MBTA Buses & Infrastructure

I think our definition of fail strongly differs from the T's definition. The clear intention is to get rid of the wires and the road projects provide such a good opportunity for them to do so, they've got to contort reality to make a case for it. Once the wires are down, it's a success for the T. By the time it's clear that we're living la vida diesel for the long term for the 71/73, it'll be "too expensive" to go back. The T gets what it wants, so it's a win for them.
It also gets them a "get out of charging" free card on BEB deployments elsewhere on the system when their initial BEB deployment is born to fail and born to waste money. "Oooh...we can't possibly tackle Roxbury emissions. Look how bad our initial BEB rollout in Cambridge ended up falling on its face! Who could ever have guessed things would be so hard?!?!" FFS...why else are the largest garages on the system all slated dead-ass-last to get upgraded for even the possibility of BEB servicing. This is a de facto "diesel forever" manifesto they're pushing. It doesn't have to be that way. 1st-gen BEB's can absolutely be part of a sane fleet mixture if they picked their spots, leveraged their strengths. They're pre-salting the earth from that ever being a possibility of happening.


I am so done with Baker and "governance by Pioneer Institute hackery". Every study his cronies get their hands on just intrinsically becomes a blank canvas to lie their faces off with alternate facts, alternate math, alternate reality. And they no longer even care enough to put an ounce of effort into the presentation. The basis of reality itself has been disparaged.
 
It's also worth noting that even if politics actually change. We're gonna get NIMBYs arguing about "how wires are so ugly" and "it going to block the sky".

While technically that's not falsehoods, the frustrating thing is status quo is a lot of the real drive. It's been our ally and part of why it managed to survive this long has been because it's been there. Any effort to restore if its +10 years after it's gone, this force is going to become an enemy.

Also another frustrating thought in my mind is how other cities are reviving trolleybusses. They killed theirs decades ago and are bringing it back. We are going to lose ours just before a possible same shift in transportation thinking spreads here (well in general, probably not within the MBTA).
 
Also another frustrating thought in my mind is how other cities are reviving trolleybusses. They killed theirs decades ago and are bringing it back. We are going to lose ours just before a possible same shift in transportation thinking spreads here (well in general, probably not within the MBTA).

It's worse than that if you ask me, because it's not even a shift in transportation thinking. It's not as though the public is clamoring for an end to the trolleybusses and bringing the wires down, it's the T's malevolence. They're looking at this in a moment where other systems are realizing the benefits of ETBs and undoing the destructions of systems they now regret losing, and deliberately going in the complete opposite direction by literally coercing the cities that don't want them to do this into falling silent. It's lunacy, made worse by the fact that you're entirely right about how the status quo inertia is going to swing around and give the NIMBYs something to complain about when we actually have a state government run by people who care about doing things well.
 
It's worse than that if you ask me, because it's not even a shift in transportation thinking. It's not as though the public is clamoring for an end to the trolleybusses and bringing the wires down, it's the T's malevolence. They're looking at this in a moment where other systems are realizing the benefits of ETBs and undoing the destructions of systems they now regret losing, and deliberately going in the complete opposite direction by literally coercing the cities that don't want them to do this into falling silent. It's lunacy, made worse by the fact that you're entirely right about how the status quo inertia is going to swing around and give the NIMBYs something to complain about when we actually have a state government run by people who care about doing things well.

It's simple: "Diesel forever", and making sure the finger is on the scale for that being the only achievable end result.

They don't want to do any BEB's beyond what they feel they absolutely must hold their nose and do (namely: Silver Line). They want the TT-to-BEB replacement to fail so hard it gets them out of needing to buy any more BEB's for anywhere else in the system. How else would you have them do something as ass-backwards as requiring deadhead charging runs to tiny North Cambridge instead of putting up charging spots around Bennett Alley and Cambridge Common right outside the Harvard busways. Or Watertown Carhouse and Waverley loop. If you could charge at Harvard/Watertown/Waverley, there'd be enough range to cover all of the 71/73's schedule blocks instead of "maybe if we cross our fingers in 2024 they'll make a vehicle we can get on the property by 2026 that'll do it." If you could charge at Harvard/Watertown/Waverley, there'd be enough slack capacity left at North Cambridge to BEB the 75 (since the 72 now appears to be permanently defunct) and possibly also 77, instead of all of that tiny yard's capacity being wasted on 25% spare ratios for the 71/73 and load relief being a decade away because of Charlestown being scheduled last in the garage renovation pile. As is, we're getting outright service reductions with the 72 giving up the ghost...even though they *claim* that they'll be ordering somethingorother with left-handed doors for Harvard and won't be harming accessibility in the process (until then, Sunday boarding practice every day is going to be the open-ended "solution"...very overtly harming daily accessibility).

They're hustling every piece on the board to make those 35 BEB's they haven't yet ordered be such born failures that they become the *only* first-gen BEB's the agency ever attempts to order outside the ones they have no choice but to employ for the Silver Line. They want the deck stacked so arbitrarily against them that we never reach a point in the next 2-4 years where their feasibility for the routes becomes even a ballpark possibility, so they don't need to place the order at all. Or, failing that, the pilot units fail so hard upon trial that they can be returned to sender as quickly as possible. It's imperative to them that the technology fail SO spectacularly hard that it leaves a crater they never have to clean up, and that there's no pressure to revisit that unpleasantness for another 20 years and 2-3 gens' worth of battery tech...saving them the indignity of having to plan internally for anything different than Yellow Line ops autopilot.

The inconvenience of having infrastructure set up for quick-charging extended-range ETB's was so troublesome to this goal that it needed to be nuked from orbit at lightning speed and massive tactical coordination. Hence, the over-the-top ratfucking of the cities over road construction, the sandbagged cost projections for maintaining the wire, the lies that the current infrastructure doesn't even permit the icky in-wire charging. They so don't want BEB's anywhere in yellow paint that it was treated like a grave existential threat to be exterminated. It's bigger than a hate-boner for trolleybuses...they don't want electric bus tech ANYWHERE on the system, and are willing to move heaven and earth to poison the well ahead of it. It's several degrees beyond mere regressiveness.
 
Did they do a CEQA on the impact of the new diesel emissions?
 
I seem to remember the 5000-5001 pilot hybrid buses they ran in the early 2000’s were grudging accepted when they clearly wanted to buy vanilla diesels.

The T staff seems to have a fondness for the old era of the RTS bus, when they could solve any problem with a 5 lb sledgehammer.
 
It's simple: "Diesel forever", and making sure the finger is on the scale for that being the only achievable end result.

They don't want to do any BEB's beyond what they feel they absolutely must hold their nose and do (namely: Silver Line). They want the TT-to-BEB replacement to fail so hard it gets them out of needing to buy any more BEB's for anywhere else in the system. How else would you have them do something as ass-backwards as requiring deadhead charging runs to tiny North Cambridge instead of putting up charging spots around Bennett Alley and Cambridge Common right outside the Harvard busways. Or Watertown Carhouse and Waverley loop. If you could charge at Harvard/Watertown/Waverley, there'd be enough range to cover all of the 71/73's schedule blocks instead of "maybe if we cross our fingers in 2024 they'll make a vehicle we can get on the property by 2026 that'll do it." If you could charge at Harvard/Watertown/Waverley, there'd be enough slack capacity left at North Cambridge to BEB the 75 (since the 72 now appears to be permanently defunct) and possibly also 77, instead of all of that tiny yard's capacity being wasted on 25% spare ratios for the 71/73 and load relief being a decade away because of Charlestown being scheduled last in the garage renovation pile. As is, we're getting outright service reductions with the 72 giving up the ghost...even though they *claim* that they'll be ordering somethingorother with left-handed doors for Harvard and won't be harming accessibility in the process (until then, Sunday boarding practice every day is going to be the open-ended "solution"...very overtly harming daily accessibility).

They're hustling every piece on the board to make those 35 BEB's they haven't yet ordered be such born failures that they become the *only* first-gen BEB's the agency ever attempts to order outside the ones they have no choice but to employ for the Silver Line. They want the deck stacked so arbitrarily against them that we never reach a point in the next 2-4 years where their feasibility for the routes becomes even a ballpark possibility, so they don't need to place the order at all. Or, failing that, the pilot units fail so hard upon trial that they can be returned to sender as quickly as possible. It's imperative to them that the technology fail SO spectacularly hard that it leaves a crater they never have to clean up, and that there's no pressure to revisit that unpleasantness for another 20 years and 2-3 gens' worth of battery tech...saving them the indignity of having to plan internally for anything different than Yellow Line ops autopilot.

The inconvenience of having infrastructure set up for quick-charging extended-range ETB's was so troublesome to this goal that it needed to be nuked from orbit at lightning speed and massive tactical coordination. Hence, the over-the-top ratfucking of the cities over road construction, the sandbagged cost projections for maintaining the wire, the lies that the current infrastructure doesn't even permit the icky in-wire charging. They so don't want BEB's anywhere in yellow paint that it was treated like a grave existential threat to be exterminated. It's bigger than a hate-boner for trolleybuses...they don't want electric bus tech ANYWHERE on the system, and are willing to move heaven and earth to poison the well ahead of it. It's several degrees beyond mere regressiveness.
If this were true, it makes no sense for them to plonk down all these garages that are in the hundreds of millions of dollars and the dozens of millions at North Cambridge (or however much it will be since it looks like just gantry + 35 new power supply connection points). The nearly $400 million for Quincy and $200 million for Arborway - how are they going to look at the Feds in the eye to say "gee, we were going to do BEBs, but I guess we can't now..." that's more shameless than I give the T credit for.
 
Did they do a CEQA on the impact of the new diesel emissions?
I think only in the context of the duration of the road construction requiring a non-optional diesel substitution period, like it did with the 73 corridor reconstruction a few years ago. They're vigorously hand-waving at the fact that they might possibly be able to procure some BEB's that'll cover the duty cycles by the time the Mt. Auburn + Mass Ave. projects are finished, so there's "no need" to factor anything permanent because they'd be zero-emission by the same timetable as if they'd hooked the wire back up. It's basically making it some future Administration's problem to square any paperwork discrepancy if/when diesel becomes open-ended past the construction periods.

Yeah, there might ultimately be a lawsuit here if 2026 approaches and there's no BEB's on the horizon. That's kind of the only straw the local reps are clinging to after getting boxed in on anything else, based on their comments from the meeting. But because the TT infrastructure will all be well gone by then, there's not anything functional that a suit would end up accomplishing. Kind of the only thing they can be functionally pressured on now is whether the charging ranges with 1st-gen BEB's look a lot more favorable with charging infrastructure installed at Bennett Alley/Cambridge Common, Watertown, and Waverley instead of the arbitrarily-selected and out-of-the-way North Cambridge.
 
If this were true, it makes no sense for them to plonk down all these garages that are in the hundreds of millions of dollars and the dozens of millions at North Cambridge (or however much it will be since it looks like just gantry + 35 new power supply connection points). The nearly $400 million for Quincy and $200 million for Arborway - how are they going to look at the Feds in the eye to say "gee, we were going to do BEBs, but I guess we can't now..." that's more shameless than I give the T credit for.

They haven't actually ordered any BEB's except for the Silver Line fleet. The first order of 40-footers was supposed to be issued to RFP in 2021, and simply never was. Now they're saying they won't in the interim because there's nothing on-market that'll run the duty cycles with a charge gerrymandered to only North Cambridge...so it's now very unlikely those 35 units will be RFP'd at all this year either. The proof-of-concept pilot for adopting BEB's at any other garages is effectively stillborn unless that feasibility timetable ever changes, as they won't actually be cashing 'dem checks on North Cambridge renos until likely 2025-26 at the earliest. After Quincy is done. They then incredulously claimed that the charging infrastructure at the garages would be self-supporting via "manufacturer contracts", so whether Quincy or Arborway are pre-constructed with future compatibility they're claiming to not need to lift a finger to actually enable the technology in the end. It'll be built into the (sky-high) purchase price of the follow-on BEB's they won't be ordering, factored into procurement budgets nobody has drafted yet.

Beyond-pale shameless: you bet. Will it make any difference to fed funding chances? The Baker Admin. sure doesn't seem to think so, since they just sketched out MA's windfall of Fed transpo stimulus simultaneous with advancing the Quincy + Arborway plans simultaneous with the BEB ratfucking and are feeling mighty fine about how it all lines up today. They were always planning to eventually do BEB's...by the 3rd or 4th vehicle generation. Therefore the garages with their half-century functional lifespans had to be pre-built and utility-hardened to support that coming attraction at whatever cost. But support it immediately out-of-box???...not necessarily. Quincy doesn't even support diesel hybrids at the current location so was a five-alarm urgency for replacement, because the scheduled retirements of the oldest currently operating straight-diesels alone render the current facility unusable by mid-decade. And Arborway was constructed only as a "temporary" facility that was supposed to be dramatically enlarged 15 years ago before neighborhood opposition turfed the first incarnation of the plans. Both those two were at the top of the rebuild priority heap strictly for current ops, without it mattering if the BEB compatibility is going to actually be tapped for another 20 years. If/when it does, we're told "the manufacturers will pay for it, silly".

We're not going to see BEB's operate out of any non-Southampton regular garages for 1-2 decades the way this is setting up. North Cambridge is slated to be a short-timer, with copious wiggle room for not doing at all. The ones they're doing they had to do with or without a BEB plan. And the ones stacked to the end can wait for the third-generation vehicles they won't have to reform any actual ops practices to adopt.
 
I have to say if the ultimate goal is "Diesel Forever" by making ETB super painful to ever revive and cause BEB to fail so hard that there's no local interest to ever try again. It's really dumb as it really depend on the vast majority of other major transit system to mostly stay on diesel.

Though I do foresee a significant possibility that national politics could develop in a way that we're going to see a future administration pull stuff like deliberately pull policies that will extend diesel (and gas for cars), if BEB eventually becomes viable - even if it takes longer than just a few more years - then the MBTA can't just fail it way out of BEBs (though I fucking ETBs will be accomplished for at least the forseeable future).
 
I have to say if the ultimate goal is "Diesel Forever" by making ETB super painful to ever revive and cause BEB to fail so hard that there's no local interest to ever try again. It's really dumb as it really depend on the vast majority of other major transit system to mostly stay on diesel.

Though I do foresee a significant possibility that national politics could develop in a way that we're going to see a future administration pull stuff like deliberately pull policies that will extend diesel (and gas for cars), if BEB eventually becomes viable - even if it takes longer than just a few more years - then the MBTA can't just fail it way out of BEBs (though I fucking ETBs will be accomplished for at least the forseeable future).

"Diesel ops forever" is more like it. I doubt they feel anywhere near as strongly about the power plant as they do about how they cycle ops. The thing is...1st-gen BEB's can absolutely be part of the mix on the current Yellow Line system. You just have to pick your spots...deploy it to the most appropriate routes...reform your ops cycling practices for max efficiency...and be willing to install the charging infrastructure with precision location for those reformed ops. And that takes a lot of organizational self-reflection to pull off.

They don't want self-reflection. They want to keep doing the same cushy jobs they've been doing on autopilot for the last 40 years...for another 40 years. Cushier, if possible, if that means eliminating square-pegs like TT ops. The 3rd or 4th generation of BEB's will probably be good enough and elastic enough on range that you could 1:1 swap diesel-era cycling ops into it with few hiccups. THAT they're fine with...that's non-scary change, because it doesn't threaten the patronage of brainpower-resting-in-neutral.

What they don't want is rethinking the efficiency of their rote practices. Which is what an effective rollout of 1st/2nd-gen BEB tech requires. Hence, the moving heaven-and-earth to opt completely out of that entire 1-2 decade transitional era. They want to run 1985's bus ops seamlessly/brainlessly come 2040, not think outside the box in 2022.
 
They don't want self-reflection. They want to keep doing the same cushy jobs they've been doing on autopilot for the last 40 years...for another 40 years. The 3rd or 4th generation of BEB's will probably be good enough and elastic enough on range that you could 1:1 swap diesel-era cycling ops into it with few hiccups. THAT they're fine with...that's non-scary change.

Meanwhile other transit agencies somehow have the type of people that are doing things like bringing back ETBs.... I have to wonder if the same type of people is going to somehow remain the same while every other transit agencies are getting such type of people.

And if it political administration related - I doubt the next governor will be a Republican. Though if Deval Patrick is a window, then just having a blue governor doesn't necesarially mean we'll have a real ally on the so many transit projects we keep dreaming about either.

But still, with other agencies reviving ETBs and a likely administration change, I can't help but wonder that if that the project can get delayed even a year, the idea of just destroying and "salting-the-earth" can be avoided but the decision makers and politics will shift enough away from critical mass.

But of course, if they quickly destroy all the poles and crush all the buses in March, it would take a Duakais type of governor to reverse the damage.
 
Meanwhile other transit agencies somehow have the type of people that are doing things like bringing back ETBs.... I have to wonder if the same type of people is going to somehow remain the same while every other transit agencies are getting such type of people.

And if it political administration related - I doubt the next governor will be a Republican. Though if Deval Patrick is a window, then just having a blue governor doesn't necesarially mean we'll have a real ally on the so many transit projects we keep dreaming about either.

But still, with other agencies reviving ETBs and a likely administration change, I can't help but wonder that if that the project can get delayed even a year, the idea of just destroying and "salting-the-earth" can be avoided but the decision makers and politics will shift enough away from critical mass.

But of course, if they quickly destroy all the poles and crush all the buses in March, it would take a Duakais type of governor to reverse the damage.

Good news is that there's no funding or timeline for removing the wires just yet, and even if the wires do go down the power feed under the street will stay. So, if the T has a change of heart, stringing up new wires shouldn't be that difficult.

Brief note: It seems as if there are enormous institutional barriers to hanging wires over streets that the T doesn't own that makes them extremely reluctant to do it. These problems seem to really exist. Any trolleybus expansion will have to make them more manageable, whatever they are.
 
It's simple: "Diesel forever", and making sure the finger is on the scale for that being the only achievable end result.

They don't want to do any BEB's beyond what they feel they absolutely must hold their nose and do (namely: Silver Line). They want the TT-to-BEB replacement to fail so hard it gets them out of needing to buy any more BEB's for anywhere else in the system. How else would you have them do something as ass-backwards as requiring deadhead charging runs to tiny North Cambridge instead of putting up charging spots around Bennett Alley and Cambridge Common right outside the Harvard busways. Or Watertown Carhouse and Waverley loop. If you could charge at Harvard/Watertown/Waverley, there'd be enough range to cover all of the 71/73's schedule blocks instead of "maybe if we cross our fingers in 2024 they'll make a vehicle we can get on the property by 2026 that'll do it." If you could charge at Harvard/Watertown/Waverley, there'd be enough slack capacity left at North Cambridge to BEB the 75 (since the 72 now appears to be permanently defunct) and possibly also 77, instead of all of that tiny yard's capacity being wasted on 25% spare ratios for the 71/73 and load relief being a decade away because of Charlestown being scheduled last in the garage renovation pile. As is, we're getting outright service reductions with the 72 giving up the ghost...even though they *claim* that they'll be ordering somethingorother with left-handed doors for Harvard and won't be harming accessibility in the process (until then, Sunday boarding practice every day is going to be the open-ended "solution"...very overtly harming daily accessibility).

They're hustling every piece on the board to make those 35 BEB's they haven't yet ordered be such born failures that they become the *only* first-gen BEB's the agency ever attempts to order outside the ones they have no choice but to employ for the Silver Line. They want the deck stacked so arbitrarily against them that we never reach a point in the next 2-4 years where their feasibility for the routes becomes even a ballpark possibility, so they don't need to place the order at all. Or, failing that, the pilot units fail so hard upon trial that they can be returned to sender as quickly as possible. It's imperative to them that the technology fail SO spectacularly hard that it leaves a crater they never have to clean up, and that there's no pressure to revisit that unpleasantness for another 20 years and 2-3 gens' worth of battery tech...saving them the indignity of having to plan internally for anything different than Yellow Line ops autopilot.

The inconvenience of having infrastructure set up for quick-charging extended-range ETB's was so troublesome to this goal that it needed to be nuked from orbit at lightning speed and massive tactical coordination. Hence, the over-the-top ratfucking of the cities over road construction, the sandbagged cost projections for maintaining the wire, the lies that the current infrastructure doesn't even permit the icky in-wire charging. They so don't want BEB's anywhere in yellow paint that it was treated like a grave existential threat to be exterminated. It's bigger than a hate-boner for trolleybuses...they don't want electric bus tech ANYWHERE on the system, and are willing to move heaven and earth to poison the well ahead of it. It's several degrees beyond mere regressiveness.
In a disturbing trend, I again strongly agree with F-Line. On this, mind you;)
 
…And if it political administration related - I doubt the next governor will be a Republican. Though if Deval Patrick is a window, then just having a blue governor doesn't necesarially mean we'll have a real ally on the so many transit projects we keep dreaming about either……


Actually, Patrick was a great ally of mass transit. Along with original funding of the new Red and Orange cars, he also greenlighted West Station in 2014, only to see Baker the following year (using Pollack as a human shield) to sweep it out to study it for 2040.

The most important thing to note re the huge difference in intent between Patrick and Baker is in what economic environment they served. Patrick’s first 3 years were the worst market crash since the Great Depression. Baker had nothing but market sunshine and unicorns (hell, even the COVID 2020 and 2021 were both positive stock market years - and the feds supplied far larger and faster federal stimuli than what was given more than a decade earlier during the Tea Party years - these last 2 years also allowed almost unprecedented space in Greater Boston for construction crews to operate if the opportunity was taken).

Patrick did more, given his far more difficult economic circumstances. Baker was an obstacle in the middle of a fast course. Good riddance.

I’m looking forward to a future-oriented Governor again, instead of a shill for the 1950’s.
 
Last edited:
Brief note: It seems as if there are enormous institutional barriers to hanging wires over streets that the T doesn't own that makes them extremely reluctant to do it. These problems seem to really exist. Any trolleybus expansion will have to make them more manageable, whatever they are.

The utility companies dont seem to have any barriers in doing whatever the fuck they want.
 
The utility companies dont seem to have any barriers in doing whatever the fuck they want.
Wiring Blue Hill Ave,Seaver, Columbus to Ruggles Cass to Nubian back to Rox, Summer St, Comm Ave Kenmore to Packards Cnr, Broadway in Everett ALL of which would be center bus lane single T post catenary, along with 39 on Huntington, would put 50% of passengers
 
Of course, its not like any local think tanks haven't refuted the BS in well-researched reports
 

Back
Top