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I fully agree with R-Line style service as a near-term ridership-priming strategy. Unlike converting to LRT, converting a regular bus corridor to BRT can be done piecemeal (by upgrade or by segment) with benefits from each piece.

This just doesn't seem like a good use case for LRT. There are really only three service reasons to use LRT over BRT: Capacity: If buses at high frequency can't handle the loads, LRT might be able to. Around 1000 passengers per hour per direction is the point where buses start having difficulty...

My (extremely subjective) classification was based on how much the municipalities could reasonably add housing now for transit-only or transit-primary lifestyles - and not just based on commuting to Boston, but also locally. Merely dropping an apartment building next to an isolated commuter rail...

Natick Center station opens over the next two weeks. Inbound platform on July 21, outbound on July 28. It's the highest-ridership non-accessible commuter rail stop - and the last with >500 daily riders. https://www.mbta.com/projects/natick-center-station-accessibility-improvements

What benefit would that have over the existing special trains that run directly to the stadium?

Some of these are a lot more forgivable than others. Middletown, Wrentham, East Bridgewater, Hanover, and Holden have no transit, not even RTA buses. Right now, you don't get much benefit from multi-family housing in these towns versus single-family housing; the only real benefits are less land...

They're not really comparable projects. Off the top of my head: Newton Highlands is a more physically constrained environment - a trench in a village center, with no road access to track level. Overhead lines make crane access difficult. Almost everything will have to be hi-railed in from Eliot...

The article is from the December 1988 issue and also discusses Ruggles and Forest Hills: https://usmodernist.org/AJ/A-1988-12.pdf

Per that article, about 1/3 of the riders using it are 92/93 riders, who do live in Boston. For the record, this was the press release when it was installed: https://www.mbta.com/news/2021-08-24/massdot-mbta-and-city-boston-announce-the-completion-new-outbound-bus-lane-north

Correct! They appear to be a secondary access point (emergency exit?) for the trail tracks. I'm not sure if they're ever actually used.

A slightly more revealing angle:

The new northeast headhouse and elevator at Courthouse are coming along. (Photos from June 3). This project is rather behind: when the contract was issued in June 2021, it was supposed to be done by the end of 2022.

https://www.mbta.com/news/2025-06-27/mbta-opens-new-north-wilmington-station-june-30 North Wilmington becomes accessible on Monday as well.

A slightly asinine one: where are these stairs located?

This is good to see - currently, there's no actual access to the river between Mattapan and Fairmount because of the thick brush.

Haverhill station coming back on Monday: https://news.keolisna.com/commuter-rail-service-to-return-to-haverhill-station-june-30

Let's go back... way back... to proposals back when "tear down South Station" was the going concern. The first serious proposals seem to have been in 1958. Here's a 3,000-car garage (with heliport!) proposed by the city that year: Here are two proposals from 1966: BRA plan from 1967. They...

I've become convinced that Route 1 really isn't the best alignment. It's the least efficient of the three likely routes (Everett Broadway, Route 1, Revere Broadway) in terms of riders per mile, and it doesn't hit the commercial centers of either Everett or Revere. It doesn't relieve the Everett...

I'm really not a fan of this design. The substandard platform length isn't great - I really don't like the pattern of ignoring the agency's own standards - but it's not the end of the world. 600' is enough for a 7-car set, and I can't imagine we'll be seeing 8-car sets on the northside anytime...