TomNelligan wrote:Cutting Amtrak a check to poke some Shuttles 3 stops north is a much more immediately visible way of doing that than throwing together a few T-logo jalopies and wondering how the hell they're going to keep them from breaking down 75 miles away from maint HQ. Frequencies using Amtrak would also be almost identical to the best they could go alone. So that's the most logical way to approach it.F-line to Dudley via Park wrote: I don't understand this mentality, which seems to have survived intact from the Patrick-to-Baker handoff, that this service has to be rushed like a "use it or lose it" proposition. Why roll out lousy transit that can't connect to anything useful and is guaranteed to bleed red for its first 5 years, when simply exercising some patience and waiting the 5 years for the connections to fill in gives it a much better chance of hitting the ground with momentum that begs for future expansion?Isn't at least part of this rush an effort to throw some highly visible transit money out west for the benefit of the local pols (whose votes Baker will need in connection with MBTA reform)? Making friends out in that wilderness beyond Worcester was certainly one of Deval's motivations.
The interregnum where Shuttles serving Greenfield gives way to commuter rail serving Greenfield and Shuttles being reassigned east to Boston times more perfectly with the Hartford Line scale-up and any probable build schedules for Inland service. So it also works best for priming the pump on both state-level service expansion initiatives out of Springfield. (And, yes, if Baker is seeking buy-in across the state for transportation funding the Inlands are hard to pass up seeing as how they have pro-rail constituencies in Boston, MetroWest, Worcester County, and Springfield/Hampden County tied neatly together by one corridor.)
MassDOT vs. CDOT, Patrick vs. Malloy...lot of bad blood there the last 2-4 years. CDOT was really nonplussed at MassDOT's unwillingness to pay fair share for major NHHS components like the layover; MA pretty much folded the tent the second the fed grants came in for the Springfield Union renovations. And Patrick made an enemy out of Malloy announcing that whole strange Berkshire Line train over an unwilling CT's head when the majority of the cost and logistical concerns were south of the border...then rubbing it in Malloy's face by chartering that MBTA train full of dignitaries across the border into New Caanan and giving a speech on foreign soil about how he (Patrick) was going to deliver them (Nutmeggers) a one-seat to New York. Not a single CT official attended the event, or went on-record making comment about it.
So there's a lot of frayed nerves and fence-mending to do in that working relationship. Most of it over petty, personality-driven stuff like that...with Patrick oddly being the aggressor (not normally his style at all). It's hard to tell where the relationship stands now because Baker simply hasn't had a lot of high-profile opportunities to go out and talk Western MA transportation. One would hope they can turn the page and see the obvious efficiencies they can both gain by working together; they'll have to if the Inlands are anyone's priority. The new MA regime is probably treading lightly out of fear of the unknown until the two governors have a chance for more quality facetime. I certainly can't imagine relations would stay status-quo as strained as before since the Berkshire folly more or less ended when Patrick's term did, and that was the primary irritant. But it would be a big missed opportunity to not coordinate. I just don't see how go-it-alone for first dibs makes for useful service when coordinating clocks around the phased rollout can scale so much better with initial momentum that begs for more.