices tumble real soon (and we’ll need another proper recession for that; in other words, we really don’t want cheap gas) any transit system is still cheaper than a gallon of petrol.


A few notes:

  1. New York has slight discounts—10% from 1993 to 2009, 7% since 2009, when purchasing at least $10 of transit fare. Chicago has charged between 10¢ and 30¢ for bus-train transfers since the 1960s. 
  2. Since most transit users (about 2/3 in Boston) use monthly passes—an advent of the last 30 years or so—their actual fare per ride, assuming 2.5 rides per day for a transit-dependent user, is significantly lower: under a dollar in Boston. In transit-heavy New York, assuming 3 rides per day yields a cost per trip of just over a dollar.
  3. DC’s higher fares and lack of monthly passes yield a higher farebox recovery rate compared with other systems of over 60%.
  4. Commuter rail fares are going up, too, but for a less sensitive population: 28% of bus riders have incomes over $75,000, while 72% of Commuter Rail riders do.
  5. Data sources for Boston (Note that this study has transit fare comparisons in it, but doesn’t use the most-frequently-purchased fares; for instance it shows a single ride in New York as $2.50 and in Boston as $2. Most users pay less.), New York, Chicago, San Francisco. Gas prices from the EIA. Inflation from the BLS.

The Portland-Boston options

Posted on by
6

If you’re going from Portland, Maine to Boston, you have several choices. You could drive … if you like to be aggravated, spend a lot, have it take no less time and lose two (or more) hours of productivity. Or, you could take the bus or the train. This page has, previously, talked about buses and trains further south along the Northeast Corridor, but the conditions are different further north.

From Boston to DC, Amtrak is a luxury product competing with air travel, boasting faster travel times and more amenities. Buses are cheap (cheaper than Boston-Portland for twice the distance) but offer cramped seats, sometimes shady equipment and the opportunity to sit in traffic for six hours if you happen to hit rush hour (likely). From Boston to Portland, travel times are faster for the bus, costs are similar, and there is a sort-of symbiotic competition between the modes; the train actually provides mostly for trips which don’t traverse the whole of the route, the bus serves air travelers, and both serve as alternatives to driving (there are no Portland-to-Boston flights).

Here’s a quick comparison between the bus* and the train in several metrics.

(* We’ll discount the couple of Greyhound buses along this route, which take longer, have no Wifi, and an overall inferior product.)

First, why is driving a poor choice? The costs, mainly (even if you have free parking at your destination).

Car Bus Train
Fare — $16-27 $20-25
Tolls 6.50 — —
Gas $14 — —
Other maintenance $11 — —
Total $31.50 $16-27 $20-25

Notes:

  • Bus fares: $22 one way. $27 to Logan Airport. $32 same-day round trip and discounts for college students. Train fares depend on time of day, either $20 or $25 (a few very-off-peak trips are $15, college students can buy six trips for $76).
  • Tolls $3 in Maine, $2 in NH, $3 one way in MA (using Tobin Bridge).
  • Gas: 110 miles at 27.5mpg and $3.50 per gallon. Other maintenance: 10¢ per mile.
  • Add another $35 to get the IRS-computed cost of driving (55¢ per mile)
  1. Travel time — The bus is scheduled at 1:55, the train at 2:25. This seems like an easy win, right? Not entirely. Outside of rush hours or weekend getaway and drive-back times, the bus will probably arrive at its terminal faster than the train. During rush hour? The bus could spend an hour getting in to our out of Boston. Also, it partially depends on where you are going. If you are going to the Financial district or somewhere along the Red Line, the bus will get you nearer to the Red Line, although it’s a bit of a walk. For the Green Line or Orange Line, it’s more of a wash, and near North Station (say, for a basketball or hockey game) you’d be better off taking the train. If there’s bad traffic, the bus will spend quite a bit of time getting from one side of downtown to the other. So, verdict: Bus, but not always.
  2. Frequency — Here, the bus winds, rather handily. It runs every hour for most of the day. The train runs five trips daily, although there are more frequent trips during rush hours, quite useful for outbound commuting during rush hour when getting from South Station to Route 1 is particularly bad. Verdict: Bus, except perhaps at the peak of outbound rush hour.
  3. Guarantee of a seat — If you go to buy a ticket for the train and it says it’s sold out, it’s sold out, no ticket. (You could board and play dumb and buy a ticket on-board by phone, but you might wind up standing. I’m not sure if Amtrak overbooks, but if you have a ticket they will let you on. When trains are sold out they sometimes check tickets on the platform.) On the bus, you buy a ticket, and it’s good, well, forever, but there are no reservations: everyone lines up for the bus, and if there are more riders than there are seats, well, you wait for the next bus. At heavy travel times, this means that you have to show up half an hour before departure, negating any real travel time savings. Amtrak suggests you show up half an hour early, but I haven’t been the only one sprinting down the platform to make a train. Concord Coach would have to amend its ticketing policy to allow for seating reservations (i.e. sell tickets for specific times) to guarantee seats. Which would be nice. Verdict: Train.
  4. Comfort — Here, the train takes the cake, as it can exploit economies of scale in a way that the bus can not. A bus is, basically, an airplane with a top speed of 75 mph, legroom-wise (the windows are bigger). The train has seating pitch equivalent to airlines’ domestic first class and wider seats. And you can get up and walk around on the train. Verdict: Train.
  5. Luggage — The train and bus both have advantages here. On the train, you can carry on however much luggage you’d like and store it above you on the (large) overhead luggage racks. On the bus you can put luggage in the under-bus bins. You can take skis, for example, on either. Verdict: Both
  6. Bicycles — Both modes allow bicycles, with caveats. For the bus, the caveat is that the bicycle is only taken if there is sufficient room, which may not be the case at busy times (especially weekends when many passengers have luggage). On the train, bicycles are taken at all times, but there is a $5 charge, although you could probably get on without a bike ticket and no one would be the wiser. The bike on the train doesn’t go underneath with the potential to get rattled around, an issue if you have an expensive ride. Verdict: Both
  7. Arrival times — While Amtrak suggests you arrive half an hour before your train, your ticket reserves a seat. On the bus, that is not the case. (see above) If the bus is full when you show, you may be waiting for the next one. (They don’t specify this on the website, but suggest arriving especially early during the holidays.) Both experience delays, although not very frequently. Verdict: Both
  8. Airport service — Concord Trailways serves the airport directly, although they charge an extra $5 for the service, it is generally direct to and from Portland. Amtrak requires two transfers to the terminal, but for a $20 ticket it’s less than the bus, even with T fare. Verdict: Bus
  9. Food — On the bus, you get pretzels and a bottle of water. On the train, you can go to the cafe and buy a beer. It’s not free, but if you have your own water bottle Poland Springs is not that exciting. Verdict: Train
  10. Wifi/power/entertainment — This depends on how much you like PG-rated movies. If you do, the bus provides them for free. If you don’t, the train provides slightly better wifi. Both bus and train have power ports. The peak wifi connection speed on the bus is 45 KB/sec. On the train the use several providers and it’s over 100 KB/sec. Neither is fast, but one will load Gmail a bit faster. (Also, you can use your iPhone for ticketing on the train.) However, the train traverses some cell-signal-free areas in New Hampshire and Maine, the signal along I-95 is better. Oh, and if you make a phone call on the bus, you get yelled at; on the train you can go to the cafe or a vestibule and talk away. Verdict: Both
  11. Restrooms — If you have the choice, use the facilities at either terminal. If you require the restroom during the trip, the one on the train is slightly better. Verdict: Train
  12. From a transportation planning perspective — This is a bit of a harder question. Ostensibly, the bus breaks even but, of course, it is subsidized, significantly, by government-built and funded roads (or roads funded by the tolls of other travelers). The train has significant government investment in infrastructure, and a direct subsidy to cover operating costs (they’d have to double costs to break even). Both are energy efficient. Both are quite advantageous over automobiles. Taking the train may take a bit longer, but it’s a more comfortable ride, and, perhaps, non-drivers shouldn’t be forced in to uncomfortable conditions. The bus is at its top speed, but with more patronage and investment, perhaps, a train could make a non-stop trip in 1:30, which would easily negate the bus’s advantages. But, for now, we’ll go with a verdict of Both
So, which wins? Well, the train wins, 4-3-4. But really, the traveling public wins, with 25 daily departures along the route. Take whichever is more convenient, especially since travel time is probably the main factor for most trips and the bus (usually) wins out there. If you’re interested in comfort more than travel time, the train is where it’s at. For speed (and a movie) the bus is hard to beat, especially outside of rush hour. If you’re in Portland and a bus leaves in 10 minutes with a train in two hours, by all means get on the bus. Plan your day around the schedules, but it’s perfectly easy to treat the corridor like a transit system (albeit one with poor headways, although they are better than most MBTA commuter rail lines). Take whichever you’d like.

I will also point out that the Concord Coach provides one of the best intercity bus experiences I’ve had. Unlike many Boston-to-New York routes (and I’m including Bolt and Megabus, which will make random, 15 minute stops at gas stations in Connecticut for “snack” where is sure seems like there’s some payola from the gas station operator for bringing in 50 captive customers) the service is very professionally run. The buses leave from terminals, not streeetcorners, the staff answers questions, and it does not seem like a two-bit operation. Considering that 20 years ago the only bus service to Portland was provided by Greyhound, Concord Coach has proven that the market can be captured and expanded (in 1997 they only ran 9 round trips daily) with service and quality.

Expanding reverse commute options in Boston

Posted on by
2

As with any city in the United States, many jobs in Boston are located away from the central business district, although those areas are not served by transit. Many jobs in Boston—in the Downtown, Back Bay, and Cambridge, are transit accessible, but many more are located in suburban office parks, far from the center of the city and with very limited transit options. There are shuttles from various transit nodes (namely Newton Highlands and Alewife) to locations along 128, mainly in Waltham. The MBTA operates limited bus service to the outer reaches of Waltham, Lexington and Needham along 128, although they are designed mainly for inbound commuting and their outbound scheduled times are likely too long for many commuters. There is limited availability and the speeds are not designed to be even close to being time-competitive with driving. However, there is ample office space which is inexpensive in comparison to downtown, and attracts all sorts of companies, even those with more urban employee bases.

There is transit service to near the Needham-Burlington employment node along 128 via the MBTA’s Riverside Line, but with a dozen suburban stops, it takes 45 minutes to reach the terminus from the core. With added shuttle times, it would create a quite-long commute. Two commuter rail lines pass through the Needham-Newton-Waltham-Lexington region, but neither has a station at 128, and their schedules are certainly not designed for reverse commuting. (It is also less desirable for park-and-ride commuters from Riverside and Woodland, as travel times to Back Bay and Downtown are not particularly speedy.) It is with these commuter lines—especially the Framingham-Worcester line—that there is potential for that to change.
There are two recent developments which make this change more feasible. One is the now-underway expansion of the Yawkey Station (named after the long-time (and racist) Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey) near Kenmore Square in Boston. Originally built to access Fenway Park, the station received limited service in the 1990s on one side platform, but is being rebuilt to accommodate stops from all trains. The station is a short walk from Boston University’s campus and the large Longwood Medical Area, both of which have significant employment and expensive parking. In addition, the parking lots surrounding the station will be redeveloped in to office space. With more frequent service, the station will better serve these communities.
The other new development is the (long-awaited) transfer of the Framingham-Worcester rail line from private ownership and dispatching (CSX) to the MBTA. The private dispatching has been blamed for delays which keep on-time performance on the line low, and the MBTA has been unable to increase service on the line west of Framingham because of limits in capacity. Still, the Framingham line sees ridership of nearly 20,000 (nearly 10,000 each way) a day (see this pdf for full statistics), second only to the Providence-South Attleboro line, which sees a significant portion of its ridership board at it’s own station at Route 128.
There are three major problems with the existing 128 station. The first is that it is not located near a major job node. There are virtually no jobs within walking distance, and no major job nodes nearby which could be reached in a short shuttle trip. In fact, east of the station, the Blue Hills take up several square miles of conservation land, which do not create many jobs. The station does serve about 2500 MBTA passengers daily and another 1000 Amtrak travelers. The second issue is that, when it was rebuilt in 2000, it was forecast to have more parking revenue that ultimately materialized, creating pitfalls for projects like it which are funded by parking revenues. Even with some MBTA parking facilites, like the Alewife, overflowing, 128 station sees hundreds of empty parking spaces every day. 
These are exacerbated by the third: the 128 Station is located in the center of the least-population-dense area along 128. With the aforementioned Blue Hills on one side and relatively sparsely-populated suburbs on the other, there are few commuters who traverse several exits on 128 for the speedy trip downtown. Those coming up I-95 from Providence would likely use some of the park-and-ride stations further south, which, thanks to the high-speed nature of the line, have shorter-than-auto times to Downtown Boston (from Mansfield to Back Bay, for instance, scheduled train times average nearly 60 mph, along a much straighter line than the often-jammed highways). Commuters to the southeast use the Red Line service, and those to the north are served by the paralleling Needham and Franklin commuter lines. 
A bus/rail transfer station with commuter parking at Route 128 in Weston, near the intersection with the Turnpike, however, may prove much more fruitful to the business and commuting communities, as it would address many of the issues which the current commuting options do not. First, it would be a boon to 128-bound commuters. (A local planning group is in early stages of discussion about this type of project.) The intersection of 128 and the Massachusetts Turnpike—which parallels the rail line—is only 11 miles from downtown Boston. Without freight traffic, rail service from Yawkey Station to this part of the line could be scheduled in 10 or 12 minutes—faster still if the grade-separated line was upgraded from a current speed limit of 60 mph. This would significantly shorten the transit time for many reverse commuters to the 128 corridor. Trains could be run at 20 minute intervals (they already are in the peak direction, so this would not require significant investment new equipment) with timed, coordinated shuttle transfers. In the future, an HOV/bus lane could speed these commuters to workplaces along the highway, and the current Riverside Line could be extended to this station. In addition to these outbound services, connecting bus service could be explored for inbound commuters with timed transfers at this station.
Such a station would not solely benefit non-traditional commuters. It would also be a boon to those Boston-bound (and, thus, not further encourage the less-than-ecologically sound movement of more jobs to the suburbs). With dedicated on- and off-ramps from 128 and the Turnpike, a garage could provide a seamless connection for park-and-ride commuters. Not only is I-90 more and more congested at rush hour (in both directions), but tolls are now $2.50 each way. Add in gas and parking costs, and $5 or $7 for parking to avoid the Turnpike would be a deal. In other words, there is already a $5 economic incentive to avoid the Turnpike, which could be a good push factor towards transit—if it were close to being time-competitive with driving. 
In addition, with more-frequent off-peak service levels, such a station would serve non-commuters as well. Visitors to Boston’s many cultural and entertainment options could be enticed with an easy, comfortable ride, and one which would incur a significant cost savings over tolls, gas and parking. The MBTA already serves many customers going to Fenway Park, this could be expanded significantly.
Now, these options neglect to mention the fate of Newton’s inner stations, which are currently served by some Framingham-Worcester trains. These stations—which once had frequent commuter service—were relegated by the Turnpike to one-platform stations with no reverse commute options. Still, these stations—Auburndale, West Newton and Newtonville, average about 400 boardings per day, more than the further-out Wellesley stations which have more service. This corridor is one of the most densely-populated in Newton (moreso than the area traversed by the Green Line), and more frequent service would certainly result in higher ridership. A local-express service could be added through “The Newtons” with local trains departing the hypothetical 128 station and stopping in Auburndale, West Newton and Newtonville (and, perhaps, additional stops in Newton Corner, Brighton and Allston) towards downtown, allowing transfers from service further west and multi-directional travel in Newton and Boston.

Here, for instance, is a potential schedule for this service and assumes some line upgrades. E = express, L = local stops, NB this is a general idea, and quite condensed, but does show that clockface scheduling (except for a peak-hour express from Worcester) would be feasible. This shows inbound scheduling; outbound would be similar (with a quick transfer at Route 128) with slightly later first and last trains:

6a – 9a, 4p-7p 9a – 4p, 7p-10p
Worcester 4:30a 5:30a :10 :20 :40 :00 11:00p
Framingham 5:10a 5:40a   6:10a :10 :30 :50 :10 :40 11:40p
L L L L E L L L L
128 5:30a 6:00a   6:30a :10 :12 :30 :32 :50 :52 :00 :30 12:00a 12:40a
L L E E L E L E L L L L L
Yawkey 5:50a 6:20a   6:40a :00 :12 :20 :32 :40 :52 :20 :40 12:20a 1:00a
Back Bay 5:52a 6:22a   6:42a :02 :14 :22 :34 :42 :55 :22 :42 12:22a 1:02a
South Sta. 5:55a 6:25a   6:45a :05 :17 :25 :37 :45 :57 :25 :45 12:25a 1:05a
Finally, there are not-insurmountable logistics towards building this type of service. The first is the ability to run two-track service between Boston and Worcester. The main current impediment to this service is through CSX’s Beacon Park Yard, which the freight railroad will mostly vacate as part of the deal with the state. This should allow the MBTA to build a second track through the area. Further west, service to the Newton stations would require platforms on both sides of the tracks, which is currently in planning stages for Auburndale (and likely relatively inexpensive for stations in West Newton and Newtonville).
The second is the ability to build a park-and-ride facility near Route 128. This, too, would present minimal issues—even for a three- or four-track station with local-express service. Why? West of Auburndale Station, the Framingham Worcester retains the four-track right-of-way which was present until the construction of the Turnpike between Back Bay and Framingham. The two tracks take up only half of the available real estate, and with shored-up embankments, there would be plenty of room for four tracks and platforms (currently, the right-of-way is 120 feet wide in this section). The office park to the north of the tracks could be connected to the station, and a parking facility could be built on the footprint of a large parking lot to the east of the offices. Furthermore, the parking facility could be connected, at rather minimal expense, to several of the ramps from 128 and the Turnpike, allowing easy access from the highways to the station. In addition, the station would allow access to the Leo J Martin Golf Course and Weston Ski Track, putting these recreational facilities within easy access of downtown Boston.


View Weston Sta. commuter rail in a larger map

Funding for this facility, and related commuter rail improvements would, of course, be a challenge. Certainly, parking revenues could help fund the parking facility, and maybe even subsidize rail operations. An additional toll surcharge could be placed on Turnpike commuters, but these drivers are already more burdened than others in Boston. Perhaps the nearby localities, which reap significant benefits from the office space in their midst, could be leaned on to help fund this type of project, which would benefit their residents and workers, and even provide some insurance to their suburban office parks against a future where higher gas prices make such car-centric facilities less economically desirable.

There is an obvious need for transit service along the Route 128 corridor. However, without smart investments in infrastructure, it will be hampered by slow service and unattractive to those who would most benefit.

(Or maybe I just want a quick train trip out to the Ski Track.)