TransitMatters, a transit advocacy group in Boston | Hacker News Reader

TransitMatters, a transit advocacy group in Boston

politico.com

100 pointsdevy31 comments

Improving regional rail in greater Boston can also serve as a key to improving the housing crisis that the city is experiencing, especially if some of the suburbs served by regional rail can be convinced to re-zone for higher density mixed-use development in an area around their commuter train stations.

> millennials who’ve rejected suburban life to go car-free or car-light in the city

I'm one such millennial living car-free in Boston. I would gladly move to the suburbs if I could complete all my ordinary day-to-day tasks (commuting, grocery store shopping, hitting my favorite local restaurant, etc) without touching a car. But the fact is, aside from the commercial/residential zoning divide, having these stores in walking distance is not economically feasible without a certain level of density that American suburbs just can't fulfill. America's strange obsession with big lawns and single family housing has shut down the dream of living without a car everywhere except for the urban cores of the few top metro areas in the country. Furthermore, this dispersed suburban housing style is enforced by local zoning ordinance (& requires supermajority of town vote to change zoning rules in the state of MA)!

Waltham has that. Within walking distance of the commuter rail station (which is also a bus nexus), there are apartment buildings, two supermarkets, a large number of restaurants, and most of the other non-big-box store types you want. A nice movie theater, too. Waltham has a big stock of rental housing because there are two colleges (Brandeis in the south and Bentley in the north). Crime tends towards shoplifting and driving with a suspended license.

It's 23 minutes on the commuter rail to North Station, less to Porter Square. The 70 bus runs to Central Square Cambridge, stopping at the Arsenal Mall along the way.

Come be my neighbor.

Thanks for the reply. I've actually been looking at renting in Waltham when my current lease ends (as well as a few other places I've been looking - Quincy, Malden, Somerville). A while back I was thinking of buying, but prices are really damn expensive right now.

I lived in Quincy not far from the north Quincy redline stop. Aside from the typical delays it was pretty affordable and there is grocery and shopping in walking distance for the most part. Waltham has gotten a bit expensive the past few years.

You absolutely can live as you describe (commuting, grocery shopping, going to restaurants, etc without a car) in the center of almost every suburb inside of 128. You can even do it while living in a single family house. Go ahead and move already.

I'm also not so sure that it will go far in terms of easing housing costs. I just moved to the SF bay area from Boston and live outside of SF, but close to a CalTrain stop. Everything is walkable for me, but the cost of living is comparable to SF (albeit the apartment is a bit larger).

I have friends in the suburbs of Boston who have to commute into Boston for work, which is not something I have to do, as my community is a bit self enclosed. But their housing situation is not necessarily much better than mine was in Boston. Yeah, double the square footage for the same price but there wasn't more reasonably priced housing available that close to the commuter rail, and there wasn't exactly much to do in those areas outside of grocery shopping and commuting.

Anyway, I'm starting to ramble a bit, but I'm failing to understand how more housing stock will improve any housing crisis. At best, it will keep the prices from inflating at the current rate further, but I don't see an increase in stock actually lowering prices. Developers are just going to build for the same price point as the market has now.

You're not wrong, especially about "double the square footage for the same price". But that's why it's essential that the key to affordable housing isn't just connecting outlying suburbs by transit but also reevaluating zoning laws to fit more units in the same space.

For a simple example, look at one of the most livable and expensive (per sqft) cities in the world, Tokyo. A median family can afford to buy a single family house in the Tokyo metropolitan region. This works because the entire Tokyo region, including transit-connected suburbs, have very little restrictions on the type of housing that can be built, and where it can be built. ( Great article: https://www.curbed.com/2017/2/3/14496248/tokyo-real-estate-a... )

That model might not necessarily work perfectly for America, particularly because Tokyo is only increasing in population 1% per year and America's top cities are growing faster than that. But I guarantee thats a lot closer to a solution to the housing crisis than anything North America has produced.

My suburb already has several newly constructed apartment buildings near the commuter rail and more on the way. This, plus a new MBTA parking garage make me think improving the train infrastructure is the big "if" now.

It is amazing what this community advocacy group is accomplishing in Boston. If you want to improve transit in the Bay Area and beyond, starting with SF, there's a group of people volunteering at Code for America working on similar things as TrasnitMatters for MUNI and Bay Area public transit. Not meeting on Halloween this Wednesday, but the following Wednesday and each week at 115 9th St (a few blocks from Market Street) at 6PM - ~9:15PM.

The group: http://opentransit.city/ Part of SF Code for America: https://codeforsanfrancisco.org/

Currently using GraphQL, Node, Cassandra, HTML, CSS, JS, Bootstrap, and React.

Always open for developers, data scientists, product and marketing people, transit people, and whoever else wants to improve public transit in the Bay Area.

I'm more than a little glad that public transit is becoming cool again, and people are seeing it as a thing they can improve rather than a "big bad government" artifact.

Maybe in 20 years we might get some transit out here in the Midwest!

This part's exciting for me:

"Early this year, TransitMatters’ leaders released their most ambitious proposal yet: a “regional rail” plan to speed up and electrify the MBTA’s sprawling, aging commuter rail system, which covers most of eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island. With faster, quick-accelerating electric trains, and high-level platforms for every train car in each station to speed up entry and exit, TransitMatters predicts that its plan could cut the commuter rail’s Boston-to-Providence travel times from as long as 73 minutes down to 45 minutes."

This excites exactly nobody who rides the commuter rail.

What would excite us is more staff. You can only get on/off a train at a door where there is a conductor (you only get on/off at a door opened by a conductor) regardless of platform height, most time spend getting on/off is waiting in line for everyone in front of you to go through whichever few doors are open. We don't need faster clock speeds, we need more cores (metaphorically speaking). Even the conductors complain about this. They could literally hire more people tomorrow if they wanted to. Three is no need to go through a long RFP + proposals + procurement process like they would need to do for new rolling stock.

This entire piece reads like some aloof central planners telling everyone else what they need without actually assessing the situation.

Another thing that would be exiting is trains that run on time. Whether they run on diesel or whale oil won't matter to most people as long as they're an improvement over the status quo. A week doesn't go by when there isn't a (mechanical breakdown related) 1hr+ delay on any given line.

Edit: Yes, raised platforms are faster but they're not so much faster (and they're certainly not cheaper) than utilizing the existing infrastructure (i.e. all the doors on the train) to a greater extent.

1. Raised platforms would allow using automatic doors and all-door boarding. Right now, doors can't be automatic because you don't know which ones board at platform level and which need to have the builtin stairs dropped down to track level. As it is, not only does it take time for a conductor to drop the stairs, but staffing is a major part of the T's operational expense for each ride.

Also, the passenger throughput per door is higher when they can just walk off, instead of having to teeter down stairs. (Not everybody can just hop down the stairs)

Oh yeah, frustrated passengers opening the door and lowering the stairs themselves is a dangerous no-no.

2. Electric trains accelerate and decelerate much faster, cutting time off the trip. They have more rated HP and can "burst" up to something like 2x the rated HP when accelerating from a stop.

(Except on those fun fall days when the train slides on the wet leaves...)

Source: personal experience as an MBTA commuter rail rider (reverse commuting to Concord) for four years, former occasional NJ Transit rider (on the electrified Northeast Corridor)

Sure all that stuff is nice but increased staffing can create the same improvement as all of that right now without the massive up front cost of new stations or rolling stock.

Yes, but with massive ongoing operational costs. That's not sustainable.

> most time spend getting on/off is waiting in line for everyone in front of you to go through whichever few doors are open

I've ridden the commuter rail for 13 years. I can't believe "exactly nobody" has noticed that raised platforms load and unload roughly 2x faster. More conductors would help too, but anyone not excited about raised platforms everywhere is unobservant.

Conductors at every door sounds bizarre to me. I ride the Metro North commuter rail into NYC on occasion and when it pulls into the station all the doors open and you get on or off.

What's the deal with this in Boston? Do the doors not have automatic opening hardware? Are they checking tickets on entry instead of walking down the train and punching them at your seat?

It's the lack of automatic opening/closing hardware and consequent safety issue of passengers potentially trying to enter or exit a moving train. Also, for most doors some stops will have raised platforms and some won't. Passengers opening and closing the appropriately-named "traps" themselves to switch between level exit and stair exit would be hazardous.

Sounds like they still run steam-powered.

You don't need a conductor at every door to allow all door embarking/disembarking. Look at metro north, or SunRail. They both allow all door boarding without a conductor at each door. Raised platforms is something that could help to achieve process improvement.

Which station is this? I never had this problem doing a reverse-commute out of Yawkey station, but perhaps that's because trains are more packed going into the city.

Well for starters Waltham at peak hours (inbound in the morning, outbound in the evening) is a good example. If you want an example with full length raised platform then Littleton/495 is another good one.

As someone who took the E trains of the Green Line to high school every day, the fact that they were holding up the entire system at night is not surprising in the least.

Was the author getting paid per use of the word “millennial“?

That's certainly annoying, but please don't start a new thread with a shallow dismissal. It leads to lousy discussion, and this article has a lot more interesting stuff in it than that.

The guideline that asks "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize" applies to articles as well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Given that the oldest millenials are mid 30s (most start the generation at 1981) is this really noteworthy? That’s a typical age for people to be assuming positions of responsibility even in traditional companies.

>TransitMatters has gone big, with an ambitious, high-cost proposal to speed up and electrify the T’s diesel-chugging commuter rail system.

Make the damn thing run on time and nobody will care if it burns whale oil and exhausts powdered asbestos

The schedule change for conductors was last week and we've already discussed with the new conductor what kind of pizza we should order when we have our multi-hour "the switches are frozen and nothing can leave north station" delays this winter.

>Ofsevit steps off an MBTA commuter-rail train onto a platform, then turns and looks behind him. His train car has already emptied, but the rear cars haven’t. Instead of stepping quickly onto platforms, riders are stepping slowly and gingerly from the train to footstools, then to the ground.

This is pure BS. There are no footstools or anything like that at Waltham. If they wanted people to get off the train fast they'd let people exit at doors where there isn't a conductor or they'd use more conductors to staff more doors. This would also reduce conductor workload and let them eliminate all the ticket checkers at the stations.

>high-level platforms for every train car in each station to speed up entry and exit,

This requirement does not allow for partial implementation. Many towns are stuck maintaining grandfathered in stations because they don't have the money to do a full length, full height platform. If you want to save time open more doors for people to use. Of course a bunch of transit budget planners in Boston would rather tell the towns to build platforms rather than hire more bodies to open more doors because the towns are the ones who have to pay for the platforms.

I'm pretty sure the MBTA owns the stations and platforms as successor to the Boston and Maine, NYCRR, etc.

Maintenance and upgrades are the MBTA's problem, not local cities and towns.

The downtown ticket checkers are useless and should all be sacked. Even if they're part-time at minimum wage there's no way that there's enough fare evasion to justify their salaries. The overwhelming majority of passengers at peak travel times have pre-paid monthly passes.

> Make the damn thing run on time and nobody will care if it burns whale oil and exhausts powdered asbestos

I beg to differ; it really stinks when one of those old diesel commuter trains goes by. They are also very noisy (electric trains are basically silent at the slow, slow speed of the MBTA commuter rail). Ask anyone who lives near or passes by the tracks regularly what they think - there's tens of thousands of us.

You get used to it in an incredibly short period of time. I'm less than a hundred feet from the Amtrak line, and you just don't even notice them going by after a while. It's the 100+ long freights that aren't slowing down to stop at the station in town that shake the windows....

Do you know what helps it run on time? New, reliable rolling stock and shorter dwell times. Electric systems are way more reliable than diesels - many fewer moving parts and no particulate matter to gum things up.

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