by octr202
leviramsey wrote:I might not be making my point clearly. I'm not talking about crazy, odd hours, I'm talking about people working 10-6, for example, or who have a meeting, event, etc. after work. Just this week I had a meeting in Kendall Sq...scheduled to end at 6 pm, but ran until 6:15. We're not talking about the middle of the evening, we're talking about 6:15 PM! (News flash to the schedule planners - people who work in Kendall Sq, Seaport, LMA have more than a 15-20 minute trip to North Station.) Under the new schedule for either Haverhill or Lowell I'd have faced an hour-plus wait for a train. That's just dumb. The 6:45 train to Newburyport or the 6:55 Haverhill trains aren't rush hour full, but they're busy! Faced with the new schedules, I'm either driving all the way into the city on those kind of days, or driving to the Orange Line at Wellington...meaning more cars driving in rush hour traffic...and less ridership on all other trains, too.octr202 wrote: And, now we get to exactly the point I'm trying to make. These changes (the hour plus outbound gaps in the evening, no mid-evening service, stacking late evening service for the Garden, the HUGE mid-morning inbound gap on the Eastern*) all smack of stripping service down to fit the 8/9-4/5 crowd and Garden patrons. Anyone else? Drive. That's the message. I'd love to know if the old schedules were really that horribly unworkable, or if they could have been fixed with tweaks here and there, versus making such a mess of this.Where is the demand for commuter rail? For the people who aren't in the 8-5 crowd and Fenway/Garden patrons, the train isn't going to be competitive with driving barring some combination of billions in upgrades (e.g. to get every line to 128 (or Salem for the Eastern Route) in 15 minutes, 495 in 35, and Worcester/Fitchburg/Providence in 50), or instituting a major fare restructuring (e.g. 20% increase in peak fares and halving off-peak fares). Meanwhile those two constituencies are or in the case of the Fenway/Garden patrons, could very easily be, filling trains. Optimizing for that clientele at least until enough other changes can be made is absolutely the right thing to do.
And, if you do have a dinner event or the like in the city, the Haverhill schedule hits you if you don't make the 7:40 PM train. Miss it? Wait until 9:30. Or just learn to start driving. All at a time when gridlock on I-93 starts about 5:30am, and last until nearly 8:00 PM some nights. I'm not talking about using the trains for truly odd-ball shifts, I'm talking about having a little flexibility for extra demands close to rush hour. There needs to be "shoulder" service in these schedules or they'll only serve to further erode ridership.
But then again, maybe that's the goal here.
The two biggest wrong assumptions these schedules are based on: Rush hour commuting only lasts from 6-9am and 3:30-6:30pm, and everyone works within 15-20 minutes travel of North Station.
*edited to fix that last sentence that got cut off when posting.
Last edited by octr202 on Thu Nov 19, 2015 12:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Wondering if I'll see the Western Route double-tracking finished before I retire...
Photo: Melbourne W7 No. 1019 on Route 78, Bridge & Church Streets, Richmond, Victoria. 10/21/2010
Photo: Melbourne W7 No. 1019 on Route 78, Bridge & Church Streets, Richmond, Victoria. 10/21/2010