I think BRT along Boylston could ease some Green Line capacity issues. Capacity issues will definitively get worse once fenway and the pike air parcels are built out. It could also extend up Brookline ave to Longwood.
Also the Chesla Silver Line extension shows how cheap BRT expansion can be. I hope that the MBTA can eventually improve the Silver Line way to I-90 transition and increase speeds in the Silver Line tunnel using some sort of automation.
The problem is you have to pick the right corridors. And there just aren't very many. Scroll to the bottom of that Amateur Planner blog link that collects all of Ari's posts on ITDP. They've got a (very flawed) scoring of corridors in Boston that qualify as potential BRT fits. None of the evaluated corridors hit the scoring threshold for 'true' BRT. So outside of an Urban Ring down payment like SL-Gateway on an unusually spacious rail ROW we really aren't well-suited for it. At least not by the ITDP's own criteria for real-deal BRT.
The problem here isn't that we don't have good bus corridors. We do. Regular-old express buses like a completion of the aborted Crosstown network are exactly what the doctor ordered on these corridors. Regular old Yellow Line express routes with careful stop selection, signal priority, bus lanes where they'll fit, and Key Corridor features like fast-loading bumpouts. Like NYC's Select Bus Service. But that's not BRT and shouldn't be mistaken for it. The problem with BRT is the slippery slope: it starts with a Gold Standard (per ITDP's own scoring) based on that oft-referenced Bogota system...and then it gets whittled down and down and down. Until it's just an express bus (or not even that) done stupidly expensive for its compromises.
That phenomenon's got an official name:
BRT Creep. Silver Line Washington is the textbook example of that. Unfortunately when you've got these astroturf groups lined with lobbying money it's all ultimately about modal warfare, so no amount of BRT Creep is too much to justify ITDP's "fucking rightness". Ari's blog cites Light Rail Now as the LRT-nihilist equivalent (although they're pretty much just an obnoxious website, not a front for thinktanks). BRT astroturfers were a lot more prevelant in the mid-90's and early-00's when they were lobbying the hell out of cities like Boston to do BRT everything. Unfortunately (fortunately?) they were a victim of the Silver Line's own notoriety, so ITDP is one of the anachronistic few that's still going strong. Other than the (now rapidly cooling off) flare-up of "DMU's for Everything!" study fad first half of this decade, for the most part sanity is prevailing with more thought to "all modes are tools in the toolbox" right-sizing.
If there's a good thing in that it's that ITDP can't get taken seriously if they publish work this half-assed. I don't want to unilaterally tar them because they have a lot of resources and a lot of interesting data. They could be doing much more valuable work if they just eased back on waving the BRT bloody shirt and just focused more agnostically on corridor studies. By sheer quantity
most transit corridors in need of solutions are going to involve buses, so they don't have to get involved with other modes if that's not their thing. Jarret Walker of Human Transit is mainly a bus guy, but when he consults for cities he mainly sticks to his area of expertise and doesn't try to force-fit. It's this modal warfare nihilism that's a complete credibility-destroyer. I honestly don't know how the heads of ITDP expect to be taken seriously treating BRT like it's a cult membership. That is so 20 years ago, back in the dark ages before anyone knew how to conceptualize a transpo
portfolio. They just look kind of silly making such easy/obvious fodder of themselves for instantaneous debunking. It's a waste of all good data collection they may have done. It's definitely a waste of MIT's talents.
