That's a sensible build out idea but I wonder how Harvard Sq/Cambridge residents would react to light rail running in mixed traffic down JFK St and across Memorial Dr. I see that as a non-starter. Also ending the line at Eliot/Brattle Sq would mean an awkward transfer to the Red Line and reduce the effectiveness of the whole project. At-grade running through Allston is no big deal but you gotta stick the terminal to make it work. It's not just about adding transit to Allston; this line would make a serious dent in diverting transfers at Park St from Red to Green. Having a simple transfer is required to make that work.
It's exactly the route the Urban Ring BRT was to run, and Harvard prodded pretty heavily during the UR scoping about why BRT and not LRT. So I don't think that's any issue whatsoever for them.
If you have stops at Ohiri Field for the Stadium the entire street-running portion would be stop-free. It really is not very much overlap with the bad traffic. The traffic here sucks because of the uncoordinated DCR signals that have no protected lefts either direction on Memorial, and no protected lefts on the bridge side of JFK for westbound Memorial. That's a deficiency that should've never been allowed to persist as long as it has. Memorial lane-drops to the west for that insanely dangerous on-street parking, so making the left WB lane coming into the intersection left-turn only, lane-dropping WB from the intersection through the on-street parking to 1 lane, then lane-shifting EB to 2 travel lanes + a protected left solves that problem. Then the bridge should just flat-out get a protected left, even if some light sidewalk reshaping is required.
That pretty much solves the major traffic queue deficiency of the intersection. And coordinated signals from the Storrow interchange through Memorial take care of the rest. I believe the Mt. Auburn lights on JFK are already tied into Harvard Sq. It's entirely DCR's fault that they have done nothing to address this easy fix.
So...Harvard support isn't a problem. And traffic has an unexplored easy-reach mitigation to eliminate that problem on JFK. Eliot St. is well under-capacity since majority of the traffic turns on Mt. Auburn. That leaves the surface station, and the fare portability from the surface station as constraints to square.
Without a tap-on/tap-off Charlie transfer there is a whole freaking lot of things that won't work correctly across the system. Silver Line Washington rapid transit transfers today. Indigo-to-rapid transit transfers tomorrow. The Urban Ring to Red @ Kendall when the stations are locked in 2 blocks apart in the far future. This is a necessity. You have to be able to hit a transfer tap surface at your surface stop and be given a controlled 20-minute time limit to tap back on at the nearest station (and only the nearest station). You would have the same trouble if the Harvard trolley went down into the bus tunnel; it's outside the Charlie gates. So timed transfers have to be implemented way before there even is such a thing as an Urban Ring. It has to be implemented before Indigo goes online or the double-dip fares on that service are going to scare half the ridership away.
So that fixes the fare portability. Now you're left with the loop. I don't think there's a great solution to this. Bennett St.--Bennett Way--Mt. Auburn--Eliot St. is the easiest place by far to loop. The plaza in front of the hotel along Eliot is the largest spot available for sticking a surface station. Might even be able to barter with the hotel for moving the Thrifty Car Rental mini-lot that takes up half their garage capacity so you can knock down the Eliot-facing side of the garage, widen the plaza, and get 2 two-car train platform berths. Bennett Way has pocket storage for 1 two-car train. So...basically Heath St. with 1 extra trainset's capacity. Assume that Ohiri Field/Harvard Stadium station has a pocket track for turnbacks in the event of an emergency shutdown, much like Brigham Circle gets activated in an instant if there's a car accident on Huntington blocking the path to Heath. That's the throttle for keeping anything on the surface from fouling the grade separation in Allston.
That's the best you're going to do. Milton Pl. is too narrow to run tracks down to reach Brattle St. And without very invasive modification to the bus tunnel you've got no turnaround that doesn't involve getting snarled in Mass Ave. traffic for a loop around Cambridge Common. That's an extremely time-consuming and operationally ugly way to go.
So you have to compromise. Depend on the tunnel and you're going to more than double the price tag for the entire route and knock it well back of the priority pile. So the only way forward is to stage it. Get Allston built, get this plaza stop built on the loop, and provide ample signage for the out-of-towners up the block to the Brattle Sq. entrance of Harvard Station. Then start saving up money for the tunnel build. Approach it from the standpoint that it's temporary. This is not bad for a temporary setup. This would THRILL Harvard if it anchored their Allston campus sooner and got them a terminus in the Square 20 years earlier than it would've taken if funded in a monolith. It can't be funded in a monolith. That tunnel isn't as mission-critical as Red-Blue where heaven and earth could/should get moved to find that $250M+ right away. You probably have a litany of other Urban Ring-related pieces much more consequential. So the dilemma is: sooner with an IOU, or not at all because your priority list is too big to fund a monolith?
This is an easy call. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Good doesn't prevent you from achieving perfect later. Good gets you perfect sooner because the difference between funding a monolith and funding a two-phaser where the leading phase is the
easier to fund can be counted in decades. The
real Urban Ring proposal didn't try to build a grade separated Charles crossing on Day 1; I would say the official data is well-supportive of this way of doing it. There's nothing Crazy Transit Pitch about the street-running interim...except for doing LRT first instead of BRT, over the bridge in mixed traffic was the official rec.
), I had a couple of thoughts, but also a question first:
