Silver Line could lose a leg
MBTA planners say it's time to ditch the little used City Point branch
of the Silver Line and instead beef up resources on the Marine Industrial Park leg. Also? Green Line riders? No relief for overcrowded trolleys for you, sorry.The MBTA's recently released Draft 2008 Service Plan discusses conditions on every single T subway, trolley and bus route and makes recommendations for the T board of directors.
In addition to canning the SL3 route, planners also want to eliminate the 500 express bus from Riverside to downtown, the 6 bus from Haymarket to South Station, the 48 bus between the JP Monument and the Orange Line. But they also propose increasing service on the 1 line, extending the 4 line out of North Station to Tide Street in South Boston and the 225 bus that now ends at Weymouth Landing to South Weymouth.
In the subway section of the report, planners mark the Green Line with a failure stamp, saying that while it's getting better, it's still failing to meet MBTA criteria for on-time performance. Also? The trolleys tend to be overcrowded - except on the E branch and on the main trunk - but that there are no resources to deal with that.
Schedule of public hearings on the proposal - between Sept. 8 and 29.
Via archBoston.
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Enlighten me
I am not familiar with each and every Green Line station, but is there any reason they can't run four-car trains on it? Most stops I've been to could easily handle them.
I'm guessing there must be a station or two on the B, C, or D lines that couldn't, or that they might not have enough rolling stock to accompany it. But if there is, and the stations can accommodate it, that would really alleviate the sardine cans of the Green. Although I suppose that would necessitate more employees, which I'm guessing DannyG would not allow.
I don't think there are very
I don't think there are very many underground stations that could fit 4 car trains.
And, except on the D line, I
And, except on the D line, I don't think there are any above-ground stations that can fit 3-car trains.
one-car trains
Sunday night at around 10 p.m. I was at Park Street and the B, C and D trains which came by were all one-car trains, and needless to say, were packed, especially with all the college kids back.
You might be able to fit 4
You might be able to fit 4 car trains at larger underground stations - definitely at North Station, but there is no way they'd work at outlaying surface stops.
The Green Line's power supply probably couldn't handle them either. Three car trains already strain the system.
With Arlington, Copley and Kenmore still under construction the T couldn't run them if it wanted to. The imminent Government Center renovations will only delay their return further.
#6 bus -- how did it survive this long?
I work near the midpoint of the #6 bus, so I would seem to be a logical customer for it. Nevertheless, I've never taken it in the four years that I've worked at Union Wharf. Even in bad weather, I've preferred to walk to Government Center or Haymarket or (in the worst rain or snow) Aquarium, rather than ride this bus and transfer to the subway.
I often see the #6 going by empty, which makes me wonder why the T didn't get rid of it years ago.
The route does have potential to attract tourists, but only if it ran a radically different schedule than it does today, and was heavily marketed.
Carefully done and marketed, it could be a hit...
The MBTA did the Freedom Trail and the Shopper's Special buses back in the 1970s, but discontinued them to low ridership. I think the original Route 3 bus was a circulator between Downtown and Copley Square before its operations were shifted to Army Base-Chinatown (what the BMIP was called back then)
If the T decided to do a circulator route for Downtown, Back Bay, Charlestown, and other Boston attractions, I think the T would do it. In fact, marketing it as an much cheaper alternative to the trolley and duck tours would not only be a boon for tourists, but would be a goldmine for the MBTA as it would bring in a good deal of revenue.
What they should do with the soon-to-be-empty Route 6 slot is make a route between Harvard Square and Ruggles, perhaps as a baseball special ("Take Route 6 to the Sox!"), following Route 66 to Union Square, then paralleling Route 47 to Landmark Center and then through the Longwood Medical Area to Ruggles. The soon-to-be-empty Route 48 slot should go to either (a) the Sunday routing of the 37/38 or (b) the nighttime/weekend routing of Route 40/50.
Who are the authors?
Who are these people? They don't seem like they're looking for solutions at all. I read quite a few of the route synopses that interest me. They all talked about compliance (and often the text didn't seem to match the chart at the top of each route) and then if a suggestion was made it was to either remove the route, add more buses, or fudge with the schedule a little bit.
What a small toolset to work with. The Green B Line, for example, needs a more radical approach. Removing stops between Packard's Corner and Kenmore is the first step. This will get more usage on the #57 and BU's own shuttle service. This approach worked wonders for transit times between BC and Packard's Corner. I would also rather see how the standards are met on a more hour-by-hour basis. I can guarantee you that the post "rush hour" period around 9 AM is no where near compliance even if the 100% compliance at 10 PM evens it out to an 80-90% total compliance for headways, etc. That's just a really ugly way of "meeting the goals".
The lowest bar in history!
Since when does 50% on time performance merit "no changes in schedule needed"?
The CT2 is abysmal at rush hour - so bad that it was taking so long for my husband to get home at rush hour that he bought a motorcycle! He would head out at the scheduled time and wait a half hour to be picked up and taken to Sullivan, only to miss the scheduled 95 bus by 2 minutes. It should NOT take 80 minutes to get from Medford to Inman Square.
I had warned him about the schedules not allowing for rush hour at all what so ever out of Sullivan, but he didn't fully believe me until he got a taste of that bitter BS himself. I notice that the 93 was also late most of the time (my bet is that it was every single bus late at rush hour), yet nothing was being done about that either.
Way to set the bar low, folks.
To me, the buses aren't
To me, the buses aren't really at fault. For me, when I take the CT1 or the 1 from Central to Hynes, and it takes almost 20 minutes, it's not because the driver doesn't know how to keep a schedule, it's that he/she gets stuck in traffic (which is not helped by one lane on the Longfellow). It also doesn't help having tons of people fumbling with their purses/wallets for their dollar bills, and having the machine spitting them back out.
Trains, both T and commuter, are a different story, since for the most part they have their own right-of-way.
But yes, Swirly, you're right about an abyssmal on-time rate. It's just that the buses have to deal with all the traffic and a horrific street layout plan.
Traffic Happens - predictably
Like, every work day. Like, clockwork!
I don't fault the drivers at all - I DO fault the fairy-tale schedules and the boneheads who refuse to change them.
Traffic is nearly always there. Abysmal street plans are nearly always there. Rush hour happens most work days and makes more traffic, passengers, and stops. So why don't the schedules reflect this? Why does a bus get three minutes more to do a twenty-five minute route at 8am than it does at 5am? Can anybody explain why they simply don't change the run times for the buses so people don't end up waiting and waiting and waiting? So busses don't get so far off schedule that three buses fail to show up in 45 minutes time at the end of rush hour?
We all know about the problems Jiffy, and the T should goddamn well know about them too. All I ask is that the T publish REALISTIC SCHEDULES for rush hour! Why the fuck don't they just do it - it costs NOTHING and it isn't like they don't republish schedules all the time anyway.
Oh, because that would be putting customer service ahead of screwing drivers out of their breaks. Right. It might skewer the fiction that service is frequent and adequate. Right.
Intense.
I think this is probably the most rabid I've ever seen Swirly. I'm amused.
An invitation
The next time it is 10F in the morning, go to Sullivan and wait for a 93 bus to arrive around 8:40 am. See how long you can last with the wind blowing in your face while the 8:40, 8:50, 9:00, 9:10, and 9:20 runs fail to show.
Alternatively, on the next day with torrential rains, send your spouse on a bus to Sullivan Station to get the CT2. Leave one hour later by car for Charlestown. Receive cellular phone call that no 91 or CT2 buses have shown up in nearly 40 minutes and divert to pick up said spouse at Sullivan and take them to work near Inman Square first.
All because the T prefers paper reality to actual reality, and internal squabbling and labor/management antagonism to customer service. Tends to make you intense after a while, especially when the solution costs nothing.
Oh yeah?
Try a fucking HOUR AND A HALF at Forest Hills waiting for the 39, in the Middle of March, around 7PM! You can almost WALK the entire length of the route in that time!
That - adjusting runtime
That - adjusting runtime based on observed timing - is exactly one of the things they do. It's only in the last couple of years that there's been good monitoring of exactly where and when the buses are (the CAD/AVL and GPS stuff the report talks about) - daily reports on this stuff instead of annual reports done by hand.
Unfortunately, with the constraint of being resource-neutral, adding runtime means decreasing frequency, and people scream bloody murder when they pick up new schedule cards one quarter and see that service has been "cut", even if the new schedule reflects reality better. So it would help to go to the public meetings and support making the schedules match reality; you'll probably find yourself in opposition to some people who want the schedules to be aspirational, or to be the motivation for getting more resources to their favorite bus route.
(Also, traffic keeps getting worse. What was 20 minutes two years ago might be 25 minutes this year, and there are a lot of routes to look at, and a lot of possible construction delays to keep track of, and so forth)
Turn off traffic lights to improve bus performance?
The T should work with cities and towns to turn off some traffic lights at rush hours when they cause the most congestion. For instance, Somerville should consider turning off all of the Union Square signals during evening rush hour, thus saving each bus run 2 or 3 minutes.
Lechmere, Sullivan, Inman, Davis, Porter, and Forest Hills are other places where this experiment might be useful to try for a month or two.
The light where the Silver
The light where the Silver Line emerges onto the surface would be a great candidate for signal priority, too. Getting the city of Boston to pay money to install something to make the MBTA run better probably runs afoul of several bureaucratic prime directives, however.
Save money, just remove it
There's no need for it at all. Take it down, and the bus can easily cross one side of D Street and wait for the other side to clear. D Street has very little traffic, anyway.
B Line
BU would probably never allow the T to remove a single stop along the school bus portion of the line.
It's also unfortunate that with all of the median work done this past year not a single bit of effort was put into planning for an express track. You know, for those people who don't go to BU or BC who might like to get home in a reasonable amount of time and / or without switching trains because the trolley they were on spent 45 minutes traveling between Kenmore and Packard's and had to be expressed to BC.
At the very least, they
At the very least, they could remove BU Central. It's what? 500 feet, a block from BU East?
I don't remember which stations they took off the route a couple years back, but it was one of the best moves the MBTA made.
Easy fix
They need to get rid of the following stops on the B line:
Blandford Street
BU Central
St. Paul Street
Babcock Street
That's every other stop between Kenmore and Packard's Corner.
The authors are the group of
The authors are the group of people at the T who plan routes and schedules. They're pretty constrained; they don't get to add a bus or a driver somewhere without taking one away somewhere else (that's why it talks about being "resource neutral"), so that's why the service additions mentioned tend to be pretty small - they have to exactly balance the places where they can get away with cutting service.
Weighting compliance by passenger load would be an interesting tweak to the statistics, but the 10pm passengers do count for something, too.
Warning: Math
The 10pm passengers do count. They count far too heavily. At 10 pm, the B line is only supposed to be at a headway of 11 minutes (give or take 5 minutes for their compliance allowances). I can guarantee you that it doesn't quite meet that, but anyways, it's an easier assumption that it does. So, in two hours (120 min) they'll see 10-11 trains go by and be at 100% compliance.
At 9 am, they should be at 8 min headway (nice that rush hour stops at 9 am to become "midday" and we lose 3 minutes between trains because of it).
Unfortunately, all of the trains are downtown from "rush hour". You can stand out near BC on the B line and watch train after train returning to the end of the line from downtown but only see one going inbound every 2nd or 3rd one returning. Compliance should be about 7-8 trains from 9A-10A. Of the 17-19 trains total between 9A-10A & 10P-12A, 13-15 trains need to arrive on time for 80% compliance. If we're still assuming that at 10PM *all* 10 trains are on time, then only 3 or so of the 9A-10A trains need to run on time to meet their compliance goal when viewing the entire day's counts. That's half of the trains in a 1 hour period immediately after rush hour in the morning that can be off schedule and still "meet compliance", in general, if two hours of easier scheduling is met that night.
Of course, all of that is also made easier by the fact that their "compliance" is simply whether the headway is spaced correctly, give or take a static value, like 3 minutes (or the 5 minutes that they adjust for later to show that compliance is satisfactory if they just back off their standards a little). So an 8 minute headway give or take 3 minutes can be as much as 11 minutes and still be on time! The next train could be another 11 minutes behind that to maintain the same compliant headway! Instead of getting 7 trains in 56 minutes, you're only getting 5 in 55 minutes and still coming close to compliance. If they back it off to 5 minutes (with an 8 minute headway scheduled) in order to meet compliance, they go from 7 in 56 minutes to just 4 an hour! And then they pat themselves on the back!!
The trains are not being spaced properly causing issues as things like "rush hour" come to a close around 9 AM. Their compliance criteria are so far out of whack with the scheduling so as to allow half the scheduled trains to run and still meet their goals. Their numbers are improved by looking at multiple lines in the same percentage (I can guarantee you that the C line is on schedule far more often than the B line). Even when they break it down they claim that each line can hold its own pretty well...but they don't examine any more detail into how time-of-day might be skewing it towards better compliance at easier hours while the majority of users experience only 50% compliance in reality.
More bullshit: the 39!
Route 39 connects Forest Hills, Jamaica Plain, the Longwood Medical Area and Copley Square. No changes to this route are recommended here. A separate process is ongoing for proposed changes to Route 39. A Citizens' Working Group is advising EOT, the City of Boston, and the MBTA.
Yeah, the "Citizen's Working Group", which hilariously met in JP, but during work hours...
So when there is a BLOCK LONG TRAIN OF 39 BUSSES (seriously, it's impressive when there are three of them in a row) on Centre Street, with all but the first virtually empty, that's a "pass" on "frequency"?
I love how they think that having one right behind the other is somehow useful, especially when one driver won't pass the other, like it's some kind of Bendy Bus Faux Pas...
Meanwhile, the driver of the first bus won't yell at everyone to get on the bus behind 'em, instead of trying to pack like sardines into the first. Which of course delays the first bus, and since the second bus won't pass the first.
And while I'm at it, how many times does the MBTA have to have an announcement to USE THE REAR DOOR before it sinks into people's heads? This drives me absolutely bonkers! Now GIT OFF MAH LAWN, dang kids!
Using the rear door
"And while I'm at it, how many times does the MBTA have to have an announcement to USE THE REAR DOOR before it sinks into people's heads?"
I dunno - probably a few times more than the MBTA needs to put their own drivers through training sessions to teach them to OPEN THE REAR DOOR and let passengers out.
and when people stop
trying to enter the bus through the rear door to evade the toll
Oddly enough I rarely,
Oddly enough I rarely, rarely see anyone attempt rear-door fare evasion on buses.
The Green Line on the other hand... nothing beats being one of the few paying passengers on a crowded trolley.