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It appears that the latest CIP (released today) has an entry for "early action items" of what's essentially electrification, for Fairmount, Providence/Stoughton, Newburyport/Rockport, Haverhill, Fitchburg and Lowell lines:

Yeah, this is the point where I have to disagree with the "advocates", and I wonder if they ever take the 66 bus. For a heavily utilized transit corridors like this, the ideal should be 2 travel lanes, 2 bus lanes and 2 (hopefully protected) bike lanes, for a total of 55-60 ft wide. The section...

Since the article mentioned the Cambridge St bridge will be rebuilt, and that the 4-lane bridge (and 4-lane road north of the Pike) narrows to 2 lanes south of the Pike: Is there any reason not to have two bus lanes on the rebuilt bridge? This is an important corridor used by the high-frequency...

To be fair, when Eng came into power, there's no longer functional infrastructure for the Cambridge trolleys, and the BEB replacements of SL Waterfront had already gotten to a point that can't be canceled.

https://whav.net/2024/04/22/haverhill-train-station-to-close-to-downtown-commuters-officials-to-receive-secret-mbta-briefing/

A car rolled over upside down near the Riverway T stop this afternoon, blocking the trolley tracks. The E branch was cut back to Brigham Circle for a couple hours, after one trolley unknowingly went into South Huntington Ave and got stuck. Outbound 39 buses was initially able to bypass the crash...

Just a quick update on this: I don't think bus drivers actually abide by this presumed 25 mph speed limit in practice, even if the T does require them to. The 39 bus that I was on today routinely had 30+ mph speeds inbetween stops based on my GPS measurements, and at the Mass Ave underpass, it...

Moving this conversation about Secretary of Transportation Tibbits-Nutt's pessimism of transit expansions here. (The trigger of the discussion was her mention that she would not support having a layover yard in West Station.) I went through the painstaking task of listening to the podcast with...

This might be a good time for a recap: Tibbits-Nutt, the same transportation secretary that said she does not support the yard here, also mentioned last fall that "rapid transit extensions just don't happen anymore". As I've explained in that link, that's wildly out of touch with what's actually...

Question: What was the layover yard originally designed for? Can its functionalities, if any, be adequately replaced if it's removed from the West Station plan?

Another factor: A domestic rail manufacturing plant makes sense if the US sees strong demand for rail vehicles. I'm not convinced that's currently the case given the unfortunate nature of most travel still being dominated by cars and planes, especially if the few major rail operators already...

https://mass.streetsblog.org/2024/04/17/worcester-line-rail-schedule-changes-capture-more-riders-at-worcesters-expense TL;DR: The former Worcester H2H train doubled in ridership since it was converted to the typical "local till West Natick" trip, but Worcester complains about 20 extra minutes...

This might be a bit stereotypical, but I'll also add that a Chinese company may be more used to dealing with Chinese construction workers who are generally more willing to work over time (or at least gotten used to it), more tolerant of strict controls and more hardworking in general, due to the...

Here's a philosophical question. Suppose you are a planner, and you're deciding between improving transit for two neighborhoods, A and B. They're similar in population, density and distance from downtown. It's easier or cheaper to bring a significantly higher quality of transit to A. However...

Since the 66 was cut in two halves today due to the marathon (Harvard to Union Square, and Nubian to Brookline Village), I thought it would have been more reliable and less prone to bunching. Unfortunately, I was wrong: (For my specific purposes, this played out in my favor: I was trying to...

An off-topic question that I've been curious about for a while: What caused these extreme densities? Has the area always been this dense, or was it primarily due to developments in the last 40-60 years where this is one of the few areas with a one-seat ride to downtown Boston at its doorstep?

Ridership on the 66 does not necessarily agree, however: Other than the stop right at the intersection of the two streets, the two stops on Brighton Ave see comparable ridership to the two on Cambridge St, if not slightly higher.

Thinking about it again, I'm not sure if even a detour as far as Brighton Ave will be a shitshow in traffic and reliability, either: Brighton Ave (dark brown) already has bus lanes in both directions for the 57, and I don't see much issues with the turn to Malvern, other than having to merge...

I was in the public meeting for BNRD's revised proposal, and happened to be in the breaking room where the 64 was included. They said they rolled back the 64's West Station detour because BNRD will likely be completed well before West Station is, not because of the detour itself or its impacts...

I was revisiting and researching some history of West Station designs, and now I think this bashing of West Station bus hub's location and potential utility may have omitted a key factor, one that may not have gotten any attention: Cambridge St Bypass, a proposed east-west street linking West...