Author Archives: Garrett Wollman

About those stations on the Providence Line…

Posted on 2019-09-02

Two Sundays ago, instead of going for a bike ride in the nice weather like I should have, I went on a road trip of sorts to look at the condition of the six stations on the MBTA’s Providence Line … Continue reading →

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My trip to the Dublin Worldcon

Posted on 2019-08-26

Folks who have followed this blog for a long time will recall that in 2017, I made two trips to Finland. For the first trip, I attended the World Figure Skating Championships. When I realized that the 75th World Science … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized

Scheduling Regional Rail for the Providence Line

Posted on 2019-06-20

Followers of this blog will recall that nearly a year ago I started doing simulations for various MBTA commuter rail lines under plausible operating schedules for TransitMatters’ Regional Rail proposal. Since I live in Framingham, I concentrated mainly on the … Continue reading →

Posted in Transportation | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Other people’s recipes: Claire Ptak’s Ginger-molasses cake

Posted on 2019-05-25

I know it’s been an incredibly long time since my last proper recipe write-up, so here’s a lovely little cake from Claire Ptak’s The Violet Bakery Cookbook (Ten Speed Press, 2014 — wow, I’ve been working through this cookbook for … Continue reading →

Posted in Food | Tagged , , , ,

Two months of thinking about buses

Posted on 2019-04-16

You may be wondering why I never followed up on my promise to simulate Regional Rail ridership for the Providence Line. In part that’s because it’s actually really hard — the Providence Line is much more complicated than the Worcester … Continue reading →

Posted in Transportation | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Updating my MBTA Commuter Rail modeling for the Worcester Line

Posted on 2019-02-04

On Friday, the MBTA quietly released the results of its 2018 in-person passenger counts. I’ve been waiting for this numbers since I started modeling service on the Framingham/Worcester Line last fall, and apparently everyone else has been waiting for them … Continue reading →

Posted in Transportation | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

MBTA Rail Vision’s “Peer Systems Review”: Adding Helsinki to the mix

Posted on 2018-12-06

The day before Thanksgiving, while I was already away and visiting with family, the MBTA Rail Vision team published their Peer Systems Review paper, describing a number of domestic and international commuter rail systems with detailed statistics about their service … Continue reading →

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My comments on Rail Vision

I attended the meeting of the Rail Vision Advisory Committee on Wednesday, and summarized what I saw in an interminable Twitter thread, which I’m not going to repeat here. After writing all that, I spent another few hours composing an … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on 2018-11-15 | Tagged , , ,

A further examination of the Agricultural Branch for Regional Rail

Posted on 2018-11-12

About a month ago, I posted the most recent of several posts about using the former Agricultural Branch Railroad, the CSX-owned freight line which runs from Framingham to Clinton, for passenger service under Regional Rail. I made a Google Maps … Continue reading →

Posted in Transportation | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Three Reasons the Commonwealth Needs to Commit to Regional Rail Now

Posted on 2018-10-27

After writing that very long slide deck, I thought it was worth boiling down my conclusions for policymakers to three important points: 1. There is a large investment of some sort required in commuter rail infrastructure over the next ten … Continue reading →

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