BU Development Thread

We need to get the yellow tube on the historic register, stat
 
The hell is with BU's biomed fetish? A lot of classes are in the dingy basement of the psych building, mechanical engineering is in a horse barn (literally), and basic student-safety projects like safer intersections (St. Marys and Mountfort, anyone?) and ADAing the west campus T stops aren't even in the institutional master plan. Yet another life sciences building (isn't 24 Cummington only a few years old) is worth losing part of the COM lawn?
 
They're building it on the parking lot, not the lawn.

They don't need to ADA the BU West stop. They need to eliminate it outright.
 
Four stops - BU West, St. Paul Street, Pleasant Street, and Babcock Street - primarily serve BU's West Campus are. Two should be eliminated, and two brought to modern ADA standards with wider raised platforms. With two stops eliminated, you can shift platforms to opposite sides of intersections (like on the C) if you can't eliminate sections of the third westbound lane.
 
Sounds about right. Current station spacing is about 230 meters, which is about half of what it should be.

When they rebuild that section of Comm Ave in 2015, they need to drop two lanes (from 6 down to 4, matching the BU East stretch of Comm Ave) and then establish proper left-turn lanes at each intersection (instead of the mixed left/thru lane that currently exists). The remaining platforms should be split across the intersections with far-side platforms, this co-exists well with left-turn lanes, and fits well with signal-priority which should be implemented in the new traffic control system. Then the platforms can be widened considerably, provided with amenities, ADA-compliant slopes, and two means of egress each, as required by law.
 
Matthew said:
Sounds about right. Current station spacing is about 230 meters, which is about half of what it should be.

When they rebuild that section of Comm Ave in 2015, they need to drop two lanes (from 6 down to 4, matching the BU East stretch of Comm Ave) and then establish proper left-turn lanes at each intersection (instead of the mixed left/thru lane that currently exists). The remaining platforms should be split across the intersections with far-side platforms, this co-exists well with left-turn lanes, and fits well with signal-priority which should be implemented in the new traffic control system. Then the platforms can be widened considerably, provided with amenities, ADA-compliant slopes, and two means of egress each, as required by law.
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Matthew -- If I was doing the planning related to Comm Ave. -- I would:
1) Bury the B Line tracks from the beginning of the incline out past Pleasant St.
2) Build one underground station for Eastern / Central BU
3) Build one underground station just west of BU Bridge
4) Build one underground station at Agganis Arena / student village
5) Build the last underground station at Packards Corner
6) build the incline up from there to the first surface stop @ Harvard Ave.


Let the students, faculty and staff walk -- it would be good for them and by drastically reducing the surface stops the line will be significantly speed-ed-up
 
Yes, if that had a chance in hell of happening, I would like to see something like that too.

But it's not, so, improved surface conditions it is.
 
whighlander said:
Matthew -- If I was doing the planning related to Comm Ave. -- I would:
1) Bury the B Line tracks from the beginning of the incline out past Pleasant St.
2) Build one underground station for Eastern / Central BU
3) Build one underground station just west of BU Bridge
4) Build one underground station at Agganis Arena / student village
5) Build the last underground station at Packards Corner
6) build the incline up from there to the first surface stop @ Harvard Ave.


Let the students, faculty and staff walk -- it would be good for them and by drastically reducing the surface stops the line will be significantly speed-ed-up
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And where will the MBTA get the billion dollars or so to put the B Line underground? Ah yes! The taxpayers.
 
Matthew said:
Yes, if that had a chance in hell of happening, I would like to see something like that too.

But it's not, so, improved surface conditions it is.
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I wouldn't take out BU West though. Axe BU Central, St. Paul, and Babcock.
 
The three-stops-on-East-campus is going to remain as long as you have to pay at the farebox. All three stops get 2500 to 2900 riders daily - that is, 30% of B Branch ridership gets on in the half-mile east of the BU Bridge. Try to push those 85-- riders onto two stops - one of which is Blandford Street which is basically unexpandable - and you have both massive overcrowding and huge dwell times, even worse than with 3 stops.

Until you have POP and can board all-doors - especially if Blandford can then go center-island to give whichever direction is peaking at the moment more space - it would be unwise to eliminate any of the 3 east campus stops.

Babcock, Pleasant, St. Paul, and BU West combine for 4600 riders, which can be split between two stops without wholly unworkable dwell times. One of Pleasant or St. Paul Street grade crossings is necessary for BU bus operations, but closing one of those and possibly Babcock Street would help a hell of a lot as well.
 
TomOfBoston said:
And where will the MBTA get the billion dollars or so to put the B Line underground? Ah yes! The taxpayers.
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Tom I didn't throw it in -- But obviously if the Olympic Games is approved and if a major part of it takes place on the the Conrail Beacon Yard then:

in addition to the re-routing of the Pike sans Toll Booths -- there needs to be T service and one obvious service would be a B-2 branching out from the underground Packards Corner

So then the money will come in part from the overall Olympic Games funding which will be mostly based on the Intellectual Property value of the Games in all forms of media
 
The EGE said:
The three-stops-on-East-campus is going to remain as long as you have to pay at the farebox. All three stops get 2500 to 2900 riders daily - that is, 30% of B Branch ridership gets on in the half-mile east of the BU Bridge. Try to push those 85-- riders onto two stops - one of which is Blandford Street which is basically unexpandable - and you have both massive overcrowding and huge dwell times, even worse than with 3 stops.

Until you have POP and can board all-doors - especially if Blandford can then go center-island to give whichever direction is peaking at the moment more space - it would be unwise to eliminate any of the 3 east campus stops.

Babcock, Pleasant, St. Paul, and BU West combine for 4600 riders, which can be split between two stops without wholly unworkable dwell times. One of Pleasant or St. Paul Street grade crossings is necessary for BU bus operations, but closing one of those and possibly Babcock Street would help a hell of a lot as well.
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EGE -- by my model -- the surface stops in front of BU are gone -- what you have are essentially Pru and Symphony on the E mapped onto Commonwealth -- i.e. real underground stations with more reasonable spacing
 
The EGE said:
The three-stops-on-East-campus is going to remain as long as you have to pay at the farebox. All three stops get 2500 to 2900 riders daily - that is, 30% of B Branch ridership gets on in the half-mile east of the BU Bridge. Try to push those 85-- riders onto two stops - one of which is Blandford Street which is basically unexpandable - and you have both massive overcrowding and huge dwell times, even worse than with 3 stops.

Until you have POP and can board all-doors - especially if Blandford can then go center-island to give whichever direction is peaking at the moment more space - it would be unwise to eliminate any of the 3 east campus stops.

Babcock, Pleasant, St. Paul, and BU West combine for 4600 riders, which can be split between two stops without wholly unworkable dwell times. One of Pleasant or St. Paul Street grade crossings is necessary for BU bus operations, but closing one of those and possibly Babcock Street would help a hell of a lot as well.
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Only if you assume that the crowds getting on remain. I'm very curious if it's a matter of induced demand. Kids jumping on the T to go two stops instead of walking. Cut a few stops and will they wait at one of the remaining ones, or will they just walk to class?

That said, I think that signal-priority is more important for the B than stop elimination in the immediate term.
 
I don't see the argument that 8500 riders split between 3 stops is somehow faster than 8500 riders split between 2 stops. If anything, 2 stops should be faster, since it means less time wasted in braking, opening/closing the doors, and resuming speed.

But yes, for surface improvements, you need to do all 3: POP/all-door boarding, signal priority, and station consolidation. They work together. For signal priority, the stations ought to be relocated and split far-side across intersections anyway. So why not rebuild fewer of them and make them better stations at the same time? Then you use all-door boarding at the new stations and everything is much more reliable.

Check out this Technical Report for a very detailed look at how Zurich went about a whole program of "transit priority" starting in the early 1970s, when they decided (a) not to build a subway, and (b) that good surface transit was the priority.
 
Very few Green Line trips are intracampus - the 57 and BU bus collectively are more convenient. But there is substantial ridership going downtown, and a huge number of students coming from the part of Allston not well served by the 57 - neither of which are likely to switch to bus.

Even with the current passenger loads at BU East and Central, you get pileups where there are too many people on the platform for effective circulation, and even the ADA platforms are too narrow for those leaving the train to quickly pass those boarding.

It would be like much like Harvard Ave is now. Only two such stops in a row - on a section of the line with many more passengers per car.
 
Yeah, I don't know why people think there's much in the way of intracampus trips. Maybe on day 1, before the students wise up to the station spacing.

I know how terrible the platforms are currently, which is why I said that this needs to be done as part of a larger program to fix the stations and operations. The platforms are narrow because they were rebuilt out-of-sync with the changes to Comm Ave, so instead of nice wide platforms they wasted space on grass and bushes while people are crammed into a few feet next to the train.

What they need to do is consolidate stations and split them across the intersections, and at the same time, create new, wider platforms using the space that was freed up by the lane diet on Comm Ave. Then do the same for west campus during the 2015 Comm ave reconstruction project from Amory-Malvern.

Harvard Ave needs the same treatment but it's a bit out of scope for "BU Development."

Do I believe that this can happen? Well, BU officials now claim to be interested in "de-car-ing" the Charles River Campus and they are developing over their parking lots without replacing them. They dieted Comm Ave some years ago, and they put some investment into the current stations. They just need to make sure that they coordinate these actions going forward. It's definitely feasible to fix these issues.
 
BU keeps floating the idea every few years of doing a BU Bridge stop anchoring Central Campus development and future Pike air rights. I don't know how that could possibly work with how dangerous that intersection is unless the act of doing the air rights massively cleaned up the Mountfort/Carlton/Bridge mess.

But if they did that--and it was a true relocation of BU Central further west instead of some insane +1 infill--then that could help the stop consolidation if it came with a requirement that BU West had to go. That would put recalibrate station entrance differences (via nearest crosswalk) to roughly Kenmore-Blandford @ 1300 ft., Blandford-East @ 900 ft., East-Central @ 1550 ft., Central-St. Paul @ 1400 ft. Whack Pleasant and it's St. Paul-Babcock @ 1500 ft., Babcock-Packards @ 950 ft., Packards-Harvard @ 1300 ft. That's a fair distribution. It's Babcock-Pleasant and Pleasant-St. Paul @ 750 ft., St. Paul-West @ 550 ft., and Central-East @ 460 ft. that are totally ridiculous. And Central-West are arguably too long @ >1900 ft.


Obviously Pleasant has to go right this second. That fixes most of the imbalances on the west end. The planned roadway + reservation reconstruction from Packards-Warren solves a lot of the platform width issues.

St. Paul vs. West vs. Central doesn't really have a good solution until Central is re-spaced. And I don't think that can happen until MassDOT nukes the entire BU Bridge mess and rebuilds it into a single-point intersection with single light cycle. i.e. retiring Carlton St./Comm Ave./University Rd. by blocking off the median and reverting that bridge to a light-use one-way pair w/St. Mary's. With the lost Storrow EB access compensated by the new street grid (Babcock, Malvern, etc.) crossing Beacon Park. Station relocation + zapping West + losing one signal cycle on that awful Bridge connection brings a lot of order. I'd do this even without air rights development because it's that bad and that pointlessly spread-out an intersection, but if that's the momentum that'll carry it...git 'r dun. That entire Comm Ave. Pike overpass is crumbling to dust, so if it needs to be widened at all for turn lanes on Mountfort or the Bridge side...as good an excuse as any.
 
One thing I don't like about Central and West, as well as any hypothetical BU Bridge station, is that half the catchment area is devoured by the Mass Pike cut. So yes, if they ever developed air rights over the canyon, then it might make sense to rejigger the stations and have one there. As it stands, I'd rather see the stations move slightly away from the Pike. For example, maybe consolidate BU Central and East by building a properly sized station between them, that splits across St Mary St.
 
If they ever do a Grand Junction urban ring there will need to be a station at BU Bridge so it can tie into the system. That of course, would also require the burying of the B to at least the BU Bridge. So it's out of the near-term realm anyway.
 
BussesAin'tTrains said:
If they ever do a Grand Junction urban ring there will need to be a station at BU Bridge so it can tie into the system. That of course, would also require the burying of the B to at least the BU Bridge. So it's out of the near-term realm anyway.
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Busses -- don't minimize the potential power of the Olympics

USOC is visiting the realistic candidates and Boston is near to or at the top of the list

Of course USOC could decide not to bid at all -- that decision will be made in 2014 after they hear preliminary presentations from the Candidates

Then if USOC decides to Bid there will be a formal Proposal process developing the proposal in 2015 / 2016 with the final USOC selection decision made in 2017 and then the IOC makes its decision

USOC was embarrassed by the two most recent proposals of NYC and Chicago -- neither of which had been very thorough in their prep -- so they want to win this one -- if its Boston -- the USOC will make it fairly easy for Boston to raise the Big Bucks needed

Some of the many B$ will be dedicated to transportation infrastructure improvements in support of the various venues

SO Boston = BU + Beacon Park ==== T renovations
 
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