We don't have the public support to even attempt that.
That bus loop, and their prioritization of private transit over public transit, is ghastly. If you want to hear them explain and defend it -
Considering Tibbets-Nutt's opinion is that "rapid transit extensions just don't happen anymore", there's almost no chance she would even think of provisioning for BLX to Kenmore under Storrow, at the very least.
Why are they waiting on model data, deferring to model data, etc. etc. and then letting that determine the design and how many lanes they are putting in? We should be determining what we want from the project, and then later predicting how that would effect the environment. If you do the model first, then you're saying the only thing in the project worth considering is highway throughput.
”What traffic model they’re using” isn’t a secret, it’s the MPO’s. Updated modeling is ongoing.
Not with the current plan it won't. The 3 jitney routes on the busway are all private, open only to member-institution (Harvard, MIT, or Longwood Collective) ID-holders. The only public bus is the hazily-defined gerrymander of the 64 off of Cambridge St., which doesn't even use the hugely wasteful busways at the station because it has to keep moving on the grid to have a puncher's chance at making schedule.
Rerouting the 64 away from Cambridge St. is probably going to make the frequencies worse with a longer route and huge detour that's probably just going to massively slow down trips from Allston into Cambridge. Transit works best in a straight line, so IMO it's better to have the 64 run in a straight line from Central Sq. to Allston Union Sq.
That they didn't even think to attempt that with the much more critically load-bearing T66 is the big red flag that the detour isn't going to work well at all with the 64. It's like they saw the slower, more meandering, less frequent route and jumped at pounding the sunk-cost fallacy into the ground. What are the practical odds that the re-route even makes it to opening day? Then all you've got is the behind-velvet-rope jitneys.
Not many, because so long as Malvern St. (with its virtually unusable intersection at Packards Corner) is the only spanning street to the south on the grid, you pretty much can't mount anything except a super-inconvenient loop-a-thon off Cambridge St. like the 64. BU cockblocking a Babcock connection absolutely cripples the crosstown connectivity. I'm not even sure how that LMA jitney in their plans is going to function at all given the fact that it has to bang a left at Brighton Ave. from that godawful intersection. And if the Cambridge St. loop-a-thon is so inconvenient and schedule-destroying that it's inappropriate for a frequent and load-bearing route like the T66, you're not going to get much in the way of high-frequency linkage from anywhere. The multimodal connections at this station are almost entirely dependent on a dedicated Urban Ring ROW coming through off the Grand Junction. Yes...fine!...do leave a future provision (not an overbuild, but a future provision) for that. But the hope-and-a-prayer GJ Purple Line dinky extra RR platform isn't that provision, either.
The problem with West Station and Boston Landing is them failing to be built near existing bus routes. This means that any bus route serving Boston Landing or West Station has to make a lenghy detour and go out of the way and double back to serve the station, which makes the bus route plain suck for riders who want to through run to the other side. The 64 has to make a detour west of Union Sq. Allston to get anywhere near Boston Landing, but straightening the route and keeping it on North Beacon St., would improve it's route reliability, frequency, and directness.
The original B&A Railroad had the station sitings more usefully set for neighborhood travel patterns. Cottage Farm was in the pit by Comm Ave. and Mountfort St. (B, 47, CT2) Allston Depot was at Cambridge St. (66, 64). Brighton Depot was at Market St. (86, 64).
For one thing, somewhat amusingly, the 64 already made the detour back in 1998, way before Boston Landing was even proposed: (Source: NETransit history page)
Boston Landing's first steps away from an industrial area to a residential area were shaky with mostly limited commercial and office venues and a single large new residential build that's half parking garage, but going east down along the pike there's a bunch of residential apartment buildings nearing their completion. At the same time the stop n shop is moving into the ground floor of one of the new buildings to be torn down into another apartment building. The area is really starting to reach a state of car-free living and more service at Boston Landing along with better bus connections will be essential towards that.
And if the city can (they won't, but they could) encourage aggressive development all around West Station, something similar could happen here, too. Yes, most of this area is Harvard and BU, but 1) the city could push them to go taller and denser near the station and 2) there is still plenty of neighborhood adjacent to this that will have private development opportunities. The point is that something that seems like a detour now might not seem so with the right amount of development. The more Guest St / Boston Landing develops, the more it seems like a necessary node on any transit routing, even to the point of making older nodes feel like the detours, rather than the new one!
