Re: Silver Line to Chelsea (Study Meeting)
The same transit bureaucrats who continue to try and skip out on every single transit improvement passed their way, from the ones that were supposed to be legal mandates all the way on down to rudimentary studies that demonstrate local engagement in a federal project.
All I'm going to say is that, while it's certainly nice talk to hear about "route priming" and phased build-outs, North Station - Chelsea is already pretty damn route primed if you ask me. I'd say most of the people crammed like sardines on the 111 would agree with me.
I'm also going to say that if this was in Somerville and the MBTA was proposing a "new branch of the Silver Line" between Lechmere or North Station and West Medford or Tufts University, everyone would be calling it what it really is - an attempt to do less than what's needed and call it "good enough", and STEP would laugh them right out of the room.
Chelsea should be saying "Sorry, not good enough." Chelsea ought to be looking over at Somerville and asking themselves "how can we be more like them?" They aren't, and that's what's disappointing.
And if the answer to "Sorry, not good enough" is "This is further behind Red-Blue in line for funding, so what now?"...what happens then? Do nothing because it's not full-build and you won't settle for less? Can't have all the things, so we have no things? Call route-priming a dirty word because it draws one brain cell away from the 100-year solution that nobody can physically accelerate for another 20 years?
Congratulations: you just fell hook/line/sinker for a pre-set trap and took sides against transit improvements
writ large and turned it into a mode vs. mode turf war where somebody has to win in-total and somebody has to lose in-total. The T is counting on the most vociferous pro-transit (esp. when it comes to pro-rail) advocates to do just that to aid and abet them into slipping out of any responsibility for lifting a finger. Just as they do the most vociferous anti-transit to do what comes naturally.
The end result is everybody's so factionalized that they ALL end up becoming NIMBY's within their own causes at the notion of anything else. No such thing as non-preferred alternatives, intermediate (and sometimes necessary) steps TO the preferred alternative, or notions of realistic-size bites for undertaking a large project. If it's not a monolith build of all I want accelerated twice as fast, then we LOST dammit. And if that other plan steals even one molecule of oxygen from my goal, they DEFEATED us goddamnit...and we can't let that happen! And there you go...preventing the other side from winning becomes more important than giving
somebody better transit. Advantage: do-nothingness. Aided and abetted by you.
Want to break that cycle? Drop the pro sports mentality and realize that there is no common 'playing field'. Chelsea's stinging transit inequity does not by its own existence put offensive pressure on Beacon Hill.
Factionalizing the various solutions to Chelsea's transit inequity most definitely doesn't generate any political pressure. Pols move political capital around on their own turf, responding to threats on that turf. There's nothing for them to bat an eye at if Chelsea's most transit-reliant citizens are stuck with shitty transit forever.
You know why Somerville is getting shit done? Because STEP plays the game entirely with political capital. Every local pol, right up to Capuano, got held feet to the fire from their first local campaign to their
highest state campaign...and off-message slip-ups (right up to Capuano
) got slapped back hard. For 20 years now. It's become its own form of advocacy 'machine' politics...nobody gets elected if they aren't full-throated for GLX. They're relentlessly on-point when the T starts throwing in curveballs, obfuscations, trapdoors, and other ways out. How many times did the state get raked over the coals with withering and
very specific inquisition when they started getting squishy about finishing the job all the way to Route 16? Enough so that the promises to finish the job got progressively more ironclad. It was packaged as more than just transit equity for 1 transit line...economic growth and redevelopment, cross-border collaboration with Cambridge and Medford, tie-ins to related advocacies like remaking Assembly Sq., Brickbottom, the McGrath corridor, etc. Stuff that offered up lots of motivation
on purely political turf to muscle resources around.
It's a whole hell of a lot more encompassing and square on what motivates
pols who'll rarely if ever visit the actual area to do their work pushing influence and resources to the right spot. If a faction believes so strongly that their transit plan is right and just, they better be able to articulate it in a way that makes the neck hairs of elected officials
with no skin in that game (and who probably will never set foot on a bus or trolley in their careers) stand at full attention. The forces that are getting GLX built worked those levers. So did the forces in and out of City Hall that got half-assed BRT stamped on the rapid transit spider map as "equal or better" on Washington St. Each one that did get built--the good, the bad, and the ugly--did have a political endgame that forced the build whereas everything else never got that far.
Ironclad control of the messaging seems to have been a key factor in the ones that did get built. With GLX that message control was STEP's rigorous discipline. With Silver Lie it was a whole lot of magic BRT marketing pixie dust being shouted on-point from the right bully pulpits. But in both cases the message was in full control FOR a build that didn't succumb to the same divide-and-conquer tricks.
I'm not seeing a real strong pulse behind improving Chelsea's transit if sides are already getting so factionalized that a no-build crosstown express bus they could feasibly roll out in 2-4 years in a tight funding environment if they meant it is somehow seen as in forever-and-ever direct competition with a theorized rapid transit ROW that is so far away from completing a prelim design that it couldn't be fast-tracked to appear in fewer than 15-20 years. For chrissakes, it's the same old trick all over again. They're playing branding games with it to force that false dichotomy. BRT/LRT on the Eastern Route isn't precluded or placed on a longer timetable by the "CT111" any more than the CT1's existence is holding up construction of the mythical Mass Ave. Subway. But we're goaded into fighting about it like they were in mortal combat with each other by the words "Silver" or "Urban Ring Phase X" heading the PowerPoint slide. And we collectively fall for it so easily every time it's sad.
All that matters is the aggregate improvements. "CT111"...that can meaningfully help today if it was a properly-calibrated express with enough Key Routes Improvements features. If they're proposing something so tarted up it takes 10 years and a wedge issue the size of the 28X to accomplish, there's as good a place as any to start the shakedown that stands pols' hairs on end. i.e...WTF is so complicated about an express bus on unmodified streets that takes more than 2 years to get right???
And then anybody who wants to dedicate their life's work to getting LRT built on the Eastern Route can push that along--and push the right buttons--with singular focus. Without feeling the least bit threatened by the "CT111", because there's nothing about an on-street express bus that compromises the need for a dedicated ROW or steals long-term resources away from it. It's only a dilemma for those who want to fall into the same messaging trap that so successfully divided and conquered the advocacy on so many other projects.
