Silver Line to Chelsea

My rule of thumb is: if you have to ask what the name means, it isn't a good name. This usually favors concrete names (like "Shuttle") or abstract-but-suggestive names (like "Acela"). Gateway falls in that awkward space in between.
 
The number that you'll see on the bus rollsign, schedules, etc will almost certainly be SL6. SL1, SL2, SL4, and SL5 are taken; SL3 was previously a route to City Point and there's occasionally been talk of bringing it back (primarily as a South Boston - Seaport route, and not as much to compete with the #7 like it did previously).
 
They need to stop branding the Washington St and Transitway routes as the same servic. They're not, in any way.

Having 1,2,3 go through the Transitway, 4,5 on the surface and not actually connected, and then 6 onwards back through the Transitway is going to confuse tourists, etc even more.
 
davem said:
They need to stop branding the Washington St and Transitway routes as the same servic. They're not, in any way.

Having 1,2,3 go through the Transitway, 4,5 on the surface and not actually connected, and then 6 onwards back through the Transitway is going to confuse tourists, etc even more.
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Confuses the hell out of me, and I live here.
 
davem said:
They need to stop branding the Washington St and Transitway routes as the same servic. They're not, in any way.

Having 1,2,3 go through the Transitway, 4,5 on the surface and not actually connected, and then 6 onwards back through the Transitway is going to confuse tourists, etc even more.
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Totally agree -- these need to be branded as separate lines.

We really should be using the European convention, where every change of terminus creates a new line designation, even if they use the same tunnel part of the way.
 
Numbering the various Silver Line routes isn't a bad way to do it, in general. The problem is not merely the different termini - that's actually shown rather well on the current map - but the very different services and fare structure. Either we need more Silver Line routes, all of which must be true BRT and share the same fare structure, or the Washington Street services should get different branding.
 
Should have been

Front half of alphabet uses tunnel

SLA Airport
SLC Chelsea
SLD Dry Dock / Design Center
(I Innovation etc)

Back half of alphabet uses Washington Street
SLS South Station (Dudley)
SLX Downtown Crossing (Dudley)
 
Yes I have it confirmed that it will be branded as the SL6. (Bus driver friends out of that garage that services the SL buses have verified this)

No idea where the "Gateway" came from, just assumed it was 'marketing buzz' for the project. But it does make sense that it would be named because Chelsea is a 'gateway' city.

And yeah Data.. "SL-Market Basket" LOL. I can't wait to see all the folks with granny carts and arm loads of MB bags get on the SL bus behind the store. It's really going to be a boon for that store (and the shopping center). A direct route from downtown to Market Basket.

On a more realistic note.. more pics coming soon. I'll probably go out on the weekend of the 12th or the 19th (depending on weather, of course). I'm trying to space it out as much as possible to show progress, otherwise we're just looking at piles of dirt being moved.

I'll probably do a set on the 12th/19th, and then again in maybe early November. I don't anticipate much work being done (if any at all) once snow and cold weather really start to set in. Then I'll start taking pics again in early spring, which I anticipate the real progress (i.e. stations, road bed) will be worked on.

I do, however, drive the route map (as best I can in a car on city streets) every time I come back from grocery shopping.. at where else... Market Basket. (typically every other week). There's always some progress being done, but usually not enough to warrant a pic taking tour :)

Right now most of the work is now clearing and grading out the busway, especially around Market Basket and Everett Ave. Demoulas wasted no time re-doing their parking lot to accommodate the new station. It's almost done.

I think the next steps will be waiting for the utility poles to be moved along that part of the busway (as many of them are in the way and need to be moved back) And I'm curious (without looking at the EIR doc), if the gas mains will be moved since they will be under the busway itself. Because finalizing the grade, and laying down a roadbed can't happen until those are done (along with significant completion of the Washington Ave bridge).
 
I think there are a bunch of opportunities for buses to use the new busway in addition to the SL6:

104 could be rerouted such that it would stay on its current route from Malden Center to Ferry St, and then continue along the small stretch of Ferry St that currently has no bus service, continue along the part of Ferry St served by 110, follow 112's route to the Mystic Mall (skipping the Quigley Hospital detour), duplicate the SL6 route from Mystic Mall to the Airport Blue Line station, serve the same airport terminal loop stops that SL1 serves, and then continue back to the Chelsea busway and reverse the rest of the route back to Malden Center. (The 97 largely covers the part of the route that 104 would no longer be serving.)

134 could be extended onto the busway, and maybe all the way to the airport.

Given that 116 mostly duplicates 117, except at the northern end, it might make sense to keep 116 on its current route to Maverick, and redirect 117 away from Maverick onto the busway (which would require building a ramp from Broadway to the busway that I have seen zero evidence of any planning for, although it appears that the land needed may be unused). I see two obvious possibilities for where to send 117:

Wonderland - existing Chelsea commuter rail - Sullivan - Union Sq Somerville - Harvard Sq - Watertown Sq - Newtonville is more or less a straight line. If that whole thing turns out to be too long to be manageable, just running Wonderland to Harvard might make sense. (And this might also point to where replacing the trolleybuses with battery powered buses might provide better routing options, since part of the longer version of this would duplicate 71.)

If you treat Broadway as a straight line and extend it across the harbor, it almost continues to Kendall, so perhaps a rerouted 117 that, after turning from Broadway onto the busway, would make a single stop on the busway where the Chelsea commuter rail station has been, then cross the Tobin bridge and stop at Community College, Lechmere, and Kendall, might make sense. It might also be worthwhile to extend this along the CT2 route to the B branch and then along the B branch reservation to Boston College.
 
Joel N. Weber II said:
Given that 116 mostly duplicates 117, except at the northern end, it might make sense to keep 116 on its current route to Maverick, and redirect 117 away from Maverick onto the busway (which would require building a ramp from Broadway to the busway that I have seen zero evidence of any planning for, although it appears that the land needed may be unused). I see two obvious possibilities for where to send 117:

Wonderland - existing Chelsea commuter rail - Sullivan - Union Sq Somerville - Harvard Sq - Watertown Sq - Newtonville is more or less a straight line. If that whole thing turns out to be too long to be manageable, just running Wonderland to Harvard might make sense. (And this might also point to where replacing the trolleybuses with battery powered buses might provide better routing options, since part of the longer version of this would duplicate 71.)

If you treat Broadway as a straight line and extend it across the harbor, it almost continues to Kendall, so perhaps a rerouted 117 that, after turning from Broadway onto the busway, would make a single stop on the busway where the Chelsea commuter rail station has been, then cross the Tobin bridge and stop at Community College, Lechmere, and Kendall, might make sense. It might also be worthwhile to extend this along the CT2 route to the B branch and then along the B branch reservation to Boston College.
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If you re-route the 117, you're going to need to supercharge service on the 116. Right now, the two function as two-faced key route, peak hour requirement for 5 vehicles on the individual lines, the 10 combined brings the whole route closer to key route service levels (compare to the 57 fx, which pulls 14 vehicles out at peak), if you cleave off half of the service levels before the line reaches downtown Chelsea, the 116 is going to fail under the crush.

None the elongated routes are going to work unless the MBTA gets serious about reserving (and the town's get serious about enforcing) street space for bus lanes, a Super-CT2 is going to get obliterated by delays and bunching at Sullivan, Union, and Harvard.

There's a reason we still run a transit feeder bus network, there's isn't a lot of demand for a one-seater from Chelsea to Harvard Sq - chicken and egg situation, yes, but... - and the routes can be more reliably dispatched if they only have to hit one or two major nodes, and not 6 or 7. It's not that consolidation/elongation is not a good idea - I'd support it - it just needs the proper infrastructure, which we do not currently have.
 
Joel N. Weber II said:
I see two obvious possibilities for where to send 117:

Wonderland - existing Chelsea commuter rail - Sullivan - Union Sq Somerville - Harvard Sq - Watertown Sq - Newtonville is more or less a straight line. If that whole thing turns out to be too long to be manageable, just running Wonderland to Harvard might make sense. (And this might also point to where replacing the trolleybuses with battery powered buses might provide better routing options, since part of the longer version of this would duplicate 71.)

If you treat Broadway as a straight line and extend it across the harbor, it almost continues to Kendall, so perhaps a rerouted 117 that, after turning from Broadway onto the busway, would make a single stop on the busway where the Chelsea commuter rail station has been, then cross the Tobin bridge and stop at Community College, Lechmere, and Kendall, might make sense. It might also be worthwhile to extend this along the CT2 route to the B branch and then along the B branch reservation to Boston College.
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I really really like that you're thinking about orange & red connections from Chelsea. This is a huge deficiency in the current bus network. It takes upwards of 2 hours with multiple transfers to get from northern Chelsea to Somerville via transit.

If you change the 117 itself, you are going to have to really beef up the 116 though. As it stands, we still don't have enough capacity on the 116 or 117 right now to properly handle loading.

CantabAmager said:
If you re-route the 117, you're going to need to supercharge service on the 116. Right now, the two function as two-faced key route, peak hour requirement for 5 vehicles on the individual lines, the 10 combined brings the whole route closer to key route service levels
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Is that how it's actually supposed to operate on paper because that's a load of bull from what the service actually is during the peak. You're lucky if there's 2 of each in the hour. #disgruntled116117rider

CantabAmager said:
There's a reason we still run a transit feeder bus network, there's isn't a lot of demand for a one-seater from Chelsea to Harvard Sq
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Chelsea is rapidly gentrifying. I believe there is sufficient demand now. 10 years ago, Chelsea to Harvard Sq? You're crazy. Now? Absolutely.
 
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datadyne007 said:
Is that how it's actually supposed to operate on paper because that's a load of bull from what the service actually is during the peak. You're lucky if there's 2 of each in the hour. #disgruntled116117rider


Chelsea is rapidly gentrifying. I believe there is sufficient demand now. 10 years ago, Chelsea to Harvard Sq? You're crazy. Now? Absolutely.
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In theory, yes - 116/117 are technically key routes but with the service levels of a local. Two of them cull 10.5k riders per day, that puts it in 32 and 57 ridership territory, but 116/117 are only scheduled at 20 min headways + varying route lengths murder any sort of schedule adherence. They have sub-60% adherence rates, the only other lines that are so shaky are the 86 and 101 (two worst amongst the top-30 lines), the 70 (longest top-30 by far), and 16. I wouldn't be opposed (I actually like it) to Joel's idea, but the Chelsea-Maverick trip needs to be maintained and really improved.

I still think Harvard is too far, not that I don't see the utility for it. I just think a shorter feeder to Lechmere/Kendall is more appropriate. The only routes about 10 miles that are able to keep at least a modicum of consistency (above 70% adherence) are the 111 and 39 and both run with 14 vehicles at peak.
 
I wasn't proposing to run a single bus route that would serve any of the CT2 while also serving any of Harvard, Union, or Sullivan. The idea would be to potentially have two different bus routes which north of the Chelsea busway would be identical to each other and today's 117, but would branch off of the busway at different points (Route 1 vs Mystic Mall) and not overlap anywhere south of the busway.

As I've thought about it, giving these routes new numbers would be a really good idea: I once misunderstood a service change when one of the overlapping routes serving my home got expressed onto a highway to bypass my home, and ended up once overshooting and having to come back home.

Since 115 and 118 don't seem to be taken in the MBTA's bus route structure, maybe we can tentatively call the Kendall route 115 and the Harvard route 118 (since that route overlaps with 86, and 118 and 86 both have an 8 in them).

The MBTA already runs 86 through Harvard, Union, and Sullivan, and the distance 86 covers to the southwest of Harvard doesn't look terribly different from the distance 118 would cover to the northeast of Sullivan.

I'm all in favor of transit signal priority and whatever other reasonable measures we can come up with to improve performance, but if the best we can do is a bus that works as well as 86 and has ridership like 86, it's probably not exactly going to be a total failure if the T starts running it.

I think an incremental approach that starts with picking either 115 or 118, and starting to run that route, and then worrying about consolidating 117 vehicles to 116 or adding whichever of 115 or 118 didn't get added in the first round, might make a lot of sense. I expect 115/118 to somewhat reduce the demand on 116/117; it seems unlikely to me that everyone on the 116/117 buses thinks the Blue Line is the optimal destination. 115 or 118 could even start out with half hour headways, and then if half hour headways lead to overcrowding we could have discussions about improving headways.

I suspect if all of the buses going to Maverick took the same route from Wonderland to Broadway as each other, they'd probably show up at the common stops on Broadway with somewhat more consistent headways in the morning peak than they do with the two different routes.

Do we know whether MassDOT is busy building a retaining wall that will have to be demolished if the ramp from Broadway to the busway ever gets built?

What would it take to get the budgets to include upgrading every traffic light controller along key bus routes to be capable of handling transit signal priority?
 
We might even consider trying to get the T to introduce 115 by taking any vehicles on 111 that are surplus if SL6 pulls riders away from 111 and reassigning those 111 vehicles to 115, although there's some chance that 111 is crowded enough now that the effect of SL6 might only be to reduce crowding on 111 to tolerable levels.

The exact 118 routing seems pretty obvious: mirror bus 117, follow the busway, Everett Ave, Spruce St, Williams St, Beacham St, highway 99, then mirror bus 86 from Sullivan to Harvard.

115 is less obvious: it's possibly 117, busway, Arlington St, route 1, Rutherford, Gilmore Bridge, but then it's less clear exactly how best to go to Lechmere and Kendall. (Maybe we could just use whatever solution the Urban Ring folks documented for Lechmere to Kendall, except I get the impression they may not have documented a specific route.) And in the reverse direction, the busway may not get involved at all; Route 1 to 4th St to Broadway may work best. And if you wanted to run 115 southbound without the busway, Broadway to 3rd to Route 1 probably works, which implies that getting the Broadway to busway ramp built is not in the critical path to making 115 exist, and if you think bus routes that take the same route in both directions (or as close as possible to that) are easiest to understand, it may not make sense to ever even send southbound 115 through the busway if the ramp did exist.

If 115 got a stop at the Cambridgeside Galleria, I wonder if the Galleria folks could be convinced to help subsidize 115 instead of paying for their dedicated Kendall shuttle. Perhaps they'd see a one seat ride from Chelsea and Wonderland to their mall as being a desirable way to bring in more customers.
 
Ok, thanks for the clarification - we really need to start breaking out the mapping apps (anyone have any suggestions - I'm a bit wiped tonight, but I could give it a go tomorrow)

I don't disagree with any of your points - we just need to see what kind of changes SL6 is going to induce. That's when we can start to experiment with 117/116, 111, etc.. Downtown Chelsea must be served, and reliably - I'm curious if SL6 is going to suck those riders down the busway or if they're going to continue feeling the gravitational pull of Maverick (and hence the need for stable downtown Broadway service). I'd err on the side of Maverick - commute patterns are notoriously hard to break.

We gotta be careful with pulling 111s to a new route, it's pretty consistent (MBTA aims for 75% OTP, 111 scored a 77% in 2012, very good for a big draw bus), but it's also a long 10 mile round tripper and schedule recovery will be harder without the 14 vehicles at peak. Just something to consider.

I'd throw some caution to the wind about mimicking the 86 (in spirit, not necessarily the exact route). The 86 is least consistent of all top 30 ridership routes in the system, 56% OTP, barely 1 in 2 busses is on time - it's the neighborhood square passages that kill it's reliability - but I'd argue that isn't necessarily a deal-breaker as nobody really rides it end-to-end. Still at scheduled 13 min peak headways (but really could be anywhere between 10 and 20, even at peak), it's on the cusp of being so unreliable that it drives people away - if 118 or 115 succumbs to similar circumstances it's going to be difficult to induce people to the service. Maybe the latent demand is there, I hope it is, but I think a Chelsea-west connection is going to have to use the bells and whistles that we have available - queue jumps, signal priority, a goddamn bus lane! Still, I'm intrigued - the one great failing of the feeder routes system is that it's not great for circumferential transit and that's particularly true of Chelsea.
 
The EGE said:
The number that you'll see on the bus rollsign, schedules, etc will almost certainly be SL6. SL1, SL2, SL4, and SL5 are taken; SL3 was previously a route to City Point and there's occasionally been talk of bringing it back (primarily as a South Boston - Seaport route, and not as much to compete with the #7 like it did previously).
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The last printed MBTA system map shows the under-construction Silver Line Gateway on the rapid transit only backside map and identifies it as SL3
 
A few corrections to things I misunderstood yesterday:

1) It turns out that CT2 continues north of Kendall, so it would be more accurate to say that 118 would duplicate the part of CT2 that runs from Sullivan to Union Sq, and 115 would duplicate the part of CT2 that runs from Kendall to the B branch.

2) The one way streets in downtown Chelsea complicate things, so for the northbound 115, Hawthorne has to come in between 4th and Broadway, and southbound there'd be a jog off of Broadway and back to Broadway a bit before ending up on 3rd. (Assuming the one way streets keep their current configuration, anyway.)
 
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