It would be the final admission that the old elevated Orange Line “replacement service” through Roxbury was a lie foisted upon the neighborhood by Ray Flynn et al.
It's always worth remembering that it wasn't intended to be this way. BRT Mania, poor planning, and bad project management brought us here. With SL Phase 3 I think it genuinely could have been 'equal or better' but its entire existence was wrapped up in BRT hype that ultimately introduced fatal constraints to the project.
I think BRT Lie is a better characterization, because the SL4/SL5 service has never passed muster as BRT. Real BRT has a dedicated right-of way that cannot be infringed on by traffic. The best BRT systems have level, all-door boarding; protected, fare control stations; signal priority at all crossings (or even crossing elimination). Some even segment stations for unloading then loading to speed the process. A BRT should have the efficiency of a well designed LRT system, just using road running vehicles.
But again, put it into the context of Phase 3. Travel time from Tufts-South Station would have been 3-4ish minutes, and that's with the good South Station/Silver Line transfer. And even today, the street section between Tufts and Nubian is not meaningfully slower than the B branch. (About 10% slower for the bottom 10% but depends on the day). If that's your comparison metric, then the added infrastructure cost for center-running seems hard to justify on a space-constrained street like Washington, and I suspect the project rationale was similar. I genuinely think if Phase 3 was built we'd all look at it and go: "well that was kind of silly and it took way too long to build" but I don't think there would be much disagreement about whether it ultimately met the 'equal or better' promise or not, just that, much like the GL, yes improvements to the street section could be made and hopefully we'd see some eventually.
I acknowledge all your points about Phase 3 being a mess -- horrible concept as BRT.
For complicated, interconnected transportation planning, it's kind of hard to say definitively what was "intended." But for a lot of the people involved, yeah, I don't doubt that the current state is basically what was intended. Real rapid transit moved to richer and whiter neighborhoods and away from the heart of Black Boston. There might have been later phases to remedy the loss of transit in Roxbury, but a lot of people in power never believed or really cared if that actually ever happened. The current state was totally predictable. People in Roxbury did predict they'd be stuck with worse service and were angry about it. This is what we did anyways. It's hard to say this wasn't intentional.
I disagree about Flynn because he didn't have control over the cuts that were made when things started spiraling out of control particularly when they found that giant erratic boulder in the way of the Ted Williams Tunnel and the fallout from the failed "Scheme Z." I think that Flynn would have preferred that any real expansion of the MBTA happen in Boston but the "Son of Scheme Z" lawsuits would have killed the whole project, so south of the city got shafted
Yes and no. There was (and still is) a lot of BRT that is more just an enhanced bus service with better branding, the term I've heard and quite like is 'BHLS' (Bus with a Higher Level of Service) but that is obviously more clunky than BRT. There was and is willfull, if not lying definitely truth-stretching, about BHLS being 'just as good as rapid transit' or whatever.
And my arguement is that I'm not sure that there's that much of a difference between the prefered light-rail line, which I think was generally considered to meet the 'equal or better' promise, and the Silver Line on the street sections. Without signal priority and crossing elimination (which seem unlikely to have happened in the 1990s/2000s) the speed between Nubian and Tufts would be about the same. So then the big difference is how that link integrates with the rest of the network. With light-rail you get the advantage of high-quality transfers at Boylston and Park St. SL Phase 3 promised the same at Boylston, Chinatown, and South Station. The current SL has neither, with the Temple Place ('DTX') and Essex St 'South Station' being particular low-lights.
Given that by 2003 they had retreated to planning to short-turn most service at Boylston Loop because of growing deficiencies in schedule-keeping on the trunk, I wouldn't even say Phase 3 was promising "high-quality transfers" in the end. Not being able to get to Orange or Red on a 1-seat from Nubian on a majority of slots would've dropped a big skunk on the projected ridership and exacerbated the general short shrift that Roxbury and the South End were getting vs. the Seaport. Any LRT Washington build would've hit all color transfers behind prepayment in one seat on every run by default due to needing to roam at least as far as North Station to tap a yard and car supply. It would've been a stark difference in trip generation and service quality even if the surface speeds had been the same for BRT or LRT builds.
www.cambridgeday.com
I can't agree more (and not just because of the map). Art on transit is something I'm incredibly passionate about. People rejected the bland and flat functionality of functionalist modernism for a reason, we like to be in beautiful and pleasant spaces and exposure to art and architecture is a great way to do that. In the Metro photos from around the world thread I've posted a lot but some of my favorites are the simple ones, you can do so much with basic tiles, mosaics, murals, and lighting. You don't have to splurge to get good-looking stations (although for stations in key areas it's not necessarily a bad idea to have a couple real good lookers on the system.)As an sort of aside, Porter Square residents want to see the kinetic sculpture outside the MBTA station repaired and repainted, and while I don't disagree, it turns out the T no longer has folks devoted to its public art. For an agency with a multi billion dollar budget, and acknowledging the budgetary constraints, I still feel like having a curator or two on staff isn't a bad idea. As an extension of that I get that the map updates that the T graphics team puts out are functional but not exactly holistic. Perhaps operational maintenance should comes first, but I don't think the T should abandon aesthetics. Just because its a maintenance burden doesn't mean it shouldn't exist - ref. The Harvard Sq ceiling removal - things looking good isn't a bad thing, and making things look better doesn't hurt the T. A director of design, architecture and art would be appropriate, someone who can actually shape the design language and how the T expresses itself, rather than a mid-level staffer whos job it is to update an existing map graphic by inserting a new bus line rather than holistically redraw it like @TheRatmeister has.
Porter Square sculpture needs repair. Who pays to fix it?
“Gift of the Wind” is perhaps the MBTA’s most prominent artwork. The challenge lies in securing funding for its restoration.
Without the full CIP I don't know that it's possible to draw a definitive conclusion but from the slides it doesn't look any worse than the past couple CIPs, if anything it actually looks a bit better.
Maybe we already knew this, but one thing that stands out to me is a statement about battery electric locomotives for Fairmont, rather than BEMU procurement. Is that just a mistake on the slide, or did they just downgrade that proposal? I'm thinking typo, since a subsequent slide does specify a BEMU maintenance facility. But the disconnect makes me wonder about the quality of information overall in this presentation.
