Looks awesome. Columbus is such a waste land on parts

That’s how I feel about Washington St. once you leave Forest Hills. We need to doll it up with some of these bike & bus lanes as well.

Looks good. Honestly, anything would be better than what's currently there. It's one of the most miserable parts of the city.

The street in that picture currently has 6 total lanes (3 each way) plus the wide SWC bike path. How does this new design only have 4 lanes total? I would love dedicated bus lanes, but making that a single lane for cars would suck.

The answer is right in the linked article:

> Repurposing some of Columbus Avenue’s asphalt to create new “green infrastructure” that would narrow the roadway, calm traffic, and provide an additional buffer between the Southwest Corridor and motor vehicle traffic.

I’m all for it. We devote far too much space to the most geometrically inefficient mode of transportation (single-occupancy automobiles). This redesign will increase the throughput capacity of the avenue with respect to the number of people.

More lanes does not equal better. This is a case where less is more.

A single motor vehicle travel lane is perfectly fine when paired with transit, walking and cycling improvements. I imagine they'll also upgrade signals to be more efficient so you probably won't even notice a difference once everyone has adjusted to the traffic patterns.

Is the plan to build a giant right of way then on day converting it to light rail or brt?

So how are they going to keep idiot car drivers out of the bus lanes?

The original Columbus ave busway design was for separated/limited access but that got vetoed by emergency services, which is probably for the best. I’ve seen fire trucks FLY down that busway. Making it less limited acces also makes it easier for idiot drivers to get out once they find themselves in

The conversion to BRT is gradual. The most important parts of BRT are dedicated lanes and frequent service. This accomplished both of those. Other elements are well-defined stations (included in this proposal), off-board payment, and all door boarding (currently possible on the couple free bus lines).

You could argue that this is BRT. And it’s certainly better BRT than the Silver Line on Washington St.

The center running bus lanes are pretty good at keeping drivers out. It’s completely different than a curb-adjacent bus/turn/Uber/delivery/parking lane. I encourage you to check out the Columbus Ave bus lane some time.

MA needs to legalize traffic enforcement cameras first. The T would make a killing if it put a camera on every bus and automatically ticketed any cars in the bus lane. The police don’t care enough to enforce it.

One way would be automatic ticketing via cameras at the front of the busses. I don't think the MBTA has plans for it yet, but it's an easy add-on that could be put in place at any point.

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> and all door boarding (currently possible on the couple free bus lines).

I believe the Fare Transformation Project should fix this for paid lines too.

Light rail is pretty expensive, so I don't see us actually doing that any time soon. GLX took decades to get the State to commit to and that had a preexisting ROW. And it goes through fairly wealthy parts of Greater Boston and hits Tufts. It only just opened on the Medford Branch this past week, after years of construction and decades of debate.

BRT seems much more likely. It doesn't require much more than some bus lanes, stations, and fairly frequent (for a bus) service. Plus the T and other transit agencies in the US love to just slap BRT branding on "half decent bus service" to get people to think its something special when really it's just a frequent bus and not reaaaaally BRT if you look at international examples of that.

Light rail on the street is way cheaper. The MBTA proposed extending the E branch to Hyde Square (0.75 miles) and it only cost $40M. Right of way makes it more expensive even if it’s a better transit option.

Cheaper compared to a GLX style project I imagine, where we made dedicated stations and a community path extension and such.

Still more expensive than standard buses or fake BRT though. You could buy a couple of buses for like $5M and slap BRT branding on that service once you've got a couple of cheapo shelters and some paint on the road. That's the problem unfortunately, we're not going to spend $40M on transit like that. Even if light rail is better.

Would be nice if we could drop like $1B on extending the Green Line across the area with street level rail. Maybe cut off some streets from regular traffic to basically give it a dedicated ROW. One day anyway.