Thanks for the information on transfers at Nubian, there's a lot of data there I'll need to look over. It seems like there isn't any data on what specific buses people transfer between, which is unfortunate, but it's still very useful.
One thing to note when using that dataset: it's much more valuable for looking at
ratios of passengers. The raw numbers themselves are just the numbers of people willing to answer the survey. (And of course there will be some bias in there, based on whose willing to respond to a slightly lengthy survey.) But yeah, it's a really cool dataset.
As a last note, my understanding of the history here might be incomplete, but I have always understood that a Washington St LRT was generally expected to replace the El, and that this was an acceptable solution for those in the area. I think it was generally understood that removing the El and making the neighborhood generally a better place would have some trade-offs for travel time, but obviously nobody was picturing a glorified local bus that took 2-3x as long, and the cancellation of SL Phase III was just an extra slap in the face.
This is a really interesting question, and worth some digging to learn more about. Two points come to mind:
First -- and I know this is not what you are saying -- there are lots of decisions that were made 40 years ago that we no longer accept the logic of. Just because someone, or some group, agreed 40 years ago that a surface route was the best replacement, it doesn't mean that logic still holds today.
Second, my question is, whom are we referring to when we say "those in the area"? Because the removal of the El most certainly benefited the residents of the South End, and the western end of Roxbury along Washington St; but those who would benefit from a separate subway to Nubian today are a completely different group, living in Mattapan, Dorchester, and the other half of Roxbury.
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@Teban54 alluded to this, but I want to share a few maps that have helped me come to realize the degree to which Boston has been and remains racially segregated. I'm not really saying that these maps, or the fact that there is de facto segregation, should push us in one direction or another. But I think it's lurking in the background of this discussion, and worth naming.
From a project at Tufts,
we see shifts in neighborhood demographics over time (blue dots indicate White residents, green dots indicate Black residents, and red dots indicate Asian residents):
We can see in particular that the South End's racial boundaries have softened between 1980 and 2010, probably reflecting ongoing gentrification:
From
Go Boston 2030, we can see that Mass Ave (and to a lesser extent, Tremont St south of Mass Ave) still forms a relatively clear boundary between the largely White and Asian populations to the north and the mostly Black and Hispanic populations to the south:
And if we zoom out, we see that most of Boston's Black population (and a large fraction of its Hispanic population) lives in the gulf between the Red and Orange Lines, served only by buses and 45-min freqs on the Fairmount Line:
I doubt any of this is revelatory to you,
@TheRatmeister -- I just felt these maps are useful context.
