www.bostonglobe.com
Boylston had too many lanes but it was a pretty drastic change to do both bike lanes and bus lanes on a road that is always choked with traffic. Whether or not it is a good idea from a technocratic standpoint, one must also consider other factors. I hope she can pull this revision off without Kraft being able to claim she's only doing it because of him.Mayor Wu says city will remove bus lane on Boylston Street in Back Bay - The Boston Globe
The bus lane was installed in 2022 as a temporary measure for shuttle buses during an Orange Line shutdown and was made permanent last summer.
Too late:
www.masslive.com
Uhhh....the only other candidate in the race is crowing that he 'accomplished' something over what Wu just did with this one lane. What exactly is the choice here? "I'm mad that this one lane got removed, so I'm gonna vote for the guy who wants to get rid of all of them." How does that wash?
It’s very early in the race, and people will probably forget. But it might have been wiser to just not budge at all, since capitulating these days is as good as an admission of guilt.Too late:
Boston Mayor Wu ditched a controversial bus lane. ‘Curious timing,’ Kraft fires back
A week after challenger Josh Kraft hit Mayor Michelle Wu over her development of bus and bike lanes, the mayor announced the removal of a particularly controversial bus lane in Back Bay.
There's still time for some DSA folks to get ideas - this, the failure to get property taxes set with Southie's Napoleon, what else is she going to backtrack on? White Stadium?
She needs to marshal the real “community” instead of the loudest screamers who falsely claim to represent it. I don’t think I’ve seen a single media article that actually just goes down to Egleston Square and asks passersby what they thing of the stadium project. It’s all just interviews of the angry.
www.wbur.org
www.wgbh.org
I wish transit advocates would instead point to the failure of allowing people to park vehicles in the bus lane, this severely curtailing its utility. There is a failure and it’s a lack of enforcement. In practice, it’s just a parking lane that’s painted red.Transit advocates call for Wu to keep Back Bay bus lane
The nonprofit TransitMatters says the dedicated bus lane has been a success and the city should reconsider its plan to dismantle it.
Agreed. And I might be a minority on this, but I think the argument TM is making here is not persuasive. They point out percentage time improvement on a very short segment of bus lane, but the actual time savings is measured in seconds. If somebody told me I had to pick a bus lane to eliminate, based on the data, it would be the one on Boylston St.
I don't think that's the right way to consider it. If you look at any short stretch of bus lane, you'd find it only saves seconds. But string those together, and it's real time savings. It looks like in the AM rush hour, buses saved a full minute going between Dartmouth and Berkeley -- just two blocks! That's pretty big. It was able to pull that off with a total lack of bus-only enforcement. I wish we could find ten more short stretches along these bus routes where we could save a full minute. I think it'd be hard to find time savings this good just about anywhere else.
I drive this stretch of Boylston a couple of times a week, often between 5:30 and 6:00 pm. The single biggest thing that would help this beleaguered street would be for BTD to a have a dedicated force towing every single double parked car in front of the restaurants. That would alleviate the need for vehicles to drive in the bus lane as the roadway effectively becomes a single lane at best.
As you mentioned, the seconds a bus saves compound and affect every single passenger all day long. Faster trips mean more trips, and better reliability, which means leaving less buffer on your commute.