OK, but what Washington Street deserved was better transit than the El, not better transit than the bus replacement. I bet that the Washington Street corridor rebirth would have been much faster had the city gone ahead with the 1948 subway plan out to Dudley, rather than the neighborhood against neighborhood "freeway centric" southwest corridor alignment.
Parts of the South End were already turning around in the late 70's (Union Park for example) -- it could have spread faster over to Washington Street.
I do agree that this is a causality versus correlation argument. Impossible to prove either way because there is no controlled experiment.
All of it, arguably. Because the stops were all positioned around bus transfers.
1967 system map. . .
With some variations, that was the gist of the route network through 1987. You can see on the '67 map the relative cavity where the SW Corridor is. That's because nearly the entire JP and Roxbury street grids reset each other at the corridor. Cut streets, one-way pairs turning into two-ways or with only one of the one ways continuing, something that's wider on one side turning narrow and very quiet/slow residential on the other, mass street name changes. And so other than couple high-profile crosssing thoroughfares like Green, Centre, and Tremont the routes pooled at Washington/Columbus on the Roxbury side and Centre/S. Huntington/Huntington on the JP side. That's not because the E and the El ran there; the bus routes pre-dated both subway routings with streetcars and horsecars. It's because of the separate street grids reset at the old SW Corridor embankment and those big avenues streets being the square-to-square collector/distributors for nearly all travel patterns.
Notice how that '67 map has a relatively neat-and-tidy arrangement of routes crossing at straight angles, pooling into terminals at the squares, and avoiding much in the way of around-the-block movement except for immediate Boston Medical Center.
Now look at what a hot mess it is today with the Dudley-Ruggles-RX atrocity. And the 48 bending back on itself 3 or 4 times to ping between Jackson, SB, and Green. And how many other routes were dragged 1-2 blocks off their straight trajectory to go somewhere and breach the break in the street grid. And the Dorchester and Mattapan routes that all had to get superextended to tie-in somewhere. It killed the schedule management to have to introduce too many 'round-the-block turns, and so these routes have poorer OTP, longer travel times, and lower frequency ceilings as a result. For the cowpaths-begat-squares orientation of the neighborhood and its travel patterns, the SW Corridor is not a logical alignment for trapping surface transit. And they've been suffering for it ever since. The terminals have been suffering for it ever since, because the three-headed Dudley-Ruggles-RX monster doesn't function properly and Forest Hills is more overloaded than ever.
Now...that's not to say the Orange relocation shouldn't have happened. As noted, when first proposed they were thinking of splitting the difference: putting Orange to Forest Hills on the new alignment so it could go longer-distance displacing the Needham Line or following I-95 through Hyde Park, and roping in Green out of Boylston as the new El-or-replacement occupant for the most irreplaceable part out to Dudley needed for the highest quantity of bus routes to function correctly at transfers. Split 'em for the best of both worlds and so new forks can serve new audiences that wouldn't be served nearly as well (if at all) with an intact single routing that had to serve too many masters.
That's where it all fell apart...not replacing with rapid transit after they were split up, getting mired in politics about eye-of-beholder "blight" optics, and then sticking the neighborhood with the forever-bus. You can debate the optics forever...but the fact is the bus mobility is far worse with the three-headed-monster run around the block, and that's just not fixable. Probably isn't 100% fixable even if you converted Silver to light rail, because the commuter rail station is still at Ruggles and that's where they want to cram the Urban Ring.
As for past Dudley...it was easier to rationalize. That was the later El extension...intended to seed the mostly unpopulated outskirts of Roxbury. Dudley was the original terminus for transfer demand, and since it remains that way that's why the last 50 years have focused on "equal or better" out to that point only.
There were still some planning mistakes, however. Egleston got shafted on access to the new stations. Jackson Sq. is a half-mile walk from the corner of Washington/Columbus where the old El station stood...BUT, it's right on Columbus so it serves a major constituency of its own and doesn't warp the buses. Good placement.
Stony Brook, however...that was a cartographer's decision that didn't correspond well to actual transit usage. The street grid's all shredded by the time you get down to Boylston St., they're all quiet residential streets illogical for cross traffic (ped or otherwise), and the matching one-way pairs only exist on the JP side. It should've been a block north spanning the Atherton/Mozart and Marbury Terrace/Wyman block, with Marbury & Wyman connected into a matching pair. That would've been a straight 700 ft. shot from Egleston...still kind of lousy for buses, but at least a short walk and complete set of streets. It would've more than justified the close spacing to Jackson and further spacing from Green. But they went with perfectly even station spacing instead, and probably got all bent out of shape by the corner of Mozart & Centre being too close to Jackson. Even though no one on the ground navigating the neighborhood on a daily basis would base their trip on a mid-block; they'd base it on orientation to Egleston or orientation to Hyde Sq., because that's where the connecting nodes were. So even this portion or the relocation was a bunch of chafing between neighborhood interests who thought they were being denigrated from planners in a (very white) ivory tower, and planners who thought everything--including baked-in historical travel patterns--was on the table for changing in pursuit of 'fixing' the neighborhood.
And then there was the fact that they used this to rationalize not bringing the E back to Forest Hills. "Look how close this new corridor is." Another mistake in judgment made by planners and mapmakers who didn't get on the ground in the neighborhood that often. The choppy grid: who was going to go down Boylston or Paul Gore from extreme opposite ends of Hyde Sq. to catch a train at Stony Brook? Green St.'s a two-way and straight shot to/from Franklin Park on the Roxbury side, one-way leading away on the JP side with Seaverns requiring trip through a 5-way intersection to reach as the putative matching pair. Those aren't logical trolley or 39 alternatives at all. And that's part of the reason why Orange ridership craters at those two. SB serves neither neighborhood all that well in its current position. Green at least is in eyesight of the old station but is on a problematic one-way that's tougher for bicyclists and kiss-and-riders, and puts Franklin Park access a little tougher.
^^These are accessibility truths neighborhood-dwellers know by heart but a planner living in Weston and driving to the State Transportation Building, meeting with BRA and City Hall folks who live in Back Bay and Southie, didn't (and only very recently have gotten on the ball about) perceive. And didn't bother asking, because they saw the people of the neighborhood as the problematic end result of the blight and figured these wouldn't be the people living there under their final design...almost as if their design helped them choose the people who'd ultimately be living there. Never dawned on them that it wouldn't matter who was living there when mobility under
anyone still skewed square-to-square and transit stations too far off-center from the squares or too non-logically aligned to the flow of the street grid weren't ever going to do their jobs as well as they should.
It was an all-around tragedy of mistrust, misunderstanding, and generally pointless division between city/state and neighborhoods endemic to the era. At least they can make some amends by upgrading Silver into a real contiguous subway-feeding route that makes Dudley terminal work better and reduces reliance on the three-headed monster (even if Ruggles and RX are still going to present issues). And someday help the corridor's congestion by addressing the overload at Forest Hills (i.e. at least bringing Rozzie onto Orange to tame the route duplication), more robust east-west routes tapping Fairmount so the distended Dot and Mattapan routes are under less stress, and building out the Crosstown/express bus network with Urban Ring Phase I and the 28X complete with protected bus lanes on Melnea Cass and Blue Hill Ave.
A kitchen-sink collection that collectively solves majority of the problems lingering since '87 and gets the neighborhood better-equipped to absorb explosive growth and transit congestion radiating further out of downtown.
