What’s up with the taxi queue at Logan?

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Early Monday morning, on Twitter, Cambridge City Councilor Jan Devereux posted this photo of the taxicab line at Logan Airport:

Then she went to check out the Uber/Lyft line and it was no better:

By 1:30, others reported that the cab line was an hour long.

What’s going on here? Where are all the taxis? Where are all the Ubers? Why are people arriving at the airport after midnight then waiting an hour for a ride home? What can we do about this?

It’s not really a simple answer. Please, though, follow me down a rabbit hole.

Logan airport is not a hub airport (okay, not really: Delta and especially JetBlue are doing their best to create a hub, but it still is mostly an origin-destination airport). This is a matter of geography: because it is tucked away at the northeast corner of the country, the airport mostly handles passengers flying in one direction, south or west, either on direct flights, or to other domestic hubs (although international travel has increased markedly in recent years, and JetBlue even has a bank of later domestic flights to accommodate connecting passengers).

Boston’s flights can be grouped in to three main types: short haul flights to non-hub cities, short-haul flights to hub cities, and long hauls, both domestic and international. Only the first group operates without geographic constraints which dictate that flights can only arrive and depart at certain times of day. Non-hub short-haul flights, mostly on JetBlue and Delta (to places like AUS, BUF, RDU, MKE) are spread more evenly throughout the day, because they don’t have to make connections at hubs. Hub-based flights within the eastern half of the United States (say, as far as MIA, DFW and MSP). These flights account for many of the early departures, but few leave Boston after early evening. They don’t arrive in Boston until mid-morning, but are the bulk of the last flights arriving later in the evening. Because of these travel patterns, Logan has a lot of early and late flights: in the morning, people want to get to a connecting hub for the first “bank” of connecting flights, and in the evening, flights have to leave the connecting hub after the last bank has occurred.

(Not all airlines utilize banking at hubs—Southwest most notably runs continuous hubs—and there are pluses and minuses to each method, about which I won’t go into too much depth here. But basically, banking decreases fleet utilization and increases congestion at hub airports since flights arrive and depart all at the same time, followed, in some cases, by periods of relatively low flight activity, but passengers have much shorter connection times at hubs since connections are coordinated. It’s actually something like a pulse system for buses, except that airports have finite numbers of vehicles which can arrive and depart at any given time, and longer dwell times. As airlines have consolidated, hubs have grown and seen more frequent banks such that they are now closer to continuous operation, especially at large airports like Atlanta and Chicago. See how this is a rabbit hole? Also, when I say people want to connect to the first bank, I mostly mean airlines, no rational human being wants to be on a flight departing at 5:15 a.m.)

Then there are longer-haul flights. Transcons have to deal with time changes, cycle times, and the fact that flights generally don’t depart or arrive between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. local time. So they arrive from the West Coast either as redeyes between 5 and 10 a.m., and then turn to depart between 6 and noon, or as day flights, arriving in the afternoon or evening. Thus, in addition to the overnight lull, there are basically no transcons which arrive in or depart Boston during the midday. International flights (mostly TATLs) generally are redeye flights going out, leaving Boston in the evening, and return during the middle of the day, arriving in the afternoon. All told, Boston has demand throughout the day, but particularly high demand for flights arriving later in the evening.

For instance, O’Hare and Atlanta, the two busiest airports in the country (by number of aircraft movements), have 29 and 24 flights scheduled to arrive after 11 p.m., respectively. Boston has 39. After 11 p.m., Boston is basically the busiest passenger airport in the country (about tied with LAX), and possibly the world (since in many countries, airports have noise regulations which limit late night flights). Yet at the same time, there are few flights departing Boston. The airport has only 14 scheduled departures after 11 p.m., and only six of these are domestic flights (all are JetBlue E190s, so they’re small planes). There is basically zero demand for passengers to get to the airport late at night. This creates a demand imbalance for ground transportation: there’s a lot of demand to leave the airport at midnight, but almost no one who wants to go there.

Here are some charts of the approximate number of airline seats arriving and leaving Boston. I adjusted for the typical arrival time at the airport (60 minutes for domestic, 120 for international) and assumed it would take 30 minutes for the average international passenger to clear customs.

(Note, the seat numbers for arrivals and departures don’t exactly match because each day at Logan is not identical and this was a snapshot of a day. This is total seats available, not total passengers, and is also a rough estimate based on plane sizes at different times of day, but should show general trends well.)

So, it’s clear that there is a good deal more demand to get to the airport in the morning, which doesn’t even out until around 9 a.m., various points of imbalance during the day, and then, starting around 7 p.m., significantly more demand to leave the airport.

A couple of personal anecdotes can illustrate this. The first illustrates the imabalce in the morning. Back before the Big Dig was completed (and, in fact, pre-Silver Line, and back when the airport had half the traffic it has today), when I was going to college, getting to the airport was, perhaps, worse than today. It involved both the elevated Central Artery and then the Sumner/Callahan tunnel complex: a trip to or from the airport to downtown could take an hour (which is, of course, not much different than it is now). For several years, however, the Ted Williams Tunnel had been open to commercial vehicles only. The connecting highways were not yet complete, so this was a way to keep the local streets from getting overrun by people trying avoid the congestion.

From Newton, where I grew up, my father came up with a solution, especially for early morning departures. He would drive me to South Station. Rather than risk the airport traffic, I’d get in a cab for the usually $10 or $12 trip under the harbor in the tunnel only cabs could use. Early one morning, I got in a cab at South Station and told the driver I was going to the airport. He quoted the fare: “$20” and didn’t turn on the meter. What I should have done is say “I’ll pay you whatever the meter quotes at the end of the ride, so it’s in your best interest to turn it on now,” but I was 18 and hadn’t quite figured that out, so at the airport, I paid him $20, noted his medallion number, and immediately reported it.

A month later my dad got a check for $20 from the Boston Police (which oversee taxi medallions), along with a note that the taxi driver had been given a stern talking to that he was never to refuse to turn on the meter for a trip within the city.

But I understand why the driver was reticent to take the fare. He would get to the airport and have two (bad) decisions. One would be to go to the taxi pool and wait in line for an fare back to the city: a long line, because there is much less demand going in to the city at 7 a.m. than there are taxis arriving at the airport. The other would be go cross back downtown without a passenger, but still incur the cost of driving, as well as the tunnel toll (which was one-way inbound at that point), with no passenger to pay it. Still, because of redeye arrivals from the West Coast in the morning, there is some traffic for cabs that do make it to the airport going back, although they have to cycle through the cab pool (or the Uber/Lyft pool) before their next fare. Even now, if you take a cab or a ride-hail vehicle to the airport in the morning, the driver is probably not particularly happy taking the fare.

The second example was an extreme example of the late-night issue. I was flying back from SLC and the flight was delayed several hours. Originally scheduled in at 11:30 (plenty of time to catch the Silver Line downtown and take the T home), the plane was more than three hours late, and didn’t arrive in Boston until about 2:30. The airport was empty. Yet a 757 had arrived with 200 passengers, and no one was making the trip at that point to pick us up. So we all converged on the cab stand, but there wasn’t a cab in sight. Immediately, people started self-pooling: it was clear that if we all took our own cabs, the line wouldn’t clear for hours. “Who’s going to Brookline?” “I’m going to JP, that’s close!” “I’m going to Concord.” “I’m going to Lexington, let’s share.” Every few minutes, a stray cab would roll up, three overtired strangers would pile in, and the line would get slightly shorter. I found a cab pretty quickly, but imagine those at the back of the line may have seen the sun rise.

Finally, here’s a picture of the departures level at Terminal A at 8 p.m. this past week.

Delta’s last domestic flight leaves at 7:45 (to MCO) and the last hub-based flight leaves at 6:56 (for ATL). Two international flights leave around 8:30. At this time, it’s a ghost town. Note: if you’re picking someone up at the airport in the evening, plan to meet them on the upper level, and note that Terminal A is a great place to wait without having State Police harass you. (Terminal B was pretty quiet, too.)

Here are scheduled arrivals and departures, by carrier, at different times of day:

Note: not all regional flights appear to be in this sample, for instance, there are no Cape Air flights shown after mid-evening, when Cape Air flies several late flights out of Boston, but these flights are minimal as far as number of arriving passengers is concerned.

Notice how departures peak in the morning, then lull in the midday, and then have a secondary peak in the evening, before domestic departures (except for JetBlue) tail off quickly after 7 p.m. International carrier flights are clustered arriving in the afternoon and leaving in the evening. But there is a clear imbalance for flights arriving and departing the airport.

In any case, this has been a problem for years, and it’s a structural issue pertinent to Logan Airport based on the airport’s geography on both a macro and micro scale. On a macro scale, the geography of the airport at the corner of the country means that, late in the evening, flights feed into it but don’t feed out. On a micro scale, the airport’s geography encourages taxi/app-ride/ride-hail use (I’ll call these taxis, for simplicity). The constrained location means that parking costs are high, because demand for parking outstrips supply. The proximity to areas with high trip generation (downtown, and high density areas nearby) means that taxi costs are often significantly lower than a day’s parking cost ($38) in the garage. The combination of these factors push many people to use taxis.

Much of the day, taxi supply roughly matches demand, and there is a minimal delay for these services. But this breaks down at the beginning and end of the day, especially in the evening. Once again, Logan’s geography comes into play. While the airport is close to the city geographically, it is expensive to get to for a taxi driver. When there is high demand for fares back to the city at 1 a.m.—especially once buses have, for the most part, stopped running—there is negligible demand to get to the airport, or even East Boston in general, so to pick up any fare would require the driver to deadhead to the airport.

Unless a driver happens to pick up a stray fare to East Boston, this requires a driver to travel several miles, and to pay the cost of the tunnel toll. Once at the airport, there is no promise that the trip home will be lucrative enough to cover these costs. They might get a $50 fare to a far-flung suburb. But it might only be a $15 fare to a downtown hotel or, worse, to Revere or Winthrop, meaning a driver would then have to drive back home—likely through the tunnel—and foot the bill for the toll both ways. Moreover, this is the end of the day for most drivers: except on a Friday or Saturday night, there is only so much demand for rides after 1 a.m. For many drivers, the potential upside of getting a decent fare from the airport doesn’t make up for the potential downsides, especially when the alternative is shutting off the app (or taximeter), driving home, and going to bed an hour earlier. There is a high disincentive to be in the last group of taxis at the airport: a driver might get one of the last passengers, but if not, there is not likely a job for several hours when the first redeye flights start to trickle in around 4 a.m. There is little incentive for taxicab drivers to go to the airport during this dwindling time, so demand is only met by drivers already in East Boston who need a fare back to the city.

This is not an easy issue to solve. It also shows why Uber and Lyft are basically just taxis: they are subject to the same supply and demand issues that affect the rest of the market. Alas, they’re providing the same service: a chauffeured ride from Point A to Point B. And the airport is pretty much the only place that cabs still have a foothold, partially because matching passengers to specific vehicles is quite inefficient with large groups, like you might find at an airport. This has been a recent point of contention at LAX, which consolidated its taxi and ride-hail facilities away from the terminals (as Logan is planning). It hasn’t gone particularly well to start, but I would venture to guess that there are similar supply and demand issues at LAX. (As several people have pointed out, the buses there are running much more smoothly, too.)

Of course, at LA, there is a temporal aspect to the complaints about #LAXit. Most of the issues are in the evening. Los Angeles has more balanced operations, with plenty of departures in the evening, both redeyes to the East Coast and transcontinentals, mostly TPACs but some TATLs as well. There is probably both more demand for cabs in the evening because LA is on the opposite side of the country as Boston, and also because most of the transcon redeyes leave before 11 p.m., and most of the later flights are international, which are fed more by connecting travelers and by passengers arriving at the airport much earlier. Thus, for the actual demand for taxis, there is a similar, if less pronounced, demand compared with Boston.

I scraped Twitter for #LAXit from the first few days and it seems clear that the issue is mostly in the evening.

But back to Boston. Here’s what the Logan cab pool Twitter feed (because of course Logan’s taxis have a Twitter feed) looked like last Sunday. There was a cab shortage by 8 p.m., and the late night arrival issue was foreseen by 10 p.m. It wasn’t a surprise. It is a market issue.

Is this feed a bot? Certainly not! Note the wrong months, typos, misspellings, random numbers of hyphens and use of quotations. The one thing that seems constant is the use of the word “need” when the airport has a cab shortage (with various qualifiers like all-caps or exclamation marks). I’m pretty sure it’s a guy standing by the taxi pool furiously typing tweets into the Twitter machine. So, I decided to scrape the feed (about 60,000 tweets), and code each tweet by whether it included the word “need” or not, to get a very rough estimate of the frequency of taxi delays at Logan.

From the charts of arrivals and departures above, we would assume that the airport would generally need cabs mid-afternoon, as well as in the evening. If we chart the arrival and departure relationship and the Twitter feed’s need for cabs together, and we shift the need for cabs back 1:15 (probably due to actual behavior of arriving passengers), voila, they match pretty darned well.

A few other notes on the need for cabs:

  • There is more demand on Sundays (36% of Tweets include the word “need”), followed by Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays (28%), with the least demand on Saturdays (20%)
  • The cab shortage is generally higher in the summer than the winter (and highest in May, June, September and October, while lowest in December, January and February), and it has been particularly high this year. In fact, the only higher demand for cabs at the airport was in February of 2015. I wonder why.

TL;DR: it is definitely getting harder to get a cab at the airport, especially during certain times of the year and at certain times of day. And when flights are delayed, this is exacerbated. Departing passengers generally still get to the airport on time, but arriving passengers get in later, meaning the cab shortage is even more acute. Which leads to situations like the one which occurred earlier this week at the start of this post, which may have taken you nearly that long to read

So what can be done about it? Well, Uber/Lyft could use their surge features to increase the cost of a trip to the point where it would make economic sense for drivers to come to the airport at this time of day. But that might double or triple the cost of a ride, so while it is a very market-based solution to the problem, it is not consumer-friendly. It (and taxi starters) could do a better job of pooling rides, and moving the Ubers and Lyfts to the same site might make pooling easier there. A very low-tech idea might be to figure out where vehicles are going and, at high-demand times, put people into lines based on regions to help them self-pool. This might nibble around the edges on the demand side, but it doesn’t help supply. It turns out that Lyft and Uber are not a magic panacea to mobility: they are subject to the same supply and demand issues as the rest of the world. And if the answer is pricing, it’s not a great answer, especially since prices might have to go up significantly to provide enough supply or suppress demand enough to satisfy market equilibrium, especially after midnight when there are really no other options available.

One solution, I think, is that rather than trying to bring supply to the demand, we should move the demand to where there is more supply: get people, en masse, downtown. This requires a magical invention: the bus. While the supply of hire cars is not limitless (there are only about 1800 taxicabs in Boston, and probably far fewer are active today, and many more Ubers and Lyfts, but a finite number), it is significantly less constrained on the other side of the Harbor. Instead of trying to entice drivers to come to the airport, we could instead move riders to where are there are more cars. Most riders are going north, west or south of the airport, and need a ride through Downtown Boston anyway. The bus might not be that appealing to a traveler at 1 a.m., but neither is a 45 minute wait for a cab. This basically takes what LA is doing, and extends it a couple of miles.

The MBTA runs the Silver Line until 1:15 a.m., which could easily bring passengers to South Station, where catching a taxi or ride hail vehicle is easier than at the airport. Massport and the T, however, do a poor job of advertising these late buses, both with signage telling passengers the hours as well as real-time information about the buses’ whereabouts (important especially if you are unsure if the last bus has left). But these are easy issues to solve. The bus real-time data is available: I have no issue pulling it up on mbtainfo.com, for instance.

Not helpful, especially if you’re trying to figure out if the last bus has left, or even deciding if it’s worth waiting in a cab line versus waiting for the bus.

And Massport could put up static signage:

NO CABS? NO PROBLEM!
GET A CAB ACROSS THE HARBOR
MBTA BUS TO SOUTH STATION
SKIP THE LINE — SAVE MONEY
BUSES EVERY 8-15 MIN UNTIL 1:15 AM
ADDITIONAL BUS AT 2:30 AM

And as I’ve written before, with some minor schedule tweaks, the T could use the Silver Line 3 returns from Chelsea to supplement this service even later, and keep one bus in service to make an extra round trip to provide service until 2:30 when, on most nights, the planes have all landed. Alternatively, or in addition, Massport could continue its Back Bay Logan Express bus later in the evening and into the early morning (or even 24/7), providing late night trips to the taxicab-rich parts of Boston when there are cab shortages at the airport (and perhaps even direct service to large hotels in the Back Bay).

Even more, the Logan Taxi Twitter feed often includes this kind of Tweet:

By 10:00 most evenings, someone at Logan knows how many late flights are coming in. So, conceivably, the bus driver could be held on duty to make extra trips in the cases of delays. Massport, which already helps to subsidize the fares for the Silver Line, could shoulder the rather minimal cost of the extra trips. And passengers arriving at midnight would no longer have to face an hour-long wait for a cab, when there are many more options across the harbor.

The market has never provided enough cabs at Logan when they are needed, and at certain times of day, lines of cabs are the rule, not the exception. Assuming the market will take care of this has never worked, and it is unlikely that it ever will. If Massport worked with the MBTA, however, it could pilot a project to move people downtown and create a secondary taxi queue there, where drivers would be much more willing to go for a fare, because even if the demand had dried up, they wouldn’t be out the tunnel tolls, mileage and time to show up at the airport.

The next 10 miles of tunnel in Boston

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In the past 30 years, Boston has been a leader (at least in the US) in building tunnels. The Big Dig, which removed the eyesore Central Artery from the center of the city and doubled highway capacity to the East Boston and the airport (which likely has something to do with the making Logan Airport one of the fastest-growing in the country), was one of the largest subterranean endeavors in the country’s history. (If you really want to see tunnels, though, head to Europe or Japan. But I digress.)

In that time, however, the region has not built any new high-capacity, subterranean transit infrastructure aside from relocating the Green Line at North Station, which didn’t add any connectivity or capacity (and it was part of the Big Dig, anyway). The Silver Line is not high capacity by any stretch of the imagination (although if it were converted to light rail, it could be much higher). Even the Green Line Extension, the first new line in decades, is being built entirely at- or above-grade.

Our competitor cities, even those in the US, are not standing still. While American cities are notoriously poor at building subways with any sort of cost controls, most every other city in the country with any sort of transit system has built some amount of underground rail infrastructure. Why do I focus on going underground? Because it’s the only way to run high-capacity transportation through a dense portion of a city. Without it, we are stuck trying to push more and more people through the infrastructure we already have: our overcrowded subways and narrow streets. We can do this, to a point. But at some juncture, we need to think bigger.

Here are what other cities have been doing since the last new subway station opened in Boston (either in 1985, when Alewife opened, or 1987, when the Southwest Corridor replaced the elevated Orange Line), from west to east (approximately, and if I missed anyone, let me know):

  • Los Angeles: The entire Metro Rail system has opened, with 18.5 miles of tunnels. With in the next decade, the amount of tunnel will nearly double as the system expands dramatically.
  • San Francisco: The BART system was mostly complete by the 1980s, including the tunnels. Since then several miles of tunnel opened in South City and San Bruno with the Millbrae/SFO extension, and several more are planned as the line is built (expensively) through San Jose. Muni is building a new tunnel diagonally across San Francisco for light rail service. At some point, Caltrain, which is currently being electrified, may be extended to the Transbay Terminal.
  • Portland: While the MAX light rail system is mostly at- or above-grade, the three-mile Robertson Tunnel runs through a major ridge west of downtown.
  • Seattle originally opened its mile-long bus tunnel in 1989. It has since converted it for light rail traffic, extended the light rail south (with a mile of tunnel through Beacon Hill), north (in a deep bore tunnel) and will continue with northward expansion as part of a major infrastructure plan which involves building more than 100 miles of high-capacity light rail by 2041.
  • The middle of the country has not seen much in the way of tunneling. Denver‘s system is entirely at-grade, while Dallas has one subway station. Saint Louis has about a mile of tunnel under downtown and shorter tunnels elsewhere. Minneapolis built a mile-long tunnel under its airport. Pittsburgh built a mile-long tunnel under the Allegheny River, and Chicago built about a mile of tunnel connecting the State Subway to the Dan Ryan Branch, allowing routes to be better optimized. Buffalo‘s light rail, which runs below grade outside the city, was completed in 1986 but hasn’t been extended since.
  • While much of the DC Metro system was completed by the mid-1980s, the last bits of tunneling weren’t completed until 1999. Baltimore‘s subway was extended by a mile and a half in 1995.
  • New York hasn’t built much since 1940, but has still managed the Second Avenue Subway, the F Train under Roosevelt Island and East Side Access (the same tunnel for part of the route), the 7 Train extension and the E train to Jamaica.
  • Which leaves Atlanta and Philadelphia. In Atlanta, MARTA‘s tunnels were completed in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Philly finished connecting its regional rail system in 1982. Much like Boston, these cities haven’t made large investments in transit since (although MARTA has been extended as planned, mostly above-grade).

So, why Boston? Why now? Because there are several short stretches which could dramatically enhance the network, and the overall capacity of the network needs to be expanded. The last increase to the system’s capacity was made in the early 1900s: since then, lines have been relocated, but not expanded. This doesn’t go into the need for wider-scale regional connectivity or faster, more efficient surface transit (both are important, but cover a much broader scale). It instead focuses on how a few miles of tunnels could transform transit capacity in the city. Much like, for better or for worse, the Big Dig did. It’s a very blue-sky approach and assumes a reasonably large investment (the state does have a billion dollar surplus), but each project is technically feasible and in most cases encompass projects which have been proposed at some point in the city’s history (albeit in some cases, a long time ago).

They are presented in approximate order of length (shortest to longest) and feasibility.

1. The Red-Blue connector (0.25 miles)


The Red-Blue connector would require about 1300 feet of new tunnel. It’s a good time for it: Cambridge Street above it is badly in need of a redesign, and MGH, next door, is planning adjacent construction. The MBTA is finally going to give it a fair shake, and it will hopefully see the light of day in the next few years.

But why is it important? Because it improves connectivity while at the same time reducing demand on the busiest part of the core of the system. It’s a win-win, for a very small investment, and should be feasible to build with minimal disruption to the rest of the system.

2. The Silver Line Phase III, but with rails (0.5 miles)


This connection has flown more under the radar screen. With the growth of the Seaport, the Silver Line buses are overburdened, and there is no good way to get to it from the Orange or Green lines without multiple transfers. The Silver Line and Central Artery were designed to include the Silver Line Phase III portion of the project, which would have run east from South Station to Boylston, and then made an asinine loop to run south to a portal somewhere near Tufts Medical Center station (they couldn’t use the old Green Line tunnel because, paradoxically, smaller buses require larger tunnels: louder now for those in the back or at Park Plaza, because buses don’t belong in tunnels). And it would have run buses, which, as we see today, have no place in tunnels with stops and have low speed and low capacity.

This idea leverages a third piece of infrastructure, and one much older: the never-used provisions for a branch of what is now the Green Line from east of Arlington to a terminal at Post Office Square. Instead of going to Post Office Square, this would extend east along the SL III plans to South Station, then through the Piers Transitway (a.k.a, the current Silver Line, which was designed to be converted to light rail, providing faster and higher-capacity service) and on to Silver Line Way, where it could be extended at-grade to the Convention Center, Seaport or elsewhere, maybe even down Track 61. No, Track 61 as a DMU shuttle just doesn’t work. This would mean a one-seat ride from Copley to the Seaport in 8 minutes, as opposed to two transfers and 20 minutes today.

I’ll defer to Vanshnookenragen for some detailed graphics about how this would work, and some other good thoughts on the Green Line.

Two tunnels down and we haven’t even dug a full mile.

3. Grand Junction (1.25 miles)


Now we get a bit bigger.

The Grand Junction Railroad has never carried a revenue passenger in its existence, which goes back to 1846. Until recently, the right-of-way once ran through a series of industrial lots and rail yards with little potential to carry paying customers. Now? It runs from North Station and passes Cambridge Crossing, runs through the heart of Kendall Square, and then on to Allston. Kendall has some of the highest-priced real estate on the face of the earth, and is growing by leaps and bounds, despite no direct highway access, which forces car traffic onto narrow, congested streets. It’s accessible from the Red Line, and has reasonable connections to some of the rest of the transportation system, but from the north and west, transit is not time-competitive with driving, so, people drive.

Cambridge Crossing promises more demand, as does the eventual replacement of the interchange and rail yard in Allston. This provides opportunity as well: for the construction in Allston to take place, the Grand Junction will be shut down for a period of several years. In 10 years, the Grand Junction could connect Allston (millions of square feet of new development adjacent to Harvard and BU’s campuses, as well as a transfer from the main east-west rail corridor in the state) to Kendall Square to North Station, with additional stops in Cambridgeport, East Cambridge and Cambridge Crossing (where the line passes only about 600 feet from the future Lechmere Station, which would provide a transit connection from the Green Line extension to Kendall Square).

This looks a lot like where you would want a frequent, high-capacity transit line, which would increase regional transit ridership (satisfying latent demand by providing connections which do not exist today) and take existing transfers out of the core of the system. What do I mean by this? Take the example of Boston Landing station. Before that station opened, there were no good options to use transit from Allston to Downtown Boston: The 86 or 66 bus to Harvard and the Red Line, the 64 bus to Central and then the Red Line, or the 57 bus to Kenmore and then the Green Line. Since it’s opened, ridership has far exceeded expectations. Why? Because there’s now an option to go from Allston to South Station in 14 minutes instead of 40. Some of this traffic comes from people who used to cram onto the 57 or 64 buses, and others take transit instead of driving.

The Grand Junction allows a similar time savings for travel to Kendall Square, except expands the benefit to everyone coming west of Boston. A trip from Boston Landing to Kendall today involves a 35 minute ride on the 64 bus, or taking a train to South Station and then the Red Line out; without the Grand Junction, traveling between West Station and Kendall will have a similar travel time, all for a trip which will cover, as the crow flies, little more than a mile. The Grand Junction is a straight line between the Worcester Line and Kendall Square, and cuts 20 minutes from the transit commute for every current or prospective passenger going to Kendall from west of Boston. The issue is that the Grand Junction runs across four heavily-trafficked city streets in Cambridge, and providing safe passage for even moderate operating speeds or frequency would be exceedingly difficult. Unless, of course, the line were put underground.

There are two main obstacles to tunneling the Grand Junction, but one major opportunity. The first obstacle is that it can’t be a simple, shallow cut-and-cover trench, because in addition to utilities (which are present in most subway projects) the line would have to cross under the Red Line at Main Street. This would mean tunneling down below the grade of the Red Line, with the bottom of the tunnel likely reaching down 40 or 50 feet. Insurmountable? Given how many buildings in Kendall Square have recently been built with footings and basements at least that deep, no. Difficult? Yes.

The second obstacle is the land ownership. While the state has an easement across the corridor in perpetuity, it does not actually own much of it. When the Penn Central was looking to raise cash in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it sold off portions of its railroad to whoever would buy. In the case of much of the Grand Junction, the buyer was MIT. The wide corridor allows MIT to manage deliveries to its buildings and utilities under the surface, with a transportation easement on the surface for the rail line. While MIT has acquiesced to move the Grand Junction Path forward, digging a deep tunnel would be more difficult.

The opportunity, however, is that because of the Allston project, the corridor will see no rail service for a period of several years. Unlike something like the Green Line extension, where much of the cost of the project stems from rebuilding the corridor while maintaining active Commuter Rail service, the Grand Junction corridor would be a blank slate. It’s much easier to dig a hole when you don’t have to worry about what is going on above it. Roads could be shifted (shoo-flied) to allow for construction to take place (like how Harvard shifted Western Avenue in Allston for construction of an adjacent building). Work wouldn’t have to be relegated to evenings and weekends to maintain weekday train service. Given the depth of the Red Line, MIT’s utilities between Main Street and Mass Ave could be put into a newly-built conduit above the Grand Junction, allowing far easier access than the current procedure of digging around an active rail line and holes in the middle of Mass Ave. Cut-and-cover projects can be very expensive under city streets or other active alignments. But digging what amounts to little more than a mile-long basement shouldn’t be impossible.

The Main Street is more difficult, but a concept would require closing Main Street (or shifting it), uncapping the Red Line, and digging down on both sides of the tracks while maintaining service. Once the pits on both sides were at the eventual depth of the Grand Junction passing underneath, the Red Line could be shut down for a week (perhaps the very low-ridership Christmas-to-New Years week) and a prefabricated concrete box could be assembled off-site and lowered into place, with service restored on the upper portion for the Red Line and, eventually, for the Grand Junction below. MassDOT is good at installing bridges in a weekend. This is essentially the same thing: the bridge takes the Red Line over the Grand Junction.

A few more concepts:

  • A Grand Junction station could be built between Main Street and Mass Ave, likely where MIT currently has a small, outdated building (Building 44) and an outdated parking garage (N4). North of this is a long-disused MIT property. Combined, these properties create an almost-perfect arrow shape, and comprise nearly 5 acres of developable land. A location atop a transit station could help the City leverage financial support for transit infrastructure in exchange for additional development rights.
  • On the north edge of the arrow property, an infill Red Line station could be built at Technology Square, filling a mile-long gap between the Red Line stations at Kendall and Central. This would provide better walking access not only to Tech Square, but also to other nearby developments, including NIBR, University Park and nearby residential districts, as well as a good transfer through the arrow property between the Grand Junction and Red Line. Given the rate of development in the corridor, a new transit station would help to relieve some of the crowding at the two existing stations.
  • Construction of a tunnel would allow a widening of the curve radius the Grand Junction currently uses between Main Street and Broadway. This would involve digging up much of the corridor there, but with the railroad already below the Red Line, it would provide the potential to add several hundred below-grade parking spaces below the street and above the rail line, which could be leveraged to allow nearby developers to build new buildings with less parking, or, perhaps, none at all. (In Delft, Netherlands, below-grade parking was integrated into a project burying a rail line.)
  • The tunnel would ascend to just below grade at Cambridge Street, and then rise east of there, tying in to the Fitchburg Line near McGrath Highway. This would probably require that Gore/Medford Street was raised several feet to accommodate the railroad grade.
  • This obviously would require electrification of at least this portion of the Grand Junction railroad, as well as the completion of additional track accessing North Station, which is planned. 
Here is a conceptual section (not to scale!) of a Grand Junction tunnel (looking from Kendall/MIT towards Central/Harvard):

Once the Grand Junction is rebuilt as part of the Allston project, demand for service will likely render this opportunity to shut the line down moot, so it would have to happen within the next decade. Given the opportunity to build a new transit line in an unused corridor, it should.

That’s two miles. Total.
4. Grove Hall-to-Dudley Subway (2 miles)

The first three projects look at core capacity, delivering workers to jobs, and moving people out of transfers in the center of the system. This next one doesn’t. If some cars which currently run to Park Street were instead split off to the Seaport, there would be more capacity at Park Street itself. Since the section of subway from Park Street to Boylston is four tracks, and the two extending south through the disused Pleasant Street Incline are grade separated, trains could be run in to the subway from the south, allowing service from Dudley Square to bypass the traffic and narrow streets downtown (because this is what the subway was designed for when it was built in … 1897). In other words, there’s plenty of capacity at Park Street, as long as it doesn’t all turn west at Boylston.

Why wasn’t the subway ever extended south from the Pleasant Portal? Probably because the railroad was in the way and already below grade. To extend the subway would require not just digging a tunnel, but digging it deeper: something that didn’t happen for decades anywhere in the system. By and large, other than crossing under each other, Boston’s original subways hewed close to the surface.

By 1914, what is now the Green Line subway was extended to just east of Kenmore Square, and only in 1932 did the subway cross under the railroad, first at Beacon Street and then at Huntington Avenue in 1941. (The Turnpike doesn’t make this crossing any easier.) The southern branch from Boylston was never extended under the wider New Haven and Boston and Albany right-of-way. But even the few existing, unused blocks of subway between Boylston and the portal would provide a major advantage: allowing service from the Washington Street corridor to bypass downtown traffic and extend north through the city. There is relatively little congestion south of there, and ample opportunity to run transit in a right-of-way on Washington Street: that’s where the Silver Line has lanes, even if it doesn’t need them. The Pleasant Portal could be reopened, and the line extended diagonally on the original route of the now-obliterated Pleasant Street across the land occupied by the 1970s-era Josiah Quincy School (which will likely need refurbishment or replacement at some point), and then down Washington Street.

Most of the rest of the corridor south through Roxbury to Mattapan on Washington Street and Blue Hill Avenue is wide enough that a modern light rail system could be put into place (think the Green Line, except completely different). Level boarding, prepaid fares, signal priority. The exceptions are two stretches, one through Dudley Square, and a second under Warren Street north of Grove Hall. Could surface transit run through these sections? Certainly, but it would be relatively slow, owing to narrow street widths on Warren Street and Washington Street and congestion at Dudley. North of Dudley, it would make sense to extend a tunnel past Melnea Cass, to avoid traffic-related impacts to transit. This tunnel would be more difficult to build than the Grand Junction and longer as well, and would probably require a tunnel boring machine and two stations (at Dudley and Malcolm X, which would probably be the first transit station named after Malcolm X). 
Still, this tunnel would leverage several physical assets already in place. It would allow transit from the center spine of Boston to get downtown without sitting in downtown traffic, like the Silver Line does today, and to potentially extend north along the route of the Green Line extension. It would provide the promised replacement for the Orange Line that was moved a generation ago. And it would use Blue Hill Avenue, perhaps the widest roadway of any length in the region, to transport far more people than the 28 bus can.
Four miles down. The next two are bigger bores, bigger miles, and bigger impact.
5. Seaport-Logan Regional Rail (North-South Rail Link, Part 1, 3.5 miles from South Station to Wood Island)
6. North-South Rail Link, Part 2 (2.5 miles from south of South Station to north of North Station)
The last two tunnels are the North-South Rail Link, about which my thinking about has evolved over time (for instance, with the redevelopment of North Station, I’m not so sure you’d want to skip it). Why split it in two? Because I think that the NSRL actually makes sense as two mostly-separate tunnels converging at South Station.
The first of these would of these would be a tunnel from South Station to East Boston, which was proposed as early as 1911 (!). Today, trains from Newburyport and Rockport (the Eastern Route) follow a straight line down the coast towards Boston until they get to Bell Circle, but then bend away to the north through Chelsea to loop around to North Station. The railroad originally operated towards a ferry in East Boston, but was rerouted to serve the city proper. Most iterations of the NSRL maintain this routing. 
There are two missed opportunities doing so. The first is the ability to halve the number of tracks in the main NSRL tunnel. With trains headed out on all four lines north of the city, a two-track tunnel would be unlikely to accommodate all of the service from the north (and certainly not all from the south), requiring the maintenance of surface stations and additional track on both ends of the system. Splitting off the Eastern Route would reduce demand on the main trunk enough that it could probably get by with two tracks in perpetuity. In other words, the NSRL would still have four tracks, they just wouldn’t be all together.
The second missed opportunity would be better service to Logan Airport. Transit service to Logan Airport today is pitiful and traffic at a breaking point, so despite sitting just three miles from Downtown Boston, it can take the better part of an hour to get from Logan to the city. Getting anywhere besides areas served by the Red or Blue lines requires multiple transfers, which are unattractive for all but the most budget-minded travelers, and adding time to airport staff. 
Yet imagine the following: half of the trains from the lines south of the city, including express trains from Providence and Worcester, would stop at Back Bay, South Station, a stop in the Seaport and then a central station at the airport. South Station to Logan would take 6 minutes, Back Bay to Logan 10, and Providence and Worcester would, assuming the necessary improvements to the rail network, have less-than-one-hour, door-to-door service. Some trains would terminate at an airport station (which could be built with enough tracks to allow trains to terminate and layover), and others would continue through a short tunnel under airport property and East Boston to the original route of the Eastern Railroad along Route 1A and north to Lynn, Salem and beyond, which would see faster trips both to the airport and Downtown Boston. The currently-used cutoff could provide continued service from the North Shore, or be used as a shuttle service from Revere through Everett to Sullivan Square, or even connecting to the Grand Junction. This would mimic the transit access to many large airports in Europe, like Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Zurich, Geneva, Oslo and London, where the airports are connected not only to the subway, but to larger, regional rail systems. 
Constructing such a tunnel would be difficult, but we built the Big Dig in roughly the same alignment, and constructing a parallel tunnel on the floor of the Harbor would certainly be feasible (in fact, some of the base geologic work may already be done). An airport station would be required, and expensive, but could be integrated to a major rehabilitation of the airport’s ground transportation network, which can barely cope with current traffic. This tunnel would stretch 3.5 miles—making it the longest of the tunnels proposed—yet most would be constructed under the Harbor, under open areas at the airport, or transportation corridors in East Boston. That should be easier than going straight through Downtown Boston. Although that’s a pretty low bar.
The final tunnel, about which I won’t go into further detail here, would be the classic South Station-to-North Station NSRL, only with the demand from the Eastern Route removed, and two tracks through the center of the city. All trains would connect at South Station, allowing transfers, and allowing the entire regional rail network to get to the airport with at most a single transfer. South Station is only a mile and a half from North Station and the Airport. A good transportation network would provide a simple trip to both.
Grand total: 6 tunnels, 10 miles and a bridge (so to speak) to the next century.


There’s plenty missing, of course. Vanshnook suggests a Green Line tunnel from Allston to Harvard and Northeastern to Brookline Village, for instance. Wentworth students have imagined a Blue Line link from Government Center to Kenmore. But for my money if I was given 10 miles of tunnel, this is how I would spend it.

It’s Time to Radically Rethink Memorial Drive in Cambridge

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Memorial Drive in Cambridge—a pleasure roadway and a park—is actually a death trap. The wide, straight roadway encourages cars to speed, and speed they do, running over a pedestrian several times per year and killing people far too often. The roadway hosts no commercial vehicles, and the eastbound lanes serve only a couple of boating facilities between the BU and Longfellow bridges, yet the roadway—which was designed for low-speed horses and carriages—is built as if it were a highway, and any efforts to improve pedestrian safety have been stonewalled in the name of keeping traffic moving.

Except for a couple of traffic lights and poor-visibility sidewalks, traffic can proceed unimpeded from the BU Bridge to East Cambridge, on a straight, flat, mostly divided highway, where the 35 mph speed limit is honored in the breach. It’s no fun to walk across and only slightly more fun to walk or bike along. Officially, it’s a park, but it doesn’t seem like one.

Memorial Drive is part of the Charles River Basin park and there is a 2002 master plan for the basin. Portions of this plan have been implemented, including the new paths along the Cambridge side of the river, but the roadways have not been touched. (Believe it or not, until the 1990s, parking was allowed on both barrels of Memorial Drive, so there was even more pavement on Mem Drive east and a line of cars along the river.) The plan proposes narrowing the road slightly and moving the eastbound barrel inland from the river, slightly increasing the width of the park along the river. It says that other options were considered, but not advanced further in to the plan. One of these would have eliminated the eastbound roadway entirely, channeling all traffic on to the combined westbound barrel. Apparently removing the roadway would be incongruous with the historic nature of the roadway:

While there is some flexibility in applying
preservation criteria, the historic value of this cultural landscape would
be entirely lost under this alternative.

I call shenanigans. I don’t remember Frederick Law Olmsted planning for two lanes of 40 miles per hour automobile traffic in each direction, and parking. I think the DCR is afraid of reducing the number of lanes on the roadway. Rather than focusing on what the road looks like today, what if the DCR prioritized what would best serve as parkland for the public?

Instead of trying to rebuild the highway-like park (or is it a park-like highway) let’s consider moving traffic to the westbound lanes. Use this roadway for two lanes of traffic, turning lanes at intersections, pedestrian refuges between the lanes to minimize crossing distances and some parking where needed (and charge for it if you can’t figure out how to pay for the roadway changes). At the same and the eastbound lanes can be converted to parkland, increasing green space and allowing us to reclaim the dead space in between the current roadway. It might not match his parkway, but it would create a Cambridge esplanade. I think old Frederick Law would be proud.

There is an 80-foot-wide median between the two barrels of Memorial Drive today, but this is lost parkland, since it is nearly impossible to access and cut off from both MIT and the river, and who really wants to sit in a park in the middle of a highway anyway? If the roadway were consolidated, it the amount of useful parkland would go from 40 feet wide to 145 feet wide. On the MIT side, the portion of the parkland between the road and the sidewalk isn’t even grass, but instead wood chips and mud, since it receives heavy pedestrian use, so the road could actually be pushed north there. This would provide enough room for one lane of traffic in each direction, left turn bays on and off of Memorial Drive where needed, and parking spaces elsewhere. By using part of this space, no trees would be impacted (which would be the case of the roadway were moved south).

But only one lane for cars in each direction? Yes! Memorial Drive in Cambridge carries about 36,000 vehicles per day. While this is high for a single lane in each direction, it is not without precedent, especially for a roadway with few intersections or interruptions. In fact, the DCR has a very similar stretch of roadway with a single lane in each direction which carries the same number of vehicles a few miles west: Nonantum Road, along the river in Brighton and Newton. Most notably, this roadway used to have four lanes but, according to the same master plan, was reduced to two in 2010, yet with turning lanes, traffic throughput has not decreased. The new design allowed room for an expanded bicycle/pedestrian path alongside as well.

These two roadway designs carry the same number of vehicles.

2007:
2018:
The 2002 master plan is dated, but it provides a blueprint for improving Memorial Drive. The DCR and MIT have started to implement some improvements, but these are small steps. It’s time that Cambridge had an esplanade along the river, not a strip of parkland and a wide highway.

Don’t double down on the mistakes of the past: Cabot Yard edition

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The Red Line derailment didn’t look too bad at first. The train stayed upright, there were no major injuries, and it appeared that the train would just have to be rerailed, the track repaired, and normal service would resume. The T did an excellent job setting up what skeleton service they could to bypass the site, providing rail service to Braintree and Ashmont without resorting to trying to put ten thousand people per hour on buses which would tie up half of the bus fleet (which is otherwise occupied at rush hour). It seemed the incident had happened in a relatively good location, one of the few where there was some redundancy, as passengers could just transfer from one side of the station to the other.

On Wednesday we found out just how bad it was. With the railcar finally removed (it is rumored that the reason the crane wasn’t placed on the Columbia Road bridge as originally proposed was because DCR didn’t know the maintenance level weight limit of the bridge and dropping the bridge on the Red Line would have been even worse) we saw what it hit. The little building next to the tracks housed the signal equipment for not only Columbia Junction—often dubbed Malfunction Junction, and that’s when the signal system works!—but several miles of track in either direction. Now the 14 trains per hour normally scheduled across the line—which are barely enough to handle rush hour traffic—are reduced to four to six, for the foreseeable future. It turns out that this derailment didn’t happen in a good location, but a bad one.

Signal systems are complex and bespoke, so a full replacement may take months or years to procure, if not longer. In 1996, when the Muddy River flooded into the Green Line, normal operations didn’t resume for months, and fixes for the system itself took years, and $40 million in repairs. The T now closes the Fenway portal during heavy rain events every few years to prevent a repeat of that situation. However, the proximate cause—flooding from the Muddy River—was a bigger issue: a century ago, the river was relocated in to culverts below Park Drive, and with only so much space in the culverts, it would back up along the Riverway during heavy rains, overtop the levee, and, once the D Line was built in 1959, pour in to Kenmore (which had happened in 1962 as well). This was eventually fixed as part of a 20-year project spearheaded by the Army Corps of Engineers and multiple other agencies, and with the new drainage in place, future flooding of the MBTA is less likely. Instead of continuing with the same reactionary system—where floodgates and sandbags were required every few years, and if they didn’t work, as occurred in 1996, the results would be catastrophic—we changed the larger ecosystem to one which would prevent the problem in the first place.

The Red Line derailment should serve as a similar wake-up call. Despite Governor Baker’s repeated calls for no new revenue, simply fixing the system we have won’t work. We—and I’m putting this in italics—can not continue to double down on the same system we have and expect different results. In the short term, this is going to require we invest in the system to make it more efficient and more resilient. In the long term, addressing wider problems will create the sort of system that will pay dividends when things like this week’s derailment occur less frequently and, when they occur, have less impact.

A short history of Cabot Yard and Columbia (a.k.a. Malfunction) Junction

The Red Line was the last of Boston’s subways to be built. The original segment operated between Harvard and Park and it was eventually extended, as the “Cambridge-Dorchester tunnel“, to Ashmont. At first, the only yard facility was on the north end of the line at the Eliot Shops, a complex of yards and shops tucked between Harvard Square and the Charles River, which is home to the Kennedy School today. When the line was extended in the 1920s, it added another yard—Codman Yard—past Ashmont station. For the next 50 years, the line would operate quite simply: trains would pull out of a yard beyond the terminal, service the line, and then pull into the yard at the terminal. This is optimal: the line requires no mid-line switches, and every train coming in or out of service simply pulls in to the first stop.

The 1970s and 1980s changed that. In 1965, the T purchased the Old Colony right-of-way to build an extension to Quincy and Braintree. This was originally planned to be an independent, express line (which is why there is no Braintree station at Savin Hill or Neponset) which would terminate at South Station. Eventually, it was aligned to be part of the Red Line, which required a new junction where the lines split at Columbia Road.

More importantly, it needed somewhere to store and service the cars. The Eliot Shops were small, cramped, and sat on valuable land eyed by Harvard for years. The T gave the land to Harvard in 1966 but needed to find a new location for its yards. The Ashmont Branch was out: Codman Yard was surrounded by housing. Braintree didn’t want a rail yard at the end of the line and blocked efforts for a yard there, so the T finally paid the Penn Central for the freight yards in South Boston to store Red Line cars. This was by no means their first choice: in order to access the line, trains would have to traverse nearly two miles of non-revenue track to get to JFK-UMass, and would then have to run the rest of the way back to Braintree to begin their inbound trips. (A small yard—called Caddigan, in keeping with an apparent rule that all Red Line facilities must begin with a hard C—exists past Braintree, but it can only store a few cars.)

This issue was exacerbated in the 1980s when the Red Line was lengthened once again. The line was extended from Harvard to Alewife, but was originally slated to go beyond. As late as 1977, the line was planned to Arlington Center (with an eventual extension) and the decision was made to curve the line past the Alewife station to aim towards Arlington, forgoing the ability to build a yard on then-vacant land just west of Alewife. The next year, the town decided it didn’t want rail service, but the deed was done, and no terminal was available at the north end of the line, either. (This was related to me by Fred Salvucci, who had some choice words for Arlington and Cambridge about this. I’ve written about an idea to build a yard below Thorndike Field beyond Route 2 to mitigate the terminal issues at Alewife.)

So Cabot is it. It serves most of the trips for the Red Line and is the only maintenance facility. It sits less than a mile from Downtown and the Seaport on what is undoubtedly valuable land. (The nearby MacAllen Building and its neighbor have 279 condos; the two northernmost portions of Cabot are about three times as big.) And Cabot is the main reason that the location where the train derailed—Malfunction Junction—is as complex as it is. In fact, the switch where the train derailed has nothing to do with splitting apart the branches of the Red Line, but rather a switch for a “yard lead” allowing trains to return to Cabot. The entire complex is conceptually designed quite well: it creates a series of “flying junctions”—not just between the two branches, but also for trains between the Braintree line and Cabot (most Ashmont trains operate out of Codman so therefore don’t require as frequent movement). This requires a series of complex switches and flyovers, but means that operationally no train ever has to cross another line.

Columbia Junction. North (towards Downtown Boston) is at the left. A snippet of a full MBTA track map (the best MBTA track map!) which can be found here.

But Columbia Junction, as built, is a known problem spot and frequent cause of delays, and this doesn’t change the fact that Cabot is in the wrong geographic location for a rail yard. In Chicago, nearly every yard is at the end of the line, or close by (the last mid-route yard—Wilson—was decommissioned in the ’90s in favor of a yard at Howard). New York, DC and San Francisco rely on yards mostly built on the outlying portions of the line. The T specializes in mid-route yards for the Orange and Blue lines (Wellington and Orient Heights), but both are located adjacent to the line, not miles away.

Thus, Cabot Yard has four major problems:

  • It connects to the wrong part of the line for a rail yard
  • It is not even close to said line
  • Where it connects to the line it requires a series of complex switches
  • It sits on otherwise valuable land, probably the most valuable land of any heavy rail yard (setting aside Commuter Rail yards downtown which, while in sensible locations operations-wise, sit on huge parcels of valuable land and which could be freed up with a North-South Rail Link, but that’s the topic of another post entirely).
The T’s plan? Rebuild Cabot Yard and Columbia Junction. The cost? At least $200 million for Cabot, and another $50 million or more for Malfunction Junction. The benefits? Negligible. Fixing the switches will help, but Cabot would still requires long non-revenue movements to get trains to the wrong part of the line to provide service and uses high-value land to store rail cars. It’s cheaper in the short run than building a new facility, but doubles down on the same issues which require extraneous operations and needless complexity. Yet this is the Charle Baker “no new revenue” vision: keep investment minimal now, continue with the same system we have even when it clearly doesn’t work, and somehow expect a different result. 
The solution, of course, would be to build a new yard facility somewhere further south along the Braintree branch of the Red Line. The question is: where?
The Braintree Split

I wrote last year about how the optimal location for bus garages is probably on state-owned land adjacent to highways, rather than next to transit stations as the T is proposing at Wellington and Riverside. No one wants a bus yard in their backyard, and building bus lots next to train stations instead of transit-oriented development is doubly wrongheaded. While rail yards are more location-constrained than bus yards (since they have to physically connect to the railroad) there is some potential to leverage the same sort of arrangement of land in Braintree for the Red Line.

If the Braintree branch were being built today, a logical location for a yard would be at what is currently the Marketplace at Braintree development. When the line was built, this was an active rail yard (a small portion still is a freight yard), and the Red Line was built on the “wrong side” of the tracks to access this parcel. Using it today would require not only nearly $100 million to buy the land and businesses, but nearly-impossible negotiations to somehow reimburse Braintree for that commercial tax base. The site south of the Braintree garage has less value (about $25 million) but is also on the “wrong side” (the Red Line is east of the Commuter Rail to allow access to what is now the Greenbush Line) and would require some sort of flyover or duck-under to gain access, while being slightly smaller than Cabot. Further south, there are some potential sites, but these would require longer lead tracks and have potential wetland impacts and NIMBY implications.

A map showing the locations of the sites mentioned above.

There is a site near Braintree, however, which would have no acquisition cost, since the state already owns it. It would have no impact on the tax base, since it has no assessed value. It will never be suitable for residential or commercial development, since it sits inside a highway interchange. It is, of course, the land within the Braintree Split. The land in the “infield” of the Braintree Split amounts to about 70 acres, which is nearly four times the size of Cabot Yard. The interchange is a “Directional-T” interchange, and designed so that at its center, three roads cross each other at the same point. The are, from lowest to highest, the mainline route from 93 north to 93 north, from Route 3 north to 93 south, and from 93 south to Route 3 south. This is important, because it would impact how a potential rail yard could be linked together.

None of the parcels bounded by the Braintree Split is as large as the entirety of the Cabot Yard (about 18 acres), although Cabot itself is split roughly evenly by the 4th Street bridge between the maintenance facility and the storage yard. Four of the sectors are roughly the same size, two are significantly smaller. Given the topographical constraints, it would be easiest to link together the 16 and 12 acre parcels. The map below shows the parcels within the Split, the size of each in acres, and, superimposed with dashed lines on the 16- and 12-acre parcels, the outlines of the Cabot shops facility and storage yard, respectively, with dashed lines.

Braintree Split parcels, with the Cabot shops and yard superimposed on the 16- and 12-acre parcels.

The Braintree Split is not as optimally located as, say, the site south of the Braintree station. It’s a bit further from the Red Line, and not at the end of the line, so some deadhead movement would be required to reach the terminal. But it’s considerably closer to both the end of the line in Braintree and to the line itself. The closest portion of the 12-acre parcel is only about 0.25 miles from the Red Line tracks, although there are some roadway ramps in between. (There are plenty of examples of rail yards interacting with highways, like the WMATA West Falls Church yard in Virginia, 98th, Rosemont and Des Plaines yards in Chicago,  and South Yard in Atlanta.

It is worth noting that Braintree Split isn’t exactly flat. If you drive from 93 south to Route 3 south, you descend from an elevation of 180 feet down to 40 feet. Rail yards have to be flat (so, you know, unmanned trains don’t roll away if their brakes fail), and rail grades, even for a rapid transit line, should be at most two or three percent. Given that the 12-acre parcel is lower than the 16-acre parcel, the two would have to be used for separate facilities, but there is no reason that the 12-acre parcel couldn’t host a storage yard with shop facilities at the 16-acre parcel. In fact, the 12-acre site is better suited for a storage facility (since it is long and narrow) while the 16-acre site would have plenty of room for a maintenance facility and potentially additional storage tracks, which might be necessary if the Red Line were one day improved to offer service every three minutes.

This would require about 1400 feet of lead tracks from the Red Line to the storage yard, and no new land acquisition as all would be built on land already owned by the state. The yard lead would extend flat over the first set of ramps and Route 3 north (the Red Line climbs at about a 3% grade out of Quincy Adams to cross over the Old Colony Commuter Rail), and would then descend down to the level of Route 3 to pass over the northbound Burgin Parkway ramp and under the southbound one. There it would split in to two, with one set of tracks leading to a level storage facility and the other extending up to the maintenance facility further north. Access to the maintenance yard would be available from near the zipper lane facility just north of the split, although parking might be better provided on the side of the highway with a pedestrian bridge for workers to access the yard. If funds were available from nearby developers, these walkways could even allow a station to provide better access to nearby office buildings to provide a shuttle service from Quincy Adams or Braintree.

Simplifying Columbia Junction and Savin Hill


There are other knock-on effects to simplifying Columbia Junction and relocating Cabot Yard.

In addition to the Old Colony Commuter Rail line running through a single-track bottleneck south of JFK-UMass (which is part of the reason only a few extra trains can be run at rush hour), there is a bottleneck on I-93 there as well. In 2012, CTPS developed a concept to add HOV lanes to I-93 and a track to the Old Colony lines (thereby removing a single-track bottleneck) near Savin Hill by burying both the Old Colony and the Red Line for the better part of a mile. Yet this concept would likely rival the Allston I-90 project in complexity and cost.

With South Coast rail now being (wrongly, in my opinion) pushed down the Old Colony Line, the FMCB has considered a similar plan. Yet this is based on the false premise that four tracks need to be provided to JFK/UMass, which is mostly required to allow access in and out of Cabot Yard from the Braintree Branch. Without the need to access Cabot Yard via a flying junction, there is no need for four tracks through Savin Hill: by combining the two Red Line branches south of Savin Hill, one of the existing Red Line tracks could be used for Commuter Rail through the Savin Hill bottleneck with only some minor modifications, at least relative to the state’s incoherent plan. In addition, by replacing Cabot Yard with a facility in Braintree, the entirety of “Malfunction Junction” could be replaced by two switches, one to split the southbound main line in to two branches, and another to combine the two northbound tracks together.

The sketches below show the current configuration of the railroads adjacent to Savin Hill, and a proposed concept. The proposed concept would have outbound trains stop at Savin Hill, but inbound trains on the Braintree Branch (which has less capacity) would bypass Savin Hill and merge in past the station (as they do today), although it could certainly be realigned to allow all trains to serve Savin Hill. North of this junction, the Red Line would operate as a simple, two-track railroad through to Andrew and on to Downtown and Alewife. Inbound passengers at JFK/UMass would no longer have to play platform roulette, or stand on the overpass and wait for the next train, as all service would take place on a single platform.

Current track layout.

Proposed track layout showing the combination of the Red Line branches moved further south.

The Cabot Yard leads and Track 61


The tracks from JFK/UMass to Cabot would not have to go unused, however. I pointed out several years ago that Track 61 could reasonably be connected to Andrew Station to provide a shuttle from JFK/UMass to the BCEC and Seaport. With the Cabot yard leads freed up, such a shuttle could instead run from JFK/UMass to the BCEC, providing a connection from Dorchester and the South Shore to the Seaport without relying on the overburdened Silver Line. There should be enough room for two light rail tracks from JFK/UMass to the Seaport (with a single-track terminal at JFK, much like the Braintree branch of the Red Line is being operated after the derailment) with the other Red Line track given over to the Commuter Rail. This would provide a useful link using the otherwise-excess right-of-way.


Cabot Yard as midday layover for Commuter Rail

While Cabot Yard is poorly-located as a Red Line facility, it is in the right place for midday Commuter Rail storage. This page is on the record saying that the best way to reduce the need for midday storage is to just run more trains, but peaks will be peaks, and having somewhere near a terminal to store trains will be important until we build the North South Rail Link (in which case trains will be able to run through the tunnel to outlying yards, freeing up land near the terminals). Today, the Commuter Rail system uses yards at Southampton (near Cabot) and Readville (at the end of the Fairmount Line, so not near Cabot, or really anything) for midday train storage.

Yet to run more trains, the agency needs more storage, so it is looking at sites in Allston and Widett Circle, despite the expense of building in these locations and their desirability as development sites. (As a participant in the planning process for Allston, the supposed need for storage drives many undesirable and expensive portions of that project.) If Cabot Yard was vacated by the Red Line, it would make a fine facility for midday storage: it’s very close to South Station and, with a rail yard on one side and bus yard on the other, a less-desirable development site. The portion of the facility between the Haul Road and 4th Street is more than double the size of Readville, and could thus replace Readville entirely while providing enough additional capacity to obviate the need for new construction in Allston or at Widett Circle.

Conclusion

As usual, actions taken in one location decades in the past cascade through the entire transportation network. NIMBYs in the 1960s pushed the T to build Cabot Yard, even if it was nowhere near the Red Line itself. A changing economy means that the land it occupies, which was little more than a post-industrial wasteland in the 1970s, is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The Braintree Split, built in the 1950s, provides enough room for a rail yard in its median. Malfunction—er, Columbia—Junction has always been a solution looking for a problem. By thinking pretty far outside the box, we could correct many of the mistakes of the 1970s. But it involves making an investment in infrastructure beyond just fixing what we have.

The current administration, it seems, is willing to double down on the mistakes which got us in to this mess. When the Muddy River flooded in to the Green Line, we didn’t just build a storm barrier and hope that it would work. We looked upstream for the cause, and rebuilt the Muddy River to keep it from overflowing in the first place. While the reactive solution might seem cheaper today, in the long run, unless we take proactive, decisive action, we’ll pay for the mistakes again and again.

Charlie Chieppo, call your office

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The vaunted Pioneer Institute, that of free marketry and good government, has a contest out which solicits plans to “move people and goods forward.” (Your fearless blogger is preparing an entry.) They encourage many people to apply, and say

If you are a rider, driver, transit employee, or simply an observer, we invite you to share how you would improve your commute, from immediate issues around parking, communication, safety, and station repair and design, to big ideas that will reduce congestion, advance bus rapid transit, and double the number of commuter rail riders.

So imagine my surprise when a Pioneer acolyte, Charlie Chieppo (along with a professor at D’Amore-McKim … which I’ll abbreviate as “Dim” because that’s my impression of the intellect of anyone associated with this article), goes into the pages of the Globe to argue that, no, we don’t need Commuter Rail, because it will be replaced by self-driving cars in no time. Also, come on, Boston Globe, you’re above this. (Oh, wait, except for Jeff Jacoby, he of amazing Twitter ratios. The man has no shame, so that’s something.)

As for the article: where to start? This basically hits every trope of the “cars are going to save us” argument that people make without even the faintest clue of how self driving cars are (or aren’t) working, and thinking about, you know, what you do with cars when people get out of them. But this is so chock-full of nonsense it makes sense to critique it line-by-line. Grab a beverage and hang on, because here we go. (Original in plain text indented, my comments in italics)

*****

Self-driving cars could make commuter rail obsolete

The could. Anything could. Unicorns and puppies could. Let’s see if you can make a cogent argument. I’m ready to put on my surprised hat.

The rise of shared electric self-driving cars and the transition from a world of ownership to one of consumers purchasing transportation as a service holds the promise of significant economic, environmental, and quality-of-life benefits.

Wait, this is being written in present tense? Because outside of a few very few minor prototypes, there are literally no self-driving electric cars. Certainly not operating on roads. Maybe they mean Teslas, which are electric, but are pretty far from self-driving, although they do have a tendency to self-drive their drivers in to stationary objects. Waymo, which is way ahead of Tesla on the tech front, has a CEO pointing out that not only are self-driving cars decades away, they may never be able to fully drive themselves. So let’s not pretend that this is something that is a couple of years away. Because it’s been a couple of years away for a few years now. So, maybe, use the future tense here.

But it will also pose an existential threat to public transportation in general and to commuter rail in particular.

Because … let’s see. Commuter Rail has been the least-affected by Uber and Lyft, which are basically self-driving cars with drivers. They have the same utility, and Commuter Rail ridership has gone up in the past few years (more on this in a moment). But, sure, go on.

The first recommendation in the December report from Governor Baker’s Commission on the Future of Transportation is “Prioritize investment in public transit as the foundation for a robust, reliable, clean, and efficient transportation system.” In broad terms, the commission is right. But maximizing potential benefits from the unprecedented disruption of surface transportation that lies ahead will also require fundamental change at the MBTA and a hard look at which transit modes are positioned to compete in a brave new world.

Do we have any idea of what this brave new world holds? No, we do not. And why not? Because fifteen years ago Segways were the future. Three years ago we were all going to be riding hover boards. No one knows the future. Sure, we should probably think about contingencies. But we should also invest in what we have now that, you know, exists.

The commission’s charge was to look at the Commonwealth’s needs and challenges over the next 20 years. But if that horizon is extended to 40 years,

But it’s not. It’s 20 years. Why? Maybe because no one can predict the future in 40 years. In 1890, would anyone have predicted the coming of the car by 1930? In 1930—when biplanes ruled the day—would anyone have foreseen the 747 in 1970? In 1970, when gas cost a quarter a gallon, would anyone have seen $4 gas and global warming, but no flying cars or Jetsons highways? The only constant from 1970 is that cars cause traffic and traffic sucks. And you’re proposing more cars. Go on.

station-to-station service to the suburbs is unlikely to be very attractive in a world where shared electric self-driving cars will offer much faster door-to-door service at a price that won’t be much higher.

Where to begin with this word-salad. Station-to-station works because it’s a nice straight line from the city to the suburbs. Door-to-door sounds good, especially if it’s much faster, but this relies on the completely fallible assumption that somehow cars are going to solve traffic. In a region which now has the worst traffic in the country. Self-driving cars are likely to increase vehicle miles traveled (just as Uber and Lyft have), and thus congestion. The reason people take the train is that it is faster than driving (as well as cheaper than parking). And don’t show me some perfect model, because the Occam’s Razor is “you put a lot more cars on the road and you’ll get more congestion.”

Drivers are normally the largest expense for any transportation business. It currently costs about 55 cents a mile to operate a vehicle with a single occupant. But it’s estimated that the cost could fall to 15 cents a mile for autonomous vehicles carrying two or three passengers, which would significantly reduce public transit’s price advantage.

Again, the cost of driving is generally not the only reason people take Commuter Rail. The time also is. And, yes, maybe the cars will make this faster. But the jury is long out on that. Also, should we not invest in Commuter Rail, which is much more efficient at moving people than cars, for 40 years with the hope that maybe cars will somewhat get more efficient even though they haven’t—space-wise—uh, ever? That doesn’t sound like planning for the future. Also, according to this, most of the efficiency of a car comes from sharing, since 45¢ split three ways is 15¢, so not much off of 55¢. And, hey, slugging works … in a couple of dense markets with very specific conditions, most notably carpool lanes which can bypass traffic (again, time ≥ money). Those aren’t a bad idea, but can’t really replace Commuter Rail. Also, many people want to be matched with three people, not two, for safety in numbers. This is a feature of slugging, but makes the matching harder and the trips take longer. Also, if you have door-to-door service, you necessarily have a portion of the trip with two people. This isn’t terribly easy to do.

Connected vehicles will also dramatically reduce human error, resulting in big increases in throughput thanks to variables like higher travel speeds, less space between vehicles and less frequent braking in response to accidents and other travel events.

Oh, here’s the second BINGO square they’re checking off. This is nonsense. First of all, connected vehicles will leave more space between cars than people do today, because drivers today generally follow too close. Second, they may deal with some of human reaction time, which is solvable. The problem is that at highway speeds, this accounts for about 15% of braking time. The other 85% is physics. That’s a little harder to solve.

In the future, agencies like the MBTA will probably subsidize trips that are currently taken on commuter rail rather than operate them. Even with the transportation transformation in its infancy, Florida’s Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority, which serves the St. Petersburg/Clearwater area, eliminated some bus routes further from the urban core, after it experienced an 11 percent overall drop in ridership, and replaced them with subsidies for Uber and Lyft rides. Since then, over 25 US communities have established similar partnerships — and the disruption caused by ride-hailing services is minuscule compared with what is to come.

Ah, yes, the transit mecca of … Tampa-St. Petersburg? Which has 57% the population of Boston and 3% of the transit ridership? (NTD data here and here) That seems like a great comparison. We should aspire to be the same Tampa-St. Pete which is well known as the strip club capital of the world? World class city, indeed! 

MBTA commuter rail ridership has declined.

No. It hasn’t. This is based off a Pioneer Institute study which selectively chooses a start and end to argue that Commuter Rail ridership is down. But this is based on data which basically useless, the T has all but admitted that outside of a ridership report in 2012, they really have no idea how many people are taking Commuter Rail. So the authors could have pled ignorance last month. Except that a couple of weeks ago, a new report came out, an actual rider count, and the numbers are pretty clear: Commuter Rail ridership is up. Way up. Up on every line. Up 20% in six years. Up nearly 50% on the Worcester Line. So this is just false. I can’t wait until Pioneer comes out a report that argues that the sky is green, the Pope is most decidedly not Catholic, bears defecate anywhere but the woods, and Commuter Rail ridership is down.

Nonetheless, it will remain with us for the next couple of decades. It still needs to be improved, but massive investments in new lines like South Coast Rail or, even worse, Springfield, would be a fool’s errand.

It’s been with us since 1834, so yes, that’s probably true. And we can debate the intelligence of extensions to Commonwealth’s 3rd, 6th and 10th largest cities (and I’d suggest there are certainly better ways to do so for South Coast Rail and that service to Springfield is probably more of a political issue than anything else). But let’s not pretend that people going to Springfield are going to want to get in to a car with two or three strangers for a two hour ride to Springfield. If you sit next to a smelly UberPool passenger on your way across town, you can hold your nose. If you sit next to a smelly person on the train, you can switch seats. If you’re on your way to Springfield, once you’re on the Pike, you’re on the Pike. Whoops.

The biggest challenge for the future will be making transit work in congested downtown areas. One Boston traffic simulation model showed that while shared autonomous vehicles would reduce travel times and the number of vehicles on the road even as total miles traveled rose by 16 percent overall, downtown travel times would be 5.5 percent longer because the vehicles would substitute for transit use.

Correct. Although actually this is usually the type of relationship where congestion goes up faster than vehicle miles traveled. But, correct. Something about stopped clocks and blind squirrels.

Rising to this challenge will require focusing more investment in the urban core. But success will require something more: changing the MBTA’s top priority from providing jobs and pensions to serving its riders.

During a three-year exemption from the Commonwealth’s costly anti-privatization law, the T dramatically improved performance in areas such as cash collection and reconciliation and warehousing and logistics, and saved millions. Despite this success, there was nary a peep about extending the exemption or making it permanent.

Can’t be from Pioneer if you don’t have a non-sequitur about privatization. What that has to do with focusing on the urban core is beyond me. Also, where do you think the destination of most Commuter Rail ridership is? Also, isn’t Commuter Rail privatized? My head is spinning.

Few would argue that the MBTA is skilled at putting customers first.

Well, a stopped clock is right twice a day.

The question is whether — in the face of an existential threat to public transit and with far less margin of error — political leaders, bureaucrats, and unions can change the authority’s culture and begin to lay the groundwork that will allow the T to perform the way we’ll desperately need it to in the future.

We’re back to Commuter Rail. Is this about privatization or Commuter Rail? Was the first two thirds of the article about Commuter Rail so we could segue to an argument for privatizing something which is already privatized? I’m really confused. Also: does the Globe have editors?

Part of that culture change will be recognizing that commuter rail is poorly positioned to compete over the long-term.

This article has offered exactly zero evidence to support this claim. None.

When the Patriots win the 2060 Super Bowl, stories about a suburban rail network overwhelmed with riders are likely to generate the same reaction as when we tell our kids about having to get up and walk to the television to change the channel.

First of all, Tom Brady will be 82 when the 2060 Super Bowl takes place. Also, football may not be a sport we recognize. And the Patriots, without Brady or Belichick, will be like any of the other 32 teams, giving them a 3.1% chance of winning Super Bowl XCIV. So there’s a 3.1% chance that the Patriots win the 2060 Super Bowl. And, I’d say, a 3.1% chance we don’t have a Commuter Rail network then, either.

 *****

Here’s the rub: Commuter Rail (and transit in general) is really quite good at moving many people in to a small space. Cars are singularly bad at this. A lane of cars carries about 1600 people per hour, even with two or three people in each, it may be able to handle 4000. Commuter Rail, as it runs today, carries more than this, but Commuter Rail, as it’s run today, is woefully inefficient. Electrified rail service with level boarding platforms (relatively small investments, compared to the cost of building the rights-of-way which already exist) can increase this five-fold. A well-functioning Commuter Rail line should be able to carry 10,000 passengers per hour, more than a roadway can, no matter who’s driving (unless there’s a bus lane with a bus terminal at the end).

As Jarrett Walker likes to point out: transit is a question of geometry. You can make all the taxi-summoning apps you want, but cars still take up a lot of space. (Remember, at rush hour, Commuter Rail brings in about as many people to Boston as highways do.) Get rid of Commuter Rail, even if everyone carpools (and people who don’t take Commuter Rail already probably won’t want to) and you’ll increase cars coming in to the city by a lot. And then where do those cars go? In to garages? Not enough garages. (No, they won’t go back out to the suburbs to fetch more people; rush hour is over by then.) They’ll probably do what Ubers and Lyfts do: drive more miles without passengers. Congratulations, you’ve traded parking in the city for parking outside the city and more vehicle miles traveled.

But, yes, Commuter Rail is going away.

The case to extend the Orange Line to Wyoming Hill

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This page wrote about how extending the E Line just a few blocks would have benefits which would compound across the system. It’s not the only portion of the T where this would be the case. While long-range extensions of the subway system are probably suboptimal from a cost-benefit analysis (and would be better served by Regional Rail improvements), it’s important to think strategically about what improvements could be made. Sky Rose’s Red Line conversion of the Mattapan Line is one such idea, the E to Hyde Square another, and the eventual rapid transit conversion of the Needham Line (the topic of a different post) a third.

Here’s another. In this case, as in the others mentioned, the extension of the line in question not only improves service for the short extension, but helps build in redundancy and resilience in to the whole line to improve service across the board. Building a new terminal also helps, allowing the T to better manage headways across the line, rather than relying on the current substandard terminal at Oak Grove.

Why run past Oak Grove?

When the new Orange Line routes—built as the Southwest Corridor to Forest Hills in 1987 and Haymarket-North to Oak Grove route in 1975—were first proposed, the current termini were not planned to be the ends of the line. On the south end, the route was proposed to extend south to West Roxbury and then to Dedham (the right-of-way to Dedham has been sold off and developed, so this is no longer feasible), and on the north side, it was proposed to extend along the Western Route (the Haverhill Line) to 128 and Reading.

Neither of these came to fruition. The extension to West Roxbury would require a full-scale conversion of the Needham Line. It can’t be done in sections (with the possible extension of a segment to Roslindale), but would require severing the Needham Line entirely, extending the Green Line from Newton Highlands to Needham, and building the Orange Line out to West Roxbury or Needham. The right-of-way could easily accommodate this, but it would require entirely new stations and at least two new bridges built on existing abutments. It’s a worthy, logical project (especially since it would take some of the pressure off of South Station, reducing the need to build the $5 billion South Station Expansion project) and would dramatically improve service to the area, but it would be relatively expensive and politically difficult.

The northern extension, to Reading, would be harder still. While the Needham Line is grade separated to Needham Junction, the Western Route has more than a dozen grade crossings between Oak Grove and Reading, including several in Melrose starting a mile to the north. It would require trains with pantographs and full crossing rebuilding, or full grade separation, and service levels which would exacerbate congestion in the corridor at the many grade crossings. Extending the Orange Line would require running all commuter and freight rail service across the Wildcat Branch to the Lowell Line, putting more strain on that main line. It would be technically feasible, but practically and financially (and probably politically), it is not about to happen.

The first mile going north is a different story. Oak Grove is not particularly well-sited for a terminal station, which work best when they serve dense nodes of ridership generation. It has park-and-ride lot which is accessible by local streets—but not from any highway—and mostly serves a local population. While there is some good transit-oriented development near the station, beyond that is parkland: to the east is Pine Banks reservation, and to the west, the Middlesex Fells. Much of the ridership at Oak Grove comes from Melrose, a relatively-dense town with a border just north of the station, where many residents have to choose between walking to the infrequent-and-costly Commuter Rail, playing roulette with the bus schedule, or driving to Oak Grove. Many choose the latter, and with the small size of the parking lot, it is frequently full before 8 a.m.

If you calculate a catchment area for Oak Grove based on Census block data, there are about 5000 people who live within half a mile of the station (and don’t also live within half a mile of Malden Center, with the assumption that passengers closer to Malden would walk there rather than Oak Grove). Oak Grove is situated in between Pine Banks park to the east and the Middlesex Fells to the west; while parks are beneficial urban amenities, they do little to attract ridership to the Orange Line. One mile north, however, there are many more people. Instead of Pine Banks and the Fells, there’s a mixture of single-family and multi-family housing and a population density of more than 10,000 per square mile, one of the densest areas in the Boston suburbs. (It’s also one of the suburbs which has at least been talking about increasing density near transit stations, which might be one of the most important single goals for the housing-starved region.) So, if you draw the same circle around Wyoming Hill that you did around Oak Grove, 9000 people are within an easy walk.

How a new terminal can improve high-frequency service

In addition, since Oak Grove was never designed to act as a terminal, it doesn’t work particularly well as a terminal. This is similar to the issues this page has previously discussed at Alewife. A Wyoming Hill terminal, especially one built with three tracks, would allow more resilient operations. The Oak Grove terminal is currently dependent on a single crossover to the south of the terminal, and can become congested at peak hours, impacting the rest of the line; providing an extension to Wyoming Hill could provide a terminal with more capacity and a better operational design. Tail tracks extend past the station, but are unused and overgrown before terminating about 3500 feet south of Wyoming Avenue. The right-of-way is wide enough for rapid transit and Commuter Rail service to coexist (it’s at least as wide as the right-of-way to the south in Malden) although to extend the Orange Line, the Haverhill track would have to be shifted east (with the potential benefit of eliminating what is now a 45 mph speed restriction on a reverse curve) and the double track switch may have to be relocated, which would have minor impact on operations. (A fully two-track Western Route would require major bridge work and earthwork between Oak Grove and Malden.)

It would also allow the Orange Line to operate with a double set of terminals on the north end, where the line ends with neither a loop nor a yard. There are few rail lines in the US which have three-minute headways and manage to turn trains at a station like Oak Grove (the Orange Line isn’t currently programmed for such headways, but if it one day ran from Oak Grove to West Roxbury, it might need them). Three minute headways depend on the ability to minimize dwell times at stations, and the ability to turn trains at the end of the line.

In the US, New York and Chicago have several lines with three minute headways, but few (if any) of these operate these headways to a stub-ended terminal at the end of the line. In New York, except for two lines which terminate in Manhattan (the L and the 7), this is achieved through branching. For instance, the 4 and 5 trains on the Upper East Side in New York run 28 trains per hour (a 2:09 headway) in Manhattan, but the trains originate at three terminals on the north end (Nereid Av, Eastchester/Dyre Av and Woodlawn) and two on the south (Crown Heights and Flatbush, with some additional service from other locations). In other cases, interlined lines do not run all trains to the end of the line, but have some turn back shy of the terminal (the 6, for example) at peak hour. (Alon has written a lot about branching in NYC; it used to have even more.)

The CTA Blue Line schedule showing how many rush-hour trips
begin or end their runs at mid-line terminals to provide more
service on the core of the system.

In Chicago, several single lines (Red, Blue, Brown) run three minute headways (the Blue Line runs 2:40 headways at peak hour) but all terminate at yards, loops, or more-than-two-track terminals (in the case of the Brown Line, where the three-track terminal at Kimball has a capacity of 21 trains per hour). The Blue Line, which is operating 23 trains per hour, doesn’t operate all trains to end-of-line terminals, but basically runs two services overlaid at rush hour: O’Hare to UIC-Halsted and Rosemont to Forest Park. If the Orange Line (in Boston) one day ran from West Roxbury (or Needham) to Wyoming Hill, the most frequent service might only run from Oak Grove (or even Wellington, which with its third track is well-suited for a short-turn terminal) to Forest Hills. So at peak hour, there would be a train every six minutes between Oak Grove and Westie/Needham, and every three minutes from Wellington to Forest Hills, but no terminal would have to turn a train more frequently than every six minutes (which wouldn’t require a three-track terminal at Wyoming Hill).

Track layout at Wyoming. Commuter Rail tracks shifted east over existing platform. Orange Line shown with a two track
terminal, with an optional third track and second platform shown to the west.

How extending the Orange Line improves service beyond the Orange Line

Beyond benefitting the Orange Line, this plan would improve service for Commuter Rail riders. Today, most Haverhill line trains make all local stops, including three in Melrose. The stretch from Cedar Park to Wyoming Hill is just half a mile, which doesn’t give any time to accelerate, so it adds several minutes of travel time. A full-speed trip from Cedar Park to Malden this would result in a faster trip for most commuters on the Haverhill Line. (It’s also possible that the two stations could be consolidated with a new station near the high school—with the assumption that many current Cedar Park customers would walk to Wyoming Hill for the more-frequent Orange Line—although this would require further study.)

Having a station a closer walk to many in Melrose would also benefit parking availability at Oak Grove. Consensus is that the Oak Grove lot is full by 7:30 a.m., if not earlier, despite charging $9 per day for parking. Shifting some parkers to walkers by proving a closer Orange Line option would provide more availability at Oak Grove, meaning that some later commuters who today drive to Wellington (or maybe all the way in to the city) would be able to leave their car earlier and get on the train, reducing congestion.

Building this extension wouldn’t be perfectly simple, but it could be done within the existing right-of-way and a portion of an existing parking lot at Wyoming Hill. The right-of-way is 80 feet wide, with at least 65 feet usable (given nearby wetlands), wide enough for two 31-foot rights-of-way. Power is already provided from a substation north of Oak Grove, and another would not likely be required since it is only 0.8 miles from the substation to Wyoming Avenue. At Wyoming Hill, some of the parking lot would be eliminated to build a terminal, and reaccommodating this parking would have to be studied. However, no physical buildings would be impacted, and a two-track station would impact only a small portion of the parking lot.

This extension would not be possible today, because the number of cars serving the Orange Line is stretched too thin as it is. With the new fleet in testing and promised to come online later this year or early next, however, this extra service could be provided, without stretching headways and pushing the line further over capacity. (New signals, in the long run, will also help increase capacity.) Beyond Wyoming Avenue, the cost to extend the Orange Line likely exceeds the benefits. But between Oak Grove and Wyoming Hill, the benefits are high for operations, existing riders, new riders, and parallel Commuter Rail riders, and the costs relatively low.

Kudos, MBTA, on a job well done.

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It’s not particularly frequent that I write (or anyone else writes) a blog post praising the MBTA (although it’s probably less frequent than it should be; the agency does a lot of good work with an old system and all-too-often inadequate funding and support) but today that is exactly what I am going to do regarding the Harvard-to-Alewife shuttle.

Some background: in 2016 I wrote a blog post about how the Harvard-Alewife shuttles could be improved. I noticed it mostly because I was on a training run for Boston (two weeks before my brush with death/fame, but I digress) and ran along Alewife Brook Parkway before taking a bus back to Harvard from Alewife. That was also for the floating slab project which has been with us since, well, at least 2011, and it sounds like the infrastructure will require continued maintenance forever, or at least until the MBTA installs a signal system which allows single-track operation (a regular occurrence for maintenance in Chicago and Washington, D.C.).

My advice went unheeded at the time. When the project came up again this fall, we (TransitMatters; if you haven’t already, become a TM member or apply for our first ever staff position) went all in. We contacted the T, city officials in Somerville and Cambridge, and wrote about it in Commonwealth. The idea is mostly sound. The pushback from the T—which we heard through intermediaries—was twofold, although any problems seemed easily solved:

  • First, they argued that it would adversely affect Alewife-Davis passengers (a valid concern, although I had someone who works with the MBTA looking at how shutdowns affect ridership look at some numbers, and these passengers account for a very small number of overall ridership, as would be expected), which could be mitigated by a single shuttle from Alewife to Davis. 
  • Second, that having buses going to multiple destinations would confuse passengers. Less valid, in my opinion. Apparently a train stopping three stops short of is normal terminal isn’t confusing, but buses with different destinations is? Or as a friend put it: “people can figure out the difference between Alewife and Braintree, right?”

In any case, on Saturday, December 1, the last day of the floating slab project, I got a message from a TransitMatters member: the T was sending buses out to different termini. Some were going to Davis. Some all the way to Alewife. I had been out of Cambridge, but once home I jumped at the opportunity to Hubway (or BlueBike) over to the Harvard Station to check it out. I wanted to see for myself. I wanted the rumor to be true. Alas, when I got there, the buses were operating “normally.”

But I noticed a peculiar difference: rather than being signed for Alewife Sta one of the buses was signed for Alewife Sta via Porter and Davis. If nothing else, this was an improvement in customer information: rather than just the terminal, it showed all of the bypassed stations. By the time I arrived, ridership was relatively low: only about 100 passengers per train, which were handled by two buses, which would be called in to the busway by inspectors as trains arrived. I was somewhat disappointed: I wouldn’t get to see the new system in practice, and that it would only live on as a rumor from a busier time of day. Nor would I be able to commend the T on trying something new. Again, just a rumor on the Internet.

So I walked down the ramp towards the pit, when I noticed a stack of papers sitting on the edge of a trash can (it was above the rim, and, no, I didn’t eat it). My curiosity piqued, I picked one up and read it. What had I’d stumbled upon?

Operator Guide: Harvard – Alewife

Saturday, December 1: 12 PM to 3 PM

We are testing a new Harvard – Alewife shuttle to use buses more efficiently and to provide a better service to our customers. There are a total of 3 different shuttle routes during this time period. A station official will let you know which route to begin when you are arrive at Harvard or Alewife.

The document went on to describe the three routes in detail, the head signs to use (this described the signage I’d seen earlier) and the fact that it had been observed earlier, but not when I was there. The details are that the T rather ingeniously came up with three routes to provide customers routes without sending all of the buses to Alewife. One route ran express from Harvard to Alewife. A second ran from Harvard to Alewife making all stops. A third ran to Davis Square only. While not as efficient as what I had proposed, it was a good balance of customer service and efficiency. I was very impressed, and I hope the test went well.

The skeptic will say “so why didn’t they try this earlier?” I’ll cut the T a lot of slack here. Transit agencies are large bureaucracies, and like ocean liners, they take some time to change course. In this case, they not only had to create this document, they had to vet the route, change the buses sign codes, and communicate with the various officials involved. Could it have happened faster? Maybe. Could it have not happened at all? Most certainly: that’s the easiest thing to do.

Maintenance shutdowns happen. They’re a necessary evil, but they’re an opportunity to experiment. ( (* see below for some brief suggestions) Unfortunately, experimentation is often something anathema to organizations like the MBTA. It takes extra effort for an often overworked staff, and even if the potential payoff is high, the willingness to fail is often low. But in this case, the MBTA tried. I would hope that it was successful, and that it will be the basis for better shuttle services for future floating Slab work, and elsewhere on the system going forwards.

So o everyone involved in the planning and operations staff at the MBTA: kudos and thank you. It’s always a risk to try something new. And to listen to some guy ranting on the Internet. You did both. I hope it worked. I hope that it will work in the future, and that the T use these sorts of situations to try new things to continue to provide the best possible service to its customers.

* Some suggestions for future experiments …

  • When the D Line is shut down from Kenmore to Reservoir, run a local shuttle bus along the route, but encourage through passengers to use the C Line from Cleveland Circle and allow fares (easiest would be to collect no fares west of Reservoir).
  • When the Orange Line is shut down past Ruggles, run every bus terminating at Forest Hills through to the start of Orange Line service, reducing the number of bus-shuttle-subway transfers by allowing passengers on buses to Forest Hills a one-seat ride to the Orange Line trains.
  • When the Green Line is shut next summer from Newton Highlands to Riverside, run alternating buses to Woodland and Riverside, instead of making every Riverside passenger make the tedious loop in and out of the Woodland station.) 
  • If the Lowell Line is shut down on weekends in the future, immediately fire anyone who proposes whatever the bus route used this fall was. Instead run buses from Lowell to Anderson/Woburn and then express to Boston, and serve the rest of the line with the adjacent 134 bus, with a couple of trips added as necessary to supplement service.

The case for extending the E Line to Hyde Square

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This post was conceived of and co-written by an author who wishes to remain anonymous (I know who he/she is and fully support the content in the post).

The proposed design for the new MBTA vehicles.

With the news that the MBTA Fiscal Management and Control Board is considering a massive revamp and modernization of the Green Line, including modern rolling stock, comes the necessity to consider the future of the E Branch. Additionally, the MBTA’s Focus40 plan for the next 20 years of the MBTA makes several recommendations for the E line, in particular, which we think could be implemented relatively easily and inexpensively, and would allow the T to provide better, more efficient service in the corridor.

However, the E branch, with its street-running segments in heavy traffic and simple loop terminal, poses a problem. Should the FMCB choose to modernize the system and acquire 100-foot-long cars, two-car trains of the new rolling stock will be unable to fit into the existing Heath Street Loop, one of the smallest on the system once the Lechmere Yard is decommissioned with the coming completion of the Green Line Extension project. This would limit the capacity of any trains serving the E Line, including in the Central Subway and the GLX.

In part as a result of the MBTA’s past lack of transparency about the Arborway line, the future of the E Branch is a touchy subject and a source of frustration for many. There are some in Jamaica Plain would obviously like to see the line extended back to the Arborway, but this is unlikely. This is due to the existing reliability issues on the mixed-traffic segment and the unlikelihood of gaining high-quality dedicated right-of-way on Centre Street (where the 39 bus suffers reliability issues) and which has a narrow cross-section which is, in certain points, just 40 feet wide (narrower than any existing streetcar line in the country with the exception of two blocks of the J-Church on 30th Street in San Francisco, where, it’s worth point out, it doesn’t snow), so a full-scale restoration still seems unlikely. Indeed, the E branch is the first line to be cut when the T runs short of vehicles; recently it has been relatively frequently terminated at Brigham Circle during the evening rush on some days, apparently due to a shortage of operable trolleys (or as the T’s Twitter called it: “disabled trains“). The T has been less than transparent about this, raising bad memories of the Arborway Line’s “temporarily suspended” days, which began in 1985 and lasted for decades (unlike the final 1985 shutdown, service has generally been restored in the evening).

Despite the state of the E Branch beyond Brigham Circle, and the challenges facing it in a modernized future, ideas for its improvement continue to pop up. The line is mostly constrained by a short section of street running near Brigham Circle, where the E Line shares right-of-way not only with the congested Huntington Avenue leading from Route 9 to the Longwood Medical area, but also the frequent 39 and 66 buses. Northeastern transportation professor Peter Furth and then-student Charlie Guo put together a proposal to create a dedicated transitway through this section, a corridor—and major bottleneck—identified by CTPS analysis as one where transit riders represent a high percentage of road users at peak hour. Meanwhile, the Go Boston 2030 plan suggests extending the branch, not all the way back to the Arborway, but to Hyde Square in the northern part of JP.

The Furth-Guo proposal on Huntington Ave.

Between the recent rush-hour cutbacks and the challenges that any proposed Green Line modernization would pose to Heath Loop, it is likely that if the E Branch is to survive beyond Brigham Circle, it is in need of a plan for modernization and improvement itself. Such a plan must satisfy several elements. It should:

  • Preserve reliability for the entire E service. Unreliablity west of Brigham Circle can cause cascading delays down the line, which will become more problematic as the line is extended to West Medford.
  • Be compatible with modern rolling stock
  • Adequately serve, or even improve, the needs of current riders on the E Branch and the parallel 39 bus
  • Increase overall capacity to meet the needs of the considerable development on the Huntington Avenue corridor

This post seeks to to combine the Furth-Guo proposal with additional dedicated right-of-way on South Huntington Avenue and follow the City of Boston’s proposal to extend the E to Hyde Square. Such an extension would likely involve some rearranging and consolidation of stations, not only in the section between Tremont and Riverway as in the Furth-Guo proposal, but additionally on South Huntington.

This Huntington Transitway would have several beneficial features. It would be designed to serve both trolleys and buses; since the E will likely never be restored beyond Hyde Square, there will always be a necessity for a frequent bus serving the Centre Street corridor. As such, while a center-running configuration is clearly preferable on the Tremont-Riverway section, a side-running configuration might be preferable on portions of South Huntington. This is particularly the case on South Huntington approaching the right turn on to Riverway, where the left lane, which is used by left-turning traffic and streetcars, is often congested, while the right lane flows freely. It would also allow an accessible, level-boarding station for trolleys and buses to be built integrated into the sidewalk.

While the right lane need not necessarily be an exclusive transit lane, moving the trolley cars from the left lane to the right—if geometry allows them to then swing into a center right-of-way on the leg of Huntington leading to Brigham Circle—would allow them to bypass this congestion. In the other direction, the right lane of Huntington Avenue westbound—the one which leads to the Jamaicway and Route 9—features far longer queues than the lane leading to a left turn onto South Huntington, so dedicating that left lane to transit should have minimal impact on queuing. Transit signal priority at this intersection would also allow transit vehicles to trigger favorable signals, rather than having to wait in queues.

In the Hyde Square area, finding an adequate terminal proves somewhat challenging. South Huntington is not quite wide enough for a multi-track terminal to be easily built (although it would probably be possible) and the most obvious off-street possibility, the parking lots on the Angell MSPCA property, are too far north of the main ridership generators further south in JP. One possibility would be to acquire the properties on the south side of Barbara Street, the acquisition of which would likely cost in the $2-$3 million (given their current assessment, and which could be partially recouped by allow development on part of the parcel or as air rights); these are currently single-story buildings housing small businesses, which could be offered assistance in relocation. This would allow for three tracks and two island platforms for the future 200-foot trains, which is similar to the Expo Line’s Santa Monica terminus in the Los Angeles area. Given the capacity constraints on the central subway, more-frequent service necessitating a larger terminal would likely not be necessary (and two tracks may be sufficient). This terminal would be well-located adjacent to a library and supermarket.

A sketch of a terminal at Hyde Square south of Barbara St. The track shown as dashed may not be necessary.

This extension would also allow a significant recalibration of bus service in the corridor, making the overall system more efficient. The current E Branch is the only branch of the Green Line which has peak demand in the reverse direction, with the dominant flow toward the Longwood Medical Area in the morning and away from it toward downtown in the evening. The  parallel 39 bus has an opposite profile, inbound in the morning and outbound in the evening. This leads to inefficiency: there are often full 39 buses running parallel to empty E trains in one direction and empty buses passing by full E cars in the other. There are, in fact, four overlapping markets served along the Huntington Avenue-Centre Street corridor.

  • JP Center/Forest Hills to Back Bay. While this is served by the 39 bus, most residents of this portion of JP are within an easy walk of the Orange Line, which is significantly faster.
  • JP Center/Forest Hills to Longwood. This corridor not well-served by the Orange Line, but is served by the trunk of the 39 bus.
  • Hyde Square to Longwood. This short trip is currently only served by the 39 bus, but if the E line were extended, it would provide redundant service along this corridor.
  • Hyde Square to Back Bay. Hyde Square is the furthest point on the 39 bus from the Orange Line which is not also served by the Green Line. Thus, it is often faster to take the 39 bus downtown than to walk to the Orange Line, despite the congestion encountered by the 39 on South Huntington.

The Hyde Square E Line extension would allow simplification of this route structure. The 39 bus would still be required for the JP Center to Forest Hills trip. However, the two Hyde Square trips, which currently cause most of the crowding on the 39 bus, would instead be replaced by the E Line, which has plenty of room in this “reverse-peak” (as far as ridership is concerned) direction. Thus, the 39 bus could conceivably be truncated to the Longwood Medical Area, since the E Line would provide the necessary service from Hyde Square to Downtown and Back Bay (with service from JP Center to Downtown provided by the Orange Line, or by transferring). The current markets would be preserved, and the half-mile extension of the E Line would be balanced by truncating the 39 bus by three times that distance.

Stations would also be consolidated, to provide accessibility without too-close stop spacing. A single bus/rail station would take the place of Mission Park and Fenwood Road on Huntington Ave, serving the 39, 66 and E Line. The Riverway Station would remain, with the potential to build a level-boarding island for buses and trolley cars. The Back of the Hill and Heath Street stations would be consolidated up the hill and closer to the entrance to the VA. This would provide better access to the VA, the new apartments across the street, and place the station on a less-steep hill. A final station would be just south of Bynner Street (on a straight, flat area) before the terminal at Hyde Square. VA and Bynner could be designed as center platform stations for the E Line, and buses could stop in the travel lanes adjacent to them. This would minimize the need to remove parking spaces.

South Huntington, typical profile. Note that while a curb-lane buffered bike lane would be preferable, this setup allows
additional room for parked cars if the street is narrowed due to snow accumulation without fouling the trolley right-of-way.

South Huntington station profile, with Green Line in mixed-traffic and center platforms for trolleys, side stops for buses. Given the narrow width of the Green Line vehicles (104″, or 8’8″) it would be easy for cars and bicyclists to pass stopped trolleys in a shared lane. When trolleys aren’t present, cars could pass bicyclists.
Truncating the Back Bay portion of the 39 bus would have additional benefits, since it would not necessarily have to end its route in Longwood, but could instead provide through service. One intriguing idea would be to merge the 39 and the western half of the 47 bus. The 47 is an amalgam of bus routes: the original Cambridgeport bus (one of the first streetcars converted to a bus, in the 1920s) was extended across the Cottage Farm Bridge and lengthened over time so that it now runs from Central Square to Broadway, with a running time generally in the neighborhood of an hour. Does anyone ride the entire route? Unlikely, given that the Red Line makes the same trip in under 20 minutes. So the 47 could be broken in to two more manageable sections. The northern/western portion, from Cambridge to the LMA, could be interlined with the 39, allowing a direct trip from Cambridge to Jamaica Plain, a new travel pattern to the growing Cambridge market. City of Boston data show that there are 1500 Jamaica Plain residents who work in Cambridge (7.5% of the population; only the Downtown market is larger, yet there is no direct bus from JP to Cambridge), and this would likely be a popular route, utilizing the “backhaul” portion of the 47 with lower peak demand. The eastern/southern portion of the 47, now a more manageable route, could be extended from Broadway to City Point, allowing a one-seat crosstown ride from South Boston to the LMA. 
A mock-up of an MBTA map showing the E Line to Hyde Square, the 39 Forest Hills-Central and the 47 LMA-City Point.
Between Hyde Square and Heath Street, South Huntington Avenue is wide enough to allow a streetcar, some of the original trolley poles may be salvageable and could be reused, and most importantly, there is an active power feed under the street. Constructing this extension, and the transit priority between Heath Street and Brigham Circle, would be relatively inexpensive, and serve tens of thousands of passengers daily and improve the bus network as well. The half acre of land used for the new terminal at Hyde Square would be balanced by the opportunity to develop a similarly-sized parcel at the current location of the Heath Street Loop (and which would probably allow higher-density development). 
Extending the Green Line to Hyde Square, and improving the line south of Brigham Circle, should be seriously considered by Boston and the MBTA. Such a project would likely be eligible for federal funding, as well, as part of the FTA’s core capacity program. This program provides federal funding to projects which increase the capacity of heavily-used transit infrastructure. The stipulations for eligibility are:
  • Be located in a corridor that is at or over capacity or will be in five years
  • Increase capacity by 10% 
  • “not include project elements designated to maintain a state of good repair”
The E Line to Hyde Square appears to check all of those boxes. Is the line over capacity? Have you ever been on the Green Line at rush hour? The ability to run larger 200-foot trains, which would require a new terminal on the E Line, would definitely increase capacity by 10% (in fact, there might be other portions of the Green Line which could included in a core capacity grant package). And since this would be adding new service, it wouldn’t be a state of good repair project, even if part of it was to move some of the track on Huntington and South Huntington avenues to allow more efficient service. With the added benefit of the potential for federal funding, this project becomes an even easier sell. 

Bus yards vs TOD: where is the best place to store buses?

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Boston has a bus problem. Beyond narrow, congested roads and
routes which traverse several jurisdictions—in some cases half a dozen in the
span of a single mile—there are simply not
enough buses to go around. At rush hour, some MBTA bus routes only have
service every 20 to 30 minutes, despite crush-capacity loads on the vehicles
serving them. To add significantly more service would require the MBTA to add
additional buses to the fleet, but procurement of new vehicles is not the rate-limiting
factor. The larger issue is that the MBTA’s bus storage facilities are
undersized and oversubscribed, so adding new buses would require adding
additional storage capacity to the system, a high marginal capital cost for any
increase in service.

Before doing this, the MBTA may be able to squeeze some
marginal efficiency from the system. All-door boarding would reduce dwell
times, speeding buses along the routes. Cities and towns are working with the agency to
add queue jumps, bus lanes and signal priority, steps which will allow the
current fleet to make more trips over the course of the day. Running more
overnight service would mean that some number of buses would be on the road at
all times of the day and night, reducing the need to store those buses during
those times (although they might need to be serviced during peak hours, and may
not be available for peak service). Still, all of this amounts to nibbling
around the edges. Improving bus service may result in increased patronage, and
any additional capacity wrung out of the system could easily be overrun by new
passengers. The MBTA’s bus system is, in essence, a zero-sum game: to add any
significant capacity, the system has to move resources from one route to
another: to rob Peter to pay Paul.

Furthermore, Boston’s bus garages are
antiquated. In the Twin Cities—a cold-weather city where a similarly-sized bus
fleet provides half as many trips as Boston (although about the same number of
passenger miles)—nearly every bus garage is fully-enclosed, so buses don’t sit
outside during cold snaps and blizzards as they do in Boston. Every facility
there has been built since 1980, while several of the MBTA’s bus yards date to
the 1930s; some were originally built for streetcars. Boston
desperately needs expanded bus facilities, but it also needs new bus garages:
the facilities in Lynn, Fellsway and Quincy are in poor condition, and the
Arborway yard is a temporary facility with very little enclosed area.

However, what Boston’s bus yards lack in size or youth they
make up for in location. The MBTA bus system is unique in the country in that there is no bus service through downtown: nearly every trip to the city requires a transfer from a
surface line to a rapid transit line. In the past, elaborate transfer stations
were built to facilitate these transfers, with streetcar and bus ramps above
and below street level (a few vestiges of this system are still in use, most
notably the bus tunnel at Harvard), with bus routes radiating out from these
transfer stations. When the Boston Elevated Railway, the predecessor to
the MBTA, needed to build a streetcar yard, they generally built it adjacent to
a transfer station, and thus adjacent to as many bus routes as possible. Many
of these have become today’s bus yards, and the MBTA has some of the lowest
deadhead (out of revenue service) mileage to and from the starts of its routes.

From a purely operational standpoint, this makes sense: the
buses are stored close to where they are needed. But from an economic
standpoint, it means that the T’s buses occupy prime real estate. Unlike rail
yards, which need to be located adjacent to the lines they serve, bus yards can
be located further away. While this introduces increased deadhead costs to get
the buses from the yard to the route, it frees up valuable land for different
uses. In recent decades, the T has sold off some of its bus garages, most
notably the Bartlett Yard near Dudley and the Bennett Yard near Harvard Square,
which now houses the Kennedy School. The downside is that the T currently has
no spare capacity at its current yards, and needs to rebuild or replace its
oldest facilities.

While the agency has no concrete plans, current ideas
circulate around using park-and-ride lots adjacent to rail stations for bus
storage, including at sites
adjacent to the Riverside and Wellington stations. The agency owns these
parcels, and the parking can easily be accommodated in a nearby garage. The
issue: these parcels are prime real estate for transit oriented development,
and putting bus garages next to transit stations is not the best use of the
land. Riverside
has plans in place, and Wellington’s parking lot sits across Station Landing, which has
hundreds of transit-accessible apartments.

In addition to what is, in a sense, a housing
problem for buses, the Boston area has an acute housing problem for people. The
region’s largest bus yards are adjacent to Forest Hills, Broadway and Sullivan
Square: three transit stations with easy downtown connections. These issues are
not unrelated: there are few large parcels available for housing or transit
storage (or, really, for any other use). If the region devotes land to housing,
it may not have the ability to accommodate the transit vehicles needed to serve
the housing (without devolving the region in to further gridlock). If it uses
transit-accessible land for storing buses, it gives up land which could be used
for dense, transit-accessible housing. What the transit agency needs are sites
suitable for building bus depots, on publicly-owned land, and which would not
otherwise have a high-level use for housing.

Consider a bus maintenance facility: it is really something
no one wants in their back yard. And unlike normal NIMBYism, there actually
some good reasons for this: bus yards are noisy, have light pollution, and
operate at all times of day, but are especially busy for early morning
operations. An optimal site for a bus yard would be away from residences, near
highways (so the buses can quickly get to their routes), preferably near the
outer ends of many routes, and not on land which could otherwise be used for
transit-oriented development. It would also avoid greenfield sites, and
preferably avoid sites which are very near sea level, although if necessary
buses can be stored elsewhere during predicted seawater flood events.

The MBTA is in luck. An accident of history may provide
Boston with several locations desirable for bus garages, and little else. While
most sites near highways don’t have enough space for bus yards, when the regional
highway system was canceled in the early 1970s, several interchanges had
been partially constructed, but were no longer needed. While portions of the
neighborhoods cleared for highways have been, or could be, repurposed in to
developable land, the “infields” of highway ramps is not generally ripe for
development. Yet they’re owned by the state, currently unused, convenient to highways
and unlikely to be used for any other purpose. For many bus routes, moving to
these locations would have a minimal effect on operation costs—deadhead pull-in
and pull-out time—and the land will otherwise go unused. Land near transit
stations is valuable. Land near highways is not.

Building bus yards in these locations would allow the T to
add vehicles to the fleet while potentially closing some of its oldest,
least-efficient bus yards, replacing them with modern facilities. They wouldn’t
serve all routes, since many routes would still be optimally served by
closer-in yards with shorter deadhead movements to get the buses to the start
of the route. (To take this to an extreme: it would be very cheap to build a
bus yard at, say, the former Fort Devens site, but any savings would be gobbled
up by increased overhead getting the buses 35 miles to Boston.) Highway ramps
are optimal because it allows buses to quickly access the start and end of
routes, many of which, by history and happenstance, are near the highways
anyway.

Most importantly: moving buses to these locations would enhance
opportunities for additional housing, not preclude it. Building thousands of
new housing units adjacent to transit stations pays dividends several times
over. It increases local tax revenues and also creates new, fare-paying transit
riders without the need to build any new transit infrastructure. Finally, by
allowing more people to use transit for their commutes, it reduces the growth
of congestion, allowing people driving—and people riding transit—to move more
efficiently.

Specifically, there are five highway sites in the region
which could be repurposed for bus fleet facilities:

  • Quincy, in between the legs of the
    Braintree Split
  • Canton, on the aborted ramps of
    the Southwest Expressway
  • Weston, where the new all-electric
    tolling has allowed for streamlined land use
  • Burlington, in the land originally
    planned for the Route 3 cloverleaf
  • Revere, in the circle where the
    Northeast Expressway was originally planned to branch off of Route 1 through
    the Rumney Marshes.

In more detail, with buses counts from the MBTA’s 2014
Blue Book. These are in-service buses required, so the total number of buses
at each location, accounting for spares, would be 15 to 20 percent higher. The
system currently maintains approximately
1000 buses.

Quincy (67 buses)

All 200-series Quincy Routes

The current Quincy garage serves the
200-series routes, with a peak demand for 67 vehicles. The current garage is in
need of replacement. The current yard takes up 120,000 square feet on Hancock
Street, half a mile from Quincy Center station. This could easily be
accommodated within or adjacent to the Braintree Split, with minimal changes to
pull-out routes. Serving additional routes would be difficult, since the
nearest routes run out of Ashmont, and pull-out buses would encounter rush hour
traffic, creating a longer trip than from the current Cabot yard.

Canton (35
buses)

Routes
24, 32, 33, 34, 34E, 35, 36, 37, 40

This would be a smaller yard and would
probably only operate during weekdays with minimal heavy maintenance
facilities, but would reduce the overall number of buses requiring storage
elsewhere.

Weston (71 buses)

Routes 52, 57, 59, 60, 64, 70/70A, all
500-series express bus routes.

With the recent conversion to all-electronic
tolling on the Turnpike and different ramp layout, the land is newly-freed,
plentiful, and many buses serving this area have long pull-out routes from
Boston. The portion between the two branches of the Turnpike and east of the
128-to-Turnpike ramp is 500,000 square feet, the same size as the Arborway
Yard, and there’s additional room within the rest of the interchange. Without a
bus yard west of Boston, any route extending west or northwest would benefit
from this yard.

Burlington (50 buses)

Routes 62, 67, 76, 77, 78, 79, 134, 350, 351,
352, 354

These routes utilize serve the northwest
suburbs, but most are served by the Charleston and Bennett divisions in
Somerville. Most routes would have significantly shorter pull-outs.

Revere (157 buses)

The two oldest bus garages north of Boston are
Lynn and Fellsway, which account for a total of 125 buses and about 200,000
square feet. They are both centrally-located to the bus network, so moving
buses to the 128 corridor would result in longer pull-outs, except for a few
routes noted above. However, the circle where Route 1 turns northeast and the
Northeast Expressway was originally planned and graded towards Lynn across
Rumney Marshes has 750,000 square feet, and the extension towards the marshes
more. The fill is far enough above sea level to not worry about flooding, and
grade separation allows easy exit and entry on to Route 1. Some buses may make
sense to base at the Route 3 site, particularly the 130-series buses. In
addition to the Lynn and Fellsway buses, this site could take over for many
routes currently operating out of the Charlestown yard, freeing up capacity
there for other uses.

Other routes served by the Charlestown yards
would face somewhat longer pull-out times from Revere, but given the development
potential in Sullivan Square, the T could consider downsizing the yard facility
there and moving operations to a less valuable site. This site, at more than
one million square feet, could likely replace the Charlestown bus facility
entirely.

The mystery of the 600 feet between the Red and Blue lines

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Last month, the MBTA presented its “Focus40” list of items it wants to complete by 2040. The Commonwealth Magazine article noted that the report states that the Blue and Red lines are only 600 feet apart, and connecting them would provide a two-minute walk in lieu of the Red-Blue connector at Charles. This sounds good. The only problem with this is that the Red and Blue lines are more than 600 feet apart. Quite a bit more. In fact, the walk from a Red Line train to a Blue Line train is more than three times as long. Where did the 600 foot figure come from? Let’s find out, with old-timey maps!

The Red Line runs beneath Winter and Summer streets. The Blue Line runs under State Street. These streets are, according to Google Maps (and, I assume, in real life), more than 1500 feet apart. But it turns out, that’s not even the real distance you’d have to walk between the subway lines. Boston’s subways were not built in a particularly coordinated fashion (although, unlike New York, which had two competing subway companies, the Boston Elevated Railway, or BERy, was the only game in town). The Green Line tunnel was built first, the Blue Line second (and, thus, below the Green Line) and the Orange Line tunnel third below the Blue (the Orange Line running through downtown predates the Blue Line, but for 7 years it ran on the Green Line’s tracks). Each newer tunnel went under the others, which is why the Green Line runs above. The Red Line wasn’t built until several years later, running below both the Green and Orange lines.

All of the lines were built within the confines of Boston’s notoriously old and narrow street grid, which was nearly three centuries in the making even then. So to fit stations in, and stairs between subway lines, both the Red and Blue Line stations are offset east of the Orange Line, and the Orange Line platforms are offset on separate sides of the subway to fit within the width of Washington Street.

Up until the 1960s, in fact, platforms were referred to as separate stations by the street they intersected, rather than station names. So the Downtown Crossing complex was referred to as Winter for the Forest Hills-bound platform, Summer for the Oak Grove-bound platform (then the Everett-bound platform) and Washington for the Red Line platforms. (It doesn’t help matters that most road names in Boston change at Washington Street.) Similarly, State was Milk-State on the Orange Line and Devonshire on the Blue Line. This seems nonsensical, until you think about it: to get to the Milk Station, you entered on Milk Street. To get to the State station, you entered on State Street. There are more examples; as this page posted long ago.

In any case, the Blue Line platform extends east from Devonshire Street, hence the name. The Red Line platform has entrances on Washington Street, but the actual platform begins around Hawley Street. To walk from Hawley to Devonshire via Washington? That turns out to be a walk of 1900 feet, up (or down) two stairs (since the Orange Line is built under the Blue Line, and the Red Line is under the Orange Line).

So where does this 600 foot figure come from? I’m actually not quite sure. What I think the number is indicating is the distance which would have to be dug between the two Orange Line platforms to provide a pedestrian connection between the Red and Blue lines. To make sense of this, we’re going to have to think in three dimensions (at least). Lucky for us, the Boston Transit Commission issued yearly reports during the construction of the subways in the early 1900s, and Ward Maps has them on their website (and has provided me with some high-resolution copies for this article, so shout out to Ward Maps for being excellent).

Remember that the Orange Line platforms are offset laterally. At Downtown Crossing, for instance, the northbound platform extends from Summer Street 350 feet north to Franklin Street, and the southbound platform south to Temple Place. In fact, the MBTA has been experimenting with new GTFS features to show the layout of Downtown Crossing, which you can view here. (Note, on the right side, the multiple levels; click B1 and B2 to toggle between.)

For the Milk-State platforms, this gets a bit more complicated. Washington Street is narrow enough at Winter/Summer: about 60 feet between buildings, but by the time you get to Milk Street, it’s narrower: only about 40 feet. Some of Boston’s oldest buildings stand here—the Old South Meeting House and Old State House date to the early 1700s—and the subway had to be built between the foundations; in the case of the Old State House, a subway entrance was built right in to the basement. (There are also newer buildings and, because reasons, parking garages.) This is barely wide enough for two subway tracks and a platform. So what did they do? They offset the platforms vertically: in effect, they stacked the trains.

Here’s what the tunnel looked like just south of the Milk platform when it was under construction around 1906:

Original caption: Portion of platform of Milk St Station over the track for northbound cars. 
For orientation, the Old South Meeting House is approximately to your right (and above). Original file.

If you’re familiar with State station, this is the platform you exit off of coming on a train from Oak Grove. To get to the Blue Line, you walk along a corridor which is sort of an extension of the platform—dubbed, apparently, the speedway (from this detailed 1909 article on the tunnel), and now home to funky colors—and then the State platform, with trains to Oak Grove also to your left, and with escalators to the Blue Line to your right.

Here’s a map from 1913 showing the stations (and, yes, it’s the best map I can find of the actual locations of station concourses). I’ve shown current station names in all-caps, and former station names in lowercase; for DTX and State, I’ve outlined the platforms in their current colors and labeled the platforms with their original names. Note that while the Orange Line platforms were built 350 feet long, and only had to be lengthened minimally to accommodate six-car trains. (Original file from Ward Maps)

View the full-size version.
I think the idea to connect the Red and Blue line stations comes from the fact that the Milk platform (the southbound State platform) extends to Milk Street, and the Summer platform (the northbound Downtown Crossing platform) extends to Franklin Street, and those streets are only about 300 feet apart. I’m still not sure where the 600 comes from, but 300 is half of 600, so this should be twice as easy. Right?

Well, not quite. Look back up at the photograph above and imagine extending the Milk (Southbound State) platform shown 300 feet east (towards you) to meet the Summer (Downtown Crossing) platform. It would have to extend above the Oak Grove-bound Orange Line platform. When Oak Grove trains leave Downtown Crossing, then descend quickly to dive under the Milk Street platform pictured, descending at a 5.5% grade. So this would not be a level ramp by any means; in fact, a 5.5% grade exceeds the maximum allowed by ADA regulations, so it couldn’t even be built above the tracks with infinite space above. Which is kind of moot anyway, because it would also butt up in to the top of the tunnel pretty quickly. It would therefore have to jog south of Washington Street’s right-of-way, under the buildings there, which would add complexity to construction and yet more distance to the walk.

From 1906, here’s an elevation profile of the entirety of the Washington Street tunnel (now the Orange Line) connecting the elevateds north and south of the city (from 1901 to 1908, the elevated trains ran through what is now the Green Line, and the abandoned Pleasant Street Portal). I’ve added some annotation to it. The vertical orange lines show the ends of the platforms which would be used as the route for the pedestrian path. I’ve also shown the location of the Red Line (not built at this point) and the Blue Line (called then the East Boston Tunnel, or the E.B.T.). I’ve also superimposed the location of the other-direction Orange Line platforms on each drawing, and used black lines to superimpose other elements of the tunnel. I mainly want to draw attention to the fact that a passageway between the Summer and Milk platforms could not fit within the current envelope of the Orange Line, and would have to be built to the south, because to the north there are train tracks in the way, and to the south there is the minor issue of building foundations being in the way.

View the full-size version.

Again, this comes from Ward Maps, and the original file is here, and while the original has been sold (and, alas, not to me) you can get a reprint to hang on your wall (which I am considering).

So what are the takeaways from this little exercise?

  • While the Orange Line platforms and concourses would allow a connection to be made between the Red and Blue lines, it would amount to a walk of more than a third of a mile, up or down multiple staircases, and along already narrow and crowded subway platforms. That’s 8 minutes of walking, plus climbing some stairs, and that’s assuming you can walk at 3 mph down crowded platforms. At rush hour, it might take a good deal longer. It would probably be faster to just take the Green Line one stop from Park to Government Center, since the Green Line is directly above the Red and Blue lines.
  • The 300 feet which would be needed for an additional tunnel would have to go through and underneath the building foundations outside of the footprint of the street, because the Orange Line is already threaded under Washington Street, which is very narrow.
  • The entire utility of this connection could be realized by allowing an out-of-system transfer between Downtown Crossing and State, which will be possible with the new fare system currently being procured. It only adds one flight of stairs: two up from Red to street level, then one down to Blue.
  • This would do little to actually address the issue of core capacity, which is what the Red-Blue connector aims to address. Even if this was convenient for people to use, it wouldn’t result any less crowding on the Red Line, and the Orange Line and Blue Line platforms would actually become more crowded than they are today.
As the last point alludes to, the reason for building a Red-Blue connector—a real, actual Blue Line extension to Charles/MGH—is two-fold. One is to provide a good connection between the Blue Line and the Red Line. Perhaps as important, however, is to pull some of the demand out of the core stations of the subway. Rather than crowding trains and concourses at Park, Downtown Crossing, Government Center and State, riders between East Boston and Cambridge would be able to bypass the busy core of the system altogether. You get that if you actually build a Red-Blue connector tunnel. You get that only if you actually connect the two lines, not if you build a long, arduous pedestrian connection and sell it as an innovative piece of infrastructure.
And, alas, I still have no idea where the the 600 foot figure came from.