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Improving South Boston Rail Corridor Katerina Boukin

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Improving South Boston Rail Corridor Katerina Boukin Improving South Boston Rail Corridor by Katerina Boukin B.Sc, Civil and Environmental Engineering Technion Institute of Technology ,2015 Submitted to the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Science in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY May 2020 ○c Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2020. All rights reserved. Author........................................................................... Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering May 19, 2020 Certified by. Andrew J. Whittle Professor Thesis Supervisor Certified by. Frederick P. Salvucci Research Associate, Center for Transportation and Logistics Thesis Supervisor Accepted by...................................................................... Colette L. Heald, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Chair, Graduate Program Committee 2 Improving South Boston Rail Corridor by Katerina Boukin Submitted to the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering on May 19, 2020, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Science in Civil and Environmental Engineering Abstract . Rail services in older cities such as Boston include an urban metro system with a mixture of light rail/trolley and heavy rail lines, and a network of commuter services emanating from termini in the city center. These legacy systems have grown incrementally over the past century and are struggling to serve the economic and population growth within the urban center, and increasing needs for mass transit to relieve traffic congestion from the surrounding suburbs. The rail systems themselves were not designed as a coherent system, with variations in power systems, vehicle fleets, block signaling systems, platform, station and even tunnel dimensions all inherited from an earlier era. The capacity of the system relies on the state of good repair of the physical assets, but bottlenecks can also arise from physical constraints on space, track alignment and configuration etc. One of the major challenges for legacy urban rail systems is to improve services by mitigating bottlenecks and to do so, while minimizing disruption of current operations. This thesis explores the physical causes of bottlenecks for the MBTA Red Line and possible mitigation strategies. The main focus is the South Boston corridor where the Red Line and Old Colony commuter rail lines occupy a common corridor, abuting a major highway (I-93 SE Expressway). Here, bottlenecks in the Red Line are related to track configuration at Columbia junction which serves as the sole access point to Cabot Yard, for vehicle maintenance and dispatch, as well as the branch junction for trains to Ashmont ad Braintree; while services on 3 commuter rail lines operate on a single track. We propose a mitigation scheme that will move the Red Line branch junction to a location South of Savin Hill station, will double-track the Commuter rail (over a 2.6 mile span), and will improve transfers between the Red Line and Commuter rail services at UMass/JFK station. We consider three possible schemes for project construction that allow different rail vehicle access to the Red Line from Cabot Yard, while minimizing disruption of rail travel through the corridor. The proposed schemes will enable improved headways along the Red Line and increase significantly the capacity of the Commuter rail to accommodate new services for the new South Coast rail line and future regional rail services. These outcomes are well aligned with current MBTA strategy to achieve a state of good repair, get the most service out of the existing system, increase the capacity for rapid transit, and expand the reach of commuter rail services. Thesis Supervisor: Andrew J. Whittle Title: Professor Thesis Supervisor: Frederick P. Salvucci Title: Research Associate, Center for Transportation and Logistics Acknowledgments I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my adviser Professor Andrew J. Whittle, for his patience, motivation, immense knowledge, invaluably constructive criticism. His guidance helped during both the research and writing this thesis. I am extremely grateful to Fred Salvucci, for his invaluable guidance to this thesis and for being an inspiration for his goal of improving public transit! To the transit lab faculty Jinhua Zhao, John Attanucci, Haris Koutsopoulos and Nigel Wilson thank you for the warm welcome, immense knowledge, insightful discussions, and feedback. Their knowledgeable insight was invaluable throughout my research. I am also deeply grateful to Pro- fessor Herbert Einstein who was always willing to give advice and offer help whenever needed. Thank you to all transit lab members for their research input, comments and fun Friday mornings. Especially to Mihir Bhosale, Gabriel Wolofsky, Saeid Saidi, Jiali Zhou and Michael Martello thank you for crucial help and collaboration with MBTA research. This research wouldn’t have been possible without the support and sponsorship of the MBTA, thank you Laurel Paget-Seekins, Jen Elise Prescott, Erik Stoothoff and others at MBTA OPMI for the help with data and feedback sessions. Thank you for the endless help and support from MIT and the CEE department, especially Kiley Clapper, Jason McKnight, Suraiya Baluch, Sarah Smith, Max Martelli, Ruth Yiu, and Jeanette M Marchocki. To Nili, Jennifer, Omar, Bing, Wei, Patrick, Michael, Hao, Ignacio, Ivo, Rafa, Sophia, Eytan, Mihir, Gabe thank you for endless coffee breaks, lunches, dinners, fun moments, help, discussions and generally for being my MIT family! Finally I am deeply grateful to my family, my parents, my sister Alona, and my grandparents for their unconditional love, support and endless motivation. You inspire me every day to be a better person and strive for bigger dreams. THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK 6 Contents 1 Introduction 23 1.1 Research Motivation . 26 1.2 Research Objective . 28 1.3 Data Sources . 29 1.4 Thesis Outline . 29 2 The Challenges of Upgrading Urban Rail Systems 33 2.1 Service Disruption and Congestion . 33 2.2 Underground Infrastructures . 34 2.3 Evolution of Rail Infrastructure Design . 35 2.3.1 Dynamic envelope of tunnels . 35 2.3.2 Evolving design specifications and codes . 36 2.3.3 Resilience and climate change . 37 2.4 Impacts on Passenger Behavior Patterns . 38 2.5 Historical Conditions in a Dense Urban Surrounding . 39 2.5.1 Property challenges . 41 2.6 Process of Capital Investment Planning . 42 2.7 Public Opinion and Influence of Social Media . 43 7 3 MBTA, Past Present and Future 51 3.1 Creation of a Transportation Hub, Boston . 51 3.2 MBTA Current Operations . 54 3.2.1 Commuter rail network . 55 3.3 MBTA’s Near Future . 55 4 Analysis of Physical Bottlenecks for Red Line 73 4.1 Introduction . 73 4.1.1 Alignment deficiencies . 74 4.1.2 Degraded infrastructures . 77 4.1.3 Maintenance frequency . 77 4.2 Bottlenecks on the Red Line . 79 4.2.1 Alewife . 79 4.2.2 Southern branch terminus stations . 82 4.3 Proximity of Downtown Crossing and Park Street Stations . 84 4.3.1 Proposed solution . 85 4.4 Harvard Square Station . 85 4.4.1 Proposed solution . 86 4.5 Columbia Junction . 86 4.5.1 Proposed solution . 87 4.6 Charles/MGH Station . 88 4.7 Discussion . 89 5 Case Study - South Boston Rail Corridor 109 5.1 Introduction . 109 5.2 South Boston Rail Corridor . 110 8 5.2.1 Key project constraints . 111 5.2.2 Proposed rail corridor improvement . 113 5.3 Alternative A . 114 5.3.1 Stage A2 . 115 5.3.2 Stage A3 . 116 5.3.3 Stage A4 . 117 5.3.4 Impacts on operations . 118 5.4 Alternative B . 118 5.4.1 Stage B1 . 120 5.4.2 Stage B2 . 120 5.4.3 Stage B3 . 121 5.4.4 Stage B4 . 122 5.4.5 Impacts on operations . 122 5.5 Alternative C . 123 5.5.1 Stage C1 . 124 5.5.2 Stage C2 . 125 5.5.3 Stage C3 . 126 5.5.4 Stage C4 . 126 5.5.5 Impacts on operations . 127 5.6 Benefits . 128 5.6.1 Common benefits of proposed projects . .128 5.6.2 Alternative A benefits . 129 5.6.3 Alternative B benefits . 129 5.6.4 Alternative C benefits . 130 9 6 Summary, Conclusions and Recommendations 171 6.1 Summary . 171 6.2 Conclusions . 173 6.3 Recommendations . 173 10 List of Figures 1-1 MBTA Red Line improvement project, with the goal of 3 minute headway on the Red line system.(Red and Orange lines improvement plan 2019-2025, MBTA 2019 [94]) 31 2-1 Mode distribution of commuting patterns in Boston developed for Go Boston 2030 transportation plan (Go Boston 2030, [78]) . 45 2-2 Schematics of dynamic envelope of a tunnel (Railsystems.net 2019) . 46 2-3 Map of Cambridge, MA composite natural hazard impact map (Cambridge.gov, 2015) 47 2-4 Full alignment of proposed changes to the I93 and parallel MBTA right of way discussed in this project [38] . 48 2-5 view of Savin Hill station area of the proposed new highway and rail.
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