Waltham Transit & Connectivity

[Smuttynose]

On paper, Waltham seems like the perfect suburb. From an urbanist perspective, it has a lot going for it:

1.) Vibrant-ish and fairly dense Downtown/Waterfront (there is a lot of room for improvement, but it's one of the best of the 'burbs)

2.) Two commuter rail stations and a 12-minute train ride to Cambridge and 18-minute ride to Downtown Boston

3.) Two decent-sized universities (Bentley and Brandeis)

4.) A huge office/tech/commercial presence off 128 (that is pretty concentrated, albeit in a shitty suburban unwalkable way)

5.) Pretty good population density/housing diversity (for a suburb)

6.) Some new more dense infill development (but not enough)

But in practice, Waltham feels like Burlington but just with worse traffic and a very distant downtown. The 128 Office area is completely bypassed by the commuter rail line and is very disconnected from the Downtown; despite being located relatively close geographically, there are few corridors linking the two areas and those roads are often traffic-clogged. Downtown has a lot of promise but there's so many underutilized properties...

The mayor infamously previously proposed a monorail:

Anybody have any more semi-reasonable ideas to improve the transit/connectivity situation here? I question whether just adding more busses between 128 and Downtown will really make a significant dent in it because they get stuck in a lot of traffic on the relatively short route there.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

The Route 128 multimodal superstation on the Fitchburg Line at the Route 20 interchange is a crucial get for tying the room together. Thankfully the T's Rail Vision placemarks it so it's got considerable strategic advocacy.

• It would hub last-mile shuttle transportation to all of the office parks between Lexington and Burlington
• It would stimulate much more vibrant TOD along 128 because those parks can now be accessed car-free from the shuttles.
• It would provide an ideal turnback spot for :15 bi-directional Urban Rail service on the Fitchburg Line between Boston and Weston/128. . .
• . . .which would in turn would de-isolate Downtown from good transit and take a ton of Downtown cars off the road.
• It would link transit to recreational opportunities like the adjacent Mass Central Rail Trail, as improvement to quality-of-life for the city
  

 

[TheRatmeister]

In terms of connectivity across Waltham I would say there exists a very good route, at least as far as Watertown Sq, already. The former Watertown branch is still mostly intact and could be reused for some type of rail line. There's a few parking lots where you'd probably need some very small C&C bits, and Waltham Station would probably need to be underground, but apart from that everything could be done at or just below grade. but Mode choice could be debated endlessly, but if you wanted to connect with a Mt Auburn St median tramway then low-floor light rail probably makes the most sense, if you want to continue into Boston via Brighton then an extension of the Blue Line is probably best.

In terms of improving connectivity to the 128 offices, as F-Line pointed out the planned CR station would go a long way. Adding HOV lanes in this area would take things a step further, and if we're being crazy then perhaps some kind of APM down the median could work, but fully enclosing the stations to make them actually bearable and building long pedestrian walkways to the actual office areas would get pretty costly pretty fast. Maybe that can just be left to the companies to fund if they really want it.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

In terms of connectivity across Waltham I would say there exists a very good route, at least as far as Watertown Sq, already. The former Watertown branch is still mostly intact and could be reused for some type of rail line. There's a few parking lots where you'd probably need some very small C&C bits, and Waltham Station would probably need to be underground, but apart from that everything could be done at or just below grade. but Mode choice could be debated endlessly, but if you wanted to connect with a Mt Auburn St median tramway then low-floor light rail probably makes the most sense, if you want to continue into Boston via Brighton then an extension of the Blue Line is probably best.

Most of the Watertown Branch's west and central sections have lapsed property lines, so re-use is going to be extremely difficult. While most of it is not built over (though that's changing!), you can see on Google maps view closeups that...especially east of River St...the property lines are subdivided lots of times. Still in linear strips, which is why you mainly only see parking lots...but reverted to abutters it is. Pan Am simply didn't give a crap about preservation when it abandoned those sections in stages from the 80's to the early-2000's. It's why you haven't seen any attempts at a rail trail running west of Downtown Watertown despite the obvious utility of stringing together even patchwork segments amid the city density...the land ownership situation is way too much of a mess to make a go of it. That's going to seriously upend any attempts at a transit line, even if the encroachment (and threat of more of the same as areas along the ROW densify) were manageable.

The grade crossings were also all-world bad with poor angles all around. It would be borderline unusable for surface LRT, similar to how the Saugus Branch has too many unusably angled crossings. I suppose if you're shooting for a megaproject like BLX-West it could serve up a relatively straightforward cut-and-cover subway ROW, but you definitely aren't running something attached to the Green Line out that way. The landbanked Cambridge-Arsenal segment in Watertown is the only one crossing-few and crossing-straightforward enough to make a go of a GLX traffic management-wise.

 

[Delvin4519]

View attachment 51266

On paper, Waltham seems like the perfect suburb. From an urbanist perspective, it has a lot going for it:

1.) Vibrant-ish and fairly dense Downtown/Waterfront (there is a lot of room for improvement, but it's one of the best of the 'burbs)

2.) Two commuter rail stations and a 12-minute train ride to Cambridge and 18-minute ride to Downtown Boston

3.) Two decent-sized universities (Bentley and Brandeis)

4.) A huge office/tech/commercial presence off 128 (that is pretty concentrated, albeit in a shitty suburban unwalkable way)

5.) Pretty good population density/housing diversity (for a suburb)

6.) Some new more dense infill development (but not enough)

But in practice, Waltham feels like Burlington but just with worse traffic and a very distant downtown. The 128 Office area is completely bypassed by the commuter rail line and is very disconnected from the Downtown; despite being located relatively close geographically, there are few corridors linking the two areas and those roads are often traffic-clogged. Downtown has a lot of promise but there's so many underutilized properties...

The mayor infamously previously proposed a monorail:

Anybody have any more semi-reasonable ideas to improve the transit/connectivity situation here? I question whether just adding more busses between 128 and Downtown will really make a significant dent in it because they get stuck in a lot of traffic on the relatively short route there.

Forgot to also add that Waltham also is a bus terminal with dozens of bus routes all converging within the Waltham commuter rail station.

Yet the Waltham bus terminal is dysfunctional and doesn't work since there's no rapid transit at Waltham Terminal. Much of Waltham's bus routes since 1972 have been super-extended to Cambridge and Downtown in order for the last mile shares to hit the rapid transit and color change transfers downtown. Having all of Waltham Terminal's bus routes super-extended to Cambridge & downtown kills headways and reliability, and results in unreliable bunched service on the 70 and a bunch of buses from Waltham stuck in rush hour traffic on the Mass Pike.

Pre-COVID, all of the 55x routes ran express from West Newton and Newton Corner all the way to downtown, and the 61/70 was just one giant hack on top of a hack on top of a hack job as the 70A running 14 miles (22km) nonstop with no layovers and uncoordinated schedules. It was literally 3 bus routes stacked on top of each other in a giant hudge pudge for 47 years between 1972 and 2019.

Since COVID the T has cut back dramatically on the 55x routes, and BNRD is going to slash and cut back Waltham's bus network even more (yikes). The 70 bus is also still 2 bus routes mashed on top of each other running through 10 miles of traffic, when the route should really be 2 separate segments (Waltham - Watertown and Watertown - Cambridge). The main issues plaguing Waltham's bus system is none of the major bus terminals have a rapid transit anchor hookup, and there's a lack of bus yards within metro west to run Waltham's bus terminal out from.

Waltham's bus system would probably remain broken if neither the Waltham, Watertown, or Newton Corner terminals have a rapid transit hookup. Without it, most of Waltham would be inaccessible given how fare integration works with CR-subway transfers and bus-bus-subway-bus transfers. Even if Newton Corner were to have a rapid transit anchor, there would still be 4 or 5 routes from the 55x series duplicating, suggesting that a hypothectical Newton Corner line would still need a westward extension to W. Newton or Auburndale.

Even then, a rapid transit hookup to hit any of the major 3 western bus terminals (Waltham/Watertown/Newton Corner) is very difficult, since there aren't any stub-ended subway lines or ready-to-use ROWs west of Boston close by. The existing Fitchburg Commuter Rail to Waltham goes via Belmont & Waverley, which crosses through the suburban sprawl of Belmont and fails to hit where all the buses to Waltham go: the urban density of Watertown Square and Newton Corner. Like with Lynn, Lynn's buses go to Wonderland via Revere's coastal density and not the CR's empty swamp between Lynn and Chelsea. At least with fixing Lynn Terminal and fixing Lynn's bus network, the Blue Line at Wonderland is only 4 miles (7km) away with mostly empty ROWs and swamps. Waltham is a lot more tricker.

 

[TheRatmeister]

Most of the Watertown Branch's west and central sections have lapsed property lines, so re-use is going to be extremely difficult. While most of it is not built over (though that's changing!), you can see on Google maps view closeups that...especially east of River St...the property lines are subdivided lots of times. Still in linear strips, which is why you mainly only see parking lots...but reverted to abutters it is. Pan Am simply didn't give a crap about preservation when it abandoned those sections in stages from the 80's to the early-2000's. It's why you haven't seen any attempts at a rail trail running west of Downtown Watertown despite the obvious utility of stringing together even patchwork segments amid the city density...the land ownership situation is way too much of a mess to make a go of it. That's going to seriously upend any attempts at a transit line, even if the encroachment (and threat of more of the same as areas along the ROW densify) were manageable.

The grade crossings were also all-world bad with poor angles all around. It would be borderline unusable for surface LRT, similar to how the Saugus Branch has too many unusably angled crossings. I suppose if you're shooting for a megaproject like BLX-West it could serve up a relatively straightforward cut-and-cover subway ROW, but you definitely aren't running something attached to the Green Line out that way. The landbanked Cambridge-Arsenal segment in Watertown is the only one crossing-few and crossing-straightforward enough to make a go of a GLX traffic management-wise.

Having a look on the property ownership map it's only about 20 landowners for the whole stretch from Waltham Station to Watertown Sq. For almost 3 miles of ROW I don't think that's really that bad honestly. If you did encounter a couple really stubborn land owners or a couple crossings that are harder/more expensive to eliminate you could always just go around via Pleasant St if the initial build is LRT.

 

[fatnoah]

Many moons ago, I had a car-free commutes from Arlington and downtown Boston to the Rt 128 corridor in Waltham. Both of those commutes worked surprisingly well due to one key element that's missing now, which is the connection from Waltham Center to the Rt 128 area.

Getting to the Center from Arlington required a 77 -> 73 -> 70 trip that wasn't as bad as it sounds, especially if one caught one of the 73 through trips from North Cambridge to Watertown Square. When I was feeling like a high roller, 77 -> CR @ Porter -> Waltham was faster.

Similarly, CR from downtown and the various 5XX buses worked reasonably well. CR was fast, and 5XX was against the flow of rush hour so it was pretty fast in the morning and mostly so at night. The number of routes meant I didn't have to wait too long for a bus that, via one route or another, would end up downtown. As a bonus, I was often the only rider on one of the buses, so I got to know the driver and I was cool with him stopping to grab a lottery ticket, and he once waited on his last run for me to grab some groceries. Regarding CR, there was a cadre of about 15 riders that made a cross-platform change at North Station from an inbound Beverly train to the outbound Fitchburg. If the Beverly train was late, the conductor would hold the outbound to wait for it.

NOTE: There was a wildcard, which was the 170 bus that went from Dudley -> Back Bay -> Waltham Center -> Bear Hill Road -> (Bedford?). There were two outbound runs and one inbound at night. That route had about 15 regular riders. Outbound kept pretty good time, but inbound had a 30 minute window for when it would get to Bear Hill Road and only got worse from there. Roughly 5-10 minutes of each trip was also wasted informing would be riders that it was the 170 and not the 70.

What made all of this work was the relatively shortlived Citibus service that ran from Waltham Center to the Rt 128 business area. The shuttle I road was generally full, with a fairly even rate of departure across the entire route. (Fare was $1, IIRC). The run I took was scheduled to depart 5 minutes after the outbound Fitchburg train, and the driver would wait for a delayed train.

 

[jklo]

What made all of this work was the relatively shortlived Citibus service that ran from Waltham Center to the Rt 128 business area. The shuttle I road was generally full, with a fairly even rate of departure across the entire route. (Fare was $1, IIRC). The run I took was scheduled to depart 5 minutes after the outbound Fitchburg train, and the driver would wait for a delayed train.

Kind of surprisingly, the 128 Business Council busses still seem to be running.

 

[Stlin]

Kind of surprisingly, the 128 Business Council busses still seem to be running.

Not for nothing, but Monica Tibbits Nutt was executive director there when she was first tapped for the FMCB role in 2015; she stayed there until tapped for undersecretary. It's actually a pretty important "transit system" in its own right, because it's focused on that last mile connection from Alewife/Waltham Center/Needham. I suspect the member companies fund it as a way to attract and retain their employees who live in camberville etc.

 

[poppycot]

How much would it realistically cost to wire up the 10ish miles of track from Waltham to North Station and buy a few trains to run every 15-20 minutes in addition to the full Fitchburg Line service? Add a couple new stations at Beaver St and 128. Seems like a no-brainer

 

[RandomWalk]

I worked in the Waltham Woods office park years ago and the 128BC shuttle was useful, but frequency didn’t make me totally comfortable with being car-free at the time. It was pre-pandemic, so hybrid wasn’t an option the company would entertain.

I was thankful when the company ended up relocating closer to Waverly.

 

[mjbellantoni]

I wonder how, historically, a city as large as Waltham missed out on more transit connections. Did it never have a streetcar network? Is it that it relied on the Fitchburg Main and the Watertown Branch, and when passenger service on those went away, nothing replaced them?

There used to be a bus that connected Waverley Square to Waltham Center. I'm not sure what happened to that. (I believe the Bus Network Redesign was slated to introduce a route connecting Waltham, Belmont, and Arlington Centers.)

A fantasy transit pitch is to continue the GLX down the Fitchburg Main and Watertown Branch to Waltham Center, and, heck, why not just scoot out to 128 while we're at it? (I'll just throw in the Red Line to Lexington, too, while I have your attention.)

 

[michaelw37]

Even then, a rapid transit hookup to hit any of the major 3 western bus terminals (Waltham/Watertown/Newton Corner) is very difficult, since there aren't any stub-ended subway lines or ready-to-use ROWs west of Boston close by. The existing Fitchburg Commuter Rail to Waltham goes via Belmont & Waverley, which crosses through the suburban sprawl of Belmont and fails to hit where all the buses to Waltham go: the urban density of Watertown Square and Newton Corner. Like with Lynn, Lynn's buses go to Wonderland via Revere's coastal density and not the CR's empty swamp between Lynn and Chelsea. At least with fixing Lynn Terminal and fixing Lynn's bus network, the Blue Line at Wonderland is only 4 miles (7km) away with mostly empty ROWs and swamps. Waltham is a lot more tricker.

The Lynn counterpoint is great because in the long run, the fix for Waltham is the same as it is for Lynn - a Blue Line extension. Though obviously it is a more daunting and longer-term prospect.

I have been working on crayoning this and I appreciate your comment because I've been stuck on whether to get from Boston Landing (assume the normal Storrow-Kenmore-B&A route to West Station as Phase 1) to Watertown Square via the Arsenal or Newton Corner. I had already been looking at the BNRD map to try to find an answer, and your flagging of Waltham Center, Watertown Center, and Newton Corner as the three main bus hubs for this part of the region sealed the deal: I think a BLX to Watertown should go via the B&A to Newton Corner rather than trying to swing over the Charles to Arsenal and then under either N. Beacon or Arsenal Street to Watertown Square. Yes, the Arsenal is a bigtime development, but a transit hookup via GLX on the Watertown Branch will get built much sooner than BLX in any long-range phasing plan and should be sufficient service in the long run.

A general principle that I have landed on as a longtime reader of this forum and as I try my hand at crayoning: Serving major bus hubs is relatively underrated and serving major brownfield redevelopments is relatively overrated in crayoning. If you can do both, that is ideal, but bus hubs should typically win out.

Anyway, to bring it back to the thread topic, you will see the BLX on my map below does not go past Watertown. I do plan to bring it out to Waltham in a later phase. But exactly for the reasons you describe in your post, a BLX that hits both Newton Corner and Watertown Center allows for much more frequent and reliable bus connections to Waltham Terminal. When combined with 15-min EMUs on the inner Fitchburg Line, I think that gets you at least a couple of decades of growth before you have to pull the trigger on the elevated down the Pleasant Street corridor (I'm somewhat hopeful this can be done mostly off the street itself through the giant parking lots. The BLX would then enable densifying them.)

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

How much would it realistically cost to wire up the 10ish miles of track from Waltham to North Station and buy a few trains to run every 15-20 minutes in addition to the full Fitchburg Line service? Add a couple new stations at Beaver St and 128. Seems like a no-brainer

If the terminal district had its own substation you could probably chain both Weston/128 and Reading off of it. Unfortunately the Eastern Route's "discontinuous electrification" plan with BEMU's leaves everything inbound of Revere un-wired, so that greatly complicates getting any easy layup on wiring the inner Fitchburg. You would probably be able to do :20-:25 turns just on diesel push-pull if the Route 128 station were set up with a turnback and all of the existing stops were raised to full-high platforms, so improvements can certainly come quick if they put their minds to it.

It's not a clearance route, so the stations themselves are fairly easy mods. You'd need to have full-highs on all of them to activate the automatic doors and speed boarding for :15 service.

• Porter - Raise platforms, widen east tip to MAB-regulation 12 ft. for island platforms (it's a little too narrow to be up-to-spec), extend a little bit towards Beacon St.
• Belmont - Enact stalled rebuild plans (was in partial design) for placing full-highs on tangent section east of the station building, ADA the egresses.
• Waverley - Revisit stalled rebuild plans (was in partial design) for raising to full-highs, extending platforms, and providing vertical circulation. The previous stab at design was very flawed for requiring an absurd number of switchback ramps to climb out of the pit. Elevators are definitely the way to go here, and probably a lot less structurally invasive than the Rube Goldberg-esque switchbacks plan.
• Waltham - Move the inbound platform (currently short and sandwiched between Elm St. and Moody St.) west of Moody opposite the outbound platform, raise outbound platform and slightly lengthen, double-track. Requires converting the angled parking next to the outbound track into parallel parking to fit in the double-track extension, installing an engineer-controlled DTMF switch on the Moody St. crossing equipment so the gates aren't down while trains are at a station stop, and installing queue-dump signaling on the area traffic lights to better clear the crossings.
• Brandeis - Raise in-place. DTMF signal for the South St. crossing.
• Route 128 - Enact the studied infill plan, and close Kendal Green station in favor of the infill. Island platform preferred because it's a short-turn terminus, and a small stretch of pocket track west of the station can serve as a layover yard for the :15 service. Per the study, driveway access to both the Route 20 and Route 117 sides is going to be required for staging the business shuttle buses.

After that you can consider additional infills, but it really needs to be after the service is initiated and has matured. TransitMatters proposed infills at Brickbottom, Union Sq., Alewife, and Warrendale/Clematis Brook. All except Warrendale are bad ideas. Brickbottom has no space, so the land acquisition and embankment/retaining wall costs are much too high for it to be viable. It's also going to painfully lengthen the terminal district slow zone at detriment to all schedules. Union requires eminent domain of 20 ft. strips of up to 5 parcels of land being targeted for dense redevelopment. If that eminent domain doesn't happen right now while the parcels are crud industrial and parking lots the post-redev cost and mitigations are going to be way too expensive for it to be viable. It's also not necessary when GLX puts Union only 3 stops from North Station. Alewife has been studied multiple times before. The last ridership analysis in 2003, predicated on all the Cambridgepark TOD coming to full fruition, projected only 60 daily riders on current Fitchburg schedules. That's beyond terrible, and scaled up to :15 service would still be a loss leader on the system. The Fitchburg Line is simply too far a walk from the Red Line platforms to be a viable transfer point when much better-integrated Porter is the next stop, and the number of required switchback ramps to get up to the parkway lengthens the walkshed greatly for much of the rest of the neighborhood. Warrendale is not bad...it's walking distance to Bentley U. and has minor bus access...but it's a modest-enough ridership prospect that you'd really want to see how :15 service affects the Waltham bus hub for a few years before implementing.

There's also possibility of reanimating the pre-1978 Beaver Brook stop beneath Main St. as a spacer between Warrendale and Waltham Center, which TransitMatters did not propose. That would connect to the frequent-service 70 bus and handle a dense walkshed. Probably slightly higher (though comparable) overall ridership to Warrendale. But that is likewise one that you wouldn't implement right away until Waltham hub has a solid several years of transformation from the :15 service and its coattails on bus ridership. There likewise was another MBTA-era stop (until 1965) at Riverview at Prospect St./Riverview Cemetery halfway between Waltham Center and Brandeis. That one's probably a marginal prospect, however. You can consider it after Warrendale and/or Beaver Brook only if the ridership at those infills tallies up on the hot side, but it's probably not necessary.

 

[Delvin4519]

The Lynn counterpoint is great because in the long run, the fix for Waltham is the same as it is for Lynn - a Blue Line extension. Though obviously it is a more daunting and longer-term prospect.

I have been working on crayoning this and I appreciate your comment because I've been stuck on whether to get from Boston Landing (assume the normal Storrow-Kenmore-B&A route to West Station as Phase 1) to Watertown Square via the Arsenal or Newton Corner. I had already been looking at the BNRD map to try to find an answer, and your flagging of Waltham Center, Watertown Center, and Newton Corner as the three main bus hubs for this part of the region sealed the deal: I think a BLX to Watertown should go via the B&A to Newton Corner rather than trying to swing over the Charles to Arsenal and then under either N. Beacon or Arsenal Street to Watertown Square. Yes, the Arsenal is a bigtime development, but a transit hookup via GLX on the Watertown Branch will get built much sooner than BLX in any long-range phasing plan and should be sufficient service in the long run.

A general principle that I have landed on as a longtime reader of this forum and as I try my hand at crayoning: Serving major bus hubs is relatively underrated and serving major brownfield redevelopments is relatively overrated in crayoning. If you can do both, that is ideal, but bus hubs should typically win out.

Yes, bus hubs are quite underrated in the fantasy crayon drawing. There's dozens of posts from F-Line crtiticizing those who make claims that "Why do we need BLX Lynn if we could ugh just electrify the CR at 7.5 min freqs and plop down a [zombie wonderland] infill"?

If transit expansions are essentially almost limited to historical railway ROWs because of punitive, expensive TBM tunneling costs, narrow streets, and underground street utilities, then the bus hubs becomes extra, extra important to provide last mile connections to neighborhoods that are forever too far from existing railway ROWs (Think Brighton Center with it's 1.2km walk to get to the nearest railway ROW at Brighton Depot station). This also means a dysfunctional, broken bus terminal means that the last mile shares are deprived of their bus headways if all the bus routes get super-extended to make distended runs to hit those color change transfers (Waltham-Watertown-Cambridge, Waltham-Newton Corner-DTX, Roslindale-Forest Hills, Nubian-RX-Ruggles, and Lynn-Wonderland).

Much of the Route 128 developments are too far from the Lexington Branch RR or the Fitchburg/Central Mass RR, and so these Route 128 developments should desire functional bus terminals at Waltham Center and Arlington Heights (plus their respective prerequsites) to provide the last mile connections at reasonable frequencies/reliability.

100% agree with sending HRT to Newton Corner instead of Arsenal Yards. Fixing broken bus terminals is quite underrated on the forum, plus the fact that the historical Watertown Branch RR would already serve Arsenal Yards.

This fantasy unrealistic map shows all potentially useful bus terminals in the NW quadrant of town, and the 3 terminals in the west I flag are easily noticeable here.

A fantasy transit pitch is to continue the GLX down the Fitchburg Main and Watertown Branch to Waltham Center, and, heck, why not just scoot out to 128 while we're at it? (I'll just throw in the Red Line to Lexington, too, while I have your attention.)

RLX just needs to hit Arlington Center and Arlington Heights to make the bus terminals at those 2 stations functional again for last mile shares to 128. (with an extra infill or so, you can cut the 77 from A-Heights back to A-Center and redistribute bus headways to other underserved bus routes).

Past Arlington Heights there's literally only a single bus route the rest of the way to 128 (the 62/76 route) and the rest of the area is greenfield and brownfield developments that would never justify 3 minute headways. 3 minute headways is overkill past A-Heights. The MBTA's market analysis marks the entire area within Lexington as only justifying hourly service, with a few parcels as 30 min service at Lexington Center. The 128 developments at Waltham are ideally served by bringing rapid transit to fix the dysfunctional Waltham Center bus terminal, and running last mile shares from there. P & R near the CR at 128 could also be used as an interim measure for Fitchburg regional rail, and can also be used to run last mile shares out from there.

 

[Charlie_mta]

What amazes me is that there is no MBTA bus line on Trapelo Road west of Waverly Sq. That route would serve McClean's Hospital and the US Army Corp of Engineers office, plus residential areas west of there. It's a major hole in the bus network.

 

[The EGE]

I wonder how, historically, a city as large as Waltham missed out on more transit connections. Did it never have a streetcar network? Is it that it relied on the Fitchburg Main and the Watertown Branch, and when passenger service on those went away, nothing replaced them?

There used to be a bus that connected Waverley Square to Waltham Center. I'm not sure what happened to that. (I believe the Bus Network Redesign was slated to introduce a route connecting Waltham, Belmont, and Arlington Centers.)

A fantasy transit pitch is to continue the GLX down the Fitchburg Main and Watertown Branch to Waltham Center, and, heck, why not just scoot out to 128 while we're at it? (I'll just throw in the Red Line to Lexington, too, while I have your attention.)

Waltham did have a streetcar network operated by the Middlesex and Boston Street Railway:

Like most small city networks, it didn't last long; it was entirely replaced by buses by 1930. The M&B continued operating local bus service until 1972, when the MBTA took over the remaining lines. The network was focused on the residential and industrial areas present in the early 20th century, which is very different from today's office parks.

I've never been able to figure out why Waltham has scarcely appeared in official rapid transit proposals. It's the same radius from downtown as Lynn and Quincy (albeit a bit smaller), has always had a dense core, and has a direct right-of-way to Boston. A Red Line spur was proposed in the 1947 Coolidge Commission final report (but not the 1945 report with the famous map) but not in any other plan I know of. I'm not sure if there was just never as strong a commuting presence from Waltham to Boston, or if the expectation was that Riverside would adequately serve Waltham, or what.

What amazes me is that there is no MBTA bus line on Trapelo Road west of Waverly Sq. That route would serve McClean's Hospital and the US Army Corp of Engineers office, plus residential areas west of there. It's a major hole in the bus network.

Some history: It had one of the shortest-lived streetcar lines in the state: the Concord and Boston, operated only from 1901 to 1905 by an M&B predecessor. Not until 1928, when the Metropolitan State Hospital was built, did the Metropolitan Coach Company start a Waverley–State Hospital bus route. It was extended to the County Sanatorium in 1932. A further extension to Lexington Street opened in 1972 to replace part of a discontinued M&B route. It was discontinued without replacement in 1979. From 2009 to 2020, a few route 554 trips operated on Trapelo between Forest and Waverley Square.

Waverley Oaks Street is also a bit of a gap given the number of businesses there. It hasn't been served since 1979 when a previous alternate routing of the 521 (now the 554) was discontinued.

If we ever do get regional rail service on the inner Fitchburg, the whole Belmont-Waltham-Lexington triangle seems a good candidate for better bus service. While it's not the densest area, there are some decent-sized pockets of jobs and homes. The calculus for bus frequency changes massively when you can can connect to frequent rail on the Fitchburg Line rather than running extended routes to the Red Line or downtown.

 

[Charlie_mta]

Waltham did have a streetcar network operated by the Middlesex and Boston Street Railway:
View attachment 51305

Like most small city networks, it didn't last long; it was entirely replaced by buses by 1930. The M&B continued operating local bus service until 1972, when the MBTA took over the remaining lines. The network was focused on the residential and industrial areas present in the early 20th century, which is very different from today's office parks.

I've never been able to figure out why Waltham has scarcely appeared in official rapid transit proposals. It's the same radius from downtown as Lynn and Quincy (albeit a bit smaller), has always had a dense core, and has a direct right-of-way to Boston. A Red Line spur was proposed in the 1947 Coolidge Commission final report (but not the 1945 report with the famous map) but not in any other plan I know of. I'm not sure if there was just never as strong a commuting presence from Waltham to Boston, or if the expectation was that Riverside would adequately serve Waltham, or what.

Some history: It had one of the shortest-lived streetcar lines in the state: the Concord and Boston, operated only from 1901 to 1905 by an M&B predecessor. Not until 1928, when the Metropolitan State Hospital was built, did the Metropolitan Coach Company start a Waverley–State Hospital bus route. It was extended to the County Sanatorium in 1932. A further extension to Lexington Street opened in 1972 to replace part of a discontinued M&B route. It was discontinued without replacement in 1979. From 2009 to 2020, a few route 554 trips operated on Trapelo between Forest and Waverley Square.

Waverley Oaks Street is also a bit of a gap given the number of businesses there. It hasn't been served since 1979 when a previous alternate routing of the 521 (now the 554) was discontinued.

If we ever do get regional rail service on the inner Fitchburg, the whole Belmont-Waltham-Lexington triangle seems a good candidate for better bus service. While it's not the densest area, there are some decent-sized pockets of jobs and homes. The calculus for bus frequency changes massively when you can can connect to frequent rail on the Fitchburg Line rather than running extended routes to the Red Line or downtown.

I worked at the US Army Corps on Trapelo Road during the summers while going to college in the early 1970s, but I had to take a privately run shuttle bus to get from the 73 bus at its Waverly Oaks terminus up to the Army Corps office. That private bus shuttle also served McClean Hospital. Also along that route is the Beaver Brook park plus lots of housing tracts. But no bus. It would be so easy to run the 73 bus a bit further up Trapelo Rd beyond Waverly Oaks, especially now that it's not a trackers trolley.

 

[Delvin4519]

If we ever do get regional rail service on the inner Fitchburg, the whole Belmont-Waltham-Lexington triangle seems a good candidate for better bus service. While it's not the densest area, there are some decent-sized pockets of jobs and homes. The calculus for bus frequency changes massively when you can can connect to frequent rail on the Fitchburg Line rather than running extended routes to the Red Line or downtown.

If RER can't fix a broken, dysfunctional, Lynn Terminal, RER is not going to fix the broken, dysfunctional, Waltham Terminal.

Like with Lynn, RER from Waltham does not follow the path of where all of Waltham's buses and urban densities go. Look at the Waltham streetcar map above. All of Waltham's historical streetcar lines, with it's urban densities, are all oriented towards Watertown Sq. and Newton Corner, and not the CR to Belmont. RER is not going to fix the broken Watertown Sq. bus terminal, since there is no CR at Watertown Sq. RER does not hit all color change transfers, neither Waltham or Newton Corner CR have a Blue Line connection, and Newton Corner CR also lacks a GL connection. RER fare integration with bus + subway is problematic, compared to just bus + subway.

One can electrify the Fitchburg & Worcester Lines, plop in an infill in Newton Corner on the B & A, and run 7.5 minute headways as much as desired on both of the RER lines. Yet all of Waltham's bus headways are still going to be eaten up by the 70, the 505, and in the pre-COVID era, all of Waltham's 55x buses, making distended super-extended runs to Cambridge and Downtown. Waltham's buses cannot cycle efficiently back and forth to Waltham Terminal because those super extended runs means all of Waltham's buses get stuck in Mass Pike traffic, or getting bunched making the long 16 kilometer slog through Arsenal St. and Western Ave. to hit all of those color change rapid transit transfers bringing riders where they want to go. The 70 bus to Waltham is among the top 10 most bunched routes in the MBTA system, because 16 kilometers of street running in mixed traffic kills reliability completely, and running a 16 kilometer route on KBR headways under BNRD is going to consume a lot of buses. Why did the 70 between Watertown Sq. and Waltham get KBR status in BNRD, and not the 54 to Belmont that parallels the CR? It's because riders from Waltham Center want to get to Watertown Sq. and Newton Corner, not Belmont. CR/RER to Belmont does not bring Waltham riders where they want to go, so RER can't possibly fix the broken Waltham bus terminal. Riders constantly fill buses to Watertown Sq. from Waltham and buses to Wonderland from Lynn. The historical Watertown Branch Railroad is one of the few branch railroads to ever have seen such signficant heavy traffic it had to be double tracked the entire length, serving as the primary railroad connection to Waltham, not the main line via Belmont.

The 55x bus routes were cut back to Newton Corner due to COVID, WFH, & the lack of bus operators. BNRD is going to cut back and reduce Waltham's bus system (mostly the 55x routes being axed), aside from upgrading the 70 to KBR. This essentially causes all those last mile shares from Waltham to be inaccessible to the rapid transit system and killing potential ridership, since one has got to take two buses to reach those rapid transit color transfers, or pay an extremely expensive bus fare + CR fare with no free/discounted transfer + an additional transfer from RER to the Red/Orange to hit the Blue/Green transfers.

Given how F-Line comments about RER vs HRT to Lynn, I'm under the impression that with no rapid transit to Watertown Square, Newton Corner, or Waltham Terminal, means that one is never going to get any meaningful bus headways for last mile shares out from Waltham Terminal, even with RER. Only a proper HRT extension hitting all 3 terminals are ever going to give one any meaningful bus headways for last mile shares in the Waltham area. High frequency urban rail from Waltham has got to hit Watertown Sq., not Belmont.

If one wants better bus service to Waltham, one has got to start with bringing rapid transit to Newton Corner and Watertown Square, then extend one of those rapid transit lines all the way to Waltham Terminal.

If one can pull off BLX to Newton Corner via the B & A alignment, one will be able to instantly nuke all of those express buses, and get balanced 1:1 bus cycling out from the Newton Corner terminal. The bus headways redistribution will instantly be able to provide a rudimentary level of service across the Waltham area & prop up demand for those last mile shares.
GLX from Union to Watertown Sq. via Porter could help, potentially allowing the 70 bus to be split into 2 separate routes at Watertown Sq. and finally allowing Watertown Terminal to have balanced 1:1 bus cycling. The western segment of the 70 to Waltham would still be load bearing. That could be fixed with an extension of rapid transit from Watertown Sq. to Waltham Center, whether with BLX from Newton Corner via Watertown Sq., or GLX from Watertown Sq. to Waltham Terminal.
Once one has got a Waltham - Watertown rapid transit extension, the western segment of the 70 bus would no longer be load bearing. Now at last, all those bus headways are now finally freed up and can be reinvested across the entirity of the Waltham area to provide increased frequencies for all those last mile shares, and possibly add crosstown routes to Lexington and Arlington, with balanced 1:1 bus cycling out from Waltham Terminal.

No rapid transit to Newton Corner, Watertown Sq., or Waltham, likely means no improved bus service in the Waltham area. It's only fixed with rapid transit extensions hitting all three bus terminals finally allowing bus service to be improved in the Waltham area with balanced 1:1 bus cycling from all of the terminals, and get those last mile and crosstown shares. It was back in 1972 when the MBTA decided to extend the 70 all the way to Waltham, dragging out Waltham's buses all out onto super-extended distended runs to Cambridge and Downtown and destroying Waltham bus headways & reliability, 52 years ago.

 

[RandomWalk]

Can the T stop thinking about Boston as the hub? </sarcasm>

What about a Waltham-centered bus network?