I second everything
@Brattle Loop has said. Blue Hill Ave has all the trappings of a streetcar boulevard, forming the strong spine of a neighborhood, except that it's the wrong-way-round from a transit-planning perspective: at its northern end, the travel corridors branch out and become diffuse before joining up into a new set of strong spines as they traverse the Inner Belt region and continue on to downtown. In an "ideal" scenario, the branching and diffusion would occur at the
outer end of the spine, not the inner.
I would
love to someday see a Park-Mattapan via Blue Hill LRT, but I'm very skeptical it could ever work. Even back in the streetcar heyday, BERy (or its predecessors) had stopped running streetcar routes from beyond Dudley (Nubian) into the subway by 1920 -- it was just so much faster to transfer to the El. Such a route would be 6.5 miles long -- we'll call it 6 miles on the surface -- and, assuming you kept SL4/SL5 stop spacing of ~1,000 feet, would need to have over 30 stops. (Twice as many as today's B and C branches. Even the Arborway Line, back in the day, only hit 23 stops, and some of those were notably less than 1,000 feet apart.)
And I do think you'd need to maintain the 1,000 ft stop spacing of the current bus routes. And I think it's interesting and worth noting that all of the stops you've placed on Blue Hill Ave are less than half a mile from a (potential) Indigo Line station. If you're looking for express service through Dorchester, 10-min-or-better frequencies on the Fairmount Line seem like a much better bang-for-buck. If you're going to go to the trouble to build LRT, it seems worth avoiding duplicating the existing infrastructure.
On a more positive note: I really do like the idea of recreating these old streetcar boulevards. I don't live in Dorchester and might feel differently about the idea if I did, but in the abstract it sounds like a nice placemaking venture, particularly if it can be used to knit together the fabric of the neighborhood.
If Dorchester said, "We want an LRT line, not because we want to get downtown faster but because we want our community to be centered on a light rail line," I would build it along Blue Hill Ave and Columbus Ave:
Wide boulevards that are already planned to be redesigned with dedicated transit lanes. Follow well-established travel corridors used by current bus routes. And you have options at the northern end: if Tremont St receives dedicated transit lanes, then you can head over to Huntington from there, and terminate at surface level around Brigham Circle -- essentially doing the same thing the proposed T22 will do, as a Longwood-focused service; you could alternatively extend further up to Columbus to hit Ruggles, with the option to jog over to Huntington from there (again, as a Longwood-focused service; downtown commuters would transfer to Orange as they do today, or would take Indigo). Non-revenue connections to Huntington would provide yard access to the rest of the LRT network.
^ This is actually pretty close to what you propose. The main difference is traveling via Egleston Sq rather than Nubian Sq. Is it unequivocally the most in-demand corridor? No. But it would be the easiest option to build, and if the goal is building an LRT line
for the sake of building an LRT line (which I think is indeed a valid reason), then you would satisfy that goal and have a reasonably good piece of transit while you're at it.
Subsequently or alternatively, you could anchor an LRT line at the northern end to an infill Indigo Line station at Ceylon Park:
(In principle, you could also anchor it instead at Four Corners/Geneva, but there's more room for a surface station at Ceylon Park.)
In this iteration, the Blue Hill LRT is explicitly a local feeder service into high-frequency mainline service on the Indigo Line. If Mattapan Yard could be beefed up a bit, maaaaaaybe you could build a Mattapan-Ceylon Park LRT line without building a connection to the Green Line? Unclear.
I agree that Columbia Road could be nicely reimagined as a streetcar boulevard, as a Phase 2 or 3 building on the above:
And over time, you could continue to convert large roads into transit boulevards -- Morton St would probably be the next candidate, either toward Forest Hills, Ashmont, or both. I think it
could be done. But in general, I think
@Brattle Loop's fundamental point holds true:
How many bus corridors could get dedicated, protected lanes and improved facilities for the cost of one LRT line down Blue Hill? Ten people having to transfer so that a thousand get to work faster would be a tradeoff that any transit planner would take in a heartbeat.
If the desire explicitly is for an LRT line for an LRT line's sake, then I think you're looking at Columbus-Blue Hill, potentially with a spur to Ceylon Park. (Which, incidentally, gets you that nice connection to Franklin Park, at three of its five corners.) But beyond that, I think you're looking at the combination of:
- As-close-to-full-build BRT infrastructure on all the proposed high-freq corridors (eg. T28, T22, etc) -- Blue Hill, Warren, Columbus, Morton, Talbot, Washington going into Ashmont, Columbia, with extension to LMA and Kenmore on the north end
- 10-min-or-better Indigo Line service on the Fairmount, with full fare integration as a de facto rapid transit service
- Extending the Green Line to Nubian (though I have an idea about this I may post later)
- Potentially converting the Mattapan Line to heavy rail
All of which (possibly except Mattapan HRT) reflect known, stable travel patterns, build on existing infrastructure, and can be built incrementally and evolve with the community's needs over time.