Southcoast Rail

This project deserved to die. It was too much money to serve too few people, and it comes at the tail end of a series of major commuter rail investments. The Red /Blue connector would have been a better investment, but it's rapid transit and not a political favor to the suburbs, so I guess it can't happen.

Another newspaper had a fascinating article in the last few days about the free automobiles the state of Massachusetts is providing for welfare recipients, and paying for the registration, inspections, maintenance, and insurange. I guess they have important social engagements they urgently need to get to. If so, perhaps we owe them all a free commuter rail pass too. Then maybe a state paid credit card so they can go shopping in Boston, after all what good is the free train ride to those who chose not to work, if they do not have some money to spend? And with the money that is left over (of what we borrowed from China) we can make improvements in the commuter rail system.

MX

cpontani wrote:Umm...construction jobs, additional rail jobs, ticket vendors, etc. If the feds are handing out big bucks for transit construction, why AREN'T they considering it?

That's all fine and good, but two important questions need to be asked first:

1. Who is paying for the construction of the line? If the state or MBTA is expected to pick up any significant percentage of the cost, then you are only adding to the current financial problems.

2. Will the MBTA receive any additional new operating subsidy for the service? If no new money is coming in to subsidize the service (remember, fares only cover approximately 50 percent of commuter rail operating expenses), then you are only adding to the current financial problems.

To Triker:
Giving cell phones to the unemployed, or the homeless, or whoever you are calling "people who don't work" as though it were a choice, sounds like a pretty good, probably extremely cheap, way to help them get jobs. And helping them get jobs is the best way to turn them into people who do work. Is it that different from letting the unemployed, the homeless, welfare recipients, etc., into a library to use hotmail or look at job ads?

To Mxdata:
As much as we might like to believe it, not every job is practically accessible to every person by public transportation. People with steady, long-term jobs can choose to live on the right side of town near the right line, but people with erratic temp work can't. People who live west of Newton and east of Chicago and north of southern Connecticut would be really, really restricted in their work opportunities. Did the article say where they're giving out free cars? I doubt it's Dorchester. It's a problem with the way we've set up our transportation system, but it's not their problem. (I used to dismiss people who said they needed cars. Then I moved from Boston to the midwest.) And if we add in that these are, by definition, people with children, often small children, a two-hour four-bus commute that changes from week to week is not the answer. I actually think it would make good sense to give free or cheap T passes to welfare recipients, especially since we now run the program as a way to get poor single mothers to work at jobs that barely pay the cost of transportation and childcare, and then give tax credits to the employers as thought they were doing us some kind of favor.

Has the media or the state or anyone considered that these two "free" services may be being given as alternatives to increased cash benefits? That would be completely in line with the welfare-reform logic of reducing cash aid to people who would obviously use it to buy drugs or restaurant meals or whatever.

Triker and mxdata, I don't mean to be rude or make personal attacks. I'm just pointing out that the issues are not as simple as they can seem in quick posts.

Note to moderator: I don't think my post is very relevant to FR-NB rail service, but neither are the ones I'm commenting on. Feel free to erase them all, or leave them all.

This topic has wandered away from the main discussion... Please bring it back or I will delete some posts.

Governor Patrick keeps saying he's going to bring back the commuter rail to New Bedford and Fall River. The article mentions how many jobs it will create by 2030. I wonder if that means the time table for the line to be operational is 2030?

While it is nice to hear about rail expansion, I don't think anyone has any ideas about where the money to fund this thing will come from.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massac ... 3800_jobs/

well, it took 20 years to restore greenbush... so fall river in another 20 years isn't unlikely

The article in my local paper said it was to be finished by 2016 and construction would begin in 2012. Ill see if I can get a link to the paper.

CBass1307 wrote:The article in my local paper said it was to be finished by 2016 and construction would begin in 2012. Ill see if I can get a link to the paper.

Last time I checked there wasn't any money to build it.

That is correct, there never was enough state money to build it, so the entire project is hung on the future availability of federal funding, which is in turn dependent on commuter rail turning out to be the most efficient way of moving the projected ridership between their respective destinations. When they get all done studying this, it could turn out that the train is not as efficient as a bus, or possibly not even as efficient as the same number of people driving their own automobiles. Considering the very low ridership south of Taunton (see previous studies on Southcoast Rail website) the last twenty miles of the run to both cities is the part of this that is likely to scuttle commuter rail. It might actually be better to restore service only as far as East Taunton or Myricks and build a large Regional Transportation Center like Anderson RTC at that location, and do the rest of the run with bus service. Of course that would make commuter rail service much less time competitive from NB and FR than taking the train from Middleborough/Lakeville station, but for New Bedford customers driving to Middleborough/Lakeville for a fifty minute train ride is already considerably faster than driving into downtown New Bedford to take an hour and a half train ride ever will be.

But seriously, a half hour of automobile travel each way to the station in downtown New Bedford or Fall River plus at least three hours a day on commuter rail, what on earth are these people thinking of? I commute to Boston driving in from southcoast regularly and most of the time it takes less than three hours of total travel time, and sometimes just more than two hours. Why would people want to spend a guaranteed four hours a day minimum auto and train time taking commuter rail from New Bedford to Boston? This service is a scam, it is a bunch of politicians trying to get their hands on $1.6 to $2.0 billion of taxpayers money so they can squander it. All you have to do is look at the Mayor of New Bedford's demands for three railroad stations in a run down welfare city with no industry to see that this is Christmas time for politicians and they are looking forward to spending lots and lots of YOUR money.

MX

Might sound like a crazy idea but have any of the 3000 studies suggested running the line right down the middle of rt 24, you could probably circumvent most of the crazy enviromental laws(and that "$$trestle$$). Run it up 93 and connect with the old colony line near braintree. (yeah sounds crazy)

The one thing i've learned in life is don't ever mess with a guy with a mohawk!

The idea of using Route 24 right of way was actually discussed at one of the Southcoast Rail meetings. They indicated that the two major problems were the cost of rebuilding exits and overpasses along a road that was not originally built with the railroad in mind, and the lack of land around the the right of way that could be taken for stations and parking. I got the impression from the way it was presented that they were thinking of the stations being right at some of the existing exits. Anyway that option did not make it to the final menu of choices.

Somebody also wanted to put a monorail right down the middle of routes 24 and 140. That would have been cute. I probably should not have gone to the meetings, it was rather disturbing to see their willingness to spend billions and billions of dollars of our money, some of it on stuff that is cute, green, and politically correct, or totally outlandish, like the Mayor of New Bedford wanting three new railroad stations in a city that is mostly collecting welfare. And there was the perception that "federal" money means "free" money, as if somebody else is going to get handed the bill to pay for all this stuff.

MX

I pretty much agree with mxdata on this one. At a projected cost of 1.4 billion, that's about $7000 for every inhabitant
of FR/NB. For the ones who would use the train, at most maybe 7-8000, that's about $200,000 per rider! At that cost, you could
just get give each commuter a voucher to buy a house in Lawrence or Fitchburg, and it would still be cheaper! Speaking of which....
the mayors of FR/NB think that somehow CR will turn them into commuter towns. Since it hasn't happened in either of the two
aforementioned locales, there's no reason to believe that it would happen there either. In addition, the kind of jobs in Boston
that a large number of FR/NB residents could get would not pay enough to justify the commute cost and time. Either way, it
would be a lot of money spent for little gain. Better to save it for better things, like Green line to West Medford, or even Blue
Line to Lynn.

I'm wondering if it's a better idea to just do the MUCH cheaper Middleborough line extension to Buzzards Bay first, and then let the ridership on that line from Fairhaven and points east make the case for the megabucks in Fed money required for FR/NB. It's well-used, well-maintained freight trackage that has intermittent tourist train passenger service to a standing, fairly recent-constuction station at Buzzards Bay. Last studies from a couple years ago pegged the track upgrades at $50 million, plus station siting and parking costs. Let's say 7 figures is wildly optimistic, and you need to throw in a couple 2-track segments on the inner portion of the line for capacity and traffic management, and there's inevitable swelling overruns on the stations. What's your worst case...$200 mil?...$250 mil? That's still, what, one-seventh as cheap as today's estimated price tag for FR/NB, which is only going to balloon further into the stratosphere when actually built.

There's plenty of reason to do the "easy" South Coast rail extension first. People north-northeast of New Bedford already have no qualms choking the lots at Middleborough to catch the train, even when that requires less-than-efficient drives from Routes 79 and 18 for those coming more directly from a NB direction. I doubt those numbers are going to thin significantly on the extension. The Wareham-proper station catches the 495/195 traffic from west and northwest, and the Buzzards Bay terminus catches the 28/6/3 bridge traffic and keeps a hell of a lot of cars off 3 and 495 to sweep those roads of the transit park-and-ride gap southeast of Route 44 (Middleborough and Kingston/Plymouth). When you consider how ungodly expensive and invasive the whole Route 3 widening project is supposed to be, honestly carpet-bombing that corridor with CR (Kingston/Plymouth, Greenbush, Buzzards Bay) probably mitigates the need somewhat for that untenable job.

And, hey, if clearing up 495/3/6/28 and the bridges means your tradeoff is a zoo on 195 to get to the train, then you've got a much easier case to get the Feds to fork over 9 figures for FR/NB. But why try to hit an impossible grand slam with no one on base when you can start off with an easier double. The T's never EVER made life easier on itself for expansions by 'priming' routes with demand-increasing improvements that make the big-money expansions a lot more self-evident to enact. There's tons of examples to cite for rapid-transit. Well...here's one to prime their be-all/end-all CR expansion hotbed. Get your toehold on the South Coast with the easy one you can get up-and-running fast on active trackage, watch the demand likely exceed expectations, and THEN you've got concrete lobbying leverage for those Federal dollars and an opposition-buster for that whole environmental quagmire with restoring the abandoned ROW. It's a lot easier to say, "Look how popular Buzzards Bay is with Cape commuters. We've proven Cape commuters will take the train to Boston, and that strengthens the case that South Coast city-dwellers will take the train in large numbers too." Whether it plays out that way or not who knows...the important thing is they'll have some sort of hard evidence to weigh on the FR/NB decision by getting the easier extension to touch the South Coast first, and it's a whole lot better managed-risk from a cost perspective.

Yes, that all makes perfectly good sense. However, there's a problem; it's called politics. The FR/NB folks have
been standing in line longer. They would view that as cutting in front of them, so they'd go out of their way to block it.
And, since they have more representatives, they can and will do it; they'll insist their project gets done first.