I feel that Boston has less bus service density roaming the streets compared to places like Chicago or NY. Part of it is the BERy-designed hub-and-spoke structure of the network. But still -- despite the extensive subway infrastructure in NY and Chicago, there is still a thick network of buses laid on top of that, and they run frequently. Also both remnants of disassembled streetcar networks.
I can't really say if Boston of 1940 had a similar density of service provided by streetcars, and lost it, or if this is something more fundamental. The street network seems to make things difficult because only the main roads are really usable by buses and they follow the old intercity / square-to-square routes.
And if Boston did get serious about surface transit (which I think they should, since it's probably the only thing we can reasonably do in the near future), they'd still need more space to store and maintain buses.
Right now we have a perverse situation where a bus rider pays more (and rising) for a single bus ride than a driver pays in tolls to use the highway (free or cheap). Express bus fares are $3.65 and $5.25 for inner and outer zones. That ought to be flipped around, to start.
The bus network is more or less unchanged from the old streetcar network, right down to a majority of the route numbers being the same. That's mainly a result of the Square-to-Square layout of the cowpaths-begat-thoroughfares we've got here in lieu of any semblance of orderly grid. There aren't that many 'new' Yellow Line routes you can invent between any 2 demand points when charting all the ways it gets squeezed, contorted, funneled, and split by the spaghetti streets between those points. And there aren't that many routes with an obvious "Eureka!" moment to be had in retooling their routings. Even most of the alt routings between destinations are more or less legacy because of these factors. So while there's always a
that route or
that other route tops on somebody's wishlist to pair up some new cleanroomed modern development with some legacy nodes, the Square-to-Square orientation of the city doesn't leave a whole lot of outright cavities on the route map as a whole. Inevitably the cowpaths drag the routes serving those new developments into proximity with the legacy network and put them through the blender such that the primary pairings--and alternate pairings--are pretty self-evident.
Strictly in terms of lines on a map*, the route network is pretty complete and doesn't leave a whole lot of infill potential on the table within the length/time limits imposed by the cowpaths between destination pairs.
The bus district's suburbs are an echo effect of this. Yes, there's a lot more gridded sprawl of historically recent origin leading to gaps that need filling. But all of the inside-128 'burbs retain traditional town centers and/or their own set of Square-to-Square cowpaths. Usually with the railroad or ex-railroad historically serving up the transfer points at those Squares. So when drawing up new routes that need to serve the mall or the medical center campus or scoop up as many residential subdivisions as you can from intersections with the 4-lane state highway...the destination pairing is still going to be shaped by the gravitational pull of the Squares. That's where people most need to go intra-town, and it's where all the transfer options are for the towns lucky enough to still have an extant railroad. It ends up being self-evident what the route expansion shortlist is, and not nearly as much a blank slate as in suburban regions around other cities whose sprawl isn't punctuated by as many legacy-Square gravitational wells.
*Now, ↑that↑ is the simply the story with the two-dimensional lines on the route map. The thing Boston has never done well, and bafflingly still doesn't attempt to do on any sort of wide scale, is express busing. The whole bloody basic concept of express busing. And that is the primary reason the service scales so very very poorly from the CBD to the outer neighborhoods to the inner 'burbs.
There's a confounding lack of service layering where a primary route is overlaid with skip-stop express routes. If the cowpaths make it so that every surface transit vehicle has to in some degree get passed like a kidney stone between the same sets of Squares, pretty much the only way to max out the service scale is with a whole bus network predicated on overtakes. Take Washington St. south of Forest Hills, for example, and how many of those run as purely locals making every stop and shooting their loads on the Washington overlap to the detriment of Rozzie's, West Roxbury's, Hyde Park's schedules. Like...it should be self-evident here that most of the so-called Key Bus Routes worth their salt should come in a regular flavor and an "E"-suffixed flavor. For example. . .
We shouldn't need to have debates like: "Well, the last few rider surveys on the 57 says this % of people need to get off at at least one of the BU stops we've been skipping Kenmore-Packards for the last 30 years...but there's no consensus on
which stops those should be. So we're just gonna drop any semblance of expressing and make it lowest-common denominator." No...why does it have to be an artificial choice like that where the only way to split a difference in demand is to never ever skip a stop no matter how many mind-numbing extra minutes it adds? There should be a 57 and 57E paired up on this route at nearly all times. Probably at equal proportions on a route that load-bearing and critical. Did they survey all the riders across the corridor who also need less of a slog to get from Kenmore to St. Elizabeth's, Oak Square, Newton Corner with fewer stops...or just zero in on BU with a preordained outcome that one size has to fit all?
Crap like ↑this↑ is what makes one's head hurt trying to figure out the reasons why Boston bus transit ops are so bass-ackwards. How many other cities have the equivalent of an "E"-suffix express scheme baked in as a standard offering like second nature? How many cities with less-than-orderly street grids do that as a near-necessity for managing their cowpaths? How many other cities not only have standard-issue "E" service overlaid over nearly every high-traffic route, but
also seamlessly manage to have a Crosstown network overlaid as a +1 on top of that to triage their suburban routes that are pooling their transfers into the outer Squares? How many other cities see implementing all this as just a baseline
operating investment writ-large, and not a mostly
capital investment applied per-route and per-stop as if they were building a fixed commuter rail line?
Here?. . .
It takes two decades of studies-about-studies here to answer the question "The 39: how many stops is too many?", and those studies inevitably grind to a halt when they get more than one answer back from the public on what to do. We can't do anything without special
branding and shitloads of streetscaping capital. Where other cities would just light up the "E" suffix on the LED route sign on any old route that suits, we have to have special-as-snowflake planning for single routes with special frills to convince people the route is a tangible concrete edifice.
- Nevermind the political football that was Silver Line Washington...why was the 28X proposed as some kind of unicorn in special paint job? That seemingly simple "E"-ification proposal over an existing route ended up becoming so overweight and neighborhood-divisive on the binary choices it tried to make that it ended up defeating itself on its own overreach.
- How, for example, did we get to the place where the CT# route scheme's repackaging as Urban Ring Phase I BRT suddenly added so much capital cost--to a totally on-street, zero-busway, light up 2 letters on the LED sign express overlay--that the program was scrapped after only 3 of the 13 routes were half-heartedly rolled out and hasn't been spoken of again?
- Why is the Key Bus Route Improvements program running more than a decade late with never-resolved debates over stop placement this block vs. next block being used as an excuse for deferring implementation of signal priority and ADA upgrades at all other stops? How does it somehow impossible to improve an entire corridor aggregately because there's one individual unsplit hair locally? That mentality lends itself to forever splitting, splitting, splitting hairs in endless debate.
"BRT-itis" lives on in the sloth bogging all this down. To have layered service becomes equated with a 'build' you can look at in steel and concrete to convince yourself "this is real; this is not going away". What it doesn't end up involving is scaling and adapting the service you have to be malleable for the divergent needs of people on the corridor. That apparently isn't convincing and permanent enough. Boston ends up repeatedly sending itself down this 'build' rabbit hole where the costs for implementing express or crosstown super-express bus routes start increasing hard on the capital end over amenities, and planning stalls out and fragments itself over provincial issues of picking winners and losers on single street corners. We're not the only city so stuck up on the shame of its utilitarian city bus that it resorts to this; the MTA in perfectly gridded NYC does a shitrific job making every Select Bus Service route implementation as torturously divisive a planning exercise as possible. But the MTA and New York don't fear it nearly as much as the MBTA and Boston seem to fear engaging the Yellow Line as a tool for getting lots and lots of mobility heavy-lifting done.
It shouldn't be that way. The route map is nearly complete, but it needs frequencies frequencies frequencies and better balance of hyper-local service vs. semi-local service. More frequencies and better balance through the same cowpaths means less stop duplication. Less stop duplication means some buses running more express than others, and backfilling of the frequencies so individual stops don't become a binary-choice game of picking winners and losers. The needs of a whole corridor shouldn't be at odds with the needs of hyper-local mobility; something is wrong when planning debates devolve into provincial gridlock of neighborhood vs. neighborhood and street corner vs. street corner all fighting each other over preventing transit loss. And system-wide scale doesn't work without being able to push those frequencies further out than the local-most stop spacing patterns go. You need those CT# routes building out a transfer backbone, because the inner-suburban and outer-neighborhood buses--which are
starving for better frequencies--have no means of substantially boosting their service until high-frequency buses from the inner reaches of the district give them more oxygen for practical transfers.
It's not magic. It is very expensive at the scale they have to reach for. But it's not as expensive to apply systemically as "BRT-like" amenities are expensive when they start gunking up each individual route enhancement proposal...multiplied by
every faux-BRT route proposal that tries way too hard to pitch the bus as something other than a bus.
Just let the bus be a bus in a network of seamless bus routes. Do you need to take the 1 or the CT1 today? The 77 or "77E" that runs skip-stop for getting deeper into Arlington faster? The primary local or the "A"-suffixed alt route that runs on a parallel street for part of the way and shortens the normal walk to your friend's apartment by a couple blocks? The primary or the "X"-suffixed short-turn that's a little less crowded for lugging a personal cart of groceries? These should be second-nature daily questions with wholly mundane answers across the system on every corridor that merits, not an invitation to inaction through overthinking or one-size-fits-all thinking.
