Head-end View wrote:What about providing replacement garage parking for the Red Line commuters? 
Not the T's call anymore. City of Quincy put in a preference for future mixed-use development over the station instead of rebuilding the garage, so that's how it's going to be.
Walkable downtown with a bus terminal not immediately by a highway exit is an absolutely terrible place to have a 900-space garage and all the induced-demand traffic that comes with it. It's as anachronistic to the surroundings as if the Alewife extension plunked 1000-space garages at new Harvard, Porter, and Davis. There's no reason to have such a parking glut there when Quincy Adams and Braintree are the ones directly attached to major highway exits, and North Quincy is the one at the convergence of all the parkways. Those are the ones that can handle the P&R traffic from the highways, not dead-center downtown. Both QC and Wollaston are anachronistic in how much parking over-capacity they offer in the midst of a regular old urban street grid thick with buses, and the City is moving away from its car-centric mistakes as it re-streetscapes downtown around walkability and transit. Both those stops--including the Wollaston lot--have sweet TOD futures if the parking over-capacity were traded for redev densification. And they're not under any pressure to make immediate decisions on what that redev will look like.
The garage was a bad idea even by 1971 standards, but they talked themselves into it because further extension to QA/North Braintree + Braintree/South Braintree was snarled at the time in controversy and no safe bet to happen at all. QC could've been the permanent end of the line, leaving it and NQ to shoulder the expressway P&R load. It didn't happen that way, so it just ended up pure unadulterated induced demand plowing through to downtown from the highways. They had little stomach for repeating the mistake in 2020 by rebuilding the garage. Traffic already is adjusting with a lot of that induced demand going away, and Braintree is getting a parking expansion to absorb the loads that don't need to be slamming all the way up Burgin Pkwy. to downtown when those cars aren't going to do any business in downtown. That's a key tell, as not enough of the traffic that was actually using the QC garage originated anywhere near downtown.
If there's one pivot the state should be making to QC's new orientation, it's simply increasing bus service out of the terminal. It's a lush net of routes, but they're getting very crowded and need more frequencies. Especially because Red frequencies will be bumping slightly as the new cars' superior acceleration allows for signal re-spacing inbound of JFK to the branch splits. From what we're told the lowest remaining level of the garage will hope to address just that in some TBD fashion. With how much streetscaping the City is doing, you'll probably even see future advocacy to bust down Burgin Pkwy.'s lane sprawl north of QA in the future to further tame the induced demand (a la the Rutherford Ave. and McGrath Hwy. road diet advocacies in Boston and Somerville).
What I hope is that before the City makes any decisions about what goes on top of the leveled garage the T injects itself in there about digging out the hillside embankment to widen the CR station into a 2-track island. The space is very much there for a turnout spanning the Dimmock St. overpass and the squeeze where Burgin Pkwy. converges south of the platform before the private air rights garage. All soft fill, just needing a new retaining wall along Burgin and underpinning of the Burgin headhouse during construction...then demolition of the existing CR platform's retaining wall, doubling of the platform's width, and rebuilt egress. There will never ever be an easier and less costly vector for doing that than after the garage gets demolished to the bottom level...but
before the City gets too far along in design about erecting something new on top. But it has to be the state realizing the opportunity, because the City itself doesn't have much skin in Old Colony services increases (let alone something like the South Coast Rail M'boro Alternative) to be the ones self-advocating for a rebuilt CR platform.
For the money it would be the most meaningful service increaser on the OC to have the inside-128 stops all done up as DT islands, because the way the 3 branches claim each of JFK/QC/Braintree as their own it guarantees a bi-directional pass/overtake opportunity for
any other branch each time one branch is making a station stop. All 3 branches would be able to take thirds of a whole new pool of slots if you did the pricier QC island, and the much less pricey JFK island. Which in turn increases the P&R utilization where it should be: out at the CR lots in the 'burbs well before the cars slam Braintree Split, with off-peak frequencies increased a little on all 3 lines so fewer drivers have to make the frequency-driven choice to drive further and overstuff the Braintree and QA RL lots. You wouldn't have to touch any of the single track between stops on the corridor to net those service increases
and accompanying P&R demand relief at QA/Braintree garages, either, so it's maximal bang-for-buck to take advantage of the interregnum between the QC garage demolition and start of whatever mixed-use future is going to replace it for doubling up the CR platform with a turnout.
