No utilities included is pretty common, especially in double/triple deckers where it's easy to hook things up separately for meters which is required to shuffle the cost of utilities onto the tenant.

As for why the broker won't provide proof of the utilities, that's probably because the landlord/broker aren't the ones paying the utilities. I imagine the best they could do is ask the current tenants for a copy of their last bill, but that's not something they generally do.

Since it's oil heat though, you could probably get the size of the tank and how often it's generally filled from the landlord/broker. Use that to call a few heating oil suppliers in the area for quotes on how much filling a tank of that size would cost this time of year. That should get you a fairly accurate estimate. YMMV though because you may use more or less heat/hot water/etc so I'd just toss on a bit extra to really be safe budget wise.

That's an issue of infrastructure, maintenance, etc. Plenty of snowy countries in Europe maintain their bike paths and bike lanes year round.

Though the commenter is being a of a dick I'll admit - it's not like everyone can bike long distances, or will when we've built suburbs sprawling out for tens of miles. Ideally we would have developed the core metro, built up a strong transit network, and walking/cycling/micro mobility in general would be easier if people had 2 mile commutes instead of 20 mile ones.

I doubt you'll notice a difference within the Boston Metro. You might notice a lack or decrease in quality of City/Town services if you move to say Arlington or Medford over say Cambridge or Somerville. But that would just be due to size of the town/city. Boston vs Cambridge vs Somerville vs Brookline etc won't have enough of a difference to really justify one over the other. I would just pick whichever neighborhood has an apartment/condo/house you like the best and which has a reasonable enough commute to your work/hobbys/etc.

> Big highways will probably not be too bad as they tend to salt the hell out of them (at least in MA- not sure about NH). General increased traffic for holiday travel should also help keep roads not too icy. Avoid using cruise control, though.

NH spends like half of its budget on roads. It doesn't have any real regional transportation outside of private bus services like Grayhound/Boston Express and some intercity buses in Nashua/Manchester/Concord. I guess there's the one Amtrak route that passes through to Maine/Boston but that's about it.

Needless to say I'm always shocked by how badly Mass plows/salts and how excellent the roads are in NH. Ski trips are a breeze even in snow until you cross into MA and suddenly all the plows disappear and there's barely any sand/salt applied to exit ramps. I used to have a Corolla when I lived up there and before I got snow tires I had very few issues even going to places like Jackson for Wildcat Mtn.

Good recommendations as well. The only other things I'd suggest to carry is a small portable shovel, an ice scraper/snow brush combo, and some traction tire mats if you can find them. Something like this can really help you get out of a bind. Won't help with ditches though, but can help free you from say a driveway or neighborhood street which isn't plowed well. Kitty litter or sand can help too, but these things can help get you off a patch of ice or snow and then you can just grab them after you're onto a better plowed section.

> The more realistic red line extension would be down between route 2.. The land there is already owned by the state and the logical end point would be a massive garage with direct access to 2 and 95.

No. The realistic extension would be under the Minute Man Bikeway, as was originally proposed during the original Red Line Northwest Extension during the 1980s. The Minute Man is owned by the State of MA and was originally used for Rail Transit as the Lexington Branch. As a result, it actually passes through numerous population and commercial centers such as Arlingtons downtown, Arlington Heights, and Lexington's downtown. It can reach 128 as well and there's enough relatively under utilized land around there that could make for a decent park and ride or transit oriented development.

> I can't tell on the map but do you have the commuter lines connected between north and south station? This would be a huge connection for passengers. More than that though it would allow the trains to travel straight through and connects Maine to NYC and beyond.

Just have to do the North/South Rail Link for this. It's a costly project ($10B to $20B are the cost estimates) but as you mentioned it unlocks a lot of potential for North/South shore connections. Even just directly connecting the two stations could make transfers way easier, especially for equipment maintenance and allowing for us to share equipment in real time vs having to shuffle equipment overnight via the Grand Junction freight railroad.

Cheaper compared to a GLX style project I imagine, where we made dedicated stations and a community path extension and such.

Still more expensive than standard buses or fake BRT though. You could buy a couple of buses for like $5M and slap BRT branding on that service once you've got a couple of cheapo shelters and some paint on the road. That's the problem unfortunately, we're not going to spend $40M on transit like that. Even if light rail is better.

Would be nice if we could drop like $1B on extending the Green Line across the area with street level rail. Maybe cut off some streets from regular traffic to basically give it a dedicated ROW. One day anyway.

Yep, any MBTA lot/garage on this list works too.

Light rail is pretty expensive, so I don't see us actually doing that any time soon. GLX took decades to get the State to commit to and that had a preexisting ROW. And it goes through fairly wealthy parts of Greater Boston and hits Tufts. It only just opened on the Medford Branch this past week, after years of construction and decades of debate.

BRT seems much more likely. It doesn't require much more than some bus lanes, stations, and fairly frequent (for a bus) service. Plus the T and other transit agencies in the US love to just slap BRT branding on "half decent bus service" to get people to think its something special when really it's just a frequent bus and not reaaaaally BRT if you look at international examples of that.

> and all door boarding (currently possible on the couple free bus lines).

I believe the Fare Transformation Project should fix this for paid lines too.

> Trying to turn that back to rail would be the hardest NIMBY battle in history.

Yeah I didn't say it would be easy, and that's why I mentioned having an alternative bikeway via Mass Ave bike lanes. Some of which already exist but aren't protected.

> Rail trails aren’t really made to create bike paths, they’re made to ensure trains don’t come back.

No. They're meant to do a number of things:

• better utilize an underutilized public space. no different from putting a park on a town/city owned parking lot that isn't used fully.
• create cycling routes to provide an alternative commute/travel option. this can actually improve traffic in some cases (see this bloomberg article with examples of bike lanes in NYC)
• land bank the space so it can be reactivated a rail corridor later on. specifically in the case of the Minute Man the MBTA still owns the land and leases it to the towns which it passes through. the majority of rail trails I'm aware of do something similar, where the State leases the land on a long term basis (99 years or whatever) but adds a clause that they'll take it back if needed. the bike to the sea trail has this kind of setup as well.

In this case, with the MBTA owning the land it's just a matter of the State government having some balls and providing residents with alternative routes and improvements to please them. Ultimately if the State wants to, they can just bulldoze the path and throw down some rails. See this recent thread on how they did that with Logan, or how they almost did that with the Inner Belt and definitely did so with the Pike and 93.

More lanes does not equal better. This is a case where less is more.

A single motor vehicle travel lane is perfectly fine when paired with transit, walking and cycling improvements. I imagine they'll also upgrade signals to be more efficient so you probably won't even notice a difference once everyone has adjusted to the traffic patterns.

The Minute Man even gives you a really awesome rail ROW to use. It's a lovely bikeway now and I'd hate to temporarily lose access during construction, but there's some really good potential to setup an alternative bikeway via Mass Ave (add protected bike lanes through Arlington and Lexington) as well as redo the entire bikeway after you complete the Red Line construction with a wider path, lights and better bike access/street crossings.

Solves multiple problems:

• Eliminates the need to turn trains around at North and South station. This is a major bottleneck and reduces the amount of trains we can run through those stations, limiting our headways.
• Allows us to run trains between North and South shore stations. Worcester to Lowell, Lynn to Fall River, Fitchburg to the Cape, you name it it's possible if we have the North/South Rail Link and enough trains.
• Allows us to share trains between the North and South shore lines easily too. Currently our main option is the slow overnight transfer of equipment via the Grand Junction Freight railroad in Cambridge. We could easily handle a broken train by sending a spare from the south shore up to the north shore or vice versa.
• Gives us a new connection between North and South Station. This on itself could allow for redundancy in our downtown transit system which is helpful if subway lines need to be repaired.
• All of these things may eliminate the need for some passengers to transfer to the subway at all too. That allows for more capacity in our transit system and faster rides. That Lowell to Worcester route might take 3+ hours today since you need to ride 2 Commuter Rail trains and the subway. Commuter Rail trains have hour long headways at times and the subway may take 15-20 minutes at times between trains. Combine all of this and you may need to catch a 9am train from Lowell to catch a noon train to Worcester out of South Station to get to your destination several hours after someone who drives gets there. Why can't Lowell to Worcester take an hour or two via ONE train?
• And if we get more people onto a train of some sort, we get people out of cars and that frees up highway, roadways and parking for people who need or absolutely want a car. Some of these improvements could lead to a few thousand to maybe tens of thousands of new train riders. Maybe that's a few thousand cars off the roads.

> Cuts out a connection and a significant amount of slower subway travel. > >

Transfers take a lot of time too. On the weekends I've seen 20 minutes between Red and Green Line trains. One less transfer could easily save you that much time. Possibly more, if a transfer causes you to miss an hourly bus for example it might cost you an hour or so.

The other cool thing is we could run trains between say Worcester and Lowell, or Lynn and Framingham, or any number of connections that currently are basically "I need to drive or spend 3 hours on a train/subway/train" with the hourly commuter rail trains and occasionally 20 minute headways on the subway being huge "fuck the T, I'll drive" points.

And if we can run trains between North and South station we could probably make due with less trains. Or run trains at higher frequencies. That gives us some good options. Maybe we take a few trains from a lesser used line and put them on those Worcester -> Lowell/Lynn routes I mentioned.

I'm pretty sure you'd need to tunnel significant portions of it in order to handle (or really remove) at grade crossings. Just in Arlington alone there's a half dozen or so major street crossings. It would likely be done as a cut & cover style tunneling. Expensive? Yeah. But we've spent tens of billions on highways before with significantly less capacity and this would enable us to increase density around a ten mile or so corridor.

> With NSRL, I'd rather double track the commuter rail line from Assembly to oak Grove than extend the orange line. That would provide connectivity to all the southern commuter rail lines. Some of the route (especially the bridge over the Mystic River) already has 3 orange line tracks, so you could turn the third track into a commuter rail track instead of rebuilding the bridge. You'd mainly need new construction from about Wellington to Oak Grove. Still expensive, but probably somewhat comparable to all the grade separations you'd need to build to extend the orange line. > >

The triple tracking was done during the mid 1970's because the Haymarket North Extension had plans to go to Reading. My suggested extension was basically just this old extension proposal. Basically just send Haverhill Line trains up the Lowell/Wildcat Line instead and you can reclaim all of the Haverhill Line ROW to Reading for the Orange Line. Makes a triple track a useful thing for express trains. Grade separations can be handled by small tunnel segments. Fun fact, the OL already does this to pass under the old Medford Branch around here. If only we hadn't let the Medford Branch ROW disappear, because that too could have been a nice 1 or 2 station Branch of the OL. Maybe a Spring St station plus a Medford Sq station. Plus there's an old station from the Medford Branch on Park St though no idea who owns it now.

I wonder which option would be better. I'm pretty sure you could get more capacity and frequency with the OL extension to Reading. Whether we'd ever build up Reading, Wakefield and Melrose enough to justify that... who knows. With a Regional Rail improvement you could always branch up through Wakefield, Lynnfield and beyond via other old rail ROWs that are slowly turning into multi use trails. Though we could even build further OL extensions under those if we ever want/need to.

> PS - This debate is much more productive than arguing over whether we even should build transit, which is all a lot of people seem to want to talk about. I hope the legislature and Maura Healey are having a similar debate, not the other one.

I hope so. I imagine the additional tax revenue from ballot question #1 (the 1% tax to fund education/transit) could help change the equation too. I have to imagine they were previously worried about raising taxes to fund infrastructure improvements. Now that that's partially solved, we could start planning some of these extensions/improvements without worrying as much about funding. But they could always try and use funky accounting to negate that increase in revenue. Or just spend it on highways. 🤡 who knows.

> IMO the suburban subway extensions are mostly redundant with the regional rail conversion. With regional rail, all those cities will already have subway like frequencies, and it'll even be faster than a subway line. If any currently unserved spot on the line needs service, infill stations can handle it. I realize there are some trips that would be better served by a subway extension, but i doubt it's enough to be worth the cost if you're already doing regional rail.

The Orange Line extension in the 70's single tracked a large amount of the Haverhill Line, so I think it's worthwhile to just run Haverhill Line trains over the Lowell/Wildcat Branch instead and replace the service south of Wilmington with the Orange Line.

The Red Line to Arlington and Lexington has no existing rail either, and would be quite useful to expand our metro a bit. Those towns would hate this but it's a necessary thing to do if we want to provide more space for growth.

The Blue Line to Lynn is certainly redundant, but still quite useful. Connecting Lynn easily to Revere, Eastie and ultimately Cambridge via the Red/Blue connector could be extremely useful for transferring car trips to transit trips. Maybe the North/South Rail Link could work for this too, but it's one of the most costly things I mentioned and I honestly don't know if we're ever actually do it.

> What that lets you do is spend the subway money creating new lines in the city - starting with one on Mass Ave, and another on Washington Street. Then you serve currently underserved areas closer to the city center and the suburban towns, at the same time, with the same amount of money.

Washington St was historically served by the elevated Orange Line, but is already served by replacement service via the Silver Line. We could overhaul the Silver Lane and provide more exclusive ROW via bus lanes, improved stops, etc. I don't know if we really need a subway line there though. The Feds already told us no to any Federal funding back in the 70's and 80's when we moved the Orange Line over to the Amtrak/Rail/almost inner belt ROW. Maybe we could convince them today that we could use more transit service there, or we could commit actual State dollars to it. But I don't know how needed it is when we have transit going there, it's just poorly done.

Not sure what you mean about Mass Ave - like connecting Cambridge/Boston together via a new subway branch? That could be useful to replace the #1 bus that crosses the Mass Ave bridge and often gets stuck in traffic, making it unreliable. But like the Silver Line on Washington St that service could be improved with significantly more exclusive ROW, better stations and more frequent bus headways. Either extension could ultimately be useful though and allow us to redeploy buses to the burbs for better last mile service to other extensions or improvements (like better connections to Regional Rail stations, removing the need for large parking garages at them).

Ultimately I'd say why not all of the above. We dumped $20B into the Big Dig for pretty lackluster return on investment. Dumping $20B into the T could easily let us do most of these things and probably more if we get our costs under control.

Yeah that is a major issue. IIRC the debt payments the T is responsible are massive, like I want to say half a billion per year. It's a major hamper on our transit system when the T is responsible for paying off the Big Dig...

> Part of the issues are that the funding and construction resources and accountability here is much higher for cars here whereas it’s for trains there.

Not sure what you mean about this. We're already looking at spending $850M on a connector; surely that kind of money gets us a <5 year timeline. 8 years is just... insane. NYU has been studying the GLX project for example (study here), we spend significantly more than many other countries on transit as is.

> A second piece is mitigation like managing detours, noise, and utility reroutes as mentioned above. There’s also more uncertainty about what’s under the ground and where it exists, which requires more exploratory digging and planning.

Yeah so maybe I was hybolic about it being done in 2 years. I still don't see how this basic extension takes 8 years to complete. It's a pretty critical extension too, since the lack of a connector leads to more people using the Green, Orange and Silver Lines instead of just hopping on the Blue Line and skipping a third transfer altogether. That added traffic/inconvenience really drives people to drive over just leveraging our pretty awesome (for American standards) public transit system. Especially as more people look to live and work around Cambridge, Somerville, Eastie, Revere, etc.

Yeah some plans actually called for that. It would have probably been pretty easy to do then since we were already digging a tunnel for a highway. Had we been bold enough to just remove the Central Artery first we could have probably cut and covered a massive overhaul on the cheap too.

I love the Minute Man and ride it monthly if not weekly. I don't see how it existing would block a major transit expansion though. As the Wikipedia article points out, the MBTA still owns the ROW:

> The property is currently owned by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority and leased to the municipalities through which it passes on an interim basis.[citation needed] The MBTA at one point planned to use this right-of-way to extend the Red Line to Arlington Center and Arlington Heights.[10]

And while NIMBYs at one point blocked the Red Line extension on racist grounds (see this article for the deets) it's not that hard to bypass NIMBYism. We simply tell them to pound sand and commit to funding the entire extension in one go. The State can do whatever it wants with the ROW it owns. It can even play hardball and start denying grants and funding to towns who refuse to play nicely with transit. Watch how quickly Arlington agrees to a Red Line extension if it finds out the millions it gets in State Grants go away.

I also don't see why the Minute Man couldn't be repaved once a Red Line extension is completed. That would serve nicely for MBTA access when needed, and temporarily pathway detours can be setup using parallel streets. Now if we were talking about using it for Commuter Rail that would be an issue, as the Minute Man has dozens of at grade crossings to deal with plus not enough ROW to handle double track trains and a pathway at grade.

The Blue Line to Watertown also isn't duplicated if it's done on the Cambridge side of the Charles using existing roadway ROWs. Motorists would be peeved at losing access temporarily to a major roadway, but there's already Storrow and i90 on the other side plus plenty of alternative routes to use. We could even loop the Blue Line back around via the Watertown/Cambridge Greenway. Or run a branch of the Red Line down that way instead.

And that's also 8 years in MBTA time. Really more like 15 years because we'll take 4 years to plan this, 3 years to fund it, another year of community meetings and then we'll take another 8 years to actually build it because we'll mismanage the entire thing. And we'll probably end up fucking it up the first time too.

Yes, it'll be expensive, as all subways are. The possibility of easing downtown subway congestion and making it really easy for folks in Cambridge and Eastie to easily visit one and another makes it really worthwhile even if it'll cost almost a billion.

We had no issue coming up with funding for the $20B and counting Big Dig.

It's a half mile extension. Countries in Europe have built entirely new subway lines in the time it'll take us to decide to actually commit to this basic connector.

> What's next: The current proposal would take at least eight years to complete.

Jesus, for a half mile extension. I get GLX taking that long or more since it involved half a dozen stations, half a dozen bridges, 3 Cities, new trains to service all the new track, plus it's 2 miles or so of track and an existing Commuter Rail line to play nicely with. The Red/Blue connector should really take a year or two at most. Then we could move onto more extensions:

• Orange Line to Wakefield/Reading and to Needham
• Blue Lynn to Lynn, and start planning a westward expansion along the Charles to Watertown
• Green Line improvements like more combined stations and better signal priority. Maybe even tunnel some of the existing street car routes to get fançy
• Electrifying all Commuter Rail Lines and rebranding / redesigning them all to be regional rail
• North/South Rail Link should be planned, long term funding acquired, and construction started as soon as we've gotten Regional Rail and electrified trains setup.
• Red Line up to Lexington, and out to Waltham is another good thing to consider.
• Major investments in Bus infrastructure too. We need to overhaul a half dozen bus garages, and build another dozen so we can buy, maintain and run 15 minute headways on most bus routes. Turning every bus route into a pseudo BRT system would be a game changer for last mile connections
• Major investments across the State in pedestrian and cycling infrastructure too, so we cover more last mile connections to bus and train stops.

I could totally see some of THESE extensions taking 8 years. The North/South Rail Link is a $10-$20B Big Dig 2.0 Electric Train Boogloo project for example; that'll take years just to get the necessary designs, funding, permits, workers, etc lined up. A half mile extension should be streamlined though, it's not rocket science.