Part of Green Line Extension to be shut for six weeks this summer, part of the Green Line downtown for 12 days

Pay off all MBTA debt AND take away the 1% of all MA sales tax, which was given to the MBTA to help it pay for its newly acquired debt, or keep the status quo. What option would you take?

Hint. The sales tax provides over $1.3B(!) a year in funding

From the T's website (Adam you may want to link above):

Due to the continued demolition of the Government Center Garage by private developer HYM Construction, Orange and Green Line service changes will take place in the downtown Boston area all day for 12 days from July 29- August 9:

Orange Line trains will bypass Haymarket Station. Orange Line riders should instead exit at North Station or State, which are less than a half-mile from Haymarket (or a four- to eight-minute walk) and travel to the Haymarket area.

Italics mine: there's a real question in whether the T is asking HYM for any payment for all of this inconvenience.

Yeah, the service sucks because of the single-track at North Station. There's not much they can do about that since North Station was never designed to be a southbound terminal (Brattle Loop at Govy serves as a southbound terminal if needed, but HYM put an end to that). Using the North Station loop requires a train to come down the ramp from Science Park, cross over the turn back tracks under the Garden and then proceed onto the single track in use at North Station. (You can see the track layout well here or here if you zoom in.)

So why doesn't this work? Lots of reasons.

North Station is bilevel, which is good for Green-Orange transfers but means that it's mostly infeasible to use both tracks as a terminal. Even if the T decided to say "Union cars on the lower level, Medford cars on the upper level" that introduces two new problems. First, it means that anyone going to Science Park or Lechmere has to run between levels to figure out which train is next. This is possible if you're crossing between two tracks on the same level, harder with two levels. Second, it would mean that all trains would have to cross over the terminal tracks, with many more moving parts (switches) which would have to be changed and require slower operations in both directions which might not even make the terminal operations that much faster.

So, you're stuck with one track. What the T does is to operate a "token" system: in order to be on the single track the driver of the train needs to be in possession of a physical object, this eliminates any potential miscommunication which could lead to two trains in opposite directions on the same track (the railroad is not signaled for bidirectional operation). Token systems are simple and work, but there are a couple of ways that the T could enhance the existing token system to make it work better.

1) The current token is passed back and forth at Science Park, although the single track section begins in the tunnel south of Science Park. If the token were passed back and forth in the tunnel, it could reduce the length of the single track section and allow more frequent operation. However, walking the token across multiple tracks here might negate any such savings.

2) The token could be used for multiple trains to follow each other together. Basically, if Union and Medford trains were scheduled to arrive at Science Park together, they could proceed following each other to North Station, both turn, and then run back to their origins. While this would increase service on the branches, it wouldn't increase service on the trunk (to Lechmere) and might actually degrade service since trains would have to wait at Science Park for the following train, and since turnaround times would increase with two separate cars.

Staff has found that anything more than 20 minutes on each line is hard to manage, especially since there are still upstream speed restrictions on the brand new line because … who knows?

Basically, there is no good solution given where the issue occurred. It would have been nice to have designed Lechmere with a stub terminal track to allow one line to operate a short turn operation there, a small oversight in retrospect (the additional cost would have been minimal). In the future if, say, the T is shutting the Green Line central tunnel (like it is Jul 15-16), the northern branches will be able to operate to the Brattle Loop at Govy.

One small silver of a silver lining: they should (hopefully will) be able to operate the Medford branch every 10 minutes when the Union Square branch is shut down, so Science Park and Lechmere will see the same level of service, and the rest of the Medford Branch will see double the existing (crappy) service.

The real question for me is what they do once Haymarket is open but Union is closed. Will they turn Union trains at North Station? Or will they extend Union trains to Medford, which would double service on the Medford branch. That, in my opinion, would be decent mitigation for an otherwise lousy situation (and since East Somerville is only about a 10 minute walk from Union). This of course begs a bigger question which is: how much could they have saved on the project if it was just built as a single line to Medford without all of the flyovers past Lechmere?

There's an interesting counterfactual where they simplify the project to be a single line, add Commuter Rail platforms and some kind of turnaround at Union, and run a shuttle from Union to North Station with a new stop behind Cambridge Crossing (perhaps with a connection to Community College). Maybe sweeten the deal and extend such a shuttle out to Alewife with a stop at Porter. Way less concrete, way fewer switches, and pretty similar service. One big issue would actually have been dealing with bridge openings in the summer to get to North Station. But … that didn't happen.

tl;dr yeah this mostly sucks sorry Adam for eating up your bandwidth.

...I thought it was pretty galling to say they're replacing a "rapid transit" line with two bus routes that often run on 30 to 45 minute headways (or worse), but then I realized on today's MBTA that might not be a whole lot of a difference. Some days the 30 minute bus route is probably more frequent.

The 86 could be a truly useful route, but god knows the T will never run it often enough. I don't use it often, but pretty much every time it feels like a case of the 2:1 ratio going the bad way - two minutes of waiting for every minute of actual travel.

The state of things has us welcoming a move to the far hinterlands (beyond the Edge of Civilization, or 495) because for one of us, it'll substitute a sometimes one hour bus commute (of about 4 miles) for a one hour commuter rail commute (of about 30 miles). Commuter rail is hardly perfect, but it's looking better and better every day by comparison.