Providence RIPTA Services

[BACsop]

Meanwhile…

Facing budget deficit, RIPTA proposes cuts to most bus routes, eliminating 16 routes altogether - The Boston Globe

The Rhode Island transit agency is also considering fare increases and layoffs as it tries to close a $10 million funding gap

www.bostonglobe.com

I would think in a state as small and dense as Rhode Island it would be a lot easier to build public support for a comprehensive and well-funded transit network, as you have fewer rural or suburban sprawl constituencies that don't necessarily see the benefits of transit. Can anyone with knowledge of RI weigh in on why that doesn't seem to be the case with RIPTA?

 

[riptide]

https://www.ripta.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/RIPTA-OES-Final-Report-7.31.25-1.pdf

RIPTA published its finalized “Operational Efficiency Study” just a day or two ago. The section comparing RIPTA to six similar peer agencies on the basis of operating costs and other metrics shows RIPTA is pretty much middle-of-the-pack (in other words, it doesn’t have any obvious fundamental inefficiencies).

Another section shows how routes are performing according to various measures, which then informs the recommendations, which are to focus RIPTA’s increasingly limited resources on the highest-performing routes (as well as those with significant equity implications).

They also recommend implementing RIPTA’s Transit Master Plan, but when you go to the appendix that shows the status of all their to-do list items, it’s pretty clear they will not be able to accomplish anything in the TMP related to increasing service once they enter this belt-tightening period.

 

[riptide]

For what it's worth, a similar proposal was put in the Transit Forward 2040 plan a few years ago, though it has since been taken out, presumably due to cost:
View attachment 65480

I don't know where their stops were supposed to be though. It's curious that they apparently preferred to use the rail tunnel instead of the bus tunnel for the route to East Providence.

Also, I figured it could be piecemeal- start with just the rail tunnel and extend it 1500' to the train station for starters. After that, who knows where it would go. It doesn't necessarily need to go to Olneyville.

Looking at this map and the proposals, I'm starting to warm up to the idea of the LRT from Central Falls to Warwick taking the same route as it does in this map, which is a bit longer than one of the alternatives outlined in the study.

Wow, I’m surprised they “officially” wanted the LRT line to take the rail tunnel instead of running on the surface until reaching the trolley tunnel. Maybe taking roadway lanes is seen as politically unthinkable, but just looking at Google Street View, there seems to be plenty of space to give up one lane each on Angell and Waterman (which form a one-way pair) for dedicated LRT lanes. It would be so much cheaper to capture the East Side’s ridership with surface stations instead of deep-mined underground stations. Even if it was a political issue, that would be a fight worth having for the cost implications. I assume they gave up on that alignment due to costs, but I wonder if they ever looked at surface running afterwards.

Also, just to be clear, I think your logic (look for underutilized, grade-separated corridors as candidates for affordable modern LRT alignments) is perfectly sound, but these particular corridors happen to be tough to retrofit for LRT in a cost-effective manner due to their own unique constraints.

 

[MjolnirMan]

A while back we had some discussion about the rail tunnel in this thread. It seems difficult to reuse for many reasons. Like I say in this thread, I think you could bore one station at Brown's Science Library about halfway through and call it a day for new-dig stations, but either end of the tunnel presents challenges too. Providence has demolished and/or built too many things in the ROW.

 

[Stlin]

Updated community meetings on Metro Connector, with not particularly very much in the way of changes since 2025 - except we now have order of magnitude cost, speed, and ridership estimates, as well as preliminary renders.

https://www.ripta.com/node/1180

https://ripta.com/sites/default/files/2026-07/RIPTAMetroConnector_July2026%20Workshops_FINAL%20%282%29.pdf

https://www.ripta.com/sites/default/files/2026-07/RIPTA%20High-Capacity%20Transit%20Renderings.pdf

 

[Lrfox]

This makes a stronger case for LRT than I anticipated. The construction cost for LRT is obviously significantly higher, but so is ridership. And the operating cost per rider for LRT is significantly lower.

 

[riptide]

This makes a stronger case for LRT than I anticipated. The construction cost for LRT is obviously significantly higher, but so is ridership. And the operating cost per rider for LRT is significantly lower.

Another thing that jumps out at me (which probably helps keep BRT construction costs that much lower than LRT) is that RIPTA only plans to have BRT run in dedicated lanes for two-thirds, or even just one-half, of the full length of Alternatives 3 and 4, respectively.

RIPTA made this “Strategies Briefing Book” in the course of developing its 2020 Transit Master Plan (which is where the Metro Connector study traces its mandate to). On p.20 and 22, one of the key attributes that distinguish real BRT from “Rapid Bus” (their term for the R-Line’s service tier) is that BRT generally has dedicated lanes while Rapid Bus generally does not.

Is 50%-65% dedicated ROW enough to get BRT that actually performs like BRT, rather than Rapid Bus? It only cost them $4 million to “build” the R-Line in 2014 (I think it was mainly an operations change, interlining two existing routes); they want $325+ million for BRT. That’s 80 times as much…and it’s not immediately clear to me that the form of BRT they want to build would result in a substantially different tier of service than what they already offer for the R-Line.

The devil’s in the details. We don’t know where the dedicated lanes would be along their proposed alignments; perhaps they cover all the known traffic pinch points and would result in a successful BRT service, but I could easily imagine RIPTA identifying certain bottlenecks as requiring really expensive solutions, and deciding it would be cheaper to just suffer through the bottlenecks and plan to make up for it by running faster in dedicated lanes on the other side.

If these are the options we have to choose from, I think I’m in the “LRT or bust” camp. I will be pretty annoyed if RIPTA builds itself a $325 million R-Line. If they’re going to spend at least nine figures on a project like this, they should fully commit and build something that people will agree was worth the expenditure. If $1 billion is too much for them to swing, then just build more R-Line type routes cheaply and efficiently — there would be plenty of practical value in that too, even if it doesn’t accomplish the original goal of providing “high-capacity transit.”

 

[Stlin]

The devil’s in the details. We don’t know where the dedicated lanes would be along their proposed alignments; perhaps they cover all the known traffic pinch points and would result in a successful BRT service, but I could easily imagine RIPTA identifying certain bottlenecks as requiring really expensive solutions, and deciding it would be cheaper to just suffer through the bottlenecks and plan to make up for it by running faster in dedicated lanes on the other side.

See this link for the concept corridor roll plans for each of the alternatives; it mostly shows the full routing and details on where dedicated lanes would be, as well as stop locations. I'm personally not a huge fan, especially through Pawtucket where the BRT plans rely a lot more on shared lanes - a lot of them would be through Cranston & Warwick as side running.
https://www.ripta.com/node/1180

If these are the options we have to choose from, I think I’m in the “LRT or bust” camp. I will be pretty annoyed if RIPTA builds itself a $325 million R-Line. If they’re going to spend at least nine figures on a project like this, they should fully commit and build something that people will agree was worth the expenditure. If $1 billion is too much for them to swing, then just build more R-Line type routes cheaply and efficiently — there would be plenty of practical value in that too, even if it doesn’t accomplish the original goal of providing “high-capacity transit.”

Personally, having had a little more time to digest it, I too want to see them build the LRT segment - an extra 600M isn't too much in the realm of government budgets - but such that it can also accommodate buses operating R-Line style branches to CCRI & TF Green - ie, run the 1 along the tram as additional frequency and different end points. That Billion dollars should really be able to get them everything they want for transit, as shared bus/tram transitways aren't unheard of, and is something along the lines of what Boston wants to build along Huntington for the E Branch and 39. As an initial operating segment, if one or both of those R-Line branches have sufficient ridership, extend then.

 

[Lrfox]

If these are the options we have to choose from, I think I’m in the “LRT or bust” camp. I will be pretty annoyed if RIPTA builds itself a $325 million R-Line. If they’re going to spend at least nine figures on a project like this, they should fully commit and build something that people will agree was worth the expenditure. If $1 billion is too much for them to swing, then just build more R-Line type routes cheaply and efficiently — there would be plenty of practical value in that too, even if it doesn’t accomplish the original goal of providing “high-capacity transit.”

Agreed. And prior to this, I was actually in the BRT camp as I felt it was the more pragmatic approach in this instance. But RIPTA's own numbers favor LRT to the extent that I don't think the BRT options are even worth considering. And that's not even factoring in the impact that LRT will have on development.