MBTA Buses & Infrastructure

Should the Commonwealth centrally procure BEBs and parcel them out to the various transit agencies?
 
RandomWalk said:
Should the Commonwealth centrally procure BEBs and parcel them out to the various transit agencies?
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What would that change? There's like 3 halfway reputable BEB manufacturers with Buy America-compliant plants, which is why unit prices are so uniformly high. You have the same limitations of first-generation technology no matter who you buy from: poor winter charging range, consistently undershot general charging ranges and spare ratios vs. route profiles, overly heavy vehicle weights causing escalated wear-and-tear maintenance issues, expensive midlife overhaul cycles because of the batteries' more limited lifespans before replacement is needed, etc. And the bus garage readiness problem and permitting problems that the Legislature isn't funding enough to fix cuts across all the RTA's too.

It's not a procurement problem, it's a management problem. Transit management in this state (actually, many others too) thinks BEB's are a drop-in replacement for current diesel ops and that they don't need to change practices, then find out rudely that it takes a whole new way of doing things that they're not mentally prepared for and panic.

The only centralized thing the Commonwealth can do here at the top-down level is actually provide adequate funding for the appropriate service facilities and inevitable higher quantities needed for first-generation BEB spare ratios, and hire people at the transit agencies who actually understand what best-practices are and how to apply them instead of arrogantly assuming they've come up with a totally novel lifehack to get out of implementing hard things. Then monitor things carefully and work together to improve ops practices until later generations of BEB tech inevitably shave more of the rough edges off. The Legislature and Governor are free to take up that task any time by opening the purse and making more intrepid leadership appointments, but they seem completely uninterested in doing any of that.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
commonwealthbeacon.org

Where the rubber meets the road: MBTA questions if electric bus mandate is worth the tradeoffs

State law requires the MBTA to purchase only zero-emissions buses starting in 2031 and to have the entire fleet transitioned by 2041. Now, to the ire of a key lawmaker, agency leaders want to kickstart a public discussion about whether that hard-to-accomplish change is still in the state’s best...
commonwealthbeacon.org commonwealthbeacon.org

The white flag is starting to wave pretty vigorously from within on the state's bus electrification mandate, with general consensus that the 2041 deadline for full deployment and 2031 cutoff for buying fossil-fuel buses won't be even close to met. And they're saber-rattling already about service cuts as a result. Dovetails with the very downbeat overall tone of the T's board presentation last week on agency-wide decarbonization, which indicated that the early results of BEB testing have been problematic. For reference, the T's 5-bus fleet of 2019 New Flyer XE60's assigned to the Silver Line haven't run any trips at all since mid-December, missing virtually the entire 2025-26 winter season (I don't think they have diesel heaters like the new North Cambridge and Quincy XE40's).
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How many of these problems could be resolved if the T was allowed to keep using diesel busses as long as they ran on biofuels? While it's not strictly carbon-neutral, it's a lot closer and should require significantly less capital costs. I can't find good data on what the cost premium would look like, but even if it was 50% more expensive than traditional diesel, that would only be about $20-30 million more annually in fuel costs. There's also the ability to have range-extended electric busses, which can provide most of the electric cost-savings (both for operating and maintenance), while mitigating the increased spare ratio needs (this is very much a new technology, but does appear to have been implemented in some Western systems).

None of this is to say biofuels are ideal or some magic bullet, but they could immensely ease the bus electrification pressure now and let that money get spent on much more valuable CR electrification instead.
 
BeansTheCat said:
How many of these problems could be resolved if the T was allowed to keep using diesel busses as long as they ran on biofuels? While it's not strictly carbon-neutral, it's a lot closer and should require significantly less capital costs. I can't find good data on what the cost premium would look like, but even if it was 50% more expensive than traditional diesel, that would only be about $20-30 million more annually in fuel costs. There's also the ability to have range-extended electric busses, which can provide most of the electric cost-savings (both for operating and maintenance), while mitigating the increased spare ratio needs (this is very much a new technology, but does appear to have been implemented in some Western systems).

None of this is to say biofuels are ideal or some magic bullet, but they could immensely ease the bus electrification pressure now and let that money get spent on much more valuable CR electrification instead.
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Well, it's not going to mitigate the need to build new or heavily renovated bus garages and have the Legislature do its damn job funding that crawl-back from eons of deferred maintenance. The hybrid fleet is an emissions-control godsend and we're lucky that majority of the fleet is now populated with them, but the T is sending off the emergency flares that even that's not enough to stabilize service levels when the garages are so ill-equipped to handle any buses with roof-mount components because of the constrained vertical clearance at so many facilities. You see slippage in service levels when they can't cycle maintenance fast enough, and that's already happening to worrisome degree with the hybrids. The BEB's shoving even more crap on the roofs is just pushing that existing problem to a breaking point, and there isn't any Jetsons Shit stuff you can come up with for technological augments that doesn't shove ever more crap on the roofs. We can change the fuel mix in the hybrids, but their overall technology is still thoroughly early-21st century and we're failing to maintain them properly because nearly all our facilities are designed for no better than mid-20th century fleets.

BEB spare ratios can be managed. Winters can be managed. There's ever growing number of systems worldwide that accommodate BEB's with no major growing pains at all. But those systems actually exercised foresight in their planning by having up-to-spec maintenance facilities, built-in capacity to grow those 1st-gen battery spare ratios, and exercising rigorous ops reform so the very different duty cycling of BEB's doesn't pose such a potentially destabilizing shock to the system's integrity-of-service. As well as proactively traffic-modeling which of their routes pose the most challenge for conversion before jumping headfirst without a safety net. Simply blanket-assuming that ops don't have to change at any level because "new bus go brrrrrrrr... just like old bus" and letting the maintenance backlog continue merrily along accumulating just happen to be fatally faulty assumptions that quite a few cities have made because they didn't pay attention to best practices and the evolving conversation around best practices. Boston is now one of those stubborn, unlucky outliers. We absolutely suck balls at applying knowledge from peer best-practice; that's been laid completely bare. The T's electrification strategy bus and rail is completely and utterly fucked at all levels, and they're flailing now that it's crunch time on delivering the promises. Healey and Eng need to own that and learn to deputize to better people than these "magic beans" evangelists they're currently stocked with at the department level who've been upselling battery-magic-with-no-fundamental-ops-change for 5 years now across modes, and are now hitting panic time because it was clearly never going to be that easy.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
Well, it's not going to mitigate the need to build new or heavily renovated bus garages and have the Legislature do its damn job funding that crawl-back from eons of deferred maintenance. The hybrid fleet is an emissions-control godsend and we're lucky that majority of the fleet is now populated with them, but the T is sending off the emergency flares that even that's not enough to stabilize service levels when the garages are so ill-equipped to handle any buses with roof-mount components because of the constrained vertical clearance at so many facilities. You see slippage in service levels when they can't cycle maintenance fast enough, and that's already happening to worrisome degree with the hybrids. The BEB's shoving even more crap on the roofs is just pushing that existing problem to a breaking point, and there isn't any Jetsons Shit stuff you can come up with for technological augments that doesn't shove ever more crap on the roofs. We can change the fuel mix in the hybrids, but their overall technology is still thoroughly early-21st century and we're failing to maintain them properly because nearly all our facilities are designed for no better than mid-20th century fleets.
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This wasn't clear in my original post, but I was talking about acquiring brand-new fully diesel busses, with the only restriction being that they eventually move to biodiesel. The main point is allowing the Legislature/T to say they are de-carbonizing without the investments/reforms needed for full bus electrification. Maybe it's overly cynical, but even if the T got the money it needs to do bus electrification "right", that money would be much better spent on rail investments.

Like you said, the ultimate problem is that the T cannot deliver on discontinuously electrified bus network with current funding at current timelines. And the T's management is the most to blame, for refusing to realize or admit that electrification would be this disruptive.
 
BeansTheCat said:
This wasn't clear in my original post, but I was talking about acquiring brand-new fully diesel busses, with the only restriction being that they eventually move to biodiesel. The main point is allowing the Legislature/T to say they are de-carbonizing without the investments/reforms needed for full bus electrification.
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If they're buying anything diesel, it's going to be a hybrid not a pure-diesel biodiesel. They're already too far in with a majority-hybrid fleet. And there's no way you'd get equivalent emissions by deleting the hybrid battery for a simpler overall biodiesel setup...one is still engine-off at idling conditions which matters the world in stop-and-go city traffic through dense neighborhoods, one is still engine-on at all times even if what it's physically burning is cleaner. The hybrids are heavier and more complicated to maintain than pure diesels, but that hasn't proved backbreaking yet because the route ops are still the same. They get turned around slower for maintenance because of the compromised roof access at the old garages we haven't upgraded or replaced, but they're still getting turned around and have been without major crisis for 15 years. If anything, you can simply convert some share of the hybrid fleet at midlife to biodiesel. It's not an invasive vehicle mod at all. Even with the funded BEB deployments at North Cambridge, new Quincy, and new Arborway there's going to be a net gain of systemwide hybrid numbers in the fleet because the 55 CNG buses at Cabot garage are due to be replaced by them when the agency gets out from under the last of its CNG fleet.

BeansTheCat said:
Maybe it's overly cynical, but even if the T got the money it needs to do bus electrification "right", that money would be much better spent on rail investments.
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The way they're proceeding with rail electrification--"partial" wire-ups, 3x as expensive battery locos on an already-electrified Providence Line, BEMU guinea pig on the easiest-to-wire-up line on the whole system under ultra-funky self-inhibiting legal gymnastics outsource agreements--is way, way stupider than the bus electrification follies. Like, groundbreaking never-before-tried levels of stupidity. At least their BEB mistakes are on well-trodden ground that Moscow and Shenzhen and a number of other cities stubbed their toes at, and eventually started to turn in a more favorable direction with lessons learned and applied. And, because of the 2030-40 Legislative bus mandate, is something they have no choice but to stagger along and try to figure out the right way...because service cuts from not doing it right are going to end a lot of careers in T management. The rail strategy is just going to light a couple billion dollars of magic beans on fire for no discernible benefit, while thoroughly scaring them off from doing anything more for a generation. I am MUCH more pessimistic about rail decarbonization at the T right now, because they're so far up their own asses eschewing anything close to best practices and blazing their own trail of original stupidity that it's going to create generational planning trauma holding back service.
 
KCasiglio said:
Generational fumble. I can't imagine how the staff who have put in so much time and work on this feel
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www.bostonglobe.com

Delayed projects, low morale: Boston’s streets department is stalling under Wu, long a transit champion - The Boston Globe

Advocates and city staff say the policy change has caused an epic bottleneck, stalling the majority of Boston’s transit and street safety projects for the past year.
www.bostonglobe.com www.bostonglobe.com
“All these projects exist because someone asked for them,” said one Streets Cabinet employee, who, like 10 other former or current city workers, spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation from the administration. “These are going to be more promises that the city’s breaking. I think that’s what is breaking people’s hearts who are working for the city right now.”
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Charlie_mta said:
The two are a bit different. The SL3X study shows no bus lanes from Bartlett St to Sweetser Circle, but your notes from from last night's meeting show bus lanes ending at Beacham Street, about 0.2 miles south of the Bartlett St/Broadway intersection. That's quite a difference.
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Some notes from looking at the presentation:
  • The current proposal maintains a continuous Sullivan-bound bus lane, while there will be an Everett-bound gap from Beacham to Sweetser Circle.
  • They're actually cutting the Everett-bound bus lane back from its existing length at Sweetser Circle, meaning that the stop at Bartlett Street will be in mixed traffic rather than a bus lane. It seems like you could very easily modify the embankment to fit a bus lane at the stop.
  • The traffic modeling results make no sense to me. They're claiming that Everett-bound queues will be substantially longer in the PM peak with their proposed design than no-build, including at Bartlett Street even though there's no changes downstream of Bartlett. The only possible way I can imagine that being true is if the Beacham and Bartlett lights were so badly coordinated that traffic from Beacham is hitting the back of the Bartlett queue.
  • Previous work showed two bus stops at Beacham and Horizon. This has stops at Bartlett, Thorndike, and Dexter.


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Scott said:
www.dotnews.com

Wu: Blue Hill Ave. design 'not set in stone' as bus-lanes face more scrutiny - Dorchester Reporter

Mayor Wu emphasized that no final decisions have been made about the design of the Blue Hill Avenue corridor, including a controversial proposal for center-running bus lanes.
www.dotnews.com www.dotnews.com
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Wu’s about face on transportation is utterly baffling. She won reelection essentially unopposed and then decides to throw away years of work and funding for projects she championed. For what? Even if she is running for another office…does she really think the bus lanes on Blue Hill Ave would make or break a campaign for US Senate? I can’t make heads or tails of it.
 
This is the person who stood up to a Republican Congress that wished to humiliate her and won. She can also stand up to those who do not want this by washing her hands of it and threatening to walk away. So I hope the bike people stop sounding a lot like Josh Kraft and realize who is and is not on their side. They are aligning with the very people Wu warns us, want to kill the Blue Hill Ave project
 
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Scott said:
This is the person who stood up to a Republican Congress that wished to humiliate her and won. She can also stand up to those who do not want this by washing her hands of it and threatening to walk away. So I hope the bike people stop sounding a lot like Josh Kraft and realize who is and is not on their side. They are aligning with the very people Wu warns us, want to kill the Blue Hill Ave project
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I’m not sure how she “won” anything tangible in Congress. She looked and sounded nice but nothing actually changed.

I think the times have changed dramatically. People are looking for Democrats who will actually use the power granted to them. This isn’t the era for people who dither and piss away their time in the drivers seat.
 
Jeremi said:
I

I’m not sure how she “won” anything tangible in Congress. She looked and sounded nice but nothing actually changed.

I think the times have changed dramatically. People are looking for Democrats who will actually use the power granted to them. This isn’t the era for people who dither and piss away their time in the drivers seat.
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"Piss" and moan about it all you want, she is clearly not wasting her political capital without support from her supposed allies on this issue.
 
Well people clearly want Wu. She got 70%. Now the leaders of the neighborhood have to decide to get their shit together or face losing the money and that being used by Wu against them locally. That is the political game they created.

EDIT: However, this is not the appropriate rapid transit this corridor deserves, so don't be surprised if the neighborhood passes.
 
Jeremi said:
People want leaders and fighters, not ditherers and triangulators.
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And people also want leaders who don't just... abandon their platform when a minority (that voted for the losing candidate no less) complains. Essaibi-George and Kraft ran significantly if not primarily on pausing bike/transit project expansion in favor of car drivers, and lost. It would be more than a little weird and off-putting if you voted in one president and then they just adopted the platform of the losing candidate instead.

Disclaimer: I am not nor have I ever been a City of Boston resident so I'm not exceptionally qualified to speak on this subject. Someone please correct me if I've gotten the wrong impression.
 
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