Bramdeisroberts wrote:BandA wrote:With all the money going to subsidize the MBTA, all the RTA's are just bus systems so strangely enough they seem to be looking for places to spend more operating money outside the MBTA system. Is highway congestion or parking in this area bad enough to justify commuter rail, or would they be better off just widening roads & adding bicycle commuter routes?
Part of me wonders if the plan is to eventually merge this service with NHHS. I'd imagine that there's the possibility for real ridership, but only if the terminal is Hartford, rather than Springfield.
If it's only a Springfield-terminating service, then I don't really see this thing attracting more riders than would fill a DMU or two.
It's also premature. Why would MassDOT ever want to jump the gun on the Hartford Line? NHHS is the catalyst that makes Springfield Union the regional transportation center to end all regional transportation centers. Both for enabling Pioneer Valley rail service and for flushing PVTA buses full of demand to increase frequencies out of downtown. But it's a slow cooker that'll take 8 years or more to scale up from its skeletal starter schedule to the full-blown service goal of 32 trains per day.
You're right...you're not going to fill more than an RDC or two to Greenfield more than couple times per day until Springfield starts acting the part as the great transit distributor to the region. Particularly for commutes to the Hartford area where folks living as far north as Northampton have to fight I-91 backups to get to work. The baffling part is...we
know within +/- a year or two when each of those Hartford Line frequency step-ups are going to come; those step-ups are real action items, not wishful thinking. So wouldn't the productive thing for MassDOT be to predicate its rollouts of Pioneer Valley transit enhancements timed with each new NHHS schedule increase? There's no bragging rights in finishing first, especially when that just leaves it vulnerable to getting cut or stunted when the Year 1 ridership isn't that hot.
-- Wouldn't it be better to have the connections in-place timed with the service start?
-- Wouldn't it be better to have beefed up PVTA bus service timed with the service start?
-- Wouldn't it be better and less costly to operate have some sort of pre-existing ops base in place timed with the service start? Especially if they're planning to dip into their own pool of rolling ruins to supply the equipment?
-- Wouldn't it be better and less costly to operate if all of the above timings happened to serendipitously coincide with the
next scheduled MBTA and CDOT/MNRR equipment procurements, such that there'll be a lot better/fresher options for spare equipment to choose from on both sides of the state line as both sides of the state line scale up?
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? Jumping the gun on the rollout seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy where the early years of guaranteed losses becomes the excuse to never expand when demand does finally catch up. And by "expand" I don't necessarily mean the Greenfield train in isolation. Increased PVTA bus frequencies are arguably the most consequential share of purely intra-state ridership into Springfield Union once the terminal really gets cranking. But having one particularly high-profile intra-state service like the Greenfield train bleed money for its first years of service becomes the excuse to curtail service expansion in
all modes of intra-state service.