Re: Silver Line to Chelsea (Study Meeting)
Here's another thought I have, for what it's worth. One of the advantages of BRT is that it can use a transitway for fast routing - as this does around, but not into, Downtown Chelsea - but then have the flexibility to run as a more local service on city streets. Why terminate this service at Mystic Mall when it could take the extra 2000 foot jog down Everett Street to loop around Cross/Park/Congress/3rd for a real Downtown Chelsea stop? (Arlington/6th isn't really downtown Chelsea.)
Because Connecticut found out the hard way how hard it is to design a signal cycle at a busway + RR crossing permitting turning movements. It took them 2 years of cost overruns on design revisions to get signals that only degraded traffic flow at the Hartford crossings to LOS D instead of LOS F and which didn't risk an articulated bus getting clipped by a passing train mid-turn.
To go off-ROW here would probably require them to eminent domain space for a turnout through Market Basket...the front if they don't mind their driveway being used as a full-time busway, the back if there's access objections. Quite doable, but the Connecticut lesson is that shared legacy rail + bus ROW's are so insanely more difficult to engineer than meets the eye, and chances are they're going to burn equal amount of funding commitment mitigating nasty surprises between Broadway and Everett. CTFasTrak is still making engineering changes in Hartford/West Hartford 2 years
after the shovels went into the ground to correct for unintended consequences, so the raw difficulty level of making the modes coexist plays into it even when you strip out ConnDOT's rank incompetence.
The street bus turnout is more something to wait and see on, and keep under wraps until the busway construction has succeeded, than an outright concession at this point. It's simply too early to tell if cost overrun contingencies are going to be needed on the main busway construction, even if by any logic this shouldn't be as difficult a time Broadway-Everett as CTFasTrak is having on the Springfield Line. But that's why it's unwise to count tack-on frills like a turnout in advance. File under "wait and see".
I do think they've got a couple big problems here that make local feeders into the busway unlikely to happen:
1) The insane fact that they are not eliminating one of the two worst grade crossings on the system for this project. The traffic queues @ Everett are already nearly untenable around the gates because of close proximity to the shopping center. This thing already got
quadrant gates, advance warning, and lane dividers installed a few years ago because of the acute safety risks at rush hour of cars backed up in traffic getting stuck around the gates. I don't see how you can propose a rapid bus AND eventual DMU frequencies on the Eastern Route without pushing the Everett corridor off the cliff.
1a) How useful are the 112 and 114 truly going to be when they hit the radiating backups in all directions around this sharply busier crossing? I think trying to keep them on-schedule to/from the Transitway while running anything on-street out here is going to be an exercise in futility until they pay for the Everett St. overpass over the ROW that they should've built into the project right up front.
1b) When the city does see how much worse one of the worst crossings gets after start of this service, the amount of mitigation $$$ required after the fact to tame the monster being unleashed is going to put off further route enhancements by several years. Think many blustering City Hall meetings and blue-ribbon "grade crossing task forces" convened. But hey...why build a bridge up-front when you can pay twice as much 10 years later after crying uncle at the pitchfork-wielding mob.
1c) Note that all the speed restrictions that slowly consumed CTFasTrak during its engineering have pretty much gotten Connecticut abandoning most plans to funnel CTransit local buses on/off the busway to streamline routes. It's pretty much just mainline pingbacks now + a noncommittal/unfunded and ever-shrinking set of proposed special-branded routes running extra distance off the busway. Here the Transitway's issues are the inhibitor that makes them a lot less willing to consider feeder routings. As long as it is what it is--slow, unsignaled, with that mangled D St. crossing and "can't get there from here" access to the Ted--they're going to be extremely reluctant to run anything out of there off a dedicated ROW. If there isn't a busway, single-purpose airport driveway, or traffic-restricted haul road to tap on a particular SL# route, they are probably going to shy away.
and...
2) The Silver Line is on subway fare. Run-thru local buses onto a BRT color line can't bureaucratically happen here until there is a half-awake *attempt* at fare flexibility across modes (such as Silver-becomes-Yellow blending). Thus passing up the whole "off-roading" advantage of BRT that got endlessly overhyped when cities were tripping over themselves to propose these things. Purely bureaucratic restriction, and they could run a couple SL# branches out of here covering the north and south spread of Chelsea destinations (but would the headways be the least bit meaningful after branches split?). Fact of the matter is they are institutionally discouraged from offering up better route options by the incompatibilities of Silver Line vs. Yellow Line fare collection. A whole lot of systemwide inertia and brainrot has to get overcome to fix these paper barriers before they do get encouraged to consider obvious flexibilities.
