MBTA Buses & Infrastructure

[Matthew]

There is a limit to bus ridership, beyond which buses bunch as you mention, but no bus route in Boston is even close to hitting it. New York has multiple bus routes in the 50,000 weekday riders region. Vancouver has a route with more than 50,000. These are all at the limit of what buses can do, with frequent bunching, but at the same time, Boston's busiest bus has 16,000 weekday riders.

This is actually something I've been wondering about for a long time.

How is it that Boston's busiest bus routes record so many fewer boardings than NYC? Is it counting methodology?

Don't tell me it's about city size -- bus ridership has to do with land use and local population, which is plenty transit-friendly in parts of Boston.

Maybe it's route length? I guess I should compare boardings per km.

The Silver Line on Washington Street runs basically a 60-foot bus every two minutes and it's packed, so it seems like it should be comparable to heavily used NYC buses.

 

[winstonoboogie]

The Silver Line on Washington Street runs basically a 60-foot bus every two minutes and it's packed, so it seems like it should be comparable to heavily used NYC buses.

Silver Line Washington St. is only 2 miles long with the majority of riders going at least as far (inbound) as Tufts Medical Center, routes in NYC can run the length of a borough, with a lot of turn over on each trip. Same is true for Chicago, Philly, L.A, etc, long, long routes. The streetcar network in Boston was developed by the same operator (Boston El) that developed the rapid transit network. Surface routes (trolley, trackless trolley, bus) in Boston were developed to feed the rapid transit for the most part. Surface routes in N.Y.C and Chicago still to some effect reflect that many of the streetcar operators were competitors to the rapid transit operators in those cities as the network developed.

 

[Alon]

This is actually something I've been wondering about for a long time.

How is it that Boston's busiest bus routes record so many fewer boardings than NYC? Is it counting methodology?

Don't tell me it's about city size -- bus ridership has to do with land use and local population, which is plenty transit-friendly in parts of Boston.

Maybe it's route length? I guess I should compare boardings per km.

The Silver Line on Washington Street runs basically a 60-foot bus every two minutes and it's packed, so it seems like it should be comparable to heavily used NYC buses.

Contrary to what I expected, the amount bus passenger-km per unlinked bus trips isn't too different between New York (3.4 km) and Boston (3.8 km). So it could just be a matter of length - the Silver Lie is very short, comparable to Manhattan crosstown buses rather than to 1st/2nd or Utica.

Honestly, it could just be that Boston railstituted most of the major routes already. It has 273 million rail boardings and 115 million bus boardings. In Vancouver, the numbers are almost exactly flipped. The Boston metro area has around 60 rail boardings per person-year, versus 50 in Vancouver, even though Vancouver has nearly twice the mode share.

Another observation: Boston's busiest buses are comparable in ridership to Chicago, Washington, and Philadelphia's busiest buses; Los Angeles and San Francisco's are comparable to New York's, like Vancouver's. Washington is almost as rail-centric as Boston - about twice as many rail trips as bus trips - but Philadelphia and Chicago are not, and in both, buses are a small majority.

 

[Matthew]

Silver Line Washington St. is only 2 miles long with the majority of riders going at least as far (inbound) as Tufts Medical Center, routes in NYC can run the length of a borough, with a lot of turn over on each trip. Same is true for Chicago, Philly, L.A, etc, long, long routes. The streetcar network in Boston was developed by the same operator (Boston El) that developed the rapid transit network. Surface routes (trolley, trackless trolley, bus) in Boston were developed to feed the rapid transit for the most part. Surface routes in N.Y.C and Chicago still to some effect reflect that many of the streetcar operators were competitors to the rapid transit operators in those cities as the network developed.

Okay, Silver Line Washington Street is short, as I surmised. I will note that the SL is, of course, not a classic trolley feeder route, and it replaced what was presumably a busy rapid transit trunk line. That should make it busier than usual, albeit minus the riders siphoned off by Roxbury Crossing and Ruggles.

How about the 39? Even the 39 + the "E" branch doesn't add up to 30,000 riders.

The 23, 28 buses are feeder routes, but they're both relatively long. I feel that they don't achieve similar ridership levels to comparable buses in Queens or the Bronx. I probably should substantiate this feeling, but I don't have time right now. Maybe after I defend.

I agree that Boston is bus-light. This came up recently, actually. Boston seems to have fewer buses than peer agencies, for the service that is offered. We need more buses, but we need a place to put them. Think about routes like the 66. It's got an awkward routing, but the frequencies are quite clearly too low. Every 9 minutes is not enough at peak hours. And it runs an atrocious 20 minute headway off-peak, which makes the buses absolutely jammed.

 

[winstonoboogie]

Okay, Silver Line Washington Street is short, as I surmised. I will note that the SL is, of course, not a classic trolley feeder route, and it replaced what was presumably a busy rapid transit trunk line. That should make it busier than usual, albeit minus the riders siphoned off by Roxbury Crossing and Ruggles.

How about the 39? Even the 39 + the "E" branch doesn't add up to 30,000 riders.

The 23, 28 buses are feeder routes, but they're both relatively long. I feel that they don't achieve similar ridership levels to comparable buses in Queens or the Bronx. I probably should substantiate this feeling, but I don't have time right now. Maybe after I defend.

I agree that Boston is bus-light. This came up recently, actually. Boston seems to have fewer buses than peer agencies, for the service that is offered. We need more buses, but we need a place to put them. Think about routes like the 66. It's got an awkward routing, but the frequencies are quite clearly too low. Every 9 minutes is not enough at peak hours. And it runs an atrocious 20 minute headway off-peak, which makes the buses absolutely jammed.

Silver Line Washington replaced three stations (Dudley, Northampton, and Dover). Forest Hills and Green were directly replaced by the relocated stations of the same name. Egleston was replaced by Jackson, requiring a bus ride or a long walk to get to Jackson. A very high percentage of boardings at pre-1987 Dudley and Egleston were transfers from bus routes that were then extended to the relocated Orange Line. Passengers bound for a final destination in Back Bay are still more likely to stay on the bus to Ruggles and transfer to the Orange Line. There is no reason to expect the Silver Line to carry the same number of riders as the pre-1987 Orange Line.

The relocation of the Orange Line also siphoned riders from the E/39 corridor. In 1980, if you were going from Cleary Sq. to the Copley Sq, on local transit, you took the 32 to Arborway and transferred to the E Line. Somebody making that same journey today would take 32 to Orange and get off at Back Bay, even if the E line still ran.

The 23 is about 5 miles Ashmont to Ruggles, the 28 is 6 miles Mattapan-Ruggles. As a comparison, SEPTA's Route 23 (their busiest route with 22,000 riders) is over 13 miles long.

 

[HenryAlan]

Contrary to what I expected, the amount bus passenger-km per unlinked bus trips isn't too different between New York (3.4 km) and Boston (3.8 km). So it could just be a matter of length - the Silver Lie is very short, comparable to Manhattan crosstown buses rather than to 1st/2nd or Utica.

And that brings us back to my comment about bunching. It was based on observation as a rider in a busy/frequent service corridor. But the corridor is only a mile in length. I don't have the data for that single mile, but the buses are about as crowded as safety allows, and run every 2-3 minutes during peak. I don't think the New York buses could be too much more busy than that, but if the routes are significantly longer, it's easy enough to see how their gross ridership numbers will be quite a bit higher.

 

[Arlington]

On BRT, generally, note that CT's Hartford-New Britain busway (which looks great, as someone who did a drive-by) is claiming ridership beyond predictions: 7,000 on the new BRT, and 7,000 on other buses in corridor vs projections of combined ridership of 11,000.

They don't seem to be doing a good job of answering the question "why wasn't this light rail" As I read it, only two "mixed" buses runs off-corridor every 20 or 30 mins before mixing onto the busway (route 102 and 128). To say the busway was worth it, shouldn't there be more lines that "do" a neighborhood and then go to downtown Hartford and run the streets there?

{EDIT: Ah: it is the 92x series routes to points farther beyond that are the answer to "why bus is better"
http://ctfastrak.com/files/CTfastrak_Map_Revised_for_Printing.pdf}

Press Release by Gov Malloy

website http://ctfastrak.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-DQts7-HJg

.

 

[Matthew]

The idea isn't terrible, the problem is that the cost overran by a factor of something like 500%, blowing up to $570 million.

Also, why do they keep calling it a 'guideway'? There's no guided aspect to this project.

 

[Scalziand]

As to the question of why not rail for CTfastrax, the original cost estimates were something like $60 million for the busway, $300 million for rail, which if it cost that much would be a no brainer. 'Course, it turns out that buying the land cost way more than expected because, duh, the busway and stations were wider than the existing rail ROW, some politically connected landowners got paid way more than what the land was worth, redoing bridges to remove a bunch of grade crossings, and suddenly a zero is added onto the cost. It is rather criminal that the rail option wasn't reaxamined when the busway cost ballooned. I do hope it becomes/remains successful though to justify eventual conversion back to rail.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

I've been following CTslightlyfasterbus in detail since I'm a CT expat. I reaaaaaaally would take what's coming out of Malloy's mouth with a grain of salt here.

-- They're still offering below-cost intro fares as a ridership stimulus...much like similar deals the Silver Line has gotten in the past...so these numbers do not yet correspond to a revenue target. Which is an extremely high target, so this ridership level not only can't level off but has to grow at breakneck pace.

-- Hartford Line commuter rail won't be up-and-running for another 18 months, and won't be scaled up to its full 32 trips per day until 2020. So there is an entire component still missing from the demand equation here at the Berlin station exactly 3 miles and 2 exits down uncongested Route 9 from the New Britain transit center. And at the West Hartford station to be outright shared with the busway.

-- Big rumblings at how much their reported cost numbers didn't add up could get ugly on the final accounting. $570M...it doesn't add up because it racked up so many cost overruns before the first shovel went in ground. They blew over $200M on design and more expensive than planned real estate acquisitions, so...a full construction cost of < $300M for that many bridges and large stations? Not likely. There are ex-DOT employees once affiliated directly with the project claiming it's more like $750M with a worst-case of $1B. There were so many no-bid contracts with permissive clauses for over-charges that % bloat vs. estimate potential after-the-fact gives off a Big Dig smell.

-- The cost paid to Amtrak for the busway easement on the Springfield Line was never reported. Final design and construction schedule were finalized BEFORE the easement agreement were negotiated, meaning there was no going back by the time they went to the table with Amtrak. There are words being tossed around like "gouging" on how that all went.

-- A prerequisite (confirmed by an ex-DOT employee who was on the project...has a big traffic engineering thread on the Somethingawful.com forums) of the deal was that Amtrak mandated that the perpetual lease on ex- tracks 3 & 4 treated exactly like a railbanking trail lease: revokable at any time if the ROW needs to be returned to RR use. Look at all the 2040 superduper Inland HSR plans, and the ones that pass through Hartford. Each and every one of those routings has a requirement of outright termination of the state's lease on the Tracks 3 & 4 ROW. Meaning the busway has to be wholesale-relocated. The state has no choice in the matter; it doesn't own the property, and it didn't go to the negotiating table until design-build was too far along to reverse course on any Amtrak blockers. It is conceivable if any of the first inland legs like Hartford-Providence get greenlit--not actually shovels-in-ground start of construction but greenlit to kick off the very beginning of the design-build process--that the eviction notice will get handed down before the busway hits its 15th anniversary. And all that concrete and station steel Newington-north--more than half the distance--gets vacated and bulldozed without any way of recouping the cost that the ridership revenue has not had nearly enough time to amortize.


There are some terrifying vulnerabilities and questionable ethics the state left itself exposed on in its haste to get this built. And a big gap in the cost accounting. I would say there's palpable concern from CT taxpayers on what burden this thing is actually going to put on them when all becomes known.



It'll be very useful when the I-84 Viaduct has to get rebuilt, because that's a 10-year project that is absolutely going to maim traffic patterns and hobble the state's ability to day-to-day function in ways even the height of the Big Dig didn't here. Too much of the Greater Hartford highway network didn't get built at all; the over-reliance on I-84 for basic economic functioning is practically terrifying when it comes to that project. The Hartford-Waterbury commuter rail study gets released to the public this Fall. They are probably going to have to build that in addition to the busway as prerequisite for the I-84 reconstruction. The local officials involved with that planning study who've also gotten a look at the crunched numbers for I-84 don't see how the traffic patterns can survive the decade of disruption without it. It's that bad. So there seems to be some revision of thinking at the Capitol about that project, evidenced by Malloy's ambitious 30-year transportation plan. Where CTDOT initially thought the busway was a replacement for it and was just throwing out a fake study to appease the legislative bloc opposing the busway...now there's a slow "Oh, shit...we really do need this too" realization manifesting itself in a lot more state cheerleading for the study and the appointment of a new "Waterbury Branch Czar" for Metro North's backwater branch to front-load shoring up that service to eventually join with the Hartford-Waterbury service.

If they have to build that because western New Britain, Plainville, Bristol, Southington, Cheshire, and Waterbury get socked in the balls by having their commutes sheared off by a full decade of 84mageddon, that's going to significantly change the dynamics with the busway. Even with the commuter rail line having to make that more inefficient jog down to Berlin. So it's an open question whether this just-completed build--likely way way more expensive than reported--has more than 15-20 years of juice in it to tap growth. A significant amount of that growth temporary-by-design because of 84mageddon mitigation. It really doesn't pool as many on-street CTransit buses on enough frequencies as originally promised, and while having more intermediate stops than the Hartford Line or the Hartford-Waterbury line...the stops that are being built or proposed intercept the very same bus routes that the busway is supposed to scoop up and pool. So there's long-term viability concerns with route redundancy on the feeders.



It's there. I hope for their sake it gets used. But, boy is there a lot still to be scared stiff about on what the real costs actually are and how much upside it truly has available to it. The amount of information keep-away the state is engaging in right now on the bottom-line questions is troubling to say the least given the risk they took.

 

[Commuting Boston Student]

Doesn't the calculus on the billion-dollar busway as a cure for 84-related woes fly straight out the window when it turns out that a third of the busway is in the way of viaduct replacement, meaning that section of road is blown up instead of carrying buses when 84mageddon happens?

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Doesn't the calculus on the billion-dollar busway as a cure for 84-related woes fly straight out the window when it turns out that a third of the busway is in the way of viaduct replacement, meaning that section of road is blown up instead of carrying buses when 84mageddon happens?

Right...that too. The preferred alignment for the 84 sinking (caveat: way early in the design process) is relocating the Springfield Line to share a common canyon with 84 from Sigourney St. to Myrtle St. Which nukes the costliest part of the busway: in front of Aetna HQ where they did their curiously costliest private land acquisition overpay of a frickin' parking lot, and the Flower St. grade crossing underneath the viaduct which was eliminated with grandiose switchback ped ramps and street traffic patterns all messed up. Grade separation will have to terminate at Sigournery with buses going in mixed traffic down Farmington Ave. for a solid decade while everything around Flower St. station gets wiped off the face of the earth.


And Capitol Ave. is going to be reconfigured in the project when the Sisson Ave. ramps come down, daylighting the dank area passing underneath the ROW and all the 84 overpasses. Much shorter-lived temporary disruption there with that busway bridge getting all blowed up so Capitol Ave. can go over instead of under.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[Scalziand]

For a long time, Malloy has been going 'Ignore the cost, the FEDs are picking up the tab, it's free money'. No idea if the state is on the hook or not for any overruns.

Waterbury's getting an early taste of 84mageddan with the last phase of the widening project. I swung by the area during the afternoon rush hour and it was a mess. There was a crash EB which looked like it closed the highway. The highway's closed from 9-11:30 in the morning for blasting this week, and probably other weeks too. To top it off, traffic detouring on Hamilton Ave was held up by an excavator being refueled in the middle of the Hamilton Ave. overpass. C'mon, you should know better than to let an excavator run out of fuel during rush hour. At least the bid came in well underbudget.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

For a long time, Malloy has been going 'Ignore the cost, the FEDs are picking up the tab, it's free money'. No idea if the state is on the hook or not for any overruns.

Waterbury's getting an early taste of 84mageddan with the last phase of the widening project. I swung by the area during the afternoon rush hour and it was a mess. There was a crash EB which looked like it closed the highway. The highway's closed from 9-11:30 in the morning for blasting this week, and probably other weeks too. To top it off, traffic detouring on Hamilton Ave was held up by an excavator being refueled in the middle of the Hamilton Ave. overpass. C'mon, you should know better than to let an excavator run out of fuel during rush hour. At least the bid came in well underbudget.

That's what they said about the Southington-Cheshire widening project, and the contractor's shoddy workmanship and do-overs made it cost almost twice as much as budgeted.

The feds released their funding dump for the busway in a one-time award. It was not a 1:1 match, just a single payout for % of the initial estimate. The state eats all overruns. So Malloy's statement to the contrary way back when the build was first announced was the first big "uh-oh" moment. The FTA documents at the time of the award didn't exactly leave a lot of ambiguity in the matter. There's his motivation for playing keep-away on any overruns. Must...preserve...illusion...of...freebies.

Fun fact: all of the no-bid design contracts from initial thru final design went to out-of-state firms that just happened to be big campaign donors to Federal Inmate Rowland, and they had no restrictions on how many times they could double-bill for last-minute design changes. "Uh-oh, spaghettios!"

CT Dept. of Asphalt is such an adorably corrupt little fiefdom. I almost pity Malloy's ambition thinking he can get them to follow through on his sweeping 30-year transpo plan and budgeting therein when the agency has been on-the-take for far longer than 30 years and is now in its nth generation of firmly-embedded bureaucrat hacks.



BTW...check the somethingawful.com thread by the ex-ConnDOT traffic engineer who was assigned to the busway project: http://archives.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3177805. Gory details all somewhere in the posts from 2012 on that enormous still-going thread. Including plenty of equally gory details about 84mageddon Waterbury and 84mageddon Hartford. SA's forums are only free for non-member viewing a couple weeks a month, paywalled the rest of the time...but it's open today.

 

[Scalziand]

Oh yes, I've been an avid follower of Cich's thread ever since it was mentioned here several years ago.

ME LOVE MAKE RED LIGHT

 

[Jahvon09]

Could be worse.

Cute li'l short bus! Looks almost like a kid's toy! Hah!

Didn't the MBTA have some buses this short, like this years ago in the late '70s or the early '80s? It did routes from JP to Dudley.

 

[cozzyd]

Was riding the Silver Line to Logan around 4 pm and got to thinking... what if there was a contraflow bus lane in the reverse-peak direction in the Ted Williams during rush hours? It wouldn't be too hard to configure on the Logan Airport side but not so easy on the South Boston side.

 

[Shepard]

I've never found the TWT to be slow any time of day, have you? The real fix for the SL1 in terms of speed would be to eliminate the horrible loop-de-loop-de-loop. D Street signal priority would also help.

 

[Arlington]

I've never found the TWT to be slow any time of day, have you? The real fix for the SL1 in terms of speed would be to eliminate the horrible loop-de-loop-de-loop. D Street signal priority would also help.

Agreed. And the use I see for a Contraflow would be in the Sumner/Callahan to extend the Massport-sponsored SL to Haymarket & North Station.

Frankly, for many users, it would represent a faster connection from the Airport terminals to downtown & transit (particularly given that the SL1 has the power changeover and the Loop-de-loop). Haymarket-NS-contraflow-Logan would be a 6.5 mile loop, with 2 off-airport stops: fast and bus/labor-efficient.

SL1 is an ~8-mile loop with 5 off-airport stops (counting WTC twice)

 

[CSTH]

I've never found the TWT to be slow any time of day, have you? The real fix for the SL1 in terms of speed would be to eliminate the horrible loop-de-loop-de-loop. D Street signal priority would also help.

It definitely gets slow (I commute through it daily). Because of the dynamics of the merges, the flow in the two-lane harbor tubes themselves is usually a pretty steady 15-25 mph at rush hour, but the backup getting into the tunnel can be *brutal*.

Specifically - inbound in AM the backup on 90 itself can get back to airport station, though the wait from the airport onramp (which the silver line uses) is usually a lot lighter - can take 10+ minutes to get through even from the airport (and 20+ from 1a). And sometimes even the inbound 'tubes' themselves get real slow in the AM, even after the merges at the tunnel entrance, because ~75%+ of the traffic is headed to the single-lane exit for 93 / South Boston, which means a lot more slow merging as you exit the tunnel...(a lot of folks are surprised that the exit for 93 comes up so quick, so they hit the brakes hard in the left lane as they come out into the daylight...)

Outbound is even more of a mess .... within 1/4 mile before the tunnel entrance you have heavy traffic entering from both the 93 ramp (which is in its own 'tunnel' segment all the way from southbay) and the southie surface ramp (which wraps around the vent building in front of the BCEC). Then you have the HOV lane merging just inside the tunnel entrance too. If you're coming on 90EB that means again it is 10+ minutes from about where the BCEC is to the airport anytime between 4:30 and 6pm, but god help you if youre on one of the onramps. It probably takes the SL 20+ min to get from the haul road to the airport, and if you're coming from 93 at rush hour ... fuhgeddaboutit (unless you're in the HOV lane/tunnel, which is always pleasantly / depressingly vacant at all hours).

And sometimes PM rush hour 1A traffic from the traffic lights way up by Suffolk Downs backs up into the tunnel in which case....fuuuuuuuuuck....

TL;DR: People sitting on the SL stuck in rush hour tunnel traffic always look very, very sad....

But anyway, you're right that the asinine looping and T under D are important fixes. - contra flow is an interesting concept, and yes the hard part would be creating connectivity to the EB HOV lane.




Bottom line.... shooda built that 3rd HOV tube back in the day.....