It took me 45 minutes to cross this bridge on Saturday. They had a lane closed by Blackmoor during the busiest time of day. And no one works on the bridge itself on the weekend. Charlestown has been a disaster with poorly planned construction work recently. So frustrating. Was hoping the bridge may open this summer but it doesn't look promising.
The bridge was slated for completion at the
end of March 2025 during the last public meeting in fall 2022. So this is still 9 months away.
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The bridge and the route to Sullivan has been a relentless growth in traffic congestion. It's a complete disaster for the OL shuttle buses this week, with additional roadwork near the OL bridge and track replacements going on between Sullivan, Somerville, and Assembly. It's worse in this week's OL shutdown compared to the 2022 monthlong shutdown.
The 2 buses that make the jaunt from Sullivan busway to Haymarket busway have had bus headway attrition and travel time increases in the past decade. What was once a crisp 11 - 13 minute jaunt between the Sullivan Station busway and the Haymarket busway via the North Washington Street Bridge back in 2009/2014. is today scheduled to take 21 - 24 minutes at the same time of day. Bus schedule changes in 2015, 2017, 2019, and 2022 have all added extra runtime to complete a full duty cycle for the buses crossing the North Washington Street Bridge and slashing headways. This means that 50% of a duty cycle of the buses have been lost to traffic. With buses cycling twice as slow back and forth in 2024, they can only cover half of the trips in the same amount of time, compared to 2014. This means that returning to 2014 headways is not possible without adding extra buses to the routes to compensate for the extra travel time and traffic congestion. Its only compounded by the reduced service caused by the operator shortage resulting in a 50% transit service cut compared to 2009/2014 levels, with rush hour headways quadrupling in length.
With the Sullivan bridge replacements starting earlier in the spring, I can only imagine that later this fall/autumn 2024, after the traffic crapshoot at Sullivan has been in place for several months, the MBTA will respond by slashing bus frequencies on the N. Washington Street bridge even more by adding extra time for buses to cycle back and forth between Sullivan and the bridge. There aren't any service restorations this summer.
Notably, the bus lanes from the southern end of North Washington Street Bridge to the Haymarket busway have all failed to do anything to make the buses faster. Instead, it seems the buses have gotten slower since the bus lane introduction in late 2019 and 2023. Bus lanes do work in other parts of the world, but it seems like the bus lanes between the bridge and Haymarket, and in other parts of Boston such as Allston, fail to to make any meaningful speed improvements to make the buses significantly faster.
The insane traffic congestion on the N. Washington Street Bridge and Sullivan Sq., is an excellent case of bus headway and cycling attrition caused by endless increasing traffic. Is there any other bus route that's had this bad of headway attrition caused by worsening traffic jams? I'm not sure how much the Lynn Terminal - Lynnway - Wonderland - 1A 4xx bus madness stacks up compared to the duo routes between N. Washington St & Sullivan.
