Greater Boston is known as a worldwide hub for higher learning and innovation, yet when it comes to solving our transportation challenges, it’s been decades since we’ve seen a true breakthrough. That’s finally changing as Boston and the MBTA embrace multimodal street redesign and its potential to dramatically improve productivity – not only of our streets but of our entire regional economy.
Many of our region’s streets have been designed – or, in the case of historic streets, redesigned – almost exclusively to accommodate vehicle traffic and parking. Single-occupant vehicles aren’t just expensive and polluting, they’re just plain inefficient, taking up too much space to move too few people, especially in a dense urban setting. Greater Boston’s gridlock has earned us the two-year-running title of the nation’s worst rush hour traffic, with workers wasting hours stuck on jammed roads and bus riders faced with the same crippling congestion.
Fortunately, planners are taking a fresh look at how we can reallocate the space on our streets to maximize the movement of people, not the processing of cars. The most recent breakthrough came last week when the U.S. Department of Transportation awarded Boston a $15 million federal RAISE grant to fully reconstruct the city’s busiest bus corridor on Blue Hill Avenue by adding center-running bus lanes, protected bike lanes and curb-to-curb pedestrian safety improvements.
By running in center of the road, rather than along the delay-inducing conflicts of the curb, these new bus lanes will speed trips for over 20,000 bus riders every single day while enabling the MBTA to add over 100 additional daily bus trips using the same number of buses and operators – effectively offering more trips and better frequency for more passengers in the same number of hours. The multimodal redesign will also dramatically improve safety for people walking and biking, without inconveniencing motorists, and the investment in transit will clean our air and help Boston reach its ambitious climate goals.
With Bus Lanes, Everyone Wins
People traveling along the corridor aren’t the only big winners in multimodal projects like this. Regional economies and local businesses stand to gain handsomely through crash reductions, cleaner air, increased foot traffic and overall desirability of the corridor as a destination. A cost-benefit analysis of the Blue Hill Avenue Multimodal Project suggests the project will generate total benefits of $137 million over its 20-year lifecycle. Most of that (about 80 percent) will come from crash reductions, as improved infrastructure ensures the safety of all roadway users. Better connections to major employment centers, vital healthcare institutions, retail sites and other critical destinations will also support economic vitality of the region.
Boston got a taste of what’s possible just this month with the newly-opened Columbus Avenue Bus Lanes Project, which showcased the first center-running bus lanes not just in Boston but in all of New England. This milestone in the expansion of bus priority across the region came after several years of incremental progress through bus lane pilots and sets the stage for an even more comprehensive and ambitious multimodal project like Blue Hill Avenue.
Having won it on the second submission, the RAISE grant award demonstrates Boston’s and the MBTA’s perseverance and commitment to improving transit service and street safety in Dorchester and Mattapan and unlocking the social, environmental and economic benefits of bus rapid transit, often called by the abbreviation BRT.
Transportation innovation needs to reach beyond street improvements and bus priority as our regional and intercity rail networks are also in desperate need of investment. However, most street redesigns can be implemented more quickly at much lower costs than new rail buildouts. With features of bus rapid transit – which includes a combination of features such as center-running dedicated bus lanes, off-board fare collection, level boarding and bus priority at intersections – benefits can match or even exceed those heavy infrastructure projects.
We’ll need every tool at our disposal to make getting around Greater Boston faster, cleaner, safer and more equitable.
Julia Wallerce is Boston Program Manager for the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy.
