The busses for the BRT routes would need replacement, but that leaves a lot of routes that could use the curret fleet of busses. Still a helluva lot cheaper than tunneling new LRV or HRT lines.A perfect world would see high level, fair-controlled platforms with full, built out stations covering the center bus lanes, but this is clearly impossible without a massive overhaul of the MBTA's fleet.
The busses for the BRT routes would need replacement, but that leaves a lot of routes that could use the curret fleet of busses. Still a helluva lot cheaper than tunneling new LRV or HRT lines.
I agree LRV is usually preferable to BRT in cities, but transit funding is mighty scarce, to say the least. Even just surface LRV on a reservation in a roadway is much more expensive to construct than BRT on dedicated lanes. It's like the phrase, perfect is the enemy of good. If we were to forego BRT and hold out for LRV, that would be a decades-long wait in most cases. Besides, dedicated BRT lanes can be converted to LRV when the funding becomes available, probably more easily so than if BRT wasn't there, because the automobile lanes and parking would already have been removed for the BRT.Oh, fun, are we on the verge of going back to the Bush-era "BRT solves all problems" mantra?
I agree LRV is usually preferable to BRT in cities, but transit funding is mighty scarce, to say the least. Even just surface LRV on a reservation in a roadway is much more expensive to construct than BRT on dedicated lanes. It's like the phrase, perfect is the enemy of good. If we were to forego BRT and hold out for LRV, that would be a decades-long wait in most cases. Besides, dedicated BRT lanes can be converted to LRV when the funding becomes available, probably more easily so than if BRT wasn't there, because the automobile lanes and parking would already have been removed for the BRT.
I hear you about the Silver Line to Roxbury. That absolutely should have been LRV, and it easily could have been if the political will had been there to pull it off. The fact that it ended up as a half-assed version of a BRT route instead of LRV is because, in my opinion, it passes through a marginalized community of poor people and people of color.I entirely agree; the emoji was meant to suggest that that particular line in my post was mostly sarcastic, though that one's always a bit tricky to get across in text. That said, we have some pretty bad history (cough*SilverLie*cough) of the politicians being attracted to BRT's cheapness even where it doesn't make sense, so I get a little touchy about suggesting that we focus too much attention on a mode that has it's uses but isn't a panacea, and it wasn't clear in your post I was initially replying to which end of the spectrum your suggestion was on (now it is clearly on the "where it fits, not force-fitting" side, which is the smart-transit-strategy side).
I hear you about the Silver Line to Roxbury. That absolutely should have been LRV, and it easily could have been if the political will had been there to pull it off. The fact that it ended up as a half-assed version of a BRT route instead of LRV is because, in my opinion, it passes through a marginalized community of poor people and people of color.
I always wondered: What was the reason for the closure of Washington Street El in the first place? I knew land was available for Southwest Corridor, but why couldn't they just use it just for CR and Amtrak while leaving Orange Line as it was?I'll put it this way; neighborhoods and communities with lots of money and political clout aren't going to have their existing transit taken away in exchange for "equal or better replacement" smoke-and-mirrors, and they're not going to have their sub-par replacement made even more sub-par by stapling it to an unrelated (Seaport/Logan) project for reasons of political and financial expediency.
That said, part of the SL Washington Street's problem wasn't in design, it was that the design (although subpar) never got built because Phase III was so bloody expensive (though Phase III was a necessary condition of having stapled Elevated 'replacement' to the Seaport transitway in the first place, a decision so stupid it would never fly anywhere where the politicians are actually afraid of consequences from screwing people over, which brings us full circle back to your point.)
There was general public support to retain the northern section of the WSE as a Green Line branch, but no one wanted the southern half kept.
Tooting my own horn again, I've written a pretty good history of the Silver Line and its development on Wikipedia - see here.
Out of curiosity, where would the 'northern half' have become the 'southern half', Dudley (now Nubian)?
Transit Matters ripped the hell out of this document on their Twitter account a while back. The T's math is still funny.The MBTA recently posted a short "Key Takeaways" about the life cycle cost differentials between maintaining trolleybus service and switching to BEB for the 71 and the 73. It's only 2 pages, so it's all below. I'm not qualified in the least to vet these numbers, but it seems to justify the MBTAs desire to pull down the wires, even if keeping the wires makes sense for enroute charging.
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Seriously, I get the T's reluctance to keep maintaining a fleet of busses that lengthen operator training by weeks, can only be used on two routes, and require specialized maintenance personnel to run. Instead of getting rid of the wires, though, the T should be expanding the system-which would make sense from an environmental, economic, political and social perspective. Replacing the TT's with diesel busses will result in more operator and equipment hours being needed to provide worse service.
This feels like the T cutting of its nose to spite its face. Even back to the MTA days, trackless trolleys were always seen as stopgaps in Boston, and only a lack of money prevented us from becoming one of the many cities that ripped out their trolleybus wires in the 50's.
use battery-ETB hybrids