The new line is the typical MA thing of spending 75% of the money of doing it right, to get 25% of the value of doing it right. And likely poisoning the well for ever doing it right.

It's going to be an incredibly long ride, service levels are shit, and the routing/scheduling requires a ton of wishful thinking to think it's not going to collapse the entire Old Colony lines into delays in reality - since, among other problems, they have single-track chokepoints and the proposed schedule basically requires everything to be perfectly on time to not have cascading delays. Good luck with that.

And for the limited service they're going to run - they really ought to have picked just one endpoint for now rather than splitting frequencies by branching. One big city with tolerable service > 2 with shit service.

The "full-build"/Phase II (PDF warning) - which would go to Stoughton and inbound from there, is a fine enough concept and could be a useful service. This half-assed one is not. And when the ridership is utter shit, it's going to kill the chances of actually finishing the project properly.

What should be happening is building SCR to Stoughton from day 1 and extending the Middleborough line to Buzzards Bay - with a couple a day over the bridge like the Cape Flyer does seasonally. That would actually be useful and effective. This is not.

Anyway, back on topic.

Middleborough can't even plan for developing at the new station either, because if the full-build/"Phase II" gets built, they'll likely switch back to the old (current) station site instead and the new station will be abandoned. If they actually follow the rules and rezone around the new station....they're risking creating this whole situation again in 10 years for a different set of lied-to people.

No, you're not understanding the situation, and Boston.com's description is wildly misleading.

Middleborough is entirely in the right to be furious with the state. The state built a MBTA station in 1997. Middleborough did exactly what the state wants them to do - built a significant cluster of higher density transit oriented development in walking distance from the station, built a big park + ride lot, and did solid ridership numbers.

Now the state, for their idiotic South Coast Rail Phase I plan (SCR could be useful, but not this plan), is closing the station and moving it to somewhere else that's not walking distance from any of that existing housing/where they'd been building.

Middleborough is not upset about having a train station, Middleborough is upset about doing the right thing and getting royally fucked by the state for it. Now they've got a pile of apartments with unhappy developers/owners that are vastly less attractive and the new station location will be far more challenging/disruptive to develop around.

All for a plan that's an idiotic waste of money and will not provide them any benefits.

It's going to be 40F and raining on Friday, and then drop to 8F that night and not get above freezing on Saturday.

How do you feel about vertical ice skating with 10,000 of your closest friends? Saturday is probably going to be an utter shitshow.

What matters is ice thickness, not air temperature.

They're not that closely related, and there's plenty of times when it's warm out, there's big puddles all over and it's perfectly safe to be on the ice. (and plenty of times of the inverse).

That said, common sense should prevail - if it hasn't been a very cold winter and it's recently been warm....you ought to be checking more carefully than normal. And certainly shouldn't be winging it.

It keeps the toilets from getting (as) trashed from people with poor aim or who don't give a fuck.

So whether you personally want to (or have the equipment to) use one or not, you should probably want to have them in any restroom that's also being used by men.

NH actually does better than the average state, to be clear - it's around #13 - about 60% of road costs were covered by those kinds of user fees in FY 2016 Source.

> Where do the funds come from? I’m asking because you seem like the expert in this.

Other "general" tax revenues.

Especially at the federal level. The infrastructure bill that's sending billions in $ to NH, is not coming from the gas tax.

The normal federal share of road infrastructure projects is increasingly not coming from gas taxes. The federal highway trust fund that pays for those is theoretically funded by the gas tax....but the tax hasn't been increased since 1993, things clearly cost more today than 30 years ago, and so Congress transfers billions per year of general revenue (income taxes and the like) to plug the gap.

> Are you forgetting the massive registration fees each year? Tolls?

No. Still doesn't cover the cost. Roughly half of road spending in the country comes from general funds, not user fees (gas tax, registration, license, other costs you only pay for driving).

> Property taxes?

Are not a tax paid by drivers specifically - the use of that money to subsidize rail is no different from using it to subsidize roads.

Either they're both "failing business models", or looking at basic transportation infrastructure through the lens of profit/loss is a dumb idea....in both cases.

Roads get massive subsidies. How do you think all of the road work is paid for? The gas tax(es) don't come anywhere close to paying for it.

Yes.

Eh, it's uncommon to result in being quite this level of apparent temp/wind chill.

And it is notable in some other ways: Mt. Washington looks like it may break the coldest temp ever recorded there tonight (record is -47F).

Branches are bad, long branches of varying lengths are worse.

As reminder, every time you branch, you split the mainline frequency. Every 3 minutes on the main line turns into every 12 if you've got 4 branches and you're feeding them equally. If they get high ridership, you can further than run into the Green Line situation where it is physically impossible to stuff more trains into your mainline and so you can't raise branch frequencies further.

Beyond that, the longer the branch the harder it is to feed the trains into the mainline in their intended scheduling/order - there's more that can "go wrong"/vary.

If you want to do Boston-Montreal, realistically you're just going to run it out through Springfield and then north on the existing Vermonter/Valley Flyer route, letting you get more value out of planned/intended investments on those corridors for other services, higher/more useful frequencies, and valuable connectivity at the expense of an indirect routing.

The old line wasn't particularly fast when it did exist and while a BOS-SPG-WRJ-MTL routing won't be faster than the historic timetables had for the old line (which were ~2hrs WRJ-Concord, ~4hrs WRJ-Boston on an express making very few stops), it won't be a lot slower either.

I think "high-density" is a bridge too far for VT, but larger areas of "medium-density" is perfectly realistic and arguably the only real solution to VT's housing crisis. The local downtown is not going to be harmed by a couple more blocks of 3-6 story buildings....like the ones that are already in the part of the downtown area as it is.

They're also the only places in VT that typically have the utilities in place to really support significant amounts of housing.

And yes - having more people living in town centers also makes transit as normal transportation choice more viable. "Last-mile" is a big issue otherwise.

Re-reading, I suppose that sounds harsher than intended - so I do apologize for that.

I'd love to see VT dream bigger when it comes to transit, to be clear. I just think it's best bets on that are the incremental work to improve services/expand services on the best/most cost-effective corridors it has to work with.

There's a reason it's (for example) a pain in the ass to go East-West across VT even by car - it's hard to build through there even for a road, building a decent rail line would be exceptionally high $.

I also do think that the economics are immensely difficult even if you are fine with large subsidies for many of these proposals and the realistic ridership they could achieve.

Regarding plenty of these ideas: Do the cheap trial. Contract to run a bus under the Amtrak thruway bus program or something, and/or beef up the local public transit schedules linking parts of the state, too.

Yeah, a train is nicer than a bus and would get more people using it - but if the bus ridership is shit even with efforts to get people to use it/make it decent, the train's unlikely to be some big winner either.

To pluck an example, I'll pick that Route 9 corridor.

SEVT Transit/MOOver currently runs 2 buses a day each way on Route 9 Brattleboro-Bennington and it takes about 1:20, not much worse than driving yourself.

Looking at VT's AADT data, we can also see that there are a couple thousand people a day moving across that corridor, probably less than ~4k actually on the corridor for a decent length of time other than the brief overlap with Rt 100.

Even if you want to imagine the hypothetical train might achieve some unrealistically high mode-share....there are simply not a whole lot of people traveling this path to move today, and it's probably not because they just don't own cars.

In contrast, you can look at something like I-91, and you can see that up through WRJ/I-89 and you're pulling ~10-20k on the corridor.

But if you want to run a trial for a few years - go make that hourly or half-hourly service or something. If you're not getting some solid ridership, spending huge sums on a train isn't likely to fix it.

One of the things that makes it a relatively cheap service to operate is running it essentially as an extension of an Albany-terminating NY Empire Service schedule - and that gets NY to pay the subsidy for the NY portion of the run, not VT.

The problem with that is, you can only get away with doing that cheaply with timeslots that work for NY + operational considerations.

What they're currently doing is taking advantage of the overnight to reduce the amount of additional equipment/crew that has to be dedicated to make the service happen.

If you wanted an earlier northbound train, there are two problems:

• There's not much in the schedule to work with - the only Albany-terminating train that's earlier is 3hrs earlier. Still not much of a day trip if you get in at 5pm. The earlier trains are heading West after Albany.

• It'd likely be sitting idle for more hours that a train is usually operating. If the Northbound train pulls into Burlington at 5pm, now it's stuck there for the night given the >7hr running time to NYC.

If the train had spent the same amount of time as a Southbound to NYC from Albany and pulls into NYC at 5pm, it'd likely be headed out for at least one more service that night.

The current time-slot with a 10PM Burlington arrival + 10AM departure allows pretty full utilization of the "normal" travel hours with minimal down-time. 12hrs off probably also means they've only got a single crew to have to lodge overnight/pay.

If the service got faster, more possibilities would potentially open up for better scheduling.

The other point is that all or most of the existing service is really tailored towards longer-distance travel. This makes sense for a very infrequent train - you're more likely to tailor your schedule to the train when it's already going to be a "big trip" occupying much of the day, and timings on the NYC end of the train are pretty ideal for maximum traveler appeal with a 2:19PM NB departure/5:46PM SB arrival.

This would cost an insane amount of money that Vermont quite literally does not have, and would in many cases be incredibly slow.

You keep using the Ethan Allen Express extension as an example of something cheap. It only achieves it's "cheap" status, by being slow, extremely infrequent, and on track that already exists, was fairly straight, and was already in fairly tolerable shape.

VT estimates it'll be another $250m just to upgrade the two existing services to FRA Class 4 track (79mph). Which does not mean the average speed of travel will be 79mph, to be clear - because that doesn't mean the many, many curves limiting speeds are all going away.

Building rail lines that have never existed through valuable property in topographically difficult terrain, will be billions of dollars. VT could vote for the highest taxes in the country and somehow acquire the highest % of federal spending in the country, it's still never going to have the money to build it, and certainly won't have the $ to maintain it.

Rebuilding lines that once existed but haven't in a long time is only very slightly more plausible (and will also piss off a lot of people who enjoy the rail trails they've often become)....and doesn't change that even in the peak of rail many of those lines were very slow.

As reminder, the historic criteria for getting people to ride a train was "is this service better than walking or riding a horse". Because that was the competition. That is not the competition today for getting people to ride a train.

Many of these routes can't even generate enough public transit demand to make a bus pencil out very well on ridership - and that's with the bus going a lot quicker than the train likely would.

I would pretty much throw the whole idea away and replace with investing every dollar VT has or can acquire into:

• Continued speed improvements on the two existing services + extension to Montreal.

• Attempt to partner with other states on extending more trains into VT for more frequencies on those lines. Extending Springfield/Valley Flyer runs to WRJ (or Burlington/MTL) or Empire Service runs Rutland/Burlington is the most obvious.

If we ever manage to hit 5x+ a day and/or actually decent travel times, maybe then you can re-examine something new. The state's plans are for Albany-Bennington-Rutland(or Burlington) as the most likely future expansion beyond MTL.

(And the state rail plan basically agrees with me, as this is more or less their listed priorities).

Transit ridership is: speed, frequency, convenience. I don't see the scatterbrained approach as going to achieve any of them.

VT's getting in on the act too. A whole bunch have been opening up on the I-91 corridor.

Pretty much the mirror of the NH state liquor stores. Your weed store on one side of the river, liquor store on the other.

Ah, yes, no arguments with anything you've said there, just wasn't sure what obstacle to electrification itself you were seeing.

That said, it may be cheaper to just electrify it rather than deal with a unicorn in terms of equipment if we are at the point of full electrification elsewhere and still can't make a decision on the extensions. I agree it'll likely be one of the last to do anything with.

Being a low-frequency branch doesn't inherently mean it can't be electric - NJT's Gladstone Branch runs a relatively similar operation that way. (mostly single-track, often requires a transfer to a different service to get to where you likely want to go).

Uh, why?

The pension fund can be $0.00, the amount of money Boston owes it's retirees has not changed.

Beyond that, I doubt there is any scheme you can come up with to try to implement what you're dreaming of that would pass a court. An employee signing a contract doesn't make illegal provisions valid.

There's a lot you can't do with compensation, and "taking money you've already paid away from one worker because of the actions of another" is usually right up at the top of that list, no matter how you want to phrase it.

As a basic example: Employee 1 crashes a company truck. Maybe he runs some people over in the process. Company is out $1m. Can the company come back and say to the other employees + former employees with retirement accounts "we're going to need each of you to return $10,000 from what we've paid you in the past to pay for it?" - obviously not, it's the company's problem. If they've got a strong enough case they can maybe sue Employee 1 for negligence although that probably won't come up with $1m.

But nothing they can write into their employment contract can force people who had nothing to do with it to pay for the company's problem.

The city of Boston is the "company" here.

If by "clean up their act" you mean "the police win a large state/federal lawsuit against the city easily", yes, that is what would happen.

I am no great advocate for the police, but these kinds of statements are incredibly dumb.

You may take the individual pension of an individual cop if you get a conviction for them committing a serious crime while on the job. That is basically it.

The pension fund is money the government has set aside (and employees may have contributed to) and invested to pay for the retirement benefits it has promised workers as part of their employment contracts. The pension fund exists to make it easier for the government to pay out the benefits it legally owes to individuals.

You can't go back and retroactively change the benefits that you promised someone, any more than your employer can go back and change how much it paid you last year.

Wipe out the entire pension fund....the only thing that changes, short of the city declaring bankruptcy, is that Boston taxes are about to skyrocket - Boston's still legally obligated to pay out those benefits and now there's no financial cushion for it. This is also why when the market is doing terribly you'll see officials start adjusting budgets to make larger payments into the pension system - Boston is on the hook for those benefits whether the market performs as expected or not.

Their current HQ is 10 minutes from BDL/Hartford, which has a pretty solid flight schedule/destination map and is the (very distant) #2 airport in New England for passengers.

That said, it's one weakness beyond "not being Boston" may be the issue for a European company - no great way to fly to Europe without a connection that's basically taking you out of the way besides seasonal flights to Ireland.

And Micro Center.

I mean, that's an opinion I suppose.

Given that there's 49 other states, I'm not seeing why they'd agree that NH deserves to be the most important in perpetuity.

At best I've got "NH is a swing state"...but that'd still suggest it should rotate at least a bit between a few swing states. Or that a bunch of them should be on the same day.

I mean, you may want to check if anyone actually cares about past use before worrying much about it.

I know the feds basically only care if you're lying about it, if you've got a history of addiction, or if you're going to do it while employed.