So every transit project from now on will need 11 years of workshopping before logistics can be planned? Both the needs of the neighborhood and the available technology can change a ton in the span of 11 years!
Where, oh where, did the requirement of an over-long gestation period come from in order to have a productive dialogue about the transit needs of the neighborhood? Point exactly to where it was stated that understanding the neighborhood required chewing torturous clock cycles to state their case.
You and F-Line could both cool it with the condescension, Colonel.
And the other pair here can cool it already with the shoving mudpies into other people's mouths with this dishonest turfing of the discussion. If it is too tedious an expenditure of energy to engage a still-living history of neighborhood transit engagement documented through decades of independent sourcing, it does not mean Bizarro World automatically reigns and any whole-cloth made-up shit is fair game to tar the messengers with. You aren't binary-choice forced to take anyone's word for it in this thread; the sourcing is there to the nines if you want to explore it and you think somebody here is fulla crap. But it doesn't follow that because you personally find it tedious to discuss these issues, the issues themselves are illegitimate and a waste of valuable SimCity'ing time. We're still Transit Pitching here, right? This a factor that's real, big, and multi-generational...and nothing gets pitched without engaging it. It's still going to be there as the giant-weighted prevailing factor long after one has run out of aB'ers to satisfactorily ad hominem for pointing it out.
I'll admit though that in high school, when I had to get to White Stadium for a football game, I'd take the orange line to Green then walk up Glen and through the park. If the walk from Stony was faster, no one ever bothered to tell me.
This is basically the story that's been told a million times: "No one ever told me the walkshed was ____." That's exactly what you get when the station placement is askew from the grid and wayfinding is forced to become this secret cottage industry of which selection of side streets to cut-n'-turn on to save a minute's footsteps. See the Street View linky from my previous post on the difference between Community College and Thompson Square when the Charlestown El was replaced: eyeshot visibility. That's basically what you'd have if Stony Brook were placed anywhere that acknowledged what the street grid was. Atherton is visually obstructed by trees such that you couldn't see the respective "T" signs from either end of the block like you could with CC/Thompson in 1975...but it's within ~100 ft. of the same walk you see clear-as-bell on that Street View linky from Charlestown. Instead you've got the grid that goes from fairly straightforward E-W orientation...but very suddenly corkscrews to 45-degree angle for a 6-block span between Porter St. and Bragdon St. before E-W order is restored at Dimock. That 6-block span is the entirety of the spanning to the Egleston vicinity, but Stony Brook opted to reshape Boylston St. from a diagonal to an E-W orientation when the NEC was sunk making an already confusing walkshed all the moreso. Now it's an isoceles-triangle shaped 2600 ft. to get between the SB headhouse and Egleston at "easiest" wayfinding. But the cottage-industry of directions-giving will tell you that you can pare that to 2350 ft. by going 1 block up Amory, 2 blocks down School, 2 blocks up Arcadia, and 2 blocks down Atherton to the Square. Or...psst!...cut through the Darlymple/Mendell Way alleyway a block down Boylston or the school parking lot and you'll save yourself another 100 ft.
Who's going to mount that kind of wayfinding? Hardly anyone...which is why SB is a ridership crater whose positioning 2 crosswalks down the SW Corridor grade separated path to Green ends up eating into Green's ridership rather than carving out any bandwidth of its own. If it was going to seek any bandwidth of its own it would've treated the heart of the grid disruption where the cross streets all angle 45-degrees. It could get away being agnostic to that back in the old days as a RR when it was a faceless spacer station on completely/totally different travel patterns and the old elevated NEC was a much more imposing Chinese wall dividing the Centre-oriented west from the Washington-oriented east. In that role it
didn't infringe on Green's catchment because RR Green and El Green were sipping from totally different cups.
Something had to bend, however, when they brought back that siting on El replacement grounds. Not only did they guess wrong...cannibalizing Jackson wasn't half the risk the state assumed because their respectively mis-aligned street grids as Green was the one that ended up functionally being undercut. But there was no "debate" presented. It was no choice at all: "It goes on the map coordinates of the old RR station or go pound sand we'll skip straight from Jackson to Green." Not "upon careful consideration we think the walksheds are adequately-accommodated"....straight to "Fuck you, that's why" and blinders welded shut. It was very much the same attitude that led to the intentional slew-footing of the Silver Line from its early design 70's-80's concepts that had way more stringently enforced bus lanes (not to mention real electricity propelling the buses) to the sick joke it became after everyone stopped pretending there was anything to it but a Seaport empire-building scheme.
History's tended to repeat itself in spades here. If "Fuck your walkshed, either take this station or get nothing at all" mentality draws a dashed line straight to how did the Silver Line become so watered down and where do we begin at fixing it...understanding WTF went awry is verily key to figuring out any sane way forward. That's it in a nutshell. It traces back to everyone trying to game the walkshed with the latest insidery crazy-quilt of cross-street hop/skip tricks that only the directionally superior can master...then that same story of trying to game the walkshed ending with an exasperated "Jeez! Why did this have to be so nonsensically hard?!?!" and getting curious about the backstory.
Nubian and DT aside, what's stopping the city from putting up barriers and banning on-street parking on Washington in the South End tomorrow? Just political will?
Yep. And BTD being the multi-generational unanswerable fiefdom that wags the Mayor. Why does the city enforcement agency not enforce double-parkers on some thoroughfares in some neighborhoods? Same reason why it's ensconded in the Constitution of Southie's wild imagination that space savers are a gift from God Himself's spare attic furniture stash. BTD district patrols are 'of' their neighborhoods...they bow to the mob. Why no one thought to put a bunch of Allston-born meter maids on-duty in JP Center when the delivery trucks are blocking the 39 all fucking day long or why Lower Dot patrols aren't swapped with South Enders who think those red-paint Silver Line lanes are an adorable optional suggestion is beyond me. Neither White nor Flynn nor Menino nor Walsh ever dared raise that possibility, so I guess they've all decided in 5 consecutive decades who really butters City Hall's bread.
In the absence of any multi-generational hint of change there it's probably safe to assume that bus lane layout is an easier change order than the enforcement politics around an anything-goes curb. Look to the 28X...center-median bus lanes, not curbside. Look to the Hyde Sq. E extension proposals which treat South Huntington with dual-mode center stops and are rumored to be doing the same for the past-Brigham E+39 stops on Huntington-proper. Look at the "
San Fran-style" transit platforming that's been oft-namechecked here...rote center-running transit with no turning out (in the case of SF Market St.
triple-mode streetcar + TT + diesel bus), and when the center is occupied by a station-stopping transit vehicle traffic bears
right around the platform in traffic-calmed fashion. Just get the hell off the mob-ruled curbside entirely and jurisdictions are clear-cut enough to be BTD proof.
Boston probably has to do this as a matter of survival on any thoroughfare design-amenable enough to take transit to the left lane instead of the curb. It's enormously better-performing on a schedule anyway because the lack of turnouts, but instead of wishing that the mob didn't exist as it rules the curbside anarchy for another decade changing the sets of questions looks like the better deal. Just sidestep the curb mob entirely by cutting out the middleman, let design truths like "ADA sez platform must be minimum X ft. wide, universal fleet compatibility sez they have to be right-hand boarding for an any-bus, and there's no such thing as a quantum superposition where you get to hold 4 precious corner parking spaces hostage on both sides of the intersection so fork 'em over on the offset-platform sides." Seems to result in way less tortured sausage-making in cities that have adopted that standard of transit prioritization on their premier (any-mode) corridors. And...look at those 28X renders that are locked/loaded/red-to-go doing exactly this. Can you really say whatever workshopping time--short-duration, long-duration, excess-duration--they did was poorly spent when that's very much the template that might be able to fish the Silver Line out of the gutter and get Washington transit carrying its weight at long last?
I'd call that a learning moment for sure in the still-evolving history here. So how can we not continue to pay very close attention to the neighborhood's pulse?
