Fairmount Line Discussion

Those are excellent photos of great subjects. Has the T made definite suggestions (oxymoron based on experience) of additional service? I *assume* South Station has midday capacity, but not in the rush periods.

Look at all that blank concrete! It'll take the vandals at least a week to cover it with graffiti!

PBM

Surprisingly, Uphams Corner and Morton Street have done pretty well on the graffiti front.

F-line to Dudley via Park wrote: This is starting to smell a little like intentional grounding. Which is utterly baffling with these funded, time-dependent stimulus projects.

I'm wondering if there's some really systemic problem going on here. Remember the delays on the various station reconstruction projects (Arlington comes to mind)? Absolutely nothing is being done on anything approaching time. Of course, this is perhaps par for the course, when you consider how the state government behaved regarding the combined sewer overflow laws. Basically, it went scofflaw until it was hammered repeatedly in the courts.

The blame, in the end, has to go to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts government. It is legally responsible for the Big Dig mitigations (where it has violated the law a dozen times or so), and is also responsible for underfunding the MBTA, and is also responsible for lading the MBTA with debt, and is now in charge of the MBTA board. In the end, when the federal government orders the MBTA to get into compliance with the PTC mandate and the ADA regulations, the state government won't be able to claim that it has an arms-length relationship -- especially now that the MassDOT board IS the MBTA board -- and will be forced to pay for it rather than allow the entire Boston transportation system to suht down.

At this point it would seem that another lawsuit against MassDOT for violating various legal commitments would be in order. MassDOT inherited the obligations of the "Executive Office of Transportation", and the EOT was responsible for the Green Line Extension and the Fairmount Line Improvements, and so forth.

Of course, the full effects of the 2009 creation of MassDOT may not be felt yet -- perhaps Governor Patrick's reorg will actually improve things eventually. To be optimistic. The first thing they might want to consider doing is updating the MBTA projects website, which appears to have stopped being updated several years ago, or the EOT projects website, which also appears to have stopped being updated several years ago. WSDOT is a model of information provision in this regard.

The first official word I've heard on when stations will open: Talbot Avenue in October, Four Corners/Geneva in April 2013, and Newmarket in June 2013.

http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/rox ... _init.html

Excellent pictures.

Are my eyes deceiving me, or do all stations require ridiculous winding ramps to get to the platform? That is, I understand and appreciate ADA requirement, but are there no staircase shortcuts....?

Also, has any word been sent out on what fares will be?

Subway fares, or are they trying to aim for record low ridership with zone 1 fares?

If it's $5.50 a ride.....I anticipate no more than 3 boardings a day.

joshg1 wrote:Those are excellent photos of great subjects. Has the T made definite suggestions (oxymoron based on experience) of additional service? I *assume* South Station has midday capacity, but not in the rush periods.

There was a report issued 2 or 3 years ago showing maximum capacity for the line. No idea where the report is now though. It did state that there was a good amount of room for additional trains, even at rush hour at current service levels.

jamesinclair wrote:There was a report issued 2 or 3 years ago showing maximum capacity for the line. No idea where the report is now though. It did state that there was a good amount of room for additional trains, even at rush hour at current service levels.

Yes. And not just for Fairmount itself. These 800 ft. platforms--a lot longer than the average Fairmount trainset is going to be--are because Foxboro would run 100% of its schedule via Fairmount. And, projecting 20 years out, the NEC is just going to be too congested for nearly every Franklin train to hit Back Bay. They're going to have to at some point start punting a portion of the schedule over to the Fairmount. Especially when South Station gets expanded and the outermost (Fairmount + Old Colony) platforms have a lot more schedule give than the inner platforms reserved for NEC/branches and Worcester.

There's a lot of future flex here that goes beyond Indigo-ish activity.

All do require longish ramps to get to the platforms, as do the rebuilt Morton Street, Uphams Corner, and (to some degree) Fairmount. I believe this is intentional, as I suspect that the stations are designed for future pre-payment/rapid transit-style service. Literally just have to install faregates.

Newmarket, Four Corners/Geneva, and Talbot Avenue are all inbound from Morton Street which is Zone 1A, thus all three of them will certainly be Zone 1A with subway fares. Given the proximity of Mattapan, I hope that Blue Hill Avenue will be as well but that's three years off. As above, I would not be surprised if the entire line is eventually subway fare.

I believe this is the study link you're looking for: http://www.eot.state.ma.us/downloads/MB ... Report.pdf
It reported that 20-minute rush hour headways were operationally feasible with current South Station capacity (using an additional 3 trainsets) and that "15 minutes headways on the Fairmount Line could be accommodated at South Station with only minor impacts on the schedules of other services". They also recommended dedicated Fairmount equipment with extra mid-coach doors, which is probably unlikely given that the T is heading towards bilevels, though maybe that's something to do with older but still working flats.

So what that combines to is, once the four new stations are opened (2012-2015), Fairmount and Readville get full-highs (~2020?) and South Station gets additional capacity (~2020?) there is absolutely no reason that the Fairmount Line could not become a rapid transit style service, with subway fares as far as Readville and 15-minute headways.

I believe thats the report I was thinking of yes. The fact that its on the eot site instead of MBTA is what makes it hard to find.

After something like 2 years, the notice on the T's website about the outbound platforms at Fairmount and Morton Street being out of service has been taken down.

It's also October. That means that, according to the latest information, we should be seeing Talbot Avenue open this month.

Perhaps those two things are related; I assume they'll wish to use both platforms at Talbot Avenue from the get-go.

The EGE wrote:All do require longish ramps to get to the platforms, as do the rebuilt Morton Street, Uphams Corner, and (to some degree) Fairmount. I believe this is intentional, as I suspect that the stations are designed for future pre-payment/rapid transit-style service. Literally just have to install faregates.

But really, could they not have an old fashioned staircase that just "met at the top" of the ramp?...It wouldn't even matter how "out of the way" the bottom of that staircase was: if you were able bodied, it would *always* be faster to walk to the bottom of the stairs and then straight up the stairs, rather than walking back-and-forth 3 times to ramp up.

The ramps aren't cutting off any hypotenuses, they're more like 3 hypotenuses back-and-forth up, and in that case you'd rather walk to the stairs and up the stairs.

I noticed it at Upham's Corner. This access issue is a widespread problem in newer rail stations in this country. I suspect it comes about because the designers of transit stations are just checking off boxes "Platform? Check. ADA compliance? Check." and aren't themselves users of transit. Or else, they just don't care. So they cannot imagine what it is like to waste time and energy running up and down long ramps everyday, or just missing the train because of the maze.

Some of the cheapest improvements to overall trip time could come from saner access and pedestrian flow design, but it doesn't seem to be on the radar, unfortunately.

I expect an unspoken reason for the lack of stairs is that they can't clear snow off them with machines. There's one in Haverhill in a surviving part of the old B&M station that they started chaining off around Xmas three years ago. That winter I "wrote to the top" when they didn't un-chain it by the end of April. Last year either they lost the chain/sign or just didn't bother.

Unauthorized footpaths will develop in Roxbury, just like they do everywhere else the designers have their heads where the sun doesn't shine.

Stairs have lots of little problematic things that makes ramps more attractive. People can fall down stairs - or be pushed. If someone's running from the cops, they can jump down the stairs, etc.

The ramps are also not that long! Two hundred feet is less than a minute's walk, especially considering the platforms are 800 feet long anyway. The only really long ramp is the ramp from Washington Street to the inbound platform at Four Corners/Geneva at around 600 feet (because the inbound platform is 600 feet away from Washington Street due to space reasons) - and the ramps from Geneva Avenue are only about 150 feet anyway.

The EGE wrote:Stairs have lots of little problematic things that makes ramps more attractive. People can fall down stairs - or be pushed. If someone's running from the cops, they can jump down the stairs, etc.

The ramps are also not that long! Two hundred feet is less than a minute's walk, especially considering the platforms are 800 feet long anyway. The only really long ramp is the ramp from Washington Street to the inbound platform at Four Corners/Geneva at around 600 feet (because the inbound platform is 600 feet away from Washington Street due to space reasons) - and the ramps from Geneva Avenue are only about 150 feet anyway.

600 feet is longer than the average distance between two bus stops!

Its distance that people shouldnt have to add to their trip.