Foxboro is not a relevant analogy, because that is not at all what Wynn Resorts estimates as their peak demand hours. They are shelling out-of-pocket for enhanced weekday off-peak Orange Line service because the resort's location near the Boston CBD puts their surge hours after-work, not weekender. Boston is a not a large gaming market for weekenders; the compact physical size of the city means the tourists and day-trippers hop and skip around with their leisure activities in couple-hour chunks instead of parking in one spot for 8+ hours at a time. Self-contained resorts like Foxwoods & Mohegan Sun (and the strips of Atlantic City and Vegas, if you want to consider those big blocks of resorts as one big amusement park) run rings around Wynn Everett in "set it and forget it" day-long entertainment. Where nothing can top Everett is on quick-trips and business-oriented travel. Foxwoods & Mohegan aren't the kinds of places you can go to after work on a Thursday night and still get home with enough sleep for for Fri. morning. They're not the kinds of places that can take a corporate day of fun and still get the out-of-town execs to Logan on their red-eye by mid-evening. And they're not the kinds of places where end-of-day at a big Boston Convention & Expo Ctr. event can send convention-goers to the after-hours entertainment in 25 minutes on a Silver Line bus.
Those are the demand spikes Wynn is chasing, and if you can't stop at the CR stop during peak hours or on the near-peak...then it's not only useless to Wynn's bottom-line but a negative-value build. Wynn Resorts would have to, as its public-private obligation for the station, invent loss-leader ways to goose its utilization. The only times it can run are well off-center from the resort's peak demand, when Orange is well under-capacity and shuttle buses freest from traffic jams, on the hours CR schedules stink and offer the least frequency incentive to ride. What incentive is there for a brutally for-profit corporation to fund that? Are their concierges going to promote a stop that the desk jockeys can't use and the corporate day outings can't use to get home after a day of team-building? Are they going to explain to all the out-of-towners that the trains only stop there the exact opposite hours the trains run most often, contrary to basic understanding of how transit frequencies work? Hell no...they'll just tell people to take the shuttle to Orange or Silver-Gateway because it does what it says and they won't have to explain away a lot of inconveniences. Negative-value.
Furthermore, the ops restrictions in the bulletin with speeds over the bridge and freight protects go into effect if the platform exists at all, regardless of when it's used or not. If a public-access platform exists, the trains must assume 24/7 that there could be a waiting passenger standing on the platform whether the train is stopping there or not. The only way around that is to spend extra $$$ to design an enclosed egress that can be locked with physical barricade during slots it's not in use (like, unfortunately, rush hour), and have security sweep the area for stragglers when it's being closed. Not only are gate-locked CR stations extremely rare systemwide, but they're unprecedented on part-time stops. And a real customer service problem for Wynn Resorts, because what are they supposed to do with the day-trippers who start milling around at 6:00pm after a hard day of gaming waiting to catch first off-peak Train #123 to Rockport arriving 7:20? Let them loiter outside the gate until it's unlocked at 6:50 after Train #175 clears, provided the T security guard shows up on time? Build a waiting room for them? Those antsy people are going to be bitching at Wynn customer service for the inconvenience, not the T who made the rules for the sake of not destroying the peak schedule on its third-busiest mainline.
It's not a real-world proposal unless there's a real-world value proposition the stakeholders can pin to it. It makes no sense for the T because of the pretzel-logic it takes to shiv anything in this location without destroying ops. And it's a negative-value proposition for Wynn Resorts because it runs contrary to their cited hours of peak demand and induces so many customer service problems with the achievable hours-of-service. Not "nice to have" few extra patrons from Ipswich on a sparse weekend schedule, not chasing every last passholder, not some manifest destiny "no frill too far" sense of vanity for a luxury resort making a big splash. An outright negative-value ROI determination for the crap they'd have to put up with for the cost. That's the end. There's no couldas or what-if's here when a bottom-line business bottom-lines it. Wynn is putting real money down for enhanced Orange Line mid-evening frequencies, and running shuttle buses to the transfers. They have even honest-to-God stuck their nose in some of the very low-odds proposals for a trans-Mystic walkway above the dam, with cursory interest. But they didn't consider for so much as 2 seconds running a front-door CR stop up the flagpole, because achievable hours-of-service doesn't fit their business model at all.
A real transit proposal is grounded in a Q&A about demand served. That Q&A about demand served has been resoundingly answered straight from the horse's mouth by where Wynn Resorts is putting real self-funded transit $$$. There's no vector one can ascribe to them for getting this CR station done, because they've already shown their math and emphatically pointed "Here--Orange + bus on our surge hours...not there where it doesn't matter." It's not a real transit proposal if it has no value proposition to its stakeholders and exists only as railfan brain-teaser re: establishing the tippy-top pain threshold that allows for building a theoretical something here for the sake of saying you built a theoretical something here. That's a civil engineering strongman competition, not public-private transpo planning.
Last edited by CRail on Mon Apr 24, 2017 11:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Removed the quote repeating the previous post to its entirety.