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From: speter@mit-trillian.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.railroad
Subject: Re: Rapid Transit Systems (also is this subject suitable for this newsgroup?)
Message-ID: <1444@mit-trillian.MIT.EDU>
Date: Tue, 18-Nov-86 13:50:57 EST
Article-I.D.: mit-tril.1444
Posted: Tue Nov 18 13:50:57 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 19-Nov-86 05:36:41 EST
References: <1031@husc2.UUCP>
Reply-To: speter@athena.mit.edu (Peter Osgood)
Organization: MIT Project Athena
Lines: 35
Keywords: costs of implementation, maintenance, and operation; service quality

In article <1031@husc2.UUCP> chiaraviglio@husc2.UUCP (lucius) writes:
>[deletions]  I don't know how many times
>bigger the Washington, D. C. metro area is than the Boston metro area, but I
>would suspect it is a large factor, which would affect all sorts of things.)

In reality the Boston SMSA is slightly larger than the Washington SMSA
(Boston 3,971,000  Washington 3,250,000)  The Washington SMSA does not
include Baltimore of course as the Boston SMSA does not include Providence.

>By quality of service I mean such things as connectivity (both between
>different routes and express/nonexpress service on the same route, etc.), time
>required to go a certain distance, reliability, and cost to the user.
>(Such things as cleanliness of the system are technically part of the quality
>of service, but are dependant more on how well the transit authorities run
>what they implement and on how much the users mess things up than on inherent
>features of the system -- although such things as the apparent deliberate
>pricing-out of poor people from the Washington Metro do have an effect on this
>kind of thing.)
>

The Boston Metro area is much more extensively developed transit-wise as
Washington's growth is very recent, Va. and Md. suburbs, whereas the Boston
Metro area peak somewhere around the 1920's when there was still transit
building of any scale going on.  So the Boston physical plant has been in
place much longer.  This means that corridors of traffic in Boston have
been defined for close to 100 years now whereas in the Washington/Baltimore
area this is not true.  Finally since Washington never really had much
commuter rail, and, since it tore down its rapid transit of the streetcar
variety it must now completely build new lines, this is expensive, and as
was told to me by a consultant to the Massachusetts Sec. of Trans., it is
too low visibly for politicians.

Hope this helps.

				---peter osgood---