by F-line to Dudley via Park
Bramdeisroberts wrote:-- The State-DTX tunnel is a pedestrian tunnel. Like the Winter St. concourse connecting Park and DTX. It's been a desire dating back decades to study a pedestrian "three-quarters ring" around the downtown transfer stations...but one totally independent of plans for rapid transit construction.SM89 wrote:How about they build a tunnel connecting State and Downtown Crossing. Wouldn't that solve the issue without costing a fortune? Sure it would be an expensive tunnel, but it wouldn't cost hundreds of millions of dollars.Since the loading gauge is damn near the same, if you were going to do that you might as well merge the Blue Line into the Orange Line. An added benefit is that you could now use the pantograph-equipped BL trains on an extension out to Needham, or have them continue straight along the Pike and run to Riverside via Yawkey.
-- You will spend WAY money trying to do something as bonkers as shotgun-marriage of Blue and Orange rolling stock than you will building Red-Blue. "Costing a fortune" is relative here. The Red-Blue construction estimate is padded by a 40% contingency estimate over the projected base costs to cover unknown mitigations when they dig at the base of Beacon Hill. The price could come down significantly closer to the base than the contingency, but no sane budgeter would plan for it without the contingency because of the risks. So you start with the high estimate. And for the money to be spent the bang-for buck is higher for Red-Blue than anything else downtown...INCLUDING finishing the former Silver Line Phase III link. There is no substitute, no creative thinking, no "cheap" (remember: it's all relative) solution that gets around it or takes an edge off it. Either do it, or spend 3x the money doing something 20% as effective. Or spend none of it at all and blow 5x the sum on South Coast FAIL.
-- As for Blue-Orange compatibility...yes, you sorta can. But it goes the opposite way...running smaller Blue cars on Orange with a littany of "easy", but collectively unsavory fixes to platform heights, etc. With no easy place to link the two because they cross each other perpendicular with zero room at State and aren't anywhere close to each other otherwise. And, by the way, run-thru (assuming you can rig it up) is a net capacity REDUCTION for Orange, which carries far more people. You'd probably have to spend another quarter-billion dollars to do 8-car platforms everywhere to offseat the loss in seating per consist. And another $2B to come up with parallel flanks, because Blue-to-Orange doesn't add capacity...it adds a branch off the downtown nerve center in which run-thru chokes each presently-'mainline' service level endpoints of car supply. That would be a disaster unless you build Atlantic Ave. El II to distribute the load. And why that would be mentioned in alternative to Red-Blue is insane.
Don't waste your energy trying to out-think what a half-century's worth of studies have made plainly obvious. There is no downtown subway enhancement and rider distributor that does more for its money than Red-Blue. None. There may be no non- state-of-repair project on the entire system that does more.