Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos
The traffic situation would be improved if the E cars did not stop on the street-running portion of Huntington Avenue. Run them non-stop to the intersection of Huntington and South Huntington (where there's enough room for a trackside platform) and then non-stop to Heath Street. Having all the cars change ends at Brigham Circle would cause a major backups after Longwood.
I have no idea why they even added Back of The Hill as a street-running stop when the line reopened from Brigham to Heath in 1989. Check the MBTA's Ridership blue book, page 32:
http://www.mbta.com/uploadedfiles/documents/Bluebook 2009.pdf. BoTH has the single-lowest boardings on the entire Green Line...by a lot. Not much more than lowest of the low Valley Rd. and Capen St. on the Mattapan line. If a stop in the heart of JP is generating numbers like that, it has no reason to exist.
Get rid of that stop; Riverway and Heath are close enough and there's not a single business on that residential block. And get rid of Fenwood, which is 1 block from Brigham and has fifth lowest boardings on the whole Green Line. I don't think having just two on-street stops is bad at all. The station spacing between Brigham-Mission Park, Mission Park-Riverway, and Riverway-Heath is pretty much on-the-button average for the surface branches.
Riverway, I think, could even be taken off-road if they redeveloped the Citgo and that blighted garage/parking lot next to it into an actual peel-out station with real platforms and a bus turnout for all the routes that converge right at that intersection. Do that and you've got a decent case for whacking Mission Park too and having nothing but ADA-equipped platform stations.
Other thing they need to do is build a D & E track connection between Brookline Village and Huntington. The Green Line needs it for operational redundancy and equipment shuttling a la the Chestnut Hill Ave. B & C connection. Once the Somerville extension opens those D's are going to be traveling end-to-end. A second route to downtown, even if only at rush hour or when there's a delay, would do a ton of good. This project is in fact listed as a medium-priority build on the Boston MPO transit plan. Would open up all kinds of useful service patterns: E-Brookline Village with free D transfer, E-Riverside, E-Reservoir, round and round downtown loop service via E, Kenmore, and the subway. Whatever makes the most sense. And can be implemented without any trolleys getting caught in intersection traffic on Washington St. if they peel off onto quiet River Rd., cut over to the Brookline Ave./Pearl St. intersection across the ugly auto chop shop land, and go one block up Pearl to Brookline Village. Even better if Riverway station got moved onto the Citgo parcel, because then the trolleys could time their start out to BV from the platform with coordinated traffic light cycles giving them an opening to cut across.
