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Nah, just raise peak hour tolls and use the $ to boost bus frequency & fund D underpass & related SL upgrades.Bottom line.... shooda built that 3rd HOV tube back in the day.....
Nah, just raise peak hour tolls and use the $ to boost bus frequency & fund D underpass & related SL upgrades.Bottom line.... shooda built that 3rd HOV tube back in the day.....
Nah, just raise peak hour tolls and use the $ to boost bus frequency & fund D underpass & related SL upgrades.
Sure ;-) That's a good idea that (because it is OT here) should be covered in the Seaport Transportation thread.Fair enough! But can we add the (long-promised) Maverick - Fan Pier ferry to the list?
Some people (in another thread) have mistakenly believed that BRT could replace the Green Line. Apparently they missed this article by Ari that lays out the geometry constraints quite well:
http://amateurplanner.blogspot.com/2015/06/what-is-actual-capacity-of-brt.html
In short: a 4-lane BRT system can beat a 2-track LRT system in capacity. But a 4-lane BRT system requires a right-of-way that is (over) twice as wide as a 2-track LRT system.
The MBTA Green Line runs inside of a tunnel that is constrained to 2-tracks in many places. Therefore, a 4-lane BRT system cannot replace the Green Line without ripping up half of Boston. I would say that even a 2-lane BRT requires more width than the Green Line has, but let's say it could be done. Unfortunately, the capacity of a 2-lane BRT is pitiful in comparison to LRT. The advantage of LRT being able to trainline multiple passenger cars is quite strong. The Green Line must remain LRT and can never be converted to BRT unless its ridership drops by half or more.
Now, anyone suggesting that the GLX alone could be BRT, while leaving the rest of the Green Line as LRT, is being short-sighted. The whole point of the GLX is that the vehicles can run directly into the Central Subway. A BRT GLX could never do that. Same issue with the Silver Line and the Tremont Street subway.
End of story.
From what I can find the Green Line only comes close to 10,000 per hour in the underground portion of the main line trunk during peak periods. But if someone can point out better numbers by all means.
And the only thing required to get to 35,000 passengers per hour for BRT is to add a passing lane at the station. Which is a cost consideration.
This conclusion seems about right (and is supported by that graphic):
"There are conditions that favor LRT over BRT, but they are fairly narrow. To meet these conditions you would need a corridor with only one available lane in each direction, more than 16,000 passengers per direction per hour but less than 20,000"
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_rapid_transit
Can you actually make a 90 degree turn in a double articulated?
This state-of-the-art steering system allows the bus to manoeuver just like a 12 meter long bus and can also steer the huge thing backward or forward with ease
From what I can find the Green Line only comes close to 10,000 per hour in the underground portion of the main line trunk during peak periods. But if someone can point out better numbers by all means.
And the only thing required to get to 35,000 passengers per hour for BRT is to add a passing lane at the station. Which is a cost consideration.
This conclusion seems about right (and is supported by that graphic):
"There are conditions that favor LRT over BRT, but they are fairly narrow. To meet these conditions you would need a corridor with only one available lane in each direction, more than 16,000 passengers per direction per hour but less than 20,000"
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_rapid_transit
Bige, I think the SL gets too much shit. Here's what I see when I view SL4/5: it's the most trafficked bus corridor in the city by far (20k per weekday, 1/CT1 gets 15k for comparison). Perhaps that's an argument for why it should be light-rail, but what I see is that even marginal improvements (i.e. bus lanes) can go a long way in improving bus service. It's a good bus - maybe it shouldn't be just a bus, but denigrating the SL-Wash services has the unwanted effect of dampening support for similar project elsewhere in the city. We should be saying: "see, even *marginal* marginal improvements (since it's not like people or the City actually respect the "bus only" nature of the lanes) can go a long way in improving service". In that sense SL is a success story - I'm sympathetic to the transit/social justice arguments against it, but I do think it's an under-heralded example of what Boston's busses can become.
Sorry, Living on SL4/5 I simply cannot agree with this analysis. SL4/5 is no where close to BRT. It is B, and poor B only. Because of the stupid single door boarding, at the high ridership it experiences huge bunching effects, then zero service for 30 minutes plus. The worst case I have documented is five (5) SL4/5 arriving inbound at Tufts Medical simultaneously -- think about what the service level behind them looks like out Washington Street.
BRT is always going to be crap in the town, because we always cheap out and remove the RT part from the equation. SL4/5 is about as close to rapid transit as the horse drawn trolleys on clogged Tremont Street used to be 150 years ago.
I'm not saying it's rapid transit by any means whatsoever, I'm saying it works better, quicker, and carries more people than any bus corridor in the town (that's not to say it's good, it's saying the rest of the high-ridership lines are even more shite). It's not perfect, but this is what I mean - the bus only lanes are an improvement that should be deployed on other routes, yes the ops regime behind SL might not be at all appropriate, but that's a different complaint from the pure, infra considerations. When all the shitty parts of the SL are bundled together, it eliminates the bus-lanes (which are better) from the conversation for bus improvements in the city.