Allston commuter-rail station put on a siding to nowheresville

Over in the reality-based community, GM announced a ride-hailing service with fleet of autonomous Chevy Bolts coming in 2019, and Waymo is riding around Arizona in Chrysler Pacificas right now. It's happening.

The problem with that is that they already did a study on sending additional Worcester Line frequencies over the Grand Junction to Kendall and North Station a decade ago, and it only showed substantial demand spikes during rush-hour specific to the times of days Red and Orange were most FUBAR'ed under load and the subway averaged considerable additional average travel time to those destinations. Off-peak there was very little unique demand for that routing distinct from a no-build alternative where regularly routed Worcester headways were growth-scaled more stiffly to Back Bay and South Station and worked the Red/Orange transfers during faster non-FUBAR times. The Grand Junction's tippy-top best travel times in an upgrade scenario were too inherently slow through the sharp MIT curves + grade crossing clusters and North Station terminal district to bum more than a few minutes' advantage vs. Back Bay/SS transfers during times of day when the subway was well-functioning. Far, far less than that 20-40 min. figure. Dilution of headways inbound of West Station by splitting service to Kendall-NS apart from Yawkey-BBY-SS ended up nullifying the ridership gains of the North Station one-seat by depriving the South Station flank of add'l frequencies it had equal-or-better demand for.

Now, the projected undercount on 'true' CR demand should blunt that effect to considerable degree...but you have to have gotten very far along with many other frequency-increasing initiatives on the main Worcester Line spine to hit a convergence point where the tables flip in favor of a one-seat service fork @ West Station being a next-highest leverage move. We've got a long, long way to go at buttering MetroWest's bread before that goes anywhere near the top of the priority pile.

The screamingly obvious conclusion from that prior study is FIX THE @#$% SUBWAY so it bloody fricking functions under load and strengthen the main Worcester-SS spine with urban rail frequencies + better service layering, and the demand question to Kendall/NS gets answered sooner and more robustly on a two-seat trip along stronger spines than by chasing one-seats on the headway-diluting fork. A 40-minute daily difference only projects as an end result if one's projections permanently consign Red and Orange to the seventh circle of non-functioning hell under load forever and ever. Our region's long-term mobility problems are waaaaaaaaay more dire and fatal to sustained growth/health than just troubleshooting MetroWest's commute options if +40 mins. a day is going to be downtown's assumed end fate.

Additionally, when Gov. Patrick proposed putting the Grand Junction on his 2024 "Indigo Lines" map (a.k.a. naked blowjob to the Olympic Committee never seriously intended for action) there wasn't so much as an attempt at reconciling whether meaningful urban rail baseline frequencies were even possible on that branch, regardless of use of more nimble DMU/EMU vehicles or hopes that draconian FRA regs would be relaxed to first-world standards. The physical speed restrictions and the steeply negative disruptions to shared road traffic at the Mass Ave. and Broadway crossings ID'd in the Worcester-North Station study were just that problematic. It wasn't clear that bi-directional frequencies could've met the "Indigo"-brand standard of all the rest of the urban rail lines on Patrick's map without disclosing what ops reform would've closed the gap around the line's throughput constraints (easily possible, but they didn't attempt any explanation whatsoever so it remains an open question). But the impacts to car, Yellow Line bus, campus shuttle, bike, and pedestrian users at the crossings would've been very severe projected up to higher-than-conventional-Purple Line frequencies. The #1 and CT1 buses together in isolation carry >50% of the daily ridership of all of northside commuter rail, so it's a not-at-all trivial balance to square road delay impacts of train service at the crossings sharply increased from that Worcester-NS study's baseline and somehow neutralize all above-and-beyond downsides.

The reason that right of way works so much better on the Urban Ring proposal rather than as "Indigo"/urban-rail RR is that by expunging it from the common carrier RR network and running trolleys or buses on it you can direct-share road traffic signal phases at the crossings on equal footing with all road users and run service levels much closer to the outer physical limits of that very constrained ROW's true geometric margins. That ends up being an especially non-invasive move at Broadway & Main where there are already existing intersection signals to rework at the crossings for innocuously inserting a transit phase. With mainline rail, the RR always has some degree of brute-force dominant priority that can only have so much "Jetsons S***" signal tech thrown at it to reactively recover enough disruption to road queues. And there are maximum allowable RR grades that prevent raising/lowering of the railbed with enough running room to eliminate the Mass Ave./Main/Broadway crossings, whereas buses and trolleys can climb much steeper grades to potentially bridge right over Mass Ave. That's because as a common carrier mode RR has to be able to intermix movements of nimble EMU's, slightly less-nimble DMU's, very much not-nimble locomotive-haul passenger trains, and extremely cumbersome freight trains agnostic to what vehicle is going to be taking up the next schedule slot.

That's not a dunderheaded U.S./FRA thing (though our pants-on-head regs make it exponentially worse than it should be) so much as the devil you know by engaging a common carrier mode. There's only so much leeway to fine-tune for specific users when the mode by its very nature has to accommodate a broad common denominator of traffic types. The UR proposal's outright mode conversion to bus or trolley ends up working way better on the same unmodified ROW and crossings by taking an entirely different and far narrower-purpose common denominator.

The Grand Junction, unfortunately, is always going to be a gimp on the RR mode because of that common carrier lowest-common-denominator and the upper limits that ROW's layout places on coping strategies for the crossings and speeds while on the RR mode. And that's where other transit like the 1/CT1 and the bicyclist/ped users take an inevitable schedule and mobility hit that needs extra-delicate balance. Hardly an impossible quest, but it's a very much not-trivial planning tightrope to walk for executing robust urban rail service through there. And the extra effort required for solving all those complications ends up kicking this GJ urban rail scheme much further down the priority pile than other more straightforwardly plug-and-play initiatives that would help MetroWest, help Kendall & NS employment access, help downtown circulation all the same.

Yes, and West Station would fall in the middle of that 2.2 mile gap.

How many trains per hour can a stub-end terminal handle, if it is managed properly? Look to Europe or Japan. And emulate subway technology and practices, as much as possible within federal railroad regulations.

None of the stops need eliminating. What the Worcester Line most needs is service layering so there are distinct inside-128, to-Framingham, and to-Worcester schedules with differentiated stop spacing to keep service frequent and travel times tolerable for each distinct audience. If the line had its woeful state-of-repair rolled back it would indeed have the capacity to juggle a broad spectrum of blended services running in-tandem.

Primary constraints:

• PROBLEM: Antiquated signal system inbound of Framingham with artificially slow speed limit, extremely limited train-tracking ability, and extremely limited ability to stage train meets and overtakes. This is the worst single bottleneck, and biggest reason for the line's perennially system-worst On-Time Performance.
  FIX: Install modern signaling like the outer Framingham-Worcester half of the line, and install track crossovers for passes/meets once every 2 stops to juggle service layering (the outer half has exactly that overtake layout, but can't take any advantage of it because the inner half is so f***ed).
• PROBLEM: The trio of single-platform Newton stops forcing service-limiting "wrong-rail" running in one direction.
  FIX: Full-high platforms facing both tracks. Auburndale: probably 2 side platforms; Newtonville + West Newton: probably center islands.
• PROBLEM: Woeful station accessibility with 6 consecutive non-ADA stops and no level-boarding platforms between Boston Landing and Worcester harming dwell times at station stops.
  FIX: Raise all platforms from Newtonville to Framingham to full-high, T-regulation 800 ft. (i.e. 9-car max) level-boarding platforms. Raise Back Bay's Worcester platform to full-high. Add the proposed Track 2 platform @ Worcester and extend the short 375 ft. Worcester full-high to a full 800 ft. NOTE: Because of many daily Worcester-Framingham freight trains that can't clear a full-high, Ashland to Grafton platforms all have to stay as-is (lows + ADA mini-highs) until you find money to triple-track those stops with center passing tracks...but that's an extremely LOW priority for traffic management that doesn't need to be on anyone's radar soon because those stops are nowhere near the real problem spots on the line.

Do all ^^that^^ and you can pretty much run unimpeded:

• a full "Indigo"/urban rail schedule of dense local headways through Allston and Newton to the Riverside track turnout, terminating at a "superstation" across from the Green Line platform. With a brand new infill stop at Newton Corner serving the local bus routes.
• Worcester locals that shed most/all inside-128 stops except select Boston Landing or Yawkey appearances on schedules that have higher-than-normal demand spikes to those stops...in order to keep uniformly better travel time out to Wellesley and beyond.
• a much fuller Framingham-turning local schedule that hits a Yawkey/West/Boston Landing pick-'em, skip-stops the Newtons, and hits every local stop beyond Route 128. These would be backfill slots that give MetroWest even all-day frequencies at no worse than 30-45 minutes off-peak, in addition to more rush-hour crowd-swallowers.
• Worcester expresses and/or super-expresses that run skip-stop everywhere inside of Framingham to keep travel time to Worcester under an hour (e.g. skips Newton, hits only the highest-demand of the Wellesleys and Naticks, then picks up local stops Framingham-and-out). Something much broader and more useful than that one-note "Heart-to-Hub" gimmick.
• Amtrak Inland Route service running every 90 minutes to Springfield-Hartford-New Haven with in-district stops at Back Bay, Framingham, and Worcester.

All of that is possible if the lineside infrastructure is up-to-snuff and you have the ability to do nimble overtakes at crossovers...like, for example, an outbound Framingham/Worcester train switching rails to hop over a Riverside-turning "Indigo" stopped at Newtonville and hop back in time for the inbound stopped at Auburndale. Or the Worcester express overtaking the Framingham local. Or the Amtrak blowing by everyone. There's a LOT of slack capacity we're not tapping on a near-fully grade separated line that was stupendously overbuilt for its task, simply because the state-of-repair has lapsed more than a half-century behind the times.