bobtehpanda

Stadler FLIRT and KISS are open-gangway pairs. As far as commuter rail service, the Copenhagen S-tog, the S-Bahn systems of Germany, NS in the Netherlands, the Paris Transilien, Stockholm commuter rail, etc. all use open gangways. It's hard to find a recent European rolling stock order for regional or commuter services without open gangways.

Yeah, this is part of why systems around the world, even rail systems, are moving towards some open gangways; mentally, people start thinking of a consist as "one car" and are more likely to move along to where seating is available. Now obviously a 12-car set with only two cabs would be ridiculous, but two or four car sets with open gangways would probably be fine; the LIRR and MNR are already using married pairs, there's not a good reason why at the very least they couldn't be joined together with an open gangway.

It'd be neat, though I hope for their sake that MBTA takes advantage of the alternative compliance rules that have since come into effect at FRA and buy some European off-the-shelf units not built like tanks. M8s are very heavy compared to their continental counterparts.

Ultimately, it costs money to handle money. Brinks trucks/the money train and the security required to handle all that cash is not free. Compared to all the labor cost, additional maintenance cost from moving parts for cash machines, etc. the 2% charge that Visa, Mastercard and friends have is probably a steal.

Just some meta news. https://www.railjournal.com/financial/hitachi-rail-to-acquire-thales-ground-transportation-systems/ Thales is one of the suppliers for CBTC, no?

If no one uses the extra capacity that doesn't really help, does it? The 4th Av really proves the point of "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink." This is not possible to build, because of the railroad tracks in that area. 34th St is also really at the southern end of Midtown, so most people would still transfer to get to their final destination. It doesn't help too much.

The people I know who've been to it for upstate love that place. Well, anything beats an overpriced Gristedes or whatever.

It's not like there's news about Phase 2. Which will probably be finished in twenty years if not more.

Picture to help explain what would be ideal for me: Note: only major transfers are marked because I'm lazy.

Which just makes it similar to PABT - Times Square, a very busy connection. Also, of the four lines at Fulton (Eighth, Seventh, Nassau, Lex) - Lex riders are not likely to move their butts, Nassau riders would probably be better served making a connection between Grand and Bowery, and it would be pretty difficult to beat cross-platform transfers for Seventh/Lex in Brooklyn. And no one has addressed the fact that routing Second Avenue through Nassau/Fulton means severing Nassau trains from that connection; Nassau's transfer situations are far worse, given that it has no connections to most lines outside of Fulton St instead of inconvenient ones. The entire reason Second Avenue is the routing and not Third or Fifth is because the east side is underserved. The problem with Alphabet City/LES is that it's impossible to serve without slowing down everyone. Personally, I think that now the road is more or less dedicated to buses that the M14 would be a great conversion candidate to a light rail/streetcar. ---- Personally, if we ever end up building a Phase III or IV, I would like to see it as a line from Broadway (Queens) to 79th St and then under Third, since I think most capacity on 63rd will more or less be spoken for in a situation I would consider "ideal."

The entire point of going that far east is that there is no subway service there at all. To be honest, this is a lot of hemming and hawing when pretty much all the stations are slated to have passageways. From Water/Fulton to Fulton Center is one avenue block.

I imagine the MTA wants nothing to do with building a station pretty much at the water line. Particularly when it would be deeper than New SF, which already flooded once.

To be quite clear, the tail tracks for the tunnel for Phase IV will reach to under the South Ferry building. There wouldn't be additional stations between Hanover and Fulton, mostly because you need to get a certain depth to clear the river. So there's nothing really to make fancy.

Well for starters, nothing is in the way of a ten car platform on Water St because nothing is there yet. The same cannot be said of the Nassau Line, which like the rest of the subway has a lot of columns supporting everything that would have to be dealt with, and Fulton St itself is ultra-constrained given the double stacking of the platforms that was deemed necessary when it was built. Also, you would then be removing Fulton access from Jamaica; Fulton has only two tracks. This is a huge negative. There are other ways to skin the connections cat. One I've heard is to swap the Sixth and Second Avenue lines at Grand, so Second Avenue goes over the bridge (getting all the connections) and Sixth goes down Water St.

But also potentially more costly and complicated than just building the dumb simple straight ROW down Water St with new platforms. Like, if there wasn't a crapton of work involved, maybe Nassau would save money, but I really don't think it would, and it's also not a great ROW even if it has connections to Brooklyn; after all, you're then limited by the also going through Montague.

The Chrystie St connection has the and the running through it. And then you're now weaving the with a lot of level changes as well. The is less directly affected, but if you lose the then Delancey-Essex once again becomes one of the most congested stations in the system. It's the entire reason why the 6th Av is never going to go away. I mean, the platforms are also not 600 ft long, no?

https://nec-commission.com/app/uploads/2021/07/C35-Executive-Summary-Only.pdf For $115B this is what we get: Hoo boy.

All you have to do is figure out a way to build that Nassau St connection without shutting off Willy B, Rutgers, and Manhattan Bridge service for 5-10 years. And also extend all the platforms on Nassau St to 10 cars, and make all the stations ADA accessible. 🙄

So I've seen this assertion before but not usually as an insinuation that it's just the padding. My understanding is that the switches around Penn and Jamaica are very slow by international standards (this northjersey.com article says 15MPH), and speeding up that slowest part of the journey right before the station with more modern switches and possibly a simpler interlocking layout would provide big wins. Now, I'm not that much of a train nerd to say that is or isn't true, but there's some degree of truth to it, since one of the big East Side Access adjacent projects is the redoing of Jamaica's interlocking which will supposedly offer 40% more capacity or something, and is why the Atlantic Branch will terminate at the new Jamaica platform. I haven't heard anything about that project recently, though.

1. they block each other at Forest Hills, hence why they don't run anywhere close to a full 30 TPH 2. both the and run alongside other lines with more frequency than the current on QBL Express and 60th St respectively. In fact it may actually make it easier to run service since it's kind of hard to evenly slot the weird amount of into the 4 minute spacing of the with a two minute headway. 3. even at current service levels, a 480 ft train every 7.5 minutes is way more capacity than a 60 foot bus every 10. there's tons of space in the trains themselves on the locals.

What I don't get is that you have to rent a citibike, so you could just park it anywhere and pick one up at your destination. Noted cycling paradise the Netherlands does not allow bicycles on public transit because of the sheer number of cyclists. (A side effect of this is that Dutch people who bike usually own multiple cheap bikes; one for home to train and one for train to work.) And now it's so popular they build massive underground bike parking garages, the size of our car garages but even more densely packed.

this just sounds like creating more bureaucratic soup, which is not really what the MTA needs

TBH this is why you go for a contractor like Cubic or Clear Devices or whatever. It is more expensive, but you are paying someone to support it on beck and call, because God knows the MTA couldn't give two shits.

If I remember correctly, BusTime was literally a bunch of Hunter college students right? I suppose that having everything being an "open" standard can be good because it's cheaper, but you do have to eventually pay for maintenance either way.

It's a blessing we don't have people foamy enough to suggest something dumb like a bus serving the entirety of 25A to Orient Point. At least not in the bus section.