Silver Line to Chelsea

[bakgwailo]

It's cheaper to build both now than try and build a second platform when the service gets extended. The initial extension was cheap and Everett desperately wants better transit- we may be posting extension construction photos concurrent with GLX.

So I have been thinking about this a little bit, but going over maps/aerials I guess I don't really see a good way/existing ROW to go into Everett? Would it be maybe the Community trail? Even that doesn't seem to get into the heart of Everett for the best catchment, or would the extension be envisioned as street running?

 

[FitchburgLine]

This is the best route design that I could make, assuming no overpasses or expensive bridge work was allowed. Gets a functioning urban ring up for less than $30m.
Red = Dedicated Busway
Orange = Center running on-street busway
Blue = Peak period curbside bus lane

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

Re: Chelsea to Sullivan bus service

You probably don't need a dedicated bus lane on the highway 99 bridge across the Mystic; there was a (TransitMatters?) video of the Everett upper Broadway bus lane with the video continuing all the way to Sullivan which seems to indicate that the light at Dexter St was (and maybe still is?) set up to give roughly half the time to traffic proceeding along Broadway, and half the time to traffic turning left from Dexter onto Broadway. When traffic along Broadway is proceeding, there are two lanes proceeding to two lanes, but Dexter only has one left turn lane, so during the time Dexter has a green, the road downstream from that light doesn't have vehicles feeding it at its full capacity, and traffic flows smoothly south of Dexter until it gets to Sullivan Sq.

Thus, adding a bus lane from Sweetser Circle to Dexter is probably sufficient.

I'd been assuming that the sort of service you are thinking of would be most direct via Beacham, but you're certainly right to point out that if we want to use dedicated bus lanes, that route to the north you're proposing is likely to be easier to get going.

If we're going to extend the South Station to Chelsea buses west of Market Basket, I think going to Malden Center would make more sense than Sullivan, because giant U shaped bus routes are pretty much never worth riding for their whole length; but having a second bus route along the busway going to Sullivan the way you're proposing is something I think would make a lot of sense. Also, having the Chelsea busway to Sullivan route be unaffected by the Chelsea Creek bridge is probably desirable.

I think there was concern that articulated buses might have trouble with angled grade crossings, and if that's really an issue, running 40' buses to Sullivan might be appropriate if that would help, or building a bridge for everyone including the buses to use at 2nd might make sense, in which case the bus might end up taking 3rd from the railroad ROW to the intersection of 2nd and 3rd.

 

[FitchburgLine]

The best reason to do it is that all of the infra except 2nd st can be used for other routes- the Everett buses need a faster route to Sullivan, so use that to piggyback a cheap urban ring route that also provides much better airport access.

 

[djohnstonb]

Now if there were only tracks and overhead wires along this route it would really be nice.

Won't this be faster? Green line is notoriously slow

 

[citylover94]

The green line is only slow because of close stop spacing on the surface branches and congestion in the central subway. The D line for example can move at a pretty good speed when its on its own branch for example Riverside to park takes about 1 hour which is the same as Boston College to park on the B line. Speed on the green line or any light rail is just based on stop spacing, line geometry, and line congestion. The GLX will be much faster than the rest of the green line as far as speed between stops is concerned as well.

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

Re: Green Line Speed

Green Line speed is also affected by traffic lights which have traditionally lacked transit signal priority.

I suspect a good chunk of the reason for the difference in speed between the 57 and the B branch is that the 57 has one farebox per 40' of vehicle length whereas the B branch has one farebox per 75' of vehicle length; once we get all door boarding, that will turn into one reader per 20' vs one reader per 25'. Also, the B branch vehicles all have stairs that slow boarding next to the fareboxes, but those should get phased out in 5-10 years.

 

[cybah]

This is the best route design that I could make, assuming no overpasses or expensive bridge work was allowed. Gets a functioning urban ring up for less than $30m.
Red = Dedicated Busway
Orange = Center running on-street busway
Blue = Peak period curbside bus lane

Only problem with your diagram. The plans in the Everett Transit Plan have the SL go up B'way to Malden Center, not go to Sullivan.

 

[tysmith95]

Only problem with your diagram. The plans in the Everett Transit Plan have the SL go up B'way to Malden Center, not go to Sullivan.

Interesting. Is there an existing right of way for a dedicated bus corridor to Malden or would it have to be put onto city streets?

 

[Equilibria]

Interesting. Is there an existing right of way for a dedicated bus corridor to Malden or would it have to be put onto city streets?

I haven't seen those plans, but I assume they'd parallel the East Coast Greenway.

 

[Arlington]

Everett's plan is all street-running, and is about consolidating service onto improved corridors:
https://www.massdot.state.ma.us/Portals/17/docs/Everett/FinalReportEnglish.pdf

Looking at the plan, Everett wants bus lanes on both upper and lower Broadway, and to me that suggests:

1) SLG can go both "out" Broadway through Everett to Malden (as a radial route) and "in" Broadway to Sullivan (as a ring route). Even if we run out of "Silver" buses, I'd suggest that existing routes (like the 112) could use the SLG busway.

2) Under the Everett Plan, FitchburgLine's routing (in image) does double duty, both for a ring Silver Line (SS-Airport-Chelsea-Everett-Sullivan) and for Everett's vision for Bus 104, 107 & 110 (see pdf, above)

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

I haven't seen those plans, but I assume they'd parallel the East Coast Greenway.

The East Coast Greenway / Northern Strand Community trail route from Sweetser Circle to near Malden Center is pretty mediocre as a potential transit corridor in that there is very little to the west of it. IIRC Jarrett Walker recommends a grid of bus service with parallel routes spaced 3/4 mile apart. If that means people will walk up to 3/8 mile to a street with bus service, almost everything within walking distance of the Northern Strand Community trail there is also within walking distance of Main St, and if the buses just run on Main St, then there's the nice bonus feature that the homes within 3/8 mile or so to the east of Main St can also walk to that bus route. And we already have the Orange Line nearby for faster, longer distance trips.

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

Looking at the plan, Everett wants bus lanes on both upper and lower Broadway

Is there any good reason Everett's part of Main St doesn't have an upper Broadway style bus lane in the mornings at this point? Was Main St left out of the plan because people were assuming any bus lane was going to be far more politically difficult than upper Broadway turned out to be such that there was an assumption that we should only try for a limited number of bus lanes?

1) SLG can go both "out" Broadway through Everett to Malden (as a radial route) and "in" Broadway to Sullivan (as a ring route). Even if we run out of "Silver" buses, I'd suggest that existing routes (like the 112) could use the SLG busway.

Which part of 112 are we discussing?

I'd be happy to see every South Station to Chelsea bus with silver paint continue along Everett St, Chelsea St, and Ferry St to Malden Center, but it seems that folks here are focused on the 2nd St alternative. (And the Everett St grade crossing might be slightly angled and maybe that interacts poorly with an articulated bus.)

 

[Arlington]

Is there any good reason Everett's part of Main St doesn't have an upper Broadway style bus lane in the mornings at this point? Was Main St left out of the plan because people were assuming any bus lane was going to be far more politically difficult than upper Broadway turned out to be such that there was an assumption that we should only try for a limited number of bus lanes?

Reading the plan, they seem to have chosen different themes for the different corridors, as if each would be a standalone test of different approaches to improving service:

Broadway= bus lanes + stop consolidation
Main St = route consolidation (Key Bus-ificiation) + Medford & Malden cooperation

At this point, I'd guess lower Broadway is second on Everett's list, so the "good reason" why Main Street doesn't have a bus lane would be (1) Lower Broadway is in the plan and will get one next and (2) Main St needs a plan revision and seems to need to wait while they sort out Lower Broadway and whatever the SLG impacts are.

Meanwhile on Main St, the plan proposes consolidating Buses 99, 105 & 106 into a single route 107 running every 10 minutes (Malden to Sullivan via Main & Lower Broadway)

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

With lower Broadway, there seems to be the challenge that there's no parking lane along the inbound side of the street to reallocate to a bus lane the way there is on Upper Broadway and Main St (and the parts of Ferry St and Chelsea St that 110 uses). I'm not convinced there's really any requirement to avoid using the obvious space for a bus lane on Main St / Ferry St / Chelsea St until after we figure out how to deal with lower Broadway, unless it turns out that the parking lanes on some of those streets aren't really wide enough to become bus lanes.

A Main St bus lane would obviously be most effective for route 99 riders if Malden joined the party too, but if Everett would just start having a bus lane along their part of Main St, maybe that would be a better demonstration to Malden that they should join in on their part of Main St than just talking about it.

Has there been any serious effort to move bus stops from near side to far side on upper Broadway? With the Key Bus Route transit signal priority efforts, the Key Bus Route Improvement Program already tried to do that in the cases where that was easier, but I don't think the T has ever made much of an effort to move near side stops to the far side of intersections outside of the Key Bus Route Improvement Program.

 

[chmeeee]

With Lower Broadway, the solution is really to take the space from the off-peak direction, but that's much more infrastructure intensive to make it safe and operable. That said, I think the reconstruction plans funded by Wynn are taking some of that into account, but I have nothing to back that up.

 

[FitchburgLine]

Regarding MassDOT's plan to extend to Malden Center, I think it's a worse route than mine, so I wrote a blog post to explain why: https://tedstransporttakes.wordpress.com/2017/12/31/silver-line-gateway-phase-ii/

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

Re: lower Broadway in Everett

With Lower Broadway, the solution is really to take the space from the off-peak direction, but that's much more infrastructure intensive to make it safe and operable.

I think there are several options that might have the potential to work:

• Congestion toll on the highway 99 bridge across the Mystic
• Widen the street (difficult just north of Bowdoin St, where taking the parking on the east side of the street instead might make sense; and perhaps not ideal for pedestrians crossing Broadway)
• Eliminate a northbound travel lane along part of lower Broadway; this might be especially likely to work north of Beecham, but even everything north of Dexter might work if half the afternoon traffic coming across the Mystic learns to take Dexter to Robin to Beacham.
• Reversible lane on lower Broadway
• Reallocate the right hand southbound lane north of Beacham to be bus only; this would have the unfortunate side effect of pushing the single occupancy vehicle storage queue back toward Sweetser Circle which might be a fatal flaw with this approach, but the number of vehicles flowing south across the Mystic from the light at the Dexter / Broadway intersection probably wouldn't change much from what it is now, and Broadway from Beacham to Dexter with two lanes and barely more than one lane feeding it would probably flow rather freely.

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

Regarding MassDOT's plan to extend to Malden Center, I think it's a worse route than mine, so I wrote a blog post to explain why: https://tedstransporttakes.wordpress.com/2017/12/31/silver-line-gateway-phase-ii/

I think it might be appropriate to think of Chelsea to Cambridge via Sullivan as radial, in the sense that it is roughly a straight line from a largely residential area to an employment center.

I think the route you're proposing makes sense as long as it doesn't cross Chelsea Creek and it becomes a second route along the busway instead of an extension of the initial busway route. The new route could be Eastern Ave to Sullivan, or it could possibly continue past Sullivan into Cambridge to connect to the Red Line.

If the casino wants good bus service to the airport, a route via Beacham and Meridian may make sense, although congestion on Beacham probably makes that challenging, and finding space for a bus lane on parts of Beacham is probably hard, so making that work would probably require a congestion toll on the highway 99 bridge across the Mystic. Given traffic congestion and the movable Chelsea Creek bridge, though, a ferry might also work. On the other hand, an airport to casino bus stopping at each terminal and terminating at the casino so that it can pull all the way into the casino facility would probably work best for folks dealing with luggage. And if the casino runs their own dedicated airport shuttle bus that makes limited or no intermediate stops, they could possibly also use Beacham when it isn't congested, and 2nd to Broadway in the morning if the casino's private airport shuttle ends up being allowed to use the Broadway bus lane.

 

[JeffDowntown]

If the casino wants good bus service to the airport, a route via Beacham and Meridian may make sense, although congestion on Beacham probably makes that challenging, and finding space for a bus lane on parts of Beacham is probably hard, so making that work would probably require a congestion toll on the highway 99 bridge across the Mystic. Given traffic congestion and the movable Chelsea Creek bridge, though, a ferry might also work. On the other hand, an airport to casino bus stopping at each terminal and terminating at the casino so that it can pull all the way into the casino facility would probably work best for folks dealing with luggage. And if the casino runs their own dedicated airport shuttle bus that makes limited or no intermediate stops, they could possibly also use Beacham when it isn't congested, and 2nd to Broadway in the morning if the casino's private airport shuttle ends up being allowed to use the Broadway bus lane.

Isn't the casino going to provide airport service via its fleet of private water shuttles? I thought the shuttle loop was Wynn Casino; Long Wharf; Commonwealth Pier (Seaport); Logan Water Taxi Pier; Wynn Casino.