Category: Urban Transit
Netroots Nation and How the 99% Talk Hurts Consensus
For the first time since 2006, I went to Netroots Nation, as it’s held in Providence. There was one panel about public transportation, entitled “Saving Public Transportation,” whose speakers included Larry Hanley, who dominated the discussion; a moderator; and three political activists: including a local union leader, a Sierra Club representative, and a state legislative candidate who Greater City is supporting. The discussion focused on preserving bus operations rather than on expansion – in fact Hanley made the point that agencies expand capital while cutting back service because the federal government only pays for capital rather than operating funds.
Since the panel was entirely political, and dealt mostly with funding issues, when it was time for questions I asked about the saddling of transit agencies with highway debt; I specifically mentioned Massachusetts’ putting Big Dig mitigation debt on the MBTA. I wanted to see if the panelists would say anything about mode shifting or about the relative power of highways and transit.
Instead, Hanley, who took the question, ignored what I said about highway debt, and instead answered about refinancing debt at lower interest rates, as issue his union is harping about. In reality, according to his union’s own figures, the MBTA could save $26 million a year by refinancing debt; for comparison, its deficit this year, which it plugged with service cuts and a large fare hike, was $163 million, and its total debt payments in 2006 were $351 million, of which $117 million came from the Big Dig. Although the parts of this debt that are not from the Big Dig come from true transit projects, those were voted on by the state legislature, rather than by the MBTA; transit’s low position in the transportation funding food chain is thus responsible for 13.5 times as much money as could be extracted from the banks.
So at first pass, Hanley was pivoting to an issue he was more comfortable talking about, which happens to involve a fraction of the amount of money in question. But at second pass, something more insidious happened. Instead of answering a question about transportation priorities and getting state governments to assume debt they’d unfairly loaded onto transit agencies, which would require clashing with other departments with their own agendas, Hanley preferred to shift blame onto banks. He did not include figures during the panel and so I could not know he was talking about such a small amount of money; his explanation for focusing on the banks is that the MTA renegotiated deals with contractors to get lower prices, so it should do the same with the banks.
And after thinking about this, I realized how it shows exactly how despite appearances, the “We are the 99%” slogan is the exact opposite of any sort of democratic consensus. It silences any notion that there are different interests among the 99%. The auto workers and Providence’s carless residents are both members of the 99%; they have diametrically different interests when it comes to transportation. But in the Grand Struggle, the 99% must be united, and thus the leaders shift any discussion to the common enemy, no matter the relative proportions of the amounts of money in question.
After Scott Walker’s win, Matt Yglesias wrote that different industries have clashing interests just as much as labor and business do. But even within the framework of fighting big business’s influence, two of the most influential opposing interest groups, the union movement and small business, have different interests and are hostile to each other. Dean Baker wrote in The Conservative Nanny State that small businesses are being coddled because they pay lower wages and benefits on average; in general, the American union movement has not organized small businesses and supports the businesses it has already organized, and is hostile toward new companies, which are usually non-union. Small business in turn is hostile toward regulations on wages, starting a business, and so on.
The 99% framing papers over all of that. The voices that dominate the protests believe themselves to be the true representatives of 99% of the population, and by implication their own issues to be the most important. Other issues are subsidiary, or outright distractions from the primary needs. Any movement that claims to represent everyone is not consensual but nationalistic, and just as nationalism requires the elites to declare a certain archetype to be Real Americans (or Britons, or French) and everyone else to be one of many negative stereotypes, so does this 99% framing require movement leaders to coopt or downplay other groups’ issues.
Consensus comes from clashing points of view. The Swiss Socialists are farther left than what is considered serious liberal opinion in the US, and the Swiss People’s Party is about as far right as the Tea Party; they and the centrist parties are more or less in a grand coalition. The consensus comes from the realization that no single faction will ever dominate, and thus the best it can do is distill how it can advance its stated goals (poverty reduction, smaller government, greater national cohesion, etc., depending on the party). The Occupy protesters have very high supermajority requirements at their general assemblies, but they do not have this clash, this diversity in either viewpoints or demographics. They have procedural near-unanimity but not actual consensus governance, leading to a system that excludes most interest groups that comprise the 99%; unsurprisingly, the movement has severe problems with race, since its center is white and thinks it speaks for everyone.
Of course, within the union movement something similar is happening, with the dominant group being the older members. This is what New York-area transit commenter Larry Littlefield calls Generation Greed, spanning people of all political classes.
The end result is that no matter how much rhetoric is thrown around about new politics, forward-looking progressives, and so on, what ends up is a repetition of an old hierarchy, one with Real Working People and with fake ones. It has to; when it has no capability of dealing with tensions between transit users and other groups, or between whites and blacks, or between labor and small business, it cannot project any unity of the 99% otherwise. And without unity, it’s a movement without any clear policy agenda.
Bus and Rail Mantras
Bus is cheaper than rail. Paint is cheap. Rail only made sense a hundred years ago when construction costs were lower. Trains have no inherent advantage over buses. It doesn’t cost more to operate a bus than to operate a train. All of those are true in specific sets of circumstances, and Curitiba and Bogota deserve a lot of credit for recognizing that in their case they were true and opting for a good BRT system. Unfortunately, the notion that buses are always cheaper than trains has turned into a mantra that’s applied even far from the original circumstance of BRT.
The advantage of buses is that dedicating lanes to them and installing signal priority are financially cheap, if politically difficult in the face of opposition from drivers. Even physically separating those lanes is essentially cost-free. This advantage disappears completely when it comes to installing new lanes, or paving an existing right-of-way. Hartford is paving over an abandoned railroad at a cost of $37 million per km.
Not to be outdone, New York’s own MTA just proposed to pave about 8.5 km of the Staten Island Railway’s North Shore Branch for $371 million. A light rail alternative was jettisoned because the MTA insisted on continuing the line to the West Shore Plaza, along what is possibly the least developed road in the city.
Another, related mantra is that light rail is cheaper than heavy rail. This contributed to the MTA’s decision not to pursue a Staten Island Railway-compatible solution, which would allow lower capital costs and cheaper maintenance since trains could be maintained together with the existing fleet without modifying the existing yard. As with all mantras, this one has a kernel of truth: it’s much cheaper to build on-street light rail than elevated rail or a subway. As with the BRT mantra, this is not true when the discussion is about what to do in an existing right-of-way.
Worse, because the MTA believed its own hype, it completely missed the point of surface transit. People who believe these mantras about bus, light rail, and heavy rail can easily miss the advantage of on-street running wherever the streets are more central than the railroad rights-of-way. The North Shore Branch hugs the shore for much of the way, halving station radius. The most developed corridor is Forest Avenue, hosting the S48, the third busiest bus in the borough and the busiest in the same area and orientation as the line in question. (The busiest in the borough, the S53, crosses the bridge to connect the North Shore to the subway in Brooklyn.) Of the three other east-west routes in the North Shore, the one that the North Shore Branch parallels the most closely, the S40, has the lowest ridership. It would be both vastly cheaper and better for bus riders to have dedicated bus lanes on Forest, or possibly Castleton, which hosts the S46.
In cities that did not develop around mainline rail corridors but rather around major streets, the only reason to use mainline rail corridors for urban transit is that reactivating them for rail can be done at much lower cost than building on-street light rail. New York is for historical reasons such a city: Staten Island development follows Forest and Castleton rather than the North Shore Branch, and for similar reasons Park Avenue in Manhattan and the Bronx is a relatively unimportant commercial corridor.
Now, these mainline corridors have great use for regional transit. Queens Boulevard can’t be easily used for train service to Long Island, and Lexington Avenue can’t be easily used for train service to Westchester. Staten Island has great potential for regional transit – but only if it’s electrified rail going through a tunnel to Manhattan. It’s expensive, but it’s what it takes to be time-competitive with the ferry and with buses to the subway. A more competent agency than the MTA would keep planning and designing such high-cost, high-benefit projects, to be built in the future if funding materializes; such plans could also be used to concretely argue for more funding from the state and from Congress.
Instead, the MTA is spending more money than most light rail lines cost, to make such a mainline connection from the North Shore to Manhattan impossible in the future. The best scenario in such a situation is that the busway would have to be railstituted, for a few hundred million dollars – an embarrassing reminder of the busway folly, but still a much smaller sum than the cost of the tunnel. The worst scenario is that like on Los Angeles’s Orange Line, the need to keep buses operating during construction would make it impossible to replace them with trains.
There aren’t a lot of lose-lose (or win-win) situations with transportation, even if we ignore driver convenience, but this is one of them. It’s a fiscal disaster relative to predicted ridership and the operating costs of buses, it makes future transit expansion in the borough more difficult, and it follows a marginal route. All this is so that the MTA can say it’s finally making use of an abandoned right-of-way.
Where Should Streetcar Corridors Be?
At a meeting of some of the Greater City people about the Providence streetcar proposal, many of us had severe criticism of the current plan. The line is too short; it is S-shaped; it detours to serve a hospital that’s close to but not on a straighter route; the frequency is mediocre; RIPTA does not have a clear plan of where subsequent lines would go. The discussion quickly turned to alternatives, involving frequent-stop commuter lines to the inner suburbs on existing trackage and perhaps a new connection to the rail tunnel, and streetcars along major corridors to fill in the gaps. It is the streetcar corridors that I want to discuss.
In brief, the existing streetcar proposal only links downtown with near-downtown job centers in College Hill and at the Rhode Island hospitals; secondary centers and neighborhoods would be served in the future, along undetermined routes. People at the meeting who know more than me believe that the western leg, serving Olneyville, is likely to be on Broadway by default, as it is a wide street, and likewise a future westward expansion would follow Manton, a similarly wide street. Instead, they propose, the streetcar should follow Westminster Street.
The issue at hand is, partially, development. Broadway looks a little more developed than Westminster (excluding the portion within downtown proper, where Westminster is a major commercial street), but this development is not dense. Westminster has developed parts and undeveloped parts that could be used for TOD. This is more than just development-oriented transit – Westminster is on the way to Olneyville – but it’s a partial reason.
But the main issue is location. The proposals that we developed at the meeting hinge on using major streets that are centrally located within neighborhoods. We prefer Hope Street to Main Street on the East Side, even though Main Street supports a higher frequency on the 99 bus than Hope Street does on the 42, because Hope Street is accessible from the entire East Side. (Both have auto-oriented commercial development that could potentially be densified.) Likewise, Westminster is closer to parts of the West End; the idea is to run down Westminster and Broad in that direction to serve the western and southern parts of the city.
This is not how I’m used to thinking about where to put favored routes, whether they are light rail or BRT. Usually I think in terms of how developed the immediate area around the street is, what destinations there are, and so on – in other words, spiky density near the route rather than general density within half a kilometer in each direction. That said, this thinking is informed by rapid transit, which is at much larger scale, and bus-oriented density is more diffuse.
The question is whether the rough sketch that came out of the meeting makes sense, or whether it’s just lines on a map. At several places, there’s tension between serving the immediate street and serving a broader neighborhood. At others, some routes are good for only part of the way: for example, in Pawtucket the streets feeding into Main are actually more central and more densely populated than that feeding into Hope, a reversal of the situation in Providence. For another example, Atwells is highly developed but not centrally located in Federal Hill, and is the opposite in Olneyville.
I’m interested to hear what existing successful practices are. Do good streetcar (or rapid bus, etc.) corridors just follow the most successful bus lines and the most developed individual streets, or do they instead serve a broader swath along the routes?
What’s a Subway/El?
The rapid transit built in New York beginning with the first els codified two characteristics that spread to the rest of the US, and are often seen in other countries’ rapid transit networks as well. First, it is separate from surface transit – even when it did still have grade crossings, they were controlled railroad crossings, rather than street-running segments as is common on light rail. And second, it is separate from mainline rail.
Not much later than New York started building els, Berlin built the Stadtbahn, also an urban elevated railroad. However, it was meant to be used for mainline rail from the start, with two local passenger tracks and two long-distance passenger and freight tracks. Part of the impetus was to connect different railroad terminals within the city, which American cities did by building union stations disconnected from local traffic. Shortly later, Tokyo built its own mainline rapid transit system – the Yamanote Line bypass in 1885 and Tokyo Station connecting the Chuo and Tokaido lines in 1914. Both cities ran frequent local commuter service early, Berlin doing so even before electrification.
Of course, nowadays US regulations locked in the separation of rapid transit from commuter rail, but at the time, there was no such separation. New York could have built its subway to mainline specifications and run trains through to the LIRR. It didn’t because of historical accidents – it preferred compatibility with the els and even when the BRT chose a wider loading gauge for its own subway network, it still opted for narrower trains than on mainline track. At the time it seemed like no big deal, although some of the subway lines built were redundant with existing commuter lines (for example, the Flushing Line with the Port Washington Line). Again due to historical practice, commuter rail did not try to operate to rapid transit standards, keeping frequency low, and so nearly all urban stations closed. In both New York and Chicago, it’s often easy to figure out where the city ends or where the subway/L network ends because that’s the point beyond which commuter train stop spacing narrows, providing makeshift local service.
In subsequent decades, the German and Japanese approach proved itself much more capable of providing good transit to growing suburbs. In Tokyo, subways are legally railroads, and most lines are compatible with at least one commuter line in order to permit through-service. German cities have mainline rapid transit (S-Bahn) and also separate subways or subway-light rail combinations (both called U-Bahn). Many other cities and countries had to adopt the same system to increase transit ridership, at much higher cost since the necessary viaducts and tunnels connecting stub-end terminals were done much later. This is what led to the Paris RER, and what’s led to Thameslink and now Crossrail in London. Any other approach would require spending even more money on extending urban lines to the suburbs, exactly what’s done now in the two big suburban-focused US rapid transit systems, the Washington Metro and BART.
The kink is that despite the above problems of subways that are separate from both mainline and street rail, there’s now a different reason to build such lines after all: they can be made driverless. Most first-world cities already have legacy rapid transit or else have so much sprawl rapid transit is inappropriate, and third-world cities aren’t saving much money by eliminating drivers, but in the few cases of new builds (Vancouver, Dubai, Copenhagen, the newer lines in Singapore), driverless trains are common, and this allows trains to run more frequently, or even 24/7 in Copenhagen’s case.
This kink aside, there’s really no reason for a city to build a new New York-style subway, i.e. disconnected from light and commuter rail and running with a driver. Extending a legacy system is fine, but for new systems, there’s no point. This could be especially bad in growing third-world cities, which could find themselves paying too much for a subway they don’t need or unable to connect a subway they do need to the suburbs once they start suburbanizing. Third-world construction costs aren’t much if at all lower than first-world costs, but wages are much lower.
Some of the world’s largest cities have made or are making this mistake. Mumbai is building a new subway, on a different track gauge from the Indian mainline network, preventing through-service to the overburdened commuter trains. Shanghai and Beijing have vast subway networks, without express tracks or any ability for trains to run fast through city center; they have widely spaced stops so that they are faster than most other subway systems, but they have nothing on the rapid commuter trains in Tokyo. (Beijing is also developing a parallel commuter rail network, running diesel trains from the exurbs to the traditional city terminals at low frequency.) It works fine now, but when Shanghai grows and suburbanizes to the degree Tokyo has, it may find itself having to spend many billions on digging new tunnels.
Since a New York-style subway is inappropriate for new builds, some cities need to ask themselves which of the three kinds is the most appropriate. A subway-surface solution is mainly an option when one underground line can naturally split into multiple surface lines, as is the case in Boston, San Francisco, Cologne, and Frankfurt; this is because there’s a big difference between on-street and grade-separated capacity.
Tel Aviv, which is building a subway-surface line without any branching, is doing it wrong. For the other choice, I believe it’s a matter of how well-developed the suburban rail network is, and how much future suburbanization the city can realistically expect. In Tel Aviv specifically there’s also a separate element, which is that for religious reasons public transit does not run on weekend. If driverless technology makes the difference between trains that run 24/7 and trains that run 16/6, then it should be used even at the cost of otherwise worse service to some suburbs and destinations easily reached by legacy rail branches.
Finally, in North America, one of the reasons to engage in strong regulatory reform is to allow the mainline option to work. Some lines, for example the Harbor Subdivision between LAX and Union Station, should ideally host a mixture of local and rapid trains on the same tracks, and also allow intercity trains; if the Harbor Sub becomes an electrified commuter line then high-speed trains could serve the airport, providing a connection from the Central Valley to a major airport in addition to SFO, which would only get a station at Millbrae.
More in general, the only real disadvantage of legacy commuter networks is that they tend to not be very dense in the center of the city, requiring new builds; most of the Tokyo subway is just lines offering the commuter lines more capacity into the CBD, overlaying itself to also provide a tight in-city network. There’s no technical reason not to just build an electrified local mainline network as its transportation backbone, and if more capacity is required then build additional lines in the mold of Tokyo.
One-Way Pairs: the Bad and the Ugly
One of Jane Jacobs’ prescient observations about bus service in The Death and Life is that one-way pairs, as practiced on the avenues in Manhattan, are bad for riders. Her argument was that one-way pairs require people to walk too long to the bus line, and this cancels out any gains in speed. (This is truer today, when signal priority is an option, than it was fifty years ago.) Jarrett Walker has formalized this in two posts using station radius as an argument; the issue is that passengers need to be within a short walking distance of both halves of the line, and this reduces coverage.
However, not all one-way pairs are created equal. An underrated reason to keep bus services on one line is simplicity: it’s easier to remember that a route follows one street than that it follows two, and also service to specific destinations can become easier. Taking a cue from proper rapid transit, ITDP’s magnum opus BRT standard treats it as a given that buses should run in the median of a street and only even lists one-way pairs as an option on very narrow streets, and even then as an inferior one. The argument revolves around service identity.
In particular, one-way pairs that preserve a semblance of service identity and simplicity are not as bad as one-way pairs that do not. For the original walk-distance reason, it’s also better to have the one-way pair closer together. Jarrett specifically praises Portland’s light rail one-way pair, located a short block apart, as an example of a good couplet. Manhattan’s one-way pairs are located a long block apart, so the walking distance is worse.
But even Manhattan’s one-way pairs are at least coherent. The First/Second Avenue bus follows First and Second Avenues for the entire length of the avenues; south of Houston, it follows Allen, the continuation of First. This is the advantage of the grid. In Providence, things are not as nice, though still somewhat coherent, if one remembers, for example, that Angell and Waterman Streets form a one-way pair (they’re treated as such for car travel, too, so anyone in the neighborhood would know, though people from outside would not).
In contrast, this is how Tel Aviv’s one-way pairs work. They’re getting worse amidst the various bus reform. The post is in Hebrew, but look at the map at the bottom of bus #5, the city’s busiest (and most frequently bombed back in the 1990s and early 2000s). The travesty is that none of those streets on which the line runs in one direction only is even one-way. East of Ibn Gabirol, the street hosting lines 25, 26, and 189 on the map, the streets are wide and two-way. The reason for the complication is lack of left turns. In order to make car traffic flow a little more smoothly, Tel Aviv has completely eviscerated its bus service.
In principle, Tel Aviv has infrastructure for consistent one-way pairs when necessary and regular two-way service elsewhere. For example, Dizengoff and Ben Yehuda, the two north-south streets hosting buses to the west, function as such for cars. They both have contraflow lanes for buses, allowing buses to use them as two-way streets; some do (for example, #5 on Dizengoff), while others still go one-way (for examples, #9 and #55). Likewise, Jabotinsky, the east-west street feeding into the big circuit, is one-way and narrow west of Ibn Gabirol, and could be a one-way pair with Arlozorov to its south; but Arlozorov is kept two-way, and so #66 is two-way, and #22 uses the two as a one-way pair. (By the way, those are fan-made maps; the official maps don’t use color to distinguish routes, and are thus completely unusable.)
The results of the mess coming from ending any service coherence are predictable. Israeli car ownership, low by first-world standards, is rising rapidly, and the social justice and affordable housing protesters are now complaining about high fuel prices. None of them is anti-transit on principle, and all who I confront tell me they’d ride transit if it were usable. I live without a car in a city with worse transit than Tel Aviv, but to me car ownership is not aspirational. When the only transit people know in their country is unusable, people this generation will get cars. The next bus reform will then take into account more left turn restrictions coming from the need to accommodate more vehicles. The next generation of people will grow up with the expectation of even worse bus service and not conceive of any alternative to automobility.
Surreptitious Underfunding
One third of the MBTA’s outstanding debt, about $1.7 billion, comes from transit projects built by the state as part of a court-imposed mitigation for extra Big Dig traffic; interest on this debt is about two-thirds the agency’s total present deficit. Metra was prepared to pay for a project to rebuild rail bridges that would increase clearance below for trucks and cut the right-of-way’s width from three to two tracks. Rhode Island is spending $336 million on extending the Providence Line to Wickford Junction, with most of the money going toward building parking garages at the two new stations; Wickford Junction, in a county whose number of Boston-bound commuters is 170, is getting 1,200 parking spaces.
Supporters of transportation alternatives talk about the inequity between highway and transit funding in the US, but what they’re missing is that the transit funding bucket includes a lot of things that are manifestly not about transit. At their best, they are parking lots and other development schemes adjacent to train stations, which would’ve been cheap by themselves. At their worst, they are straight highway projects, benefiting road users only.
The situation in Boston, while unique in its brazenness, is not unique in concept. In the US, where there are no pollution taxes on fuel, the only way to mitigate air pollution is by regulation and by building alternatives simultaneously. Put another way, combined highway and transit construction is in most cases not really a combined project; it’s a highway project, plus required mitigation. Requiring the transit agency to shoulder the debt and the operating subsidies is exactly requiring transit users to pay for highways. It’s equivalent to charging transit multiple dollars per gallon of gas saved from any mode shift. And it may get even worse: the proposed House transportation bill includes a provision to allow spending national air pollution control funds on regular highway widening, in addition to the current practice of spending them on carpool lanes.
Historically, the diversion of funding from transit to roads took such insidious forms. For an instructive example from Owen Gutfreund’s book, roads advocates fought to get driver’s license fees and even inspection fees for fuel trucks recognized as road user fees, whose proceeds must be diverted toward roads. For another example from the same book, in Denver, the streetcar system was required to cover 25% of the cost of road maintenance on one-way streets and 50% on two-way streets, and as car traffic rose, streetcars both became slower and had to send over more money toward roads.
Another instructive case study is grade separations. It is to my knowledge universal that expressways and high-speed railroads, both of which must be grade-separated, pay for their own grade separations. In all other cases, who pays is determined by which mode is more powerful, and in the US, this is roads. As the national highway system was built in the 1920s, interurban railroads were required to pay for grade-separations, even when the rail came first. The practice continues today: in Kentucky, the railroad has to shoulder the full cost if it’s from 1926 or newer (Statute 177.110), and half the construction cost and the full planning cost if it’s older (177.170). In contrast, in Japan, grade separations are considered primarily a road project, and so the Chuo Line track elevation project was paid 85% by the national and city governments and only 15% by JR East (page 36). The segment in question of the Chuo Line was built in 1889; I believe, but do not know, that new rail construction in Japan is always grade-separated, at the railroad’s expense.
The situation in the US today is a surreptitious underfunding of transit, and at the same time a surreptitious overfunding of roads. It is not subject to democratic debate or even to the usual lobbyist funding formulas, but, like the obscure regulations that impede good passenger rail, hidden in rules nobody thinks to question. To pay for road mitigations and for parking, transit agencies will cut weekend service and reduce frequency. It’s bad enough when done in the open, but it’s done while claiming that transit is too expensive to provide.
Park and Rides, and Good Planning
Some people with experience in American bus planning have come strongly for park-and-rides, as a convenient means of concentrating all people boarding buses at one spot in order to improve frequency. The charge is led by Joel Azumah of Transport Azumah, who, responding to my question of whether it’s worth it to have strongly peaked buses, says,
Instead of running a separate park & ride and regional service, you can broaden the span of park & ride service. That would allow you to use some buses more than once or to add the early & late buses for flexibility. Park & riders that use services with a narrow span will drive in if they think their schedule is going to change. The extra buses will reduce that tendency.
In this view, the primary purpose of off-peak service is to provide peak riders with extra flexibility, making it a loss leader. This is indeed one of the main purposes of an all-day clockface schedule, as opposed to the essentially peak-only service provided by nearly all North American commuter lines. And yet, one part of Joel’s response bothered me. Observe that he contrasts his view with “running a separate park-and-ride and regional service.” In other words, a bus that serves a park-and-ride can’t serve walkable residential and commercial suburban strips. While this is a plausible constraint for an express bus, it is not a real issue for commuter rail, as long as the commuter rail is done right: trains make multiple stops, and those can include both walkable towns and some regional park-and-rides.
Of course, American commuter rail is without exception done wrong. This manifests itself in three different problems, all of which make park-and-rides look much more important than they actually are.
First, the rolling stock used, except on the LIRR, SEPTA, and Metro-North, is substandard. In particular, trains hauled by adapted freight locomotives take a long time to accelerate to even medium speed: the MBTA’s current trains lose 70 seconds just accelerating from 0 to 60 mph, and the FRA-compliant improvement, using Colorado Railcar DMUs, only cuts this to 42, as established in Table 3.1 of the Fairmount Line study. For comparison, modern EMUs, even of the FRA-compliant variety, lose about 13 seconds. The result is that trains can’t make frequent stops while maintaining acceptable average speed. Thus the service pattern already includes widely separated stops, forcing people to drive to stations, and moreover involves complex patterns with express trains.
Second, nearly all agencies, assume because of tradition that they can only serve peak riders to the CBD. Occasionally there’s some reverse-peak service, but its usage as a percentage of employment in the suburbs served is trivial. Even Metro-North, perhaps the most forward-thinking agency for reverse commuting, is uncompetitive for suburban employment. Stamford has a ridership of about 4,000 employees, in addition to about 3,000 residents working in New York; the total number of transit users working in Stamford is 8,600, itself only 11% of the city’s employment. This pattern in which nearly all ridership is inbound peak reinforces itself, and agencies do not usually try to provide adequate off-peak and reverse-peak service. The MBTA provides two-hour service off-peak on most lines. The LIRR runs trains one-way on the Main Line during peak hour, to allow the peak frequency of 20 trains per hour to run express trains rather than just locals.
And third, invariably, the suburban stations are all park-and-rides themselves. Some are explicitly configured as such, such as Metropark and Route 128. Those are good and need to be there. The problem is that pretty much all stations are friendlier to cars than to pedestrians. Sometimes they’re located outside the towns they purport to serve – for particularly bad examples, look at satellite photos of Plymouth and Westborough. Plymouth’s station is to the north of the old train station and town center, robbing the station of pedestrian traffic, and because Plymouth’s ridership has to come from drivers, the MBTA prefers to have most trains skip Plymouth entirely and just serve Kingston-Route 3, a standard park-and-ride. In a similar manner, Hicksville has a fair amount of development near the station, but so much parking that it’s poorly connected to the station for the pedestrian. Even Providence, Worcester, and New Haven get stations without much pedestrian-oriented development nearby; Providence, the best of the bunch, has development, but it’s sterile residential plus a mall flanked by pedestrian-hostile arterials.
The result of all this is that there isn’t a single example in the US of a commuter line, rail or bus, where most people walk to the station. Thus, issues including off-peak ridership and development near the stations look unsolvable. Those park-and-ride users grumble about difficult parking and do not take trains except to the city during rush hour. Who will drive to take a train that comes every two hours when it’s possible to just drive to the city?
Commuter rail done right does not have this problem, because it runs good (high-performance, low-energy consumption) trains with only one or two staff on board, and so it can run with long span and high frequency while serving many stations. This is roughly how many modern light rail lines in North America operate: there are a few park-and-rides, and a lot of stations located in between that are accessible to pedestrians and interface with feeder buses.
But for mainline rail, one has to look for examples outside the US. In Japan, new transit construction outside the dense city cores is accompanied by intense development near stations: see, for a recent example, the Tsukuba Express. Shopping centers and dense residential areas will generate ridership all day and in both directions; park-and-rides exist, but do not occupy center stage as they do in the US. Likewise, in Germany, one of the practices that evolved in the recent transit revival is closely spaced stations, located everywhere a railroad intersects a walkable place; speed is maintained via trains with good acceleration and level boarding, resulting in average speeds that match those of American commuter lines despite the shorter interstations.
The political infrastructure that exists in Germany and Japan and allows this and is absent in the US is coordinated planning. There is no way a single entrepreneur can create all the required development and local transit coordination. Transportation isn’t web entrepreneurship; it has no Mark Zuckerbergs or Larry Pages, who can almost singlehandedly create all the agglomeration required to support the new technology. Most of the time, this is done by cooperative government planning. The rest of the time it’s done by established conglomerates, usually combining real estate and transportation, including the Hong Kong MTR and the private railroads in Japan.
There is also some component of technology there. Small-scale entrepreneurs can run express buses, which can’t adequately serve many stations while maintaining competitive speed, much more easily than they can run trains, which can. They cannot run trains at all in the closed-access paradigm that rules American (and Japanese) railroading; they have an easier time in open-access Europe, and yet even then most private players are again big conglomerates, such as Veolia and Virgin.
Although transit must make room for the private sector, a transit revival that relies on uncoordinated private players will necessarily fail. Britain, the most privatized of the countries with a revival (high-income East Asia has no revival, as in the big metro areas transit never declined in the first place), needed to revert to public infrastructure planning with Network Rail, and maintains some of the key features of cooperative planning, including integrated tickets and fares. The rest of Europe contracts out services, but still strives to improve intermodal and interagency transfers; in Switzerland, transfers are timed even when multiple operators are involved. The role of people like Joel and the other private-sector players is to bid for operating routes that fit into a combined system, and add service (still within a fare union!) on thick routes where timetable coordination is less important.
What this means is that a transit revival must include more competent government planning. If there had been no Interstates, and certainly if there had been no expressways built by the states from the 1930s on, some of the railroads would’ve survived to do planning entirely in the private sector, as is the case in Japan. But given that there’s nothing like Japan’s private railroads in the US to plan integrated transportation using market principles, the government needs to do it, and it needs to do it well. It can’t privatize everything; the operators will just loot it for subsidies and neglect any components of development that don’t lead to immediate profit. And it needs to learn from some of the practices of express bus operators, but recognize when it can do better than just copy them.
Macrodestinations and Microdestinations
In her book Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs complains that freeways as built are good at getting people to macrodestinations (downtown) but not microdestinations (particular addresses within city center). In her example from Toronto, this is correct, but in general, each mode of transportation will be good at serving microdestinations in an urban form that’s suited for it. Cars are not good at serving an intact city center; but equally, transit is not good at serving suburban sprawl, and regional rail that’s not integrated with urban transit is not good at serving urban destinations away from immediate train stations.
The idealized job center in an auto-oriented city is the edgeless city. Even the edge city, as explained in Lang and LeFurgy’s now-paywalled article Edgeless Cities, is too dense, and becomes congested too quickly; indeed, Tysons Corner is infamous for its lunchtime rush hour conditions. Ideally, cars drive from low-density residences to low-density office parks, primarily on freeways but with fast arterial connections at both ends; the freeway network in the auto-oriented city serves an everywhere-to-everywhere set of origins and destinations.
In such an environment, transit can’t do well. The distance between suburban attractors is too great for an easy walk, and the roads are too wide and fast for a pleasant walk. Buses and trains can serve a general macrodestination (“Warwick Mall/CCRI”), but not individual microdestinations, not without splitting and cutting frequency to each destination or detouring and raising travel time. The buses serving Warwick Mall and CCRI have hourly frequency, and are a long, uncomfortable walk from the hotel in Warwick I needed to go to. Judging by the frequency, I’m not the only person who chose not to use them, and take a taxi instead; everyone who has a car or who isn’t extremely price-sensitive does. The only way transit can serve such a destination is by concentrating development near the station – in other words, making a mini-transit city in the sea of sprawl, which generally conflicts with the goal of easy station parking.
In a city, the opposite situation exists. It’s easy to just pronounce transit more suited to dense city centers than driving, but the situation is more complicated. Transit, too, thrives on good connections to microdestinations. It can’t serve employment that’s dense but evenly dispersed in a large area – people would need too many transfers, and the result would be service that’s on paper rapid and in reality too slow. Instead, it works best when all destinations are clustered together, in an area not many subway stations in radius.
In this view, one failure of urban renewal is its failure to recognize that most people who visit city centers are going to do a lot of walking, and amenities should make it easier rather than harder. Traditional urban renewal would build cultural centers and other projects at the fringe of the CBD, to help its growth: Lincoln Center just north of Midtown, Civic Center just southwest of the San Francisco CBD, Providence Place and Providence Station just north of Downcity. In New York and San Francisco, there’s at least rapid transit serving those destinations, mitigating the effects. In Providence, no such thing exists. It’s an inconvenient walk from Kennedy Plaza to the mall and the train station – it’s not too long, but it crosses Memorial Boulevard right when it turns into a freeway on-ramp. Walking to the Westin, immediately adjacent to the mall, is practically impossible without rushing across roads without crosswalks. Even the walk between the station and the mall, which were built together and are close to each other, is much worse on the street than on a map, again involving crossing auto-centric roads.
Organic city amenities do not look like this. If they cluster at the same location (for example, 125th Street in New York, or Thayer Street in Providence), they tend to be along roads that facilitate rather than hindering pedestrian movement. And if they don’t, they are all located along a rapid transit network in its shared service area, where it is still a tight mesh rather than a network of radial lines.
In view of the recent emphasis on parking policy, due to Donald Shoup but now mirrored by other urban planning and transportation experts, the observation is that in any city center, on-site parking is difficult to find. Even in cities that make downtown parking relatively easy to get to, people can’t hope to park at every single microdestination, so instead they trip-chain, driving into the city and parking but going to multiple points within the city, all within a short and easy walking distance from one another. This is roughly the urban geography of the French Riviera, which combines easy parking with a dense, lively center in Nice and a fair amount of urbanity on some streets even in auto-oriented secondary cities such as Monaco and Menton.
The connection to regional rail is that, historically, it descends from intercity trains, and therefore the conception of connecting the suburbs to the city is very macrodestination-driven. To name two egregious American examples, the Boston’s north side lines and Caltrain both connect many suburbs to the city while also connecting people to the suburban tech job corridor, but in reality miss the biggest job centers at both ends. North Station is two subway stations north of the CBD, and as a result ridership underperforms the south side lines; 4th and King is far enough outside the Market Street CBD that it’s not close to the CBD jobs – the proposed Transbay Center site, which is, is located near more jobs than all existing Caltrain stations combined. And if microdestination-level service to an already transit-oriented CBD is bad, then service to other urban destinations is worse: urban station spacing is wide, there’s no attempt to develop near stations, and the poor integration with local urban transit ensures that even people who could be willing to make the last-mile transfer don’t.
Trip Chaining
Gendered Innovations’ charts of trip chaining and gender breakdown of public transit riders got me thinking about how different systems of transportation handle a mixture of short and long trips. Eric Jaffe at The Atlantic Cities reports this and suggests that transit agencies orient physical features such as accessibility to the needs of women who trip-chain care and work trips.
But to me, the first observation is that although women trip-chain more, it doesn’t seem to be true that women are more likely to ride transit in the US than men just because of trip-chaining features. Instead, women traditionally have been less likely to have jobs requiring commuting, and the commute gap has been shrinking more slowly than the gap in employment.
This comes from the fact that trip chaining on transit is cumbersome in most cases. Both cars and transit have to deal with the time it takes to stop for an errand, but transit tends to handle this worse, unless it’s very frequent and has practically zero access and egress times. Transit cities instead get people to take their short errand trips on foot – since their neighborhoods are denser and have more mixtures of uses, they make retail and care trips attractive on foot. In light of the fact that walking is not useful for long commute trips and transit is not useful for short errands, we can construct the following typology of cities:
| Long \ Short mode | Foot, bicycle | Car |
| Transit | Transit-oriented | Traditional suburban |
| Car | New urbanist, small-town, auto-oriented dense | Auto-oriented |
Auto-oriented cities are the easiest: in those places, people drive for all purposes. Trip chaining can be done on a commercial arterial road, dropping off laundry or kids or buying something on the way to work, and because of ample parking availability, the time each additional link in the chain consumes is very small, since the longest access and egress time comes from navigating from the residential cul-de-sac to the arterial and from the arterial to the office park.
Traditional suburbs, common around New York and Chicago and sometimes in other old North American cities, are similar for trip-chaining purposes. In those areas, the urban form is suburban and auto-oriented, but work trips to the city are done by commuter rail or occasionally commuter bus, since the city is not as auto-friendly as the suburbs.
Transit cities too have their long-range commuter rail, but it is built as an extension of walking rather than of driving. Neighborhoods tend to have mixed uses, and there’s a concentration of retail development near the outlying stations, sometimes forming large secondary clusters but sometimes just acting as neighborhood centers. It could take considerable time to add more trips to one chain, especially if not everything is located at the train station. But conversely, the amount of time a single short trip takes is small, unlike the case for auto-oriented cities – the supermarket is right around the corner, and within five minutes’ walk are plenty of stores. When people walk, the concept of a single trip begins to lose meaning then. Potentially, every single purchase can be considered a separate trip, in which case the chaining becomes quite long.
In many places the transit is absent and people drive outside the neighborhood, while still doing errand trips on foot. This is the typology that characterizes different environments including new urbanism, traditional cities like Providence and Tel Aviv that have been made car-oriented, and auto-oriented modernist projects such as Co-op City. Those environments all differ in how trip chaining is done. In principle, it can be done on foot, but usually people who can drive do.
If my own experience is any indication, one feature of cities in this typology is that children and teenagers walk more. In Tel Aviv, my father drove me to elementary school on the way to work while (in later grades) I walked back, and I took the bus to and from middle school. Most trips my parents did in a car, but there was a reasonable number that were short enough to walk. I’d walk to farther destinations such as the cinema and the urban mall. The view of the North Tel Aviv middle and upper-middle class of the 1990s as I remember it is that the bus is fine for trips to school, but adults drive. I doubt I’d have had the same view if I’d grown up in New York, or for that matter in the Houston suburbs, where everyone drives or is driven.
Although most of the discussion about transit cities contrasts them with car-oriented cities, the other two typologies need to be examined, too. When adults and children trip-chain differently, children can get a distorted view of who transit is for (poor people, people who can’t drive yet), and the next generation will make the city auto-oriented; this is indeed what is happening in Tel Aviv, which despite population growth in the core is adding cars and spawning low-density suburbanization well outside the built-up urban areas.
Likewise, Cap’n Transit’s attacks on park-and-rides don’t quite capture what is wrong with the car/transit typology. A transit agency that wants to make it easier to trip-chain will want to concentrate development near the train stations, because that’s where it’s easiest to add minor trips without having to walk ten minutes out of one’s way. Of course in the middle of the dense city there’s development everywhere, which may well be orthogonal to where the subway is, but then trip-chaining becomes easier because each foot trip is so short.
The principle is that cars are a big one-time purchase but have a much lower marginal cost of usage. If one major class of trips can’t be done on transit – and chained trips generally can’t when they require the rider to wait for the next bus and the next bus will come in 15 minutes – then people will buy a car and then drive it even for trips they’d happily take transit to if they didn’t already own a car. The class of trips that can only be done conveniently by car needs to be kept small enough that people will use car share, take a taxi, or beg a friend who does own a car.
Thus what transit agencies and pro-transit politicians should devote more time to is appropriate development more than physical features of the transit system. Accessibility is important for so many reasons other than strollers. In contrast, the primary importance of using transit to extend the range of the pedestrian rather than provide a capacity boost for the car is precisely that transit needs minor trips to be doable on foot. A transit system that one needs to take to the supermarket may be technically successful, but it’s in a failed urban area.
MBTA Mode Shares
As a followup to my claim in my first post about improving the MBTA about the low mode share of commuter rail for trips into Boston, here are some figures about commuter rail use, by sector. All numbers exclude commuters from inner suburbs and from Boston itself, since those would use the subway. Only Boston-bound commuters are included. I’m providing wider and narrower numbers, wider numbers corresponding to the entire sector defined by a commuter line and narrower numbers including only towns within reasonable range of a commuter station.
All commuter rail numbers come from the Bluebook and are averages as of February 2009, from page 74; be careful not to use numbers from the map on page 70, as they inflate the ridership on the Providence Line. All commute market numbers come from the 2000 census; I do not believe commuting patterns have changed so radically as to significantly alter the picture.
Update: we obtain the following table, explained below (see also computation error fix for Haverhill):
| Line | Wide market | Narrow market | Riders | Share of wide | Share of narrow |
| Old Colony | 43,587 | 34,934 | 20,907 | 48% | 60% |
| Providence, Stoughton | 23,297 | 17,490 | 11,719 | 50% | 67% |
| Franklin | 14,899 | 12,747 | 7,043 | 47% | 55% |
| Worcester | 19,997 | 15,581 | 7,479 | 37% | 48% |
| Fitchburg | 16,544 | 13,358 | 5,883 | 38% | 44% |
| Lowell | 15,551 | 11,912 | 5,586 | 36% | 47% |
| Haverhill | 19,196 | 16,902 | 8,922 | 46% | 53% |
| Newburyport, Rockport | 26,926 | 25,534 | 13,230 | 49% | 52% |
Old Colony Lines (including Greenbush)
Commute market (wider): all of Plymouth County; Cohasset, Weymouth, Randolph, Holbrook, and Avon towns in Norfolk County
Commute market (narrower): including only the above Norfolk County towns and Plymouth County’s towns of Abington, Bridgewater (including East and West), Brockton, Hanson, Hingham, Hull, Kingston, Lakeville, Middleborough, Plymouth, Rockland, Scituate, and Whitman
Commuter volume (wider): 43,587
Commuter volume (narrower): 34,934
Inbound commuter rail ridership: 12,065 (excluding JFK-UMass, Quincy, and Braintree)
Extra transit use: 7,244 subway and commuter rail boardings in Quincy and Braintree beyond those accounted for by those two towns’ commuter market; 1,598 commuter ferry riders, mostly from Hingham
Mode share: 60% of the narrow market, 48% of the wide market
Providence and Stoughton Lines
Commute market (wider): all of Rhode Island, all of Massachusetts’ Bristol County, and the towns of Sharon, Canton, Stoughton, and Plainville in Norfolk County
Commuter market (narrower): the three Norfolk County towns omitting Plainville, all of Rhode Island’s Providence and Kent Counties, and Massachusetts’ Bristol County’s towns of Attleboro (including North), Mansfield, Easton, Norton, and Seekonk
Commuter volume (wider): 23,297
Commuter volume (narrower): 17,490
Inbound commuter rail ridership: 11,719
Extra transit use: none
Mode share: 67% of the narrow market, 50% of the wide market
Franklin Line
Commute market (narrower): Norfolk County’s towns of Dedham, Westwood, Norwood, Walpole, Norfolk, and Franklin
Commute market (wider): the above plus the towns of Medfield, Medway, and Wrentham
Commuter volume (wider): 14,899
Commuter volume (narrower): 12,747
Inbound commuter rail ridership: 7,043
Extra transit use: none
Mode share: 55% of the narrow market, 47% of the wide market
Worcester Line
Commute market (wider): all of Worcester County except Fitchburg, Harvard, Westminster, Gardner, and Leominster; Wellesley; and Middlesex County’s towns of Natick, Ashland, Framingham, Marlborough, Hudson, Hopkinton, Holliston, and Sherborn
Commute market (narrower): Wellesley; Middlesex’s above counties omitting Hudson, Holliston, and Marlborough towns; and including only Worcester County’s towns of Southborough, Westborough, Northborough, Shrewsbury, Grafton, Worcester, Auburn, and Millbury
Commuter volume (wider): 19,997
Commuter volume (narrower): 15,581
Inbound commuter rail ridership: 7,479 (west of Newton only)
Extra transit use: none, as all Green Line usage is accounted for by Newton commuters
Mode share: 48% of the narrow market, 37% of the wide market
Fitchburg Line
Commute market (wider): Worcester County’s Fitchburg, Harvard, Westminster, Gardner, and Leominster towns; Middlesex County’s Belmont, Waltham, Wayland, Weston, Concord, Sudbury, Acton, Maynard, Stow, Lincoln, Littleton, Boxborough, Ayer, and Townsend towns
Commute market (narrower): Worcester County’s Fitchburg and Leominster only; Middlesex County’s above towns, omitting Stow, Townsend, Wayland, and Sudbury
Commuter volume (wider): 16,544
Commuter volume (narrower): 13,358
Inbound commuter rail ridership: 5,883 excluding Porter
Extra transit use: two local bus lines (70, 70A) to Waltham with 4,343 trips in each direction and two more express lines (553-4) with a combined 681 trips (none serving just Waltham, but also Newton or Cambridge), but conversely much of the ridership Waltham generates is non-commuter student traffic
Mode share (assuming neutral Waltham effect): 44% of the narrow market, 36% of the wide market
Lowell Line
Commute market (narrower): Middlesex County only, towns of Winchester, Wilmington (half, shared with Haverhill Line), Woburn, Billerica, Lowell, Chelmsford, Tewksbury, and Dracut
Commute market (wider): the above, plus the Middlesex County towns of Dunstable, Westford, and Tyngsboro, and all of New Hampshire’s Hillsborough County
Commuter volume (wider): 15,551
Commuter volume (narrower): 11,912
Inbound commuter rail ridership: 5,586 excluding West Medford
Extra transit use: none – if anything, this line is missing more of its potential coming from its inability to serve Medford well under current commuter rail paradigms
Mode share: 47% of the narrow market, 36% of the wide market
Haverhill Line
Commute market (narrower): Middlesex County’s towns of Melrose, Stoneham, Wakefield, Reading, North Reading, and Wilmington (half, shared with Lowell Line); and Essex County’s towns of Andover, North Andover, Lawrence, and Haverhill
Commute market (wider): the above, plus Essex County’s towns of Boxford, Middleton, Groveland, and Lynnfield
Commuter volume (wider): 19,196
Commuter volume (narrower): 16,902
Inbound commuter rail ridership: 5,343 excluding Malden
Extra transit ridership: Malden’s two subway stations get 8,375 riders beyond the commute market, but they could be coming from people from Everett and Medford – let’s just add the number of parking spaces, which is 976, plus one half of the remaining ridership at Oak Grove, representing Melrose and Stoneham’s share, which is 2,603 (total bus ridership in Malden and the cities to its north is 3,394 in each direction, and I’m willing to believe 2,603 of this is from north of Malden)
Mode share: 53% of the narrow market, 46% of the wide market (update: a previous version of this post gave slightly lower numbers coming from forgetting to add the 976 subway parking spaces to the imputed ridership)
Newburyport and Rockport Lines
Commute market (wider): all of Essex County except the towns of Andover, North Andover, Lawrence, Haverhill, Boxford, Middleton, Groveland, and Lynnfield
Commute market (narrower): Essex County omitting, in addition to the above, the towns of Amesbury, Georgetown, Essex, West Newbury, Topsfield, and if one wants to be very narrow then also Saugus
Commuter volume (wider): 26,926
Commuter volume (narrower): 25,534 with Saugus, 22,999 without
Inbound commuter rail ridership: 8,821 excluding Chelsea
Extra transit use: no rail, but likely high bus ridership coming out of Lynn – total North Shore ridership is 4,409 in each direction excluding the 430, which is assigned to the Haverhill Line, and some lines that do not serve subway stations (429, 431, 435, 436, 451, 455, 465, 468)
Mode share: counting commuter rail only, 38% of the narrowest market and 33% of the wide market; counting also buses, 52% of the narrow market including Saugus and 49% of the wide market
Conclusion
The best-performing sectors capture about half the ridership of their general area of service and two-thirds of the ridership coming from the towns served by transit. Except for the Providence Line, this requires heavy use of subways and buses; the high contribution of commuter buses north of Boston suggests that better regional rail service, with more useful frequencies and integration between the CharlieCard and Charlie Ticket, really would make a difference, effectively railstituting the trip to Boston and allowing redirecting the buses to feeder service. The worst-performing lines only capture a third of the market, and for those there’s less that can be done; regional rail improvements would help, especially with regards to speed and reliability, but often those areas are too sprawled out.
Another conclusion is that for the purposes of constructing timetables for an electrified, FRA-free MBTA, we should ignore current ridership patterns, and instead look at the volume of commuting. The southwesterly slice serving Providence is not special; it just gets higher mode share on commuter rail since the service levels are higher than elsewhere. A 15/30 timetable on each line or branch (counting Kingston and Plymouth as one, but not any other split) would more or less approximate market demand; it would still underserve the South Shore, but the South Shore has ferry use and subway use, and therefore there’s no lower-level service to replace with good commuter rail.
A third conclusion is that it matters whether commuter rail can serve shorter trips or not, such as trips from Waltham, Medford, Malden, Lynn, and the Fairmount Line area. Those towns and neighborhoods have much larger volumes of commuters heading toward Boston than farther-out towns. This observation favors the regional rather than intercity interpretation of commuter rail, sacrificing speed in order to improve coverage in the innermost suburbs and in outer-urban neighborhoods.
On no line is express service a good proposition except when it’s downright intercity service, such as high-speed rail to New York via Providence, or even intercity trains to Maine or deep into New Hampshire. The problems coming from runtimes that aren’t a short turnaround time less than an even multiple of 15 minutes should not be fixed with express trains, but with closing some stations that aren’t necessary (such as River Works and Mishawum), and building more infill together with the North-South Rail Link, redistributing lines in such a manner as to maximize efficiency. For example, if the branch from Lynn to Marblehead is reactivated, then even with several additional infill stops, trip time from North Station to Marblehead would be about 22 minutes, which together with time gains from the tunnel (travel time through the rail link should be a hair lower than a turnaround time) would allow mixing with the Worcester Line. Currently it’d be difficult to do Worcester-Boston in 55 minutes even under best operating assumptions, and impossible with infill stations, but with the rail link and through-service to Marblehead, the limit would be closer to 1:01, and this allows a few infill stops in Brighton.
What’s driving all of this is the fact that there isn’t all that much demand mismatch. The South Side lines have a larger (wide) market than the North Side lines, but the difference is much smaller than the difference in ridership, and decreases even further if one lets the subway take care of certain parts of the South Shore. This means that, in terms of planning, all lines should be upgraded and should receive ample attention toward service levels, and in terms of operations, through-service should be based on infrastructure capabilities and scheduling constraints rather than on service demand matching.
Pedestrian Observations 
