dmaze

Q: Where in greater Camberville can I get one of these CharlieCard widgets?

A: They will be distributed "at key locations during rush hours" starting next Monday, 4 December, including Alewife, Davis, and Lechmere (all three on both 5 and 8 December). See the PDF here for full dates and locations.

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Q: What are you doing?

A: I plan to get a CharlieCard on Monday, probably at Davis, and let it sit unloved in a drawer at home. Meanwhile, I'll keep buying monthly commuter rail Zone 1A CharlieTickets so that, if I want to take the commuter rail from Porter to North Station, it's still free.

Tried the Galleriawards commute today taking the commuter rail between Porter and North Station both ways. Got a window seat both ways, which was surprising; the outbound evening train was pretty full but lots of people got on 0-3 minutes before departure. GPS says the train goes 50 mph between Porter and the Medford Street underpass, 25 mph past the Boston Engine Terminal, and 10-15 mph between the inbound end of the BET and North Station proper.

Afternoon commute: left work at 5:50 PM, took EZRide to North Station, got there at 6:05 for a 6:15 train. (There's a Downeaster train that also leaves at 6:15; being right next to it was a little odd.) Got home at 6:35, so a 45-minute commute. This suggests to me that the bus is probably faster. The timing constraints around EZRide also make me uncomfortable: getting to North Station more than 10 minutes early makes for an awfully long wait, but there's not much margin if traffic in front of the Museum of Science is bad.

Tomorrow, Alewife. Thursday...who knows?

An informal mailing list I'm on gets digests of transit news from various places. An entry from early August mentions that San Jose's light rail system had a 31% year-over-year ridership increase in July 2005, with a notable increase in weekend ridership going to the Great Mall in Milpitas and Oakridge Mall "in Almaden Valley" (where I can quibble about San Jose geography, but that's not the point). The interesting thing about Oakridge is that it's a somewhat nasty walk from Ohlone-Chynoweth station, or across a moderate-sized street and the parking lot from a dedicated Oakridge station on the two-stop single-track "Almaden" spur (again, I don't think Almaden Station is in Almaden Valley, but it was walking distance from home when I lived there). This is actually more interesting because both malls have pretty good highway access (Great Mall is just off of 880; Oakridge is basically at the 85/87 interchange).

A related thought was on LA transit: I feel like public transit in Boston is an attractive choice because the road system is so bad that the T is time-competitive even if the Red Line only goes 40 mph between stops. LA has a very extensive highway system, and it's very sprawling, so your choices from what I can tell seem to be drive to transit to drive to work, or just drive straight in to work and be done with it. So too many highways makes transit a less attractive option, but destroying highways so that transit succeeds feels like it's increasing the overall commute suckiness.

The real question is, what does make the local malls in San Jose compelling enough that people are willing to take Light Rail to them? Oakridge is certainly bigger than when I lived there but it's not particularly unique. In suburban California, a shopping mall is actually an interesting strange case of commercial density. Could you move transit closer to the mall? With a fair bit of pain, but sure, but people are riding it regardless, in a sort of similar way to people taking the T to Lechmere or Kendall to get to the Galleria.

A side question is whether there are interesting directions for VTA light rail to go. I always wanted to see it extended down Almaden Expressway, but VTA shot itself in the foot allowing the development in the Almaden station parking lot. I suspect they really, really need to fix the downtown bottleneck, but this probably means a subway which is really expensive. (Do note that South San Jose and Santa Teresa to Oakridge don't cross the downtown barrier, nor does Santa Clara to Milpitas.) If they can borrow the UP right-of-way along 85, the Vasona Corridor could also be extended up to 85 and 280; maybe interesting, but a really awkward way to actually get anywhere. A line west, maybe along Stevens Creek Boulevard, or looping around on Capitol Expressway, is probably what I'd think about if I had capital dollars to spend.

Yesterday's bike trip took us across several of the runs-north-and-south-between-main-lines lines north of Worcester, and across the failed Mass Central. ( possibly incorrect speculation on Massachusetts freight rail )

So, about that Mass Central. In Berlin and Bolton, the part we biked past, there's this big berm that's clearly the ex-MCRR right-of-way. (From West Boylston west, there's a unpaved rail trail; between Waltham and Sudbury there are power lines.) The point at which we crossed it had a "no trespassing, MWRA" sign. It's really visible; if you look at my Google Maps bike trip page, double-click on the 60-mile marker, zoom all the way in on satellite mode and go east to the next turn, you can see it winding along, parallel to the straighter CSX (ex-OC) line. Did they really build what looks like 15 or 20 miles of rail on a big pile of dirt? Or is this some kind of subtle aqueduct thing on an unused right-of-way?

Last night I took the 90-cent tour of outer Arlington. Might have been nicer if it was light out. I confused the bus driver with a question of just how far the tour went (the route starts at Alewife, then goes through a loop, so I wanted to get off in some sonce past "the end"). Didn't help me understand how things out there are or aren't connected. The little kids behind me were really fascinated with Christmas lights, though.

Another casualty of the DNC madness: the Amtrak Downeaster (Boston North Station to Portland, Maine) isn't running. At all. Not even, say, with bustitution from South Station to Anderson/Woburn the same way the commuter rail is and then through train service from there. (Are the equipment moves involved just too hard, maybe? Is there enough room to turn a train consisting of a Genesis engine, three coaches, a cafe car, and a cabbage on the north side of the drawbridge? Or is that inside the Secret Service exclusion zone? It still feels like you could do something complicated involving getting on the freight track on the Lowell line through Somerville, from there wind up behind the Boston Engine Terminal, and from there cross on the Grand Junction, but this may just be too much effort for them.)

Reports I've seen so far is that the T's "searches" consist only of swab tests for explosive residue, and that they're not looking for anything else, and that security in general will be more relaxed than the literature has been making it sound (they understand that people want to take their luggage on the T to the airport, and that people in Roxbury and JP might take the Orange Line to downtown for their jobs without going near the convention).

A random top-of-page graphic has a picture of T central command on it. I can't entirely place the track map at the top left, but I bet it's the Braintree line; I suspect they've left off the very unsexy and unformative Green Line display. The very top left must be the Ashmont line, by extension.

As part of signal improvements on the Orange Line, the T is shutting down the northern part of the line on Sunday through Thursday evenings after 9 PM: buses from Oak Grove to Sullivan, and then single-track operation from Sullivan to Haymarket. I've done this a couple of times now; it's more irritating than fun, riding the train "wrong rail" isn't that exciting, and the train tends to go kind of slowly, and it's frustrating getting bussed right past home to need to walk back later.

On Monday night: "Sullivan Square. This is the last stop for this train; shuttle buses to Wellington, Malden Center, and Oak Grove are at the lower busway up the stairs." (pause) "Could you please run the baton to the other end of the train?"

Rail systems have this little goal of not having trains run into each other. The usual way they accomplish this is with signal systems: the track gets divided into blocks, and you get a red signal on entry to a block if there's already a train in it, so you never have two trains in the same block and therefore never have two trains in the same place. In this case, though, they're running trains in the opposite direction of the signals, and have no way to get them out of the way of a train coming the other way.

So now you have a constrained resource (the track), that you can only have a single user of at a time in the place of multiple current threads of execution (trains). The solution, of course, is a mutual-exclusion lock: you can't use the resource until you're holding the lock. And in this case the lock is a two-foot-long green piece of wood; the driver stops when entering the single-track section to get the lock, it stays with the driver when the train turns at Sullivan, and gets handed back to the people on the ground when the train gets back to Haymarket.

You'd think that three or four days after the snow stopped, it'd be possible to get around, right? On principle I took the T to Wellington last night and walked home, only to discover that, in true form, the %!@$ing MDC has done nothing to clear the sidewalks along 28 between Wellington Circle and 93. So walking home from the T involved lots of trudging through the snow. Separately, while the 95 is running more-or-less on schedule, the CT2 has been 15-20 minutes late both yesterday and today. With GPS-enabled busses, shouldn't the T be able to tell you at least where the next bus is, even if they can't guess how long you have to wait?

Let's say I'm trying to get home from Teele Square on a Sunday or after 8 PM. The 89 bus goes across Winter Hill; experience shows it saves me about 15 minutes over walking. But, it runs every hour (leaving the Foodmaster at x:20). So 25% of the time, it's worth waiting for the bus. Trying to get to Sullivan in the morning, the 95 saves me 15 minutes but runs every 20, so it's 75% useful.

This clearly isn't the only metric; you don't want to wait an hour outside to save three, usually, and I can time when I leave home to catch the 95. But for evaluating transportation options in the abstract, if you can identify a clear alternative, "how often does it save me time" seems to be a neat metric that I haven't seen discussed before. (And is also useful for busses with random schedules, like the CT2: 50% effective from Sullivan Square to campus, if it saves 10 minutes over the T but runs every 20.)

...the subject of the T's automated bus announcement system came up. "Sometimes I've gotten on a bus and watched a driver futz with the thing, and I've wanted to say, 'no, see, let me sit there for a minute, now, you put it in this mode, and the route code is 7-4-7-0, and--" "--and this is why I can't see you ever buying a car."

Yesterday I got hosed trying to go from Harvard to Davis; I got on the train, it left, and didn't stop again until Alewife. When we got there I vaguely heard an announcement say this train will run express to harvard so I got off and waited for the next train. $!@#ing 16xx red line trains with the dead PA systems. (Car 01638, IIRC, if anyone cares.)

Also, my T pass, with the big letter "C" on it and the word "combo"? It's really a bus pass. It makes the happy beep when I try to get on busses, but refuses to let me through any turnstiles getting on the subway. Haven't tried the green line yet, but I've definitely failed to get on the train at Kendall (both ways), Harvard, Davis, and Sullivan. I bet it'll work on the green line because a bus pass is good enough there.

I seem to have run into the Orange Line's emergency brakes more than usual recently. A couple of nights ago, I was heading home, the train left Haymarket, and immediately stopped; I think the driver forgot to flip the wayside 40 switch, the train left ATO territory, and the system said "no cab signals, must stop!" This morning we stopped headed into Downtown Crossing inbound (or, perhaps, right in front of the platform, but in the wrong direction).

Also, conflicting with a statement I made on zephyr a long while ago, it looks like the Orange Line does in fact have train stops; I noticed them at the outbound signal at Wellington, and now that I've thought to look around they do seem to be by every wayside signal. I haven't figured out if there's anything that actually happens if a train runs over one in the raised position, but I'd also think they'd have been removed at some point in the past 20 years if the current trains completely ignored them.