Speed is a big issue in the viability of New Bedford service. Most people who live around New Bedford know the back road route to Middleboro through Lakeville. Consider fifteen minutes in your car fighting your way through the traffic to get from Dartmouth or Fairhaven to a station in downtown New Bedford, and compare it with the twenty five minutes it takes you to get to the Middleboro/Lakeville station (to start the train ride a lot closer to Boston). If the New Bedford service is going to crawl through the middle of Taunton and a half dozen other built up areas, driving to Middleboro is still a much better deal. And regional transportation centers servicing commuters need to be situated where there is room for additional future parking capacity and good access to major roads, not in a congested location where they are out of date as soon as they are completed. The section of Route 140 through the middle of Taunton is extremely slow and congested, if that is going to be the connector to a regional transportation center, the commuters are going to be sitting in traffic gridlock in their cars trying to make it to the MBTA station.
"We Repair No Locomotive Before Its Time"