This post could go here or in Crazy Transit Pitches, but the other thread is in the midst of a different conversational topic right now, so I'm gonna put this here.
Earlier this fall, I went down a rabbit hole of analysis on the B & C Lines, as I increasingly realized that they... well, they're kinda weird. The full writeup is available on my website:
The curious case of the MBTA’s B and C Lines.
But the bottom line is this: nowhere else in the system can you board the equivalent of a local bus 3+ miles outside of downtown and get a one-seat ride all the way into the core.
The degree to which this is exceptional becomes, I think, more strikingly clear with a crayon map that imagines that all the heavy rail lines were LRT similar to the B & C + Boylston St Subway (click through for big version):
As I wrote on my site:
Don’t look too hard at the details of this map – it’s not meant to be a particularly serious exercise. For example, it’s all-but-certain that in some alternate history where the Cambridge Subway was a streetcar subway, one of the branches would have run to the North Cambridge carhouse along the route of today’s 77; I chose not to use that alignment to confound expectations a bit, try to jar us out of the conventional routes we’re used to.
Probably the most provocative example here is the Green Line branch to Codman Square via Nubian (Dudley). The old Dudley el station was only slightly farther from downtown that Kenmore is; Codman Square is 2.9 miles of surface-running from Dudley/Nubian, which is longer than the C Line’s 2.4 miles, but comfortably less than the B Line’s 4 miles. In terms of distance and transit type, a Codman Square line is roughly comparable to a Cleveland Circle line, simply transposed into another neighborhood.
The major difference between today’s Cleveland Circle line and this allohistorical Codman Square line is the presence of the dedicated median on the unusually wide Beacon Street (something like 130 feet from sidewalk to sidewalk). Even the wider boulevards on Seaver St, Columbia Road, or Blue Hill Ave are “only” 80-90 feet wide. So I’m not trying to argue that a system like this
should have been built.
Rather, I’m trying to draw attention to the
degree to which the B and C Lines are unique. Nowhere else in the system can you board the equivalent of a local bus 3 miles outside of downtown and get a one-seat ride all the way into the core.
~~~
Now, from a Green Line Reconfiguration perspective, this analysis has bearing on the broad perennial question of "What the heck do we do with the Kenmore subway-streetcar lines?", and the more specific question of short-turning the C (and even the B) at Kenmore.
From an equity perspective, I think it's hard to look at the C Line in particular and not conclude that it probably should be truncated. Like, in some ways this story is very simple:
Boston's wealthiest immediate neighbor got to keep its boutique local service one-seat-ride into downtown, while every other community at a similar distance had to make do with a bus + subway transfer. That seems pretty straightforwardly unfair.
That being said... the C Line's ridership (to say nothing of the B's) is astronomical. C Line ridership (on the branch) is comparable to the top 10, perhaps even the top 5 bus routes. And of those bus routes, there's only one that reaches similar numbers on a route as short as the C: the combined SL4/SL5. For example, the 23 bus has similar ridership, but is a bit less than twice the length.
And this is of course not surprising. As an OSR, the C is always going to be more convenient than the bus + subway transfers with which it compares. Of course people will be more inclined to take it.
The C Line is indisputably a transit success story. From a utilitarian perspective -- if our goal is to move as many people by mass transit as possible --, truncating the C would appear to be a quantifiably terrible idea.
So, what am I saying should be done about all this? I dunno. I continue to maintain that the B & C should be isolated from the rest of the network due to their unique character -- none of the above changes that -- and I continue to believe that it's not worth designing a system that would require short-turning most C trains, if for no other reason than politics.
Probably what this makes me think about more than truncating the C (a negative action) is what kind of
positive actions could be taken to provide similar benefits to other communities. Maybe it's about creating a second LRT or BRT "light metro" network, mirroring the B & C but fanning out into, for example, Dorchester or Chelsea. Maybe it's about extending some routes back inside the Inner Belt but with rapid transit spacing (e.g. extend the T70 past Kendall into Downtown with limited stops, or something similar with the T15).
But either way -- the B & C are
weird and I'm thinking about it a lot more than I used to.