Providence RIPTA Services

[BACsop]

Meanwhile…

Facing budget deficit, RIPTA proposes cuts to most bus routes, eliminating 16 routes altogether - The Boston Globe

The Rhode Island transit agency is also considering fare increases and layoffs as it tries to close a $10 million funding gap

www.bostonglobe.com

I would think in a state as small and dense as Rhode Island it would be a lot easier to build public support for a comprehensive and well-funded transit network, as you have fewer rural or suburban sprawl constituencies that don't necessarily see the benefits of transit. Can anyone with knowledge of RI weigh in on why that doesn't seem to be the case with RIPTA?

 

[riptide]

https://www.ripta.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/RIPTA-OES-Final-Report-7.31.25-1.pdf

RIPTA published its finalized “Operational Efficiency Study” just a day or two ago. The section comparing RIPTA to six similar peer agencies on the basis of operating costs and other metrics shows RIPTA is pretty much middle-of-the-pack (in other words, it doesn’t have any obvious fundamental inefficiencies).

Another section shows how routes are performing according to various measures, which then informs the recommendations, which are to focus RIPTA’s increasingly limited resources on the highest-performing routes (as well as those with significant equity implications).

They also recommend implementing RIPTA’s Transit Master Plan, but when you go to the appendix that shows the status of all their to-do list items, it’s pretty clear they will not be able to accomplish anything in the TMP related to increasing service once they enter this belt-tightening period.

 

[riptide]

For what it's worth, a similar proposal was put in the Transit Forward 2040 plan a few years ago, though it has since been taken out, presumably due to cost:
View attachment 65480

I don't know where their stops were supposed to be though. It's curious that they apparently preferred to use the rail tunnel instead of the bus tunnel for the route to East Providence.

Also, I figured it could be piecemeal- start with just the rail tunnel and extend it 1500' to the train station for starters. After that, who knows where it would go. It doesn't necessarily need to go to Olneyville.

Looking at this map and the proposals, I'm starting to warm up to the idea of the LRT from Central Falls to Warwick taking the same route as it does in this map, which is a bit longer than one of the alternatives outlined in the study.

Wow, I’m surprised they “officially” wanted the LRT line to take the rail tunnel instead of running on the surface until reaching the trolley tunnel. Maybe taking roadway lanes is seen as politically unthinkable, but just looking at Google Street View, there seems to be plenty of space to give up one lane each on Angell and Waterman (which form a one-way pair) for dedicated LRT lanes. It would be so much cheaper to capture the East Side’s ridership with surface stations instead of deep-mined underground stations. Even if it was a political issue, that would be a fight worth having for the cost implications. I assume they gave up on that alignment due to costs, but I wonder if they ever looked at surface running afterwards.

Also, just to be clear, I think your logic (look for underutilized, grade-separated corridors as candidates for affordable modern LRT alignments) is perfectly sound, but these particular corridors happen to be tough to retrofit for LRT in a cost-effective manner due to their own unique constraints.

 

[MjolnirMan]

A while back we had some discussion about the rail tunnel in this thread. It seems difficult to reuse for many reasons. Like I say in this thread, I think you could bore one station at Brown's Science Library about halfway through and call it a day for new-dig stations, but either end of the tunnel presents challenges too. Providence has demolished and/or built too many things in the ROW.