Silver Line to Chelsea

Globe: Silver Line route extending to Sullivan Square, North Station and Kendall

Adam Vaccaro said:
One year after the state extended the Silver Line to Chelsea, officials are now planning additional new service into Cambridge, Charlestown and beyond.

A coalition of state, municipal, and regional agencies this week said they were planning to extend the route of the Silver Line from Chelsea to Sullivan Square and beyond, along two courses: one would go to North Station in Boston; the second would course through Somerville, ending at Kendall Square.

While the new service might not be in a Silver Line bus, the routes would likely run within their own roads for much of the trip, similar to the dedicated busway in Chelsea, before moving onto bus-only lanes on local streets to complete the trip. And both would have stops at the new Encore Boston Harbor casino in Everett, scheduled to open this spring.

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I'm assuming they are talking about laying pavement next to the CR tracks... which it does look like there's room for it down to Assembly albeit you would need to build a new bridge over the Mystic. Beyond that it'd have to be surface streets I guess. Needless to say the CR would be way faster to NS.
 
Finally! Crucial part of the urban ring.

Would like it to be heavy or light rail if possible, though.
 
Hubman said:
Finally! Crucial part of the urban ring.

Would like it to be heavy or light rail if possible, though.
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Would be pretty straight forward to convert the Chelsea busway to LRT and hookup to the Green Line system west of the Boston Engine Terminal and send to the Grand Junction. It's been discussed in many threads in the "Design a Better Boston" forum.
 
Might be able to attract some CR riders whose destination is Assembly to get off at Chelsea and transfer there instead of going all the way to NS and taking the Orange back up.
 
BussesAin'tTrains said:
Would be pretty straight forward to convert the Chelsea busway to LRT and hookup to the Green Line system west of the Boston Engine Terminal and send to the Grand Junction. It's been discussed in many threads in the "Design a Better Boston" forum.
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Biggest issue is the Logan tunnels. Though some sort of dual mode bus/rail route might work.
 
tysmith95 said:
Biggest issue is the Logan tunnels. Though some sort of dual mode bus/rail route might work.
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No, no...the primary routing for LRT would switch to west out of Lechmere + Sullivan (or a thru-routing from Kendall + Sullivan), and not south out of the Transitway and Ted. That's how you solve the Chelsea St. bridge problem: on the Urban Ring it's at the end of the line, not beginning. Everett-Chelsea get served free from bridge openings, and the only stop that may get held up by an opening is Logan...which has 2 other lines (Blue + SL1) serving it to mitigate that problem.

In an LRT conversion, SL3 probably goes away altogether and SL1 gets tweaked to stop at the Blue Line stop for further transfer to the Urban Ring. More transfer opportunities for Chelsea since they'd be going into the subway, and LRT would be more schedule-accurate not needing to deal with the Ted...as well as probably outright faster on the grade separation. So despite it being an inversion of the SL3 routing to the opposite direction, Urban Ring light rail would be across-the-board superior service for those communities.
 
Sorry for bumping...

Was thinking about the Silver line extension options.

What ever happened to the Silver Line Way pilot findings? I never found the final decision, but can see that it was taken back out of use on googlemaps... https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2019/05/21/silver-line-ramp/

All I can see is:
1699913520663.png
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Vagabond said:
Sorry for bumping...

Was thinking about the Silver line extension options.

What ever happened to the Silver Line Way pilot findings? I never found the final decision, but can see that it was taken back out of use on googlemaps... https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2019/05/21/silver-line-ramp/

All I can see is:
View attachment 44481 View attachment 44483
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Last I heard it was only a weekend long pilot to test it out, that results indicated that while helpful to journey times it needed minor work to fix visibility and acceleration concerns. It also got a short term allowance during the Sumner tunnel closure.

But that is a point - why aren't we talking about this anymore? It's not as if it isn't still a very good idea.
 
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Stlin said:
But that is a point - why aren't we talking about this anymore? It's not as if it isn't still a very good idea.
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I'd say in general it's just because the rest of the MBTA has gotten so much worse, that optimizing the Silver Line (including the D Street light) just kind of falls by the wayside at this point. Totally agree, though, that the Silver Line still has low hanging fruit like using Silver Line way, and it should still be front and center as easy wins that have real meaningful impact on service.
 
Buses post-Sumner tunnel closure still use the ramp as dispatch allows during 3-6 PM weekdays. Also it is worth mentioning that SL3 weekday ridership has surpassed the estimated # of riders of 8,700 back before the route started over 5 years ago. It has the highest ridership compared to all other Silver Line routes currently.
 
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Vagabond said:
Sorry for bumping...

Was thinking about the Silver line extension options.

What ever happened to the Silver Line Way pilot findings? I never found the final decision, but can see that it was taken back out of use on googlemaps... https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2019/05/21/silver-line-ramp/

All I can see is:
View attachment 44481 View attachment 44483
Click to expand...
It appears that the T themselves have effectively given up on the idea, as the Bus Network Redesign calls for both SL1 and SL3 to skip Silver Line Way station and use D St to and from the Transitway portal:
1700104964655.png

1700104993677.png

1700105004355.png

This makes sense, because even if you can use the ramp outbound to shorten travel times, there's no equivalent inbound and you're stuck with the WTC-SLW-WTC loop-de-loop. Removing Silver Line Way station at least makes the loop shorter, and now that Silver Line is using a full fleet of battery electric buses, there's no need to change mode at SLW anymore.

It still sucks that elimination of SLW station reduces service to one of the only three Transitway stations (and a decent one at that, with 30% of total weekday ridership among the three stations), but it's also true that stopping at SLW holds SL1 and SL3 back.
 
Does the shuttle from South Station to SLW still run, or have all of those slots been taken up by SL3?
 
Teban54 said:
It appears that the T themselves have effectively given up on the idea, as the Bus Network Redesign calls for both SL1 and SL3 to skip Silver Line Way station and use D St to and from the Transitway portal:
View attachment 44568
View attachment 44569
View attachment 44570
This makes sense, because even if you can use the ramp outbound to shorten travel times, there's no equivalent inbound and you're stuck with the WTC-SLW-WTC loop-de-loop. Removing Silver Line Way station at least makes the loop shorter, and now that Silver Line is using a full fleet of battery electric buses, there's no need to change mode at SLW anymore.

It still sucks that elimination of SLW station reduces service to one of the only three Transitway stations (and a decent one at that, with 30% of total weekday ridership among the three stations), but it's also true that stopping at SLW holds SL1 and SL3 back.
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Well the buses are actually hybrid with extended-range battery for the transitway and SL3 in Chelsea plus the 5 battery electric buses we previously had before the DMAs got replaced.
 
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