JPoland wrote:I tried turning the Minuteman Bike trail into a subway line to Lexington MA and the result was that I only got 9,000 more riders.
It's all about the station spacing, though what the ridership algorithms basically show is that the Arlington stops will pull similar ridership to the quieter Braintree branch stations, while the Lexington stations will show less ridership.
One (hypothetical) way to take care of that would be to build a mirror of the Mattapan high-speed line to the north, running from Alewife to Bedford Center, and short-turn some of the trains with a loop at Arlington Heights. If you could keep the stations to D-branch levels of opulence, it could be done pretty cheaply, while being able to coexist with the bikeway for most of the ROW, though imho, trains will always take precedent over cyclists as they are a far more effective way of getting people out of their cars.