Back in January of this year, the MBTA released a sketch of a long range plan for 2024 that showed a new rapid transit line that would connect Riverside via Newtonville to a new West Station in Allston and then on to North Station via Cambridge via the long defunct Grand Junction railroad line right-of-way.
Then at the end of May, the State Dept of Transportation announced that the first piece of this puzzle, the new West Station in Allston, had been dropped from the highway project to re-engineer the Mass Pike in Allston.
This past Sunday, the Boston Globe reported that West Station in Allston is now back on the drawing board. The initial plan will connect Allston’s new West Station to Back Bay and South stations. This is big news for the Allston neighborhood and appears to be in response to Harvard University ante’ing up for a substantial fraction of the cost of the project.
Long term, this all could be be good news for Newton down the road. There’s a long road from here to there, but this would be the first essential step for the MBTA to eventually build the hazy plan to one day connect Riverside to North Station via Cambridge.
What’s most curious about all of this is that the only information about the supposed end game – a new rapid transit line by 2024 from Riverside to North Station is this fuzzy map that was included in the MBTA’s report from last January.
Now that the new West Station is back on the table it seems like it might be time for the MBTA to flesh out that plan a bit in public, even if there’s a lots of ifs, ands, and buts to eventually get there.’
Rehabilitation of the Grand Junction Railroad has been discussed a lot lately in Cambridge, where bicycle advocates are pressing hard for a multi-use path. Even in the short term, with more frequent service on the existing line, one could imagine a reasonably short trip from Newton to Cambridge with a shuttle or even a hubway connection. However, as I recall there are challenges for rail service, where there’s only a single track in places, some at-grade crossings, and of course the bridge over the Charles which would need significant work. There was talk of being able to barely run a rail shuttle service over the existing track layout.
The rest is easy. The spur at Riverside operated briefly in 1996 during the flood. DMU purchases would bring more frequent service. And track 61 plans could connect to the Seaport. The south side of Newton will envy the north for its transit options.
Well, duh. The south side of Newton is served by a single bus line, the 52, which runs only on weekdays, operates once every two hours at midday, and has its last run at 7pm. So for all intents and purposes, public transport is non-existent south of Route 9. But does anybody care? Apparently not. Hooray for you northerners who get all of the transit investment.
Michael, I think everyone knows what I meant, as the south side generally refers to much more than Oak Hill and is served by the D-line, but point taken. Got a suggestion for the newer neighborhoods south of route 9 with no transit infrastructure? We’re lucky to have a 52 bus at all, given the dismal ridership.
Adam, my wife and I would ride the 52 bus if it were actually useful. One time we walked to Newton Centre, and my wife didn’t feel like walking back so she literally waited two hours for the bus. I walked, and was home 90 minutes before she was. So if the 52 were to have a normal schedule, and if it ran past 7pm, then I think people would actually use it.
Also it would be nice to have some transport in this part of town that went to useful destinations. I don’t know what the ridership on the 60 bus is, since there’s no way for me to ever walk to it given the lack of sidewalks on Dudley Rd. or any other north-south artery for 1.5 miles on either side. So for all I know, it may also have dismal ridership à la route 52. But if the 60 bus were to go down say, Brookline St. instead of turning around in the middle of a commercial strip of Route 9, I would definitely take it.
I think that any bus that were to go to Cambridge or Boston would serve a lot more people than one that goes to Watertown or the Dedham Mall. (Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you, 52 bus!)
At the end of the day, though, there’s not a heck of a lot you can do to improve transit in a neighborhood of mostly sedentary residents (I’ve rarely seen anyone else walking or cycling in Oak Hill, save for cyclists on their way to points west) which is also completely removed from any railroad rights-of-way. C’est la vie!
Unfortunately, they didn’t. The 52 used to run more frequently, later, and on weekends. The schedule was cut because of low ridership. In fact, the entire route was on the chopping block and saved by local officials. It has one of the highest per rider subsidies in the system.
FWIW, the 52 is quite useful as a connection to the express bus downtown via Newton Corner. If you’re going to the financial district, it’s faster than taking the green line, with the obvious caveat that you have to plan your ride around the limited schedule. The 60 is a slow, miserable ride. You’re not missing much.
Adam – I wasn’t aware that the 52 used to have a more normal schedule but was still unused. In that case, it’s too bad that there’s apparently no market for public transit south of Route 9. I still think it has something to do with the 52’s destinations (Watertown and the Dedham Mall), but based on your experience with the 60 then a Boston-bound route would probably still be useless.
If I had my druthers then the median strip of Route 9 would be converted to a tramway from Framingham to Back Bay Station, but this is America, so of course anything that useful doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell. When it comes to converting major thoroughfares to modern transitways, Paris has done it, Istanbul has done it, and Calcutta has done it, but the world’s richest economy can never afford to do that sort of thing, I guess.
Michael, we’ve “been there done that.” From 1903 to 1932, the Boston-Worcester Street Railway, know as The Trolley Air Line, ran from Boston to Worcester through Newton along the Worcester Turnpike, which is now Route 9. Ridership began declining in the 1920s due to the increasing popularity of the automobile. So, it can be done, but we would have to go back to the future.
Good call, Ted – But I suspect that back then, they didn’t have the traffic jams on Route 9 that we do today, nor did they have the $40-per-day parking garages in Boston. So I say: bring back the TAL!
Michael, personally, I would love to see it and not just along Route 9 but throughout the metropolitan area. Some people in Boston are hoping to get the Olympics, but it will never be a world class city without a world class public transit system. But the car is king in Boston. Why else would we spend $14 billion on the Big Dig and not even connect North Station with South Station?
It’s a real shame that there’s never any momentum for serious transit projects in this city. In Istanbul, their main circumferential highway was choked with traffic and in less than two years, they eliminated the breakdown lanes, narrowed the traffic lanes by a few inches, and constructed a first-class transit system down the median strip. Today, the buses are packed, because people got sick of sitting in traffic that didn’t move, while comfortable metrobuses were whizzing past them at 60 mph. Imagine if the 128 “add-a-lane” project had actually added transitways? Maybe next century…