Tag Archives: commuter rail

Massachusetts’ transportation bond bills: an analysis and recommendation

Posted on 2020-07-26 by

This month, I’ve spent rather more time than I would like to admit digging through the Massachusetts state legislature’s web site to try to figure out what the heck they have done with the transportation funding (and MBTA governance) measures … Continue reading →

Posted in Law & Society, Transportation | Tagged , ,

Commuter rail schedules for the Plague Year

Posted on 2020-05-19 by

At a couple of recent MBTA board meetings, the authority’s staff have made it clear that they expect the passenger volume on MBTA commuter rail to remain depressed for significantly longer than that of the subway, light rail, and bus … Continue reading →

Posted in Transportation | Tagged , , ,

Comments on today’s Rail Vision decision by the MBTA board

Posted on 2019-11-04 by

I don’t usually write blog posts with my comments before the MBTA board, but after today’s momentous decision, with which I mostly agree, I wanted to memorialize my own comments in a more public place than the video replay of … Continue reading →

Posted in Transportation | Tagged , ,

A quick look at congestion tolling for Boston

I’ve written in these pages before about creating a cordon-type congestion charging zone (à la London) for Boston, and argued for it to be geographically quite large to reduce shunpiking. And I’ve also supported doubling the motor fuels tax — … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on 2019-09-05 by | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

About those stations on the Providence Line…

Posted on 2019-09-02 by

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 →

Posted in Transportation | Tagged , ,

Scheduling Regional Rail for the Providence Line

Posted on 2019-06-20 by

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

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

Posted on 2018-12-06 by

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 →

Posted in Transportation | Tagged , ,

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 by | Tagged , , ,

A further examination of the Agricultural Branch for Regional Rail

Posted on 2018-11-12 by

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 by

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 →

Posted in Transportation, Uncategorized | Tagged , , ,