Is trolley-stituting route 77 a crazy transit pitch, or a reasonable one?
Crazy, but only because it's sort of a mis-read of what the corridor is. Upper Mass Ave. is characterized by
hyper-local on-line ridership on the 77, 77A, 79 that significantly overturns at several points en route...and is generally
not a one-seat corridor where people are riding for long distances. The overturn at Porter, for instance, is so enormous that you can almost cleave the Harvard-Porter and North Cambridge intracity halves off each other as unique catchments so few people ride thru the Porter divide. Similar effect with intra-Arlington travel cleaving at the city line with the 79 running into Alewife. So right then and there the corridor already eschews any BRT service identity (and thus all the same things you'd evaluate LRT on), as you would not be looking to prune stops for a faster end-to-end trip when end-to-end is such an inconclusively middling piece of the demand pie and hyper-local is where it's at. The dense stop spacing is a feature, not a bug. Thus, the everlasting needs of the corridor trend heavily to more/better relief valve bailouts at those 1.5-2 mile intervals so the increases in hyper-local demand have more substantial means of dumping their transfers. For example:
- Alewife-Mass Ave. busways to speed the 79's last leg.
- Possible extension of 77A to Alewife busways to mirror-image the intra-Arlington 79 for intra-Cambridge trips.
- post-GLX bus revamp strengthening Arlington Center-Mystic Valley Parkway pipe (enhanced 80 frequencies + etc.)
- post-GLX Route 16 BRT Alewife-Mystic Valley Parkway-Wellington-(possibly) Chelsea, creating major 77 transfer point at the parkway stop.
- GLX Union to Porter superstation.
- Fitchburg Line Urban Rail to 128 @ Porter superstation.
- Red Line to Arlington Center & Arlington Heights.
Some of those are short-term like the Alewife busways and studies of post-GLX diverging bus revamps. Some of them are longer-term, like the proper Red extension. And some are medium-term, like GLX-Porter. But you get the idea. The most meaningful reaches addressing the Upper Mass Ave. corridor are all at the overchurn nodes, and with every additional strengthened touch accomplished there's always a next priority to turn to at strengthening another overchurn node. BRT (or LRT) on Mass Ave. itself never rates on this bucket list, because the dense stop spacing is the ever-differentiator between taking these buses vs. all the other modes & routes that hop straight to the overchurn points. The only schedule that matters for the on-corridor buses is keeping it reasonably efficient within every 2-mile hyper-local chunk to the next relief valve...not timing on-the-clock from Arlington Heights all the way to Harvard. Too few ever utilize it like that for BRT speedup features to rate. When the first change in BRT-ification is stop consolidation, it's already at odds with how people ride the constituent routes and begs the question of whether force-feeding those features because "sounds efficient" is in fact a mis-read of the corridor's vitals.
On-corridor the only big thing left improvements-wise is North Cambridge streetscaping. City has a
lot of nice renders on what a transit- and biking- friendlier Harvard-Alewife Mass Ave. should look like. Right now it's stuck in vaporware purgatory without much in the way of kickstarter push, as they're content to study it about once per decade but never take any action. The renders themselves seem to be well thought-out, however. Seeks a net reduction in the truly excessive number of side-street traffic lights north of Porter and better turn-lane configurations across the board so the number of curb cuts isn't such a traffic clog. Simply moving forward with that and implementing transit priority signaling is pretty much all they need to do to tighten the bolts on the 77/77A. Arlington's re-streetscaping is long complete, and is a major improvement to 77/79 fluidity, so if Cambridge achieves similar the local conditions become about as good as they're going to get.
Most consequential state/not-municipal touch that could get cued up quickest would be finally--at long fucking last--building those Alewife-Mass Ave. busways. It's not a big-ticket item by any stretch, so long past time to stop talking about it and actually grade the grass on the sides of the parkway for this. It would be the perfect companion piece to funding-lump with GLX Mystic Valley Parkway, since spanning Alewife-MVP-Wellington with a BRT 'outer ring' Crosstown route is a mucho high-leverage touch implementable cheaply. Would also tag-team the Arlington-side improvements by substantially speeding the 79's rapid transit transfer at same time that the post-GLX bus revamp is strengthening the 80's Arlington Ctr.-GLX transfer pipe. Start right there, and sell it on the very strong GLX coattails for leveraging Mystic Valley Parkway. Sell job is important, because all the advocacy to-date has been about what a clusterfuck the current Alewife station access is with that carpocalypse rotary...and all that's netted in action to-date is ineffectual garbage like the most recent "Brownsberger Square" cosmetic re-striping of the rotary. Pols like the (unofficial) State Senate namesake/effigy of the last round of unimproved "improvements" still don't fucking get it and never fail to succumb to Alrewife car-centric zoning brainlock in the end, so the pivot to selling the busways on GLX (which by and large even the dumbest amongst them
do seem to grasp at a basic-most level) is also explicit for shaking the cobwebs loose by changing the prevailing narrative. I've totally given up on Alewife-centric improvements ever originating from
within Alewife itself; the local planning attitudes there are just hopeless, hopeless, hopeless. So literally can't hurt to try to turn the tables outside-in fashion by bootstrapping onto the GLX rejuvenation machine to try to get some overdue action here.
