In My Travels...

Over the past week or two I've come across some interesting things in my travels. A recent ride on RTS #0010 revealed that not only has the axle-grinding problem (which produces a foul odor in the rear of the bus) not been fixed, but part of the steering column housing has disappeared as well! The speedometer also did not seem to work; it stated that we were traveling across the Tobin Bridge at zero miles per hour. The sooner that bus is sent to Everett to be scrapped, the better!

It seems that the Silver Line Washington Street extension to South Station is a step closer to becoming a reality. At least four of the Neoplan AN460's (i.e. the buses used on the Route 39 and SL Washington) have been repainted from the general MBTA paint scheme into Silver Line colors. I spotted 1030 broken down at Newton Street several days ago:

Sorry for the terrible photo.

Now with these four buses having been repainted (1018, 1019, and 1020 are the others), it seems only natural that bus assignments out of Southampton Garage would change. There are 44 sixty-foot buses in the MBTA fleet; all assigned to Southampton. With fewer "normal colored" buses available, all Route 32 trips have been dropped from the garage. Arborway will now provide all the equipment for this route. Southampton had formerly offered five articulated buses for rush hour service on the line.

No more 60' buses for rush hour service? Crowding will surely worsen on the high ridership Hyde Park route! To offset this, two or three Arborway buses have been added to the line for increased capacity. The improved rush hour headway is now every 3-4 mins. I plan to take a ride and see how things are going.

At least the Forest Hills inspector will no longer have to deal with this:


Occasionally, Southampton would send out one of their 40' New Flyer C40s instead of a sixty-footer. Very helpful!

The MBTA fare increase/service cuts workshops are coming up next week (August 10th-27th). I have yet to see tangible booklets detailing the particulars being distributed, but at least a few people managed to get their hands on them:

Found on the floor of an Orange Line train laid up at Oak Grove

I plan on attending several workshops and the final hearing at the State Transportation Building. Visit the MBTA website for workshop dates and locations. Ten points if you can find where to click on the homepage in five minutes or less.

As a final note, I snapped these two pics:



Notice anything unusual?

Are You Being Served: The Urban Ring

Finally! Sorry for the delays, let's just say I've been experiencing some "technical difficulties" lately. I've also tweaked the format of the series a bit, as well as the names of each post. Hope you enjoy!

- The Lone Rider

So there has been a lot of buzz lately around the Urban Ring project. The tentative plan for it (including proposed routings, etc.) has been somewhat finalized. However, there is still some room for tweaking. Several community meetings held in Chelsea, Roxbury, Cambridge, and The Fenway gave residents (and possible future riders) a chance to learn more about the project, raise their concerns, and chip in some suggestions. Some chaps I know over at Alternatives For Community and Environment (ACE) stopped by the Roxbury meeting. Check out their blog to see what they think about the Urban Ring:

http://www.ace-ej.org/a_transit_injustice_in_the_making

So what is the Urban Ring, that experiment in rapid transit that has everyone talking? The Urban Ring is a proposed bus rapid transit system that would connect the outlying "spokes" of the current rapid transit system. Using a combination of private rights of way, dedicated bus lanes, and a massive $1,000,000,000+ tunnel under the Longwood Medical Area, commuters would no longer have to go into the downtown core to transfer between lines.

Or take often congested and slow buses across town...

*cough*Route 01*cough*Route 66*

Sorry, I think I may be coming down with something.

Trip times between major points such as Dudley Square and Cambridge, would drop drastically. As I said before, places that currently require passengers to take local buses (or if you belong to MASCO, a private shuttle) to get to and fro. Each stop would be a little mini-station, similar to the ones on the Silver Line Washington Street. Hopefully, they will be better designed. The Urban Ring would also have key features such as priority signaling, CAD/AVL (like that found on the current bus fleet) and much more state-of-the-art technology to ensure maximum efficiency and performance. And of course no new BRT line would be complete without a fleet of state of the art buses. Hopefully New Flyer Industries, my favorite bus manufacturer, will get the bid. It is projected to attract up to 175,000 passengers per day.

According to one of the slides from the Roxbury meeting (you may view a PDF of each of the meeting presentations on the official Urban Ring website, www.theurbanring.com) another goal of the Urban Ring is to bring "new rapid transit for environmental justice communities". That's sounds fantastic! Apparently, included in their definition of an environmental justice community are places such as The Fenway and Admiral's Hill in Chelsea. Those places seem kinda upscale to me, not really areas that jump out at you as "EJ". Check out their handy-dandy map outlining which areas are "EJ" and which ones aren't here, on page five. Just in case you're curious, Everett Shops and Briggs Field also count as EJ areas. Really? You mean the place where they store retired RTS buses before they are scrapped and the MIT sports field in Cambridge? Reminds me of how in the MBTA 2005 Title VI report several parks and even a pond were shown to be "Minority Transportation Access Zones", a rough equivalent to the Urban Ring's "EJ communities." Do they really count fish as minorities? Seems kinda insulting...

MASCO will certainly be happy: no more shuttles! The Urban Ring will pretty much do the job for them. Think of the money they'll save.

My enthusiasm, however, is somewhat curbed...

I'm all for a new transit line. Hopefully, it will draw people away from their cars and onto public transit. But the Urban Ring is going to be Bus Rapid Transit (or as some mocking call it, "Barely Rapid Transit"). Since the Silver Line debuted in 2002, I've wary of the whole concept. I'm still not entirely sold on the idea of a bus being considered rapid transit. I won't get into the particulars right now, that'll be the next post! When I first heard about the project several years ago, heavy rail rapid transit (i.e. a subway) was being considered as one of the options. Of course that never came to be. Would've been nice though.

It is the fact that Roxbury and Dorchester are almost all but skimmed over that really troubles me. Proposed stations in these areas include Ruggles, Melnea Cass Boulevard, Dudley Square, Newmarket (1010 Mass Ave.), Edward Everett Square, and UMass Boston. If you look at their Environmental Justice map (EJ areas are colored red), a large swath of communities are overlooked. True, the ring is focused on the "urban core", but while you're at it maybe build a new light rail line or two in Roxbury? The Urban Ring could be like one of those hippie bracelets that has strings of beads hanging from it. Only, those strings would be light rail lines feeding into the Urban Ring. All of this investment, about $2.2 billion dollars, but some people are still being left out. So once again, some riders will just be left waiting at the bus stop.