Needham doesn't have enough NEC slots to meaningfully increase frequencies. The only way to get interzone frequencies up is a Forest Hills-terminating outbound dinky. But that's completely unacceptable to the neighborhoods and Needham due to impairment of transit accessibility to downtown and the dangerous overcrowding it would induce on the FH Orange platform during transfer surges (it's already near-dangerously overcrowded when bunched buses take a big dump of transferees at rush, and getting worse each year). That "Urban Rail" line item in the report re: Needham is just not realistic. The NEC FUTURE traffic modeling paints a bleak, bleak picture where the only way to juggle Amtrak and Providence/Stoughton traffic through the SW Corridor is to relegate all Needham and Franklin traffic to one bi-directional track at horrible service reduction to their headways. Granted, Captain Obvious didn't tell the NEC FUTURE commission that the full Franklin schedule can be punted over the Fairmount Line at no-harm to headways, but that still leaves Needham with a suffocating ceiling that doesn't allow for service growth. NEC FUTURE's only suggestion was blowing up and widening the entirety of the SW Corridor tunnel to 4 NEC tracks, an ungodly destructive act that was already given cursory study during the initial South Coast Rail scoping studies and written off by the state as a total infeasible laugher.
What this means is that after the FRA gets thrown out from its disastrous administration of the NEC FUTURE study and the states are finally given equal say, the main point of negotiation with MassDOT is going to be over solutions to SW Corridor capacity. And that means bartering for fed funding to complete the changeover of Needham Line to rapid transit (Orange from FH-W. Roxbury, Green from Newton Highlands-Needham Jct.), because this now becomes an Amtrak/federally-induced crisis of avoiding local transit loss rather than an easy-to-duck local transit expansion or NIMBY issue. Terms of engagement for SW Corridor capacity are going to become match funding for the HRT/LRT conversion. Front-loading the Rozzie extension can thus help the state a lot with that negotiation, because if they show their work on the first 1.5 miles and 1 stations of the Orange extension...the feds--and their NEC-induced traffic crisis--are going to be tasked with picking up more of the tab for the 'swallow' of 1.5 more miles and +3 more stations to W. Rox. And as long as those terms are clear, it's an easier pitch to the NIMBY's in W. Rox that they have to bargain with Orange as a hedge against transit loss and hedge for national intercity ambitions.
Rozzie has its own independent merits by serving up a terminal for 4-6 bus routes that duplicate each other to Forest Hills and get in each other's way with bunching along Washington, contributing to the problem of irregular dumps of bunched transferees overwhelming FH station. Yellow Line cleanup coattails are almost as big as the one-seat upside, so this is a very far-reaching project in terms of network effects. Way, way more impact than just a +1 linear extension where there happens to be a 3-track ROW available for rejiggering. And such an extension serves the city's overall goals for streamlining the bus network. By cleaning up the transfer surges at FH it frees up capacity there for more robust routes. It allows for better timekeeping to not have such severe bunching problems on Lower Washington. That better timekeeping allows for increased frequencies on the remaining Lower Washington routes that run thru to FH. It allows for increased frequencies on other routes from other directions into the FH busways, and routes like those east-west circulators to Mattapan that have express bus/BRT-lite features. So this ends up a high-priority rail project because of how tightly-bound it is with the citywide bus program, and with enabling more of those city-led bus upgrades. That's why the city is driving the advocacy here while needing to defer to the state on the Really Big Ones™ like Red-Blue, NSRL, Urban Ring, etc.
FWIW...City of Newton is saber-rattling too for kickstarting the Newton Highlands-to-128 half of the Green extension. They did a very comprehensive 'reimagining' study of their own. Here's the huge 100+ page slide package from Winter 2016's grand presentation, linkied to the page where the Green Line action starts:
http://www.wabanareacouncil.com/sites/d ... df#page=49" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;. Includes their own bus network effects master plan for business shuttles around the 128 industrial park redevelopment straddling the Newton/Needham city line. As well as full rail-with-trail incorporation of the Upper Falls path as an analogue to the Neponset Trail/Mattapan Line tag-team. The slides on TOD revenue upside are pretty eye-popping, as that industrial park is an office space redev bonanza. Figure that if Orange-Rozzie gains traction that they're going to be ready to pounce on this first installment of the Green spur to the east side of 128, leaving only the CR 'swallow' section Needham Heights-Needham Junction as a Phase II task. Similar to Orange, that sets up a maximum-leverage situation for forcing the feds to match-pay (or better) for the rest of the 'swallow' sections as compensation for settling the SW Corridor capacity issue. Both Newton and Boston are segmenting their advocacies so the state-funded "down payment" extensions have a lot of network-effects transit and TOD upside boosting them, and the 'swallow' sections are framed as a federal funding issue for federal reasons.
Way, way, way to early to predict how it'll play out. But both cities have sharpened their game and gotten a lot smarter with the respective sales pitches on these rapid transit extensions that have been malingering as active but unfollowed-up proposals ever since 1945.
