YamaOfParadise wrote:Yeah, the only way service in South County is ever going to be viable is if the commuter rail service extended westward into Connecticut at least to New London. There is a significant number of people who commute from Rhode Island to Groton (for Pfizer and Electric Boat), and to New London proper. I imagine something like this that is roughly equivalent to Amtrak's old Beacon Hill service could do better in contemporary times, especially now that states are more willing to actually give funding for commuter rail operations. The endpoints of such service would be debatable, though. I think Providence <-> New London service would be the bare minimum requirement to get any significant passenger numbers. Extending to New Haven would help with the logistical problems of terminating in New London, and it would probably also increase ridership. Assuming everyone played nice, you'd also be able to roll R.I. commuter rail (in South County) and SLE into one service, which would play into the service logistics of extending commuter rail to the eastern part of CT. Of course, though, extending that to New Haven and extending to Boston is completely dependent on the capacity issues along the route to either city. BOS <-> PVD is just plain congested, so I don't know how much of that can be actually solved. If we make the assumption Amtrak builds their coveted new inland alignment for the NEC in 2 decades according to their longterm plan, (as R.I. commuter rail has a long-term roll-out ahead of it anyways,) I can see a NHV <-> PVD service using some of the freed up train slots potentially being viable.
Just looking at South County itself, though, I wonder if a stop between Kingston and Westerly would be viable with whatever service would come to it. Historically there were three stops there, Bradford, Wood River Junction, and Shannock, with Shannock being the only one keeping service into the Beacon Hill days. Wood River Junction is about halfway in between Kingston and Westerly, but it has a small population density in the immediate area of the old station. Shannock and Bradford both have decently sized residential populations in the immediate areas, with some commercial and industrial areas. But both seem like they would be too close to Kingston and Westerly respectively by train, as well as being within about a 10 minute driving range to their nearby stations. Flag stop(s) might be a solution, even if they're a pain to do. Though, if you take the potential development into account that transportation can have, putting any sort of station into any of those spots could be worthwhile; even when excluding all the land protection areas, there is a lot of land in southern R.I. that's vacant.
They aren't dealing with intermediates between Kingston and Westerly yet because they still have to build all the more important intermediates north of Wickford--Cranston, East Greenwich, West Davisville--before it matters. Their grand plan for commuter rail calls for all 3 future services--Providence Line, South County, and Woonsocket--to overlap each other at all stops between Pawtucket and T.F. Green so Metro Providence has the absolute densest possible service frequencies inside I-295. Pawtucket's already full-funded for design and advancing along. And of course Green (and Wickford) were half-built to make it inexpensive to drop down and tie in the northbound platform turnouts. So that means Cranston is the next-most important infill to go guns-blazing at since it's the last unbuilt stop common to every future commuter rail schedule.
To begin starter South County service at useful--but skeletal--frequencies, all they need to do is finish Pawtucket, drop in the missing halves of Green & Wickford, do the same tri-track renovation job @ Westerly as they're doing at Kingston, get Westerly layover set up, and get the inbound layover (expanded Pawtucket and/or whatever midpoint site they're looking at this week) expanded. To hit full-blown 2030 service levels to South County the only other dependencies are Cranston, East Greenwich, West Davisville and more service density in the overlap region to simply make Metro Providence/inside-295 exert a much bigger gravitational pull. (I guess if you're talking overlaps exerting gravity that's also where SLE @ Westerly comes into the picture).
Recall as well, they're keeping these builds separated from each other so small funding shots coming in out-of-order get useful things done without holding a small and budget-challenged state to any big monolithic builds with big delay potential if 100% funding isn't immediately available. So this is one of the reasons why Cranston infill is not an ironclad requirement despite being in the overlap region for every conceivable service. It would be the
next most-important one to fund for sure; they may even want to wait for some design kick-off $$$ on Cranston before initiating service to Westerly. But the northern terminus at Pawtucket is the only one you
have to have before "a" train/"any" train can make its inaugural run to Westerly. So they keep the builds firewalled like that for maximum wiggle room and play it by ear on when they've got just enough in-place to stick their necks out and start running some trains. It's very much the Wickford philosophy extended. Yes, it'll be incomplete. Yes, the trains will be infrequent, empty, and only semi-useful for much of the first decade...and they'll take criticism for that like they are at Wickford. But by minimizing their dependencies on steel-and-concrete builds they get on sooner with the long-term process of initiating/marketing/building permanent fixed-route service.
So I'm sure there'll be a day when Intermediates between Kingston and Westerly help generate South County ridership. If some community really gets behind an advocacy for an intermediate they can make hay with it in short order. RIDOT just doesn't need to account for that right this second the way the planning process is being kept intentionally decentralized, and the focus weighted to the overlap region that'll eventually be served by the most concurrent CR schedules. For purposes of demand now through 2030 all of the main ridership growth in South County comes from pumping up destinations in the overlap region. That means, sure, a Shannock intermediate could help generate South County ridership...but not as much as TOD/walkability/new jobs in Warwick or Cranston or Davisville would help generate South County ridership at existing Kingston & Westerly (or--if paper barriers can be squared--the same in the opposite direction with SLE). So first things first, and things with lowest cost per new rider first. They've broken this whole master plan down modularly enough the order-of-build can shape-shift and adjust very nimbly.
