Superinteresting: Proposal for extending the E-line reservation to Heath St with room for the 39 and 66 busses.
It's done in
San Francisco on streets narrower than South Huntington...triple-use (trolley, trackless trolley, diesel bus) platforms on a street-running section with no permanent reservation. Elegant in its simplicity. Transit vehicles run in the left lane and in case of buses do not chew their own schedule time or clog other traffic making constant weaves to/from the curb; they reach the platform by staying square in their lane. Road lanes split around the platform, and cars pass to the right of the platform on space reclaimed from taken parking spaces at the corner. Crosswalk is positioned at the head of the platform, and makes for safer passage because of how it segments the road for pedestrians.
Market St., where this is done, is 45-50 ft. wide curb-to-curb in most places. South Huntington is slightly wider, at 50-55 ft. The only difference is in road layout. Market is contiguous 4 lanes with no parking except in curb juts (mainly for taxis and delivery vehicles) because it runs through the heart of the CBD. South Huntington is 2-lane with wall-to-wall parallel parking, but is in much less dense environs with fewer intersections and thus should easily be able to pass every stress test that Market St. transit v. traffic handles relatively well in-practice. I spent nearly half the day--while a Giants playoff home game was scheduled--walking up/down Market a few years ago when I was in San Fran killing a day at the end of a business trip, with keen interest in watching the nuts-and-bolts of this transit setup throughout the day. It's an extremely crowded corridor, and the transit vehicles are hardly operated with any state-of-art frills (bunch of generic 40-footer diesels and TT's, and single-car PCC's on the historic F trolley...regular traffic signals that may have been transit-prioritized but certainly weren't any "hi-tech" transit priority). Yet...things flowed ploddingly but faithfully, with fairly noticeable lack of vehicle bunching to these Boston-trained eyes who ALWAYS sees depressing gaps and gluts of yellow- or green-paint T vehicles on the streets.
While a San Fran/Market setup may pose some challenge for snow removal, it shouldn't be hard to implement given the relatively few number of stops where it would be needed. It's mainly about how many additional parking spaces you're willing to sacrifice for the setup, since platforms for 2-car Type 10's and the associated lane-split allowances for passing on the right are quite a bit longer @ 250-275 ft. than the pathetically cramped 70 ft. painted bus stops the 39 has to jam itself awkwardly into at the curb. If each of those inadequate-size bus stops is worth 4 parking spaces, is the City willing to donate another 8-10 spaces to give the stops full platforms? Neighborhood parking mob rule says no, although if it comes with a stop consolidation the corridor needn't lose that many parking spaces in the name of far speeder ADA-compliant transit.
For example, Fenwood and Back of the Hill are immediate deletions on the E due to extreme proximity to adjacent stops. So the San Fran-style platforms would only need to be done at Mission Hill and Riverway for the current route. For the Hyde Square extension you'd do that setup at Heath, VA, Bynner St., Perkins St., and Hyde Sq. If the 39/66 similarly consolidated stops on the co-running portion, the parking can remain *almost* in equilibrium on the corridor from the parking givebacks of deleted bus stops offsetting most of the extra parking taken at the multi-use platforms.
And, why yes, prove it works on a multi-modal and (hopefully) signal-prioritized corridor like the E/39 and it's ripe for application on other uni-modal corridors that just happen to host a whole lot of bus routes and get frequently clogged from all the curb turnouts and associated bunching (Mass Ave...I'm looking in your direction).
When the T was officially studying Arborway restoration it was stupidly doing curb-running trolley tracks, which was a defective-by-design layout guaranteed to get the trolleys blocked by double-parkers all-day/every-day. But that almost seemed to be the point of it all given how gleefully they were trying to bury the Arborway commitment. Conversely, a full median quasi-reservation like the Hyde Sq. consultant group proposed is probably too big an ask. And probably also dubious for snow removal on South Huntington. But the San Fran platforms pretty much conform to exactly those Hyde Sq. renders' median dimensions...only they're intermittent instead of continuous on the roadway. Functionally that's not really any different from SF, since the only noteworthy action is happening at the actual transit stops. Just say for argument's sake that snow removal doesn't play nice with a complete unbroken median on a street that narrow, and the first adjustment from there--deleting all median length where the platforms ain't--lands you exactly at the SF setup. We're pretty much there already at proof-of-concept for Boston streets if those consultant recs are carrying any sway with major decision-makers.
