Tag Archives: boston

Poor sharrow/pothole placement

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I was biking up to Arlinton to check out the black raspberries along the Minuteman Rail Trail (sadly, there are many fewer than a few years ago when I cleared several pints) and was biking up North Harvard Street in Allston towards Harvard Square. I’ve biked this route frequently in recent months, and it’s a very convenient way to get from Brookline to Cambridge. It’s always faster than the 66 bus (I love the 66, but … walking is often faster than the 66) and usually faster than driving since there are delightful bike lanes to slide by traffic in several locations of Harvard Street. And there’s always traffic on Harvard Street.

Anyhow, I was approaching Western Avenue and there was a truck straddling both lanes, so I cut him a wide berth and aimed over the “sharrow” (the road marking of a bicycle and double-chevron) as I slowed towards the intersection. Since I was braking, my weight shifted forwards, and I kept my eye on the truck to my left. All of the sudden, I was looking at the sky, and a second later, I was lying on the ground. In aiming at the sharrow I had inadvertently aimed directly into the six inch deep pothole it pointed directly at (see picture below), and since my weight was already shifted forwards I managed a full-on endo.

I realized I’d hit my head and would need a new helmet, and got up, shaken, but otherwise mostly unscathed. (My most recent bicycle acrobatics involved a swerve around a car pulling out of a parking space on Chestnut Hill Aveune—and in to the streetcar tracks. I came out of that one completely unscathed since I somehow stuck the landing and wound up running down the street as my bike skidded away.) I was shaking too much to ride my bike, but there was a bike shop a couple of blocks away and I went there to buy a new helmet (my current one was only five or six years old).

I settled down and managed to get back on my bike and return to the scene of the crime. Here’s a picture of the offending pothole:

The high sun angle doesn’t attest to its depth. It’s about six or eight inches deep and the perfect size to catch a bicycle wheel and flip a decelerating rider. Like me.

Just as impressive is the fate of my iPhone. I had it in my pocket—and thank goodness the back was facing out. It took a lot of the force, it seems:

The amazing thing is that it works perfectly! I put some packing tape over the shattered glass—which I’m sure absorbed a lot of energy—and it’s good as new. And a new back costs $12 and is pretty easy to replace, so I’ll get around to that. Until then, I have one badass iPhone.

So, I took a picture with it of my old helmet in the trash and the above pothole picture which I sent off to Boston’s bike czar (I have her email in my gmail) and she suggested I contact the mayor’s 24 hour hotline, which I did. We’ll see if the hole is patched; I’m biking that route at least weekly for the next month or so. I’ll be interested to see if there’s much response—it’s definitely a hazard to cyclists.

I am going to take off my amateur planner hat and put on my bicyclist hat (helmet?) to take away a couple of lessons from this adventure:

1. WEAR A HELMET. I am flabbergasted by the number of cyclists I see biking around the city without helmets. I know all the excuses, generally in the form of “I don’t need a helmet because …”

  • I’m a good cyclist, I don’t need to worry. This is the stupidest one of all—most likely you are not going to be at fault for an accident. I can’t even begin to explain the inanity of this notion. I am a pretty good cyclist—I have thousands of miles of city riding under my belt—and I still have my share of mishaps.
  • I’m not biking at night. This accident occurred around noon; the pothole would have been even more invisible filled with water.
  • I don’t bike in bad weather. It was 85 and sunny.
  • I don’t bike in heavy traffic. There was almost no traffic when I was out midday the week of July 4.
  • I don’t ride fast. I was going about 8 mph when I hit this pothole.
  • I don’t take chances or run red lights/stop signs. I was slowing down to stop at a red light and giving a wide berth to a truck.
  • I don’t bike drunk. I was quite sober when I had my little flight here. As a matter of fact, I’ve never crashed drunk.
Basically, I was biking under ideal conditions, and I had an accident where a helmet meant the difference between walking away (and, a few minutes later, biking away) and going to the hospital. Please, please, please wear a helmet!
2. A lot of people are concerned about using clipless pedals and not being able to clip out when something goes wrong. Well, I’ve had two incidents in the past few months (the aforementioned streetcar track gymnastics and perfect landing being the other) and both times the force of the torque of the accident easily got my feet out of the pedals—and by easily I mean I didn’t have to think about clipping out, it just happened. Basically, if your feet go in a direction violently different from pedaling, you’ll clip out. (At least with my SPD cleats which are probably a bit worn down and have a decent amount of play; I’m sure there are pedal adjustments which would yield different results.)

3. Watch the pavement. Even in the summer. Potholes happen.

Happy biking.

(On a very slightly related note: the fact that, nearly 20 (!) years after it opened, there is no safe route through Arlington Center on the rail trail that doesn’t involve bricks and curb cuts is a travesty. How hard would it be to link the two sides of the bike path?)

Charlie and the Clipper

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On a recent trip to San Francisco, I found out that they were still giving away their new, integrated, cross-agency (and boy, with Muni, BART, Samtrans, Golden Gate, Caltrain and AC Transit in the city alone there are a lot of agencies to cross) smart card, called the Clipper Card. I stuck one in my pocket and tapped on to a ferry, a bus, a train, a subway, and a streetcar. Except, it wasn’t quite the tap-your-wallet convenience I’ve come to associate with my Charlie Card.

So I experimented. Clipper and LA TAP card worked fine. Clipper and Charlie? Not so much. And a week later in Boston, well, the Charlie Card didn’t work well here unless the Clipper was out of proximity. It’s too bad; proximity cards are very convenient, speed transactions and boarding, and can make a multi-agency hodgepodge like San Francisco (to say nothing of LA) somewhat more seamless. But, really, someone should assure that the cards’ frequencies don’t interfere with eachother.

(Or, perhaps, I can dream of a day when transit agencies nationwide are all on the same frequency, and system. Ha!)

(posted from iPhone; will clean up later)

Are buses the wrong technology for the Northeast Corridor?

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In the past few years, most every budget-conscious (read: cheap) traveler in the northeast corridor has jumped on the bus. Fifteen years ago, Peter Pan owned the Boston-to-New York corridor, and with an almost-monopoly charged fares which were not much less than Amtrak. Since then, the industry has changed very significantly:

  1. The trains have gotten faster, better, and more expensive. 15 years ago, train travel still required an engine change in New Haven and barely cleared 100 mph north of there. Travel times were four and a half hours. Despite Acela’s lack of actual high speed, travel times have been shaved by an hour (or, for the cheaper alternatives, half an hour). And the train has gone from competing to the bus to competing with the airlines, so fares have risen (as has ridership) significantly.
  2. Bus options have multiplied and fares have dropped. It was only in the late-1990s that the Chinatown Bus fad began. While Peter Pan would charge (and I’m going on memory here) $25 to $40 each way from Boston to New York, Fung Wah and its many competitors had fares of $10—often payable in cash to the driver. They had no overhead (bus stations), very low personnel costs and, with full buses running constantly, at high rates of speed, a profitable, if uncomfortable and traffic-prone service. But, $10! Almost instantly, fares were cut by 50-80%, and the bigger players, once they caught on, came up with copycat services for lower prices. Now there are as many as half a dozen buses running between Boston and New York each hour, most of them express service. It’s the free market at work.
  3. Technology has made non-air service much more productive. Fifteen years ago, if you had a laptop, it was big, clunkly and slow. Sure, you could write up a report on it, but only with the information you had on hand. Otherwise, if you got on the train, you were in the dark for four hours. Same with cell phones: keeping a connection through the wilds of Connecticut and Rhode Island was an iffy proposition at best. Oh, and if your NiMH battery ran low, well, hopefully you’d packed a magazine. Airplanes had the same downfalls, but you were only in the air for 45 minutes. Now? Cell service is uninterrupted. Most buses and trains offer free wifi (it has a way to go, but you can generally send email at least). Laptops are light and powerful, most have long battery lives, and many buses and Amtrak offer 110V power outlets. Productivity is attainable, at least on the train where you’re not packed in like sardines.
To boil it down, however, the allure of buses is their cheapness. The legroom of an airplane (if that) and the speed of a car (if that). If the bus and the train were priced similarly, would anyone take the bus?


But as cheap as buses are, they have several minor deficiencies which, when compounded, make for a transportation mode which lacks many safety features of air and train travel. It’s not just a question of oversight of small, fly-by-night (or, um, drive-by-night) companies. It’s an issue of buses using over-capacity infrastructure clogged with other large vehicles traveling at high speeds.

Buses are, in a sense, quite scalable, which is one of their selling points but also a cause of many problems. If you run out of room on one bus, you just add another bus (although buses have to run at or near capacity to attain the efficiency which makes them so cheap). One more driver, one more set of wheels—the only issue is that peak travel times tend to have more traffic, so companies often have to charter tour buses (known as wet leasing) at these times (which may not have the same amenities). However, this further segments the industry, and means that while airplane pilots and railroad engineers have stringent training and safety guidelines, bus drivers from tour operators may be driving routes for the first time (I heard a story recently of a bus which took the Merritt and somehow didn’t hit any bridges before it was pulled over by the state troopers).


The bus companies afraid to ever have prices above a set maximum (since their product is based solely on low prices), so they vary pricing on the low end of the scale (Buy in advance for $1 tickets!). No company has started charging $40 or $50 for travel on Thanksgiving weekend even though the extra $20 would be pure profit. The fear is that higher prices, even when demand may call for it, might drive their customers to other lines or other modes. But it means that during times of high demand, wet leasing is almost a given.

The issue with scalability then becomes the terminal facilities, which are more scalable than airlines and railroads simply because there is an alternative: load the buses curbside on the street. (At least in New York; Boston effectively banned this a few years back by threatening to write tickets to Chinatown buses which would block streets for twenty minutes at a time loading and unloading passengers.) This makes it much easier for the overall bus network to add capacity, but it impedes street flow in several locations in Manhattan.

Buses also seem prone to rather catastrophic failure, as is the case with most mass transit. However, while train derailments and airline mishaps—despite the over-capacity infrastructure—are rare, bus issues are commonplace. Several years ago, after watching Chinatown buses roll along well above the speed limit and seemingly take corners on two wheels, my mother offered to pay the difference between them and a more traditional bus line (whose drivers’ main concern didn’t seem to be their next cigarette break). It’s not to say that bus travel isn’t quite safe: it is. Buses on city streets never get going too fast and drivers have rest at the end of their routes, and buses on rural highways don’t have much other traffic to contend with. Which leaves buses on heavily-traveled highways, with drivers behind the wheel for four hours straight, or, with traffic or weather, much more.

In a most of the country, this is not as much of an issue as in the northeast. But in the northeast, there is very little highway which resembles rural interstate. Every conceivable route between Boston and New York is three lanes wide (save 95 or 395, which is narrower in portions but significantly longer than other routes). Exit ramps are often short and abrupt, speed limits change continually, and gridlock is frequent. Complicating the matter, south of Hartford, there are several automobile-only parkways, concentrating commercial traffic on I-84, I-684 and I-95. (And thank goodness that buses aren’t trying to buses aren’t vying for space on the raceway known as the Merritt.) (Update: This doesn’t necessarily keep buses off of low-bridge roadways; a driver in Syracuse got lost and took a cars-only parkway, resulting in four deaths in 2012.)

Finally, buses are solely dependent on the vigilance of their drivers, who often drive long shifts under less-than-ideal conditions in traffic and weather. Airlines are heavily regulated and operate under the auspices of the air traffic control system as well as their own companies’ dispatchers. Oh, and they have “operator redundancy” in the form of a copilot (if one pilot nods off there’s another to fly the plane). While railroads can implement systems such as positive train control, speed limiting and, in the long run, exclusive right-of-way to separate their operations from other traffic, buses assuredly can not. There’s no backup safety system: one minor slip-up by the driver can result in a major incident. There’s also little oversight: bus drivers are not tracked by speed (some claim to speed limit their buses, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen buses over 80 on the Mass Pike), leaving that up to state highway authorities, who may not be particularly vigilant in ticketing speeding or otherwise unsafe drivers.


These are all relatively minor issues, but they compound. Let’s run them down:
  1. Bus scalability results in frequent wet leases, and drivers who are unfamiliar with roads, routes and traffic patterns
  2. Buses frequently speed, increasing the likelihood of an accident
  3. Buses, due to their profile, are prone to rolling and flipping
  4. Drivers are often poorly paid and work long shifts in excruciating traffic, leading to fatigue
  5. Roads between Boston and New York are confusing and often have short merges and sharp turns, and congestion, in addition to delaying buses and fatiguing drivers, creates more dangerous traffic conditions
  6. Many roads are car-only, so buses are squeezed on to roads with heavy truck traffic.
It is this last point, truck traffic, which was responsible for the recent bus catastrophe in New York. No one knows if the bus was actually clipped by a tractor trailer or was attempting to avoid it, but it is clear that an incursion by a truck’s trailer played a part in the accident (as did driver fatigue and the geometry of the roadway). And another driver cites trucks as a major problem:

“Tractor-trailers are our biggest problem,” Mr. Ha said. “When the rear of the truck slides toward you, you have to stay calm because if you steer too hard to avoid it, you might flip.”

Drivers know that trucks are a problem. And accidents—truck-related or not—are frequent. While there haven’t been any accidents of this magnitude yet, the bus service in the northeast has been a powder keg with a lit fuse, and the frequent breakdowns, fires and rollovers have had remarkably few deaths. Until now. It will be interesting to see if this accident, which seems more related to the structural operation of buses over busy highways with fatigued drivers rather than glaring driver error, changes the demand curves for transportation in the NEC.


In any case, it’s time to look at our regional transportation structure and decide whether the low end of our transportation structure should be road based or should be modernized for safety, speed and reliability. Amtrak’s antiquated Northeast Corridor is maxed out, New York’s airports are as well, and the roads are congested and not particularly safe. Perhaps Amtrak’s $100b+ proposal for the Northeast Corridor, with the potential to have capacity to move most traffic off the road, is a safety issue.

The fallacy of one-way car sharing

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(This all began a few months ago, when a friend in Austin and I discussed a one-way rental scheme there. Months have passed, he’s moved, and one-way car sharing still isn’t open to the public in Austin. Or anywhere else in the hemisphere. And, outside a couple isolated cases, I’m not sure it will ever work. I distilled the argument, a bit, in a comment at the Transport Politic, and promised to flesh it out. Here’s my best attempt …)

One of the most frequently asked questions for those of us in the car sharing industry is “when are you going to have one-way rentals.” There’s no good answer. Yes, car sharing is a relatively young industry: Communauto is celebrating 15 years in Montreal, most other Car Sharing Organizations (CSOs) in the western hemisphere are 10 or younger. While the technological advances during that time have been rapid, from paper log books and lock boxes to iPhone reservations and remote unlocks, everyone has been vexed by one-way rentals. Supposedly some very smart people (at MIT IIRC) tried to build an algorithm to allow for one-way rentals, and it failed miserably. So, with one minor exception, if you take out a car sharing vehicle, you have to return it to the same space.

The one exception is with Car2Go (not to be confused with a similarly named CSO in Israel), which is “operating” in Ulm, Germany and Austin, Texas. Why Ulm and Austin? Well, Car2Go is backed by Daimler, and has a fleet of Smart Cars in each city. I know very little about the operation in Ulm (or the city itself) other than it is a small, dense, European city. As far as Austin, I know two things. First, the system there is not open to the public. Second, it seems to have backing from the municipal government and the University of Texas, at least as far as parking, which is why it might not fail. Might.

There are two ways to figure out why one-way rentals do not work for car sharing. One is to take a CSO, its members, vehicles, and a defined area, and try to create an model which takes in to account car usage, parking, times of day and fees per mile or minute to see if it, well, works. That is very complicated and, even if it proved successful (so far it has not) is still only a model. The second method, however, is to take a step back and look at some of the underlying factors which would create a workable one-way car share, and how these mesh with such a program. Doing this, it becomes quite clear that one-way car sharing will never really work, no matter how many GPS-enabled cell phones there are.

So, let’s take that step back. In North America, one-way rentals would seem to be based on cities with high density, i.e. cities where, once a car was parked, it would not be long before another driver needed it. We can use a very good proxy for this: cities which are existing major car sharing markets. These are, in the United States, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Chicago, San Francisco, and to a somewhat lesser extent, Portland and Seattle; and in Canada, Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. (All have at least 300 shared cars on the road, except Portland and Seattle, which have about 200.)

What do all these cities have in common? They all have the soft factors which, in my opinion, are supportive of car sharing: the availability (or lack thereof) and cost of parking, the frequency, reliability and speed of a transit network, and the prevalence of urban congestion. (See this post about car sharing for a longer discussion of these three factors.)

Why won’t one-way car sharing work in these cities? One word: parking.

Imagine starting something like this in a city like Boston (a stand in for our dense car sharing cities because I am poaching most of the next few paragraphs off of an email I wrote a while back). No one would use it. The reason Zipcar is successful (as are other CSOs in other cities) is that when you return your car you are guaranteed a parking spot. If you are going from Cambridge to the South End, you take the T, because it is faster (or marginally slower) than driving, cheaper, less aggravating, and less likely to experience a traffic jam. (And if it is delayed you can walk—you’re not wedded to your car.) If time is of the essence, you take a taxi; as long as you aren’t going right there and back it’s probably cheaper than a shared car (you pay for when you use it, driving or not, so if you are going to a party, it’s cheaper to that the T there and a cab home). You use Zipcar for trips to the grocery store when you don’t want to haul groceries on the T, trips to Ikea &c., trips to the suburbs or places to which the T doesn’t run and to which a cab would be abhorrently expensive (anything within spitting distance of 128).

Now, imagine the one-way car sharing scenario. You pick up a car near your house in Cambridge, and drive to the South End. It works well because it is an easy trip. But there are two problems on two different scales. On a small scale, you get to the South End, and start looking for parking. Most likely, any time you saved driving you lose trying to find a space. Maybe a firm comes up with a way to send the location of spaces to your phone (I worked for one of these for a while, and it did not work out), but there is still a lot more demand than supply. So circling the block eats up any time savings you may have enjoyed. And there’s no way that this service, at $300+ per space per month, goes out and buys enough spaces around the city that you could always find one open and convenient. It might work if you dynamically base the price of the destination based on demand, but then high-demand locations will cost more than taxicabs.

Based on the density of cities like Boston alone, one-way car sharing would work. Except that it is impossible that the parking could be worked out. You’d almost necessarily have more parking spaces than cars, which is both an economic and social detriment: parking, especially empty, is antithetical to density and walkability. (Most CSOs have as many parking spaces as cars; some have fewer. If a CSO has 15 cars assigned to a lot and knows that 99.5% of the time no fewer than 2 cars will be checked out, and lower pricing for off hours can encourage this, they can buy fewer spaces than they have cars. At $300 a space, this is a nice thing to be able to do.)

The other problem is large scale, one of congestion. Imagine that you somehow solve the parking conundrum this takes off. Imagine that whenever you need a car, you can get one and drop it off wherever you need to, and pay a few dollars for its use. It would be great. Everyone would use it. And, there’s the problem. And all of the sudden, tens of thousands of people who used to be carried below grade on subway lines (and some buses) would be clogging the streets in their little two-seater cars. Even if they were in such eight-foot long vehicles, they’d take up a lot of space. In cities like Boston, New York and San Francisco, adding a few percent to the already at-capacity roads throws the system in to gridlock. You’d pretty quickly lose whatever time advantage you had over mass transit, trips would be more expensive than transit (or, if they were short enough, still more expensive than walking), and it’s not pleasurable to sit in stopped traffic in a city.

Finally, cars will necessarily flow to certain places at certain times of day. From residential areas to office areas, from offices to restaurants to entertainment districts. If there are too many, you have to move them. But cars aren’t like shared bikes. You can’t send one buy out with a truck, load ten of them up in one location, and ship them off somewhere else. You need a driver for each, and that gets costly.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are less dense American cities, some of which do have shared cars on the street. I’m not speaking of universities which pay for a couple of shared cars, but cities with smaller shared car fleets on their streets, like Madison, Denver/Boulder, Minneapolis/Saint Paul, Atlanta and Pittsburgh. We’ll use these are stand-ins for the less-dense American city, which may not have the aforementioned factors in place.

Here our stand-in will be Minneapolis and Saint Paul, because, uh, again, I can coöpt much of an existing email in to this post. In the Twin Cities parking is pretty easy. But for a scheme like this to work, you’d need so many cars in order for them to be within walking distance of enough people. (Add to that the fact that in the neighborhoods where it works best—Uptown, the University of Minnesota, the downtowns—parking is an issue.) So there are a few neighborhoods where it might work okay, they are not very well connected, and many people living there ride their bikes anyway. Andy pretty much every city I can think of falls in to this category.

In addition, cities such as the Twin Cities have many services which are only available in the suburbs. For instance, in Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, there are REIs and Apple Stores easily accessible by transit. In the Twin Cities, they’re in the suburbs. So for a lot of trips, you have to drive somewhere, leave the car in a suburban parking lot, and need it to get back. One-way rentals don’t really apply here.

The only cities I can think of that might be able to solve the parking issues yet have dense enough areas to support many cars are mid-sized cities with huge, urban college camuses, decent transit and middling parking issues, and the right “clientele” for the service. Basically, Austin and Madison. The colleges can be strong-armed in to giving up enough parking to make it viable on the campus, and the geography might work out otherwise. (Of course, would this program be used by broke college students when free options like biking or walking abound?) It’s definitely a might; I’d still be surprised if it works.

You may notice I have not said a word about the logistics of the whole charade yet. I am rather well-qualified to speak to them, and it would scare the hell out of me. Basically, what happens when a car goes off to never-never land—a part of the city which might be in the city limits (or the sharing limits), but where no one really wants to drive from. Either it sits there generating no revenue until someone wants it, or you have to dispatch someone a folding bike to get it. Either way costs staff time and mileage.

What happens when someone parks it and leaves it in an underground garage with no GPS reception. You know, like Whole Foods (in Austin, which has underground parking)? (I assume they’ll have sensors there, which would be somewhere I’d assume a lot of the cars would wind up, but you’d have people walking up and down the aisles in the lot, or have the cars in a special parking space. Still, now you’ve spent a lot of money wiring every garage in the city for connectivity.) No one can find the car, you have to have someone call the previous user (and good luck reaching the jet-set type anymore, many of us don’t answer calls promptly), and try to find the car. CSOs know where our cars are—they are returned to their spots 99.9+ percent of the time.

Finally, take the following scenario: you live near the outskirts of the drop-off area and work eight miles away, also near the outskirts of the drop-off area. You pick up a car one day and park it at your house, where no one else is likely to use it. Then you wake up, drive it to work (you pay for what you drive, so 15 minutes costs you $3) and leave it at work, where, likely, no one will want to use it. At the end of the day, you drive it home, another $3, and leave it there. All of the sudden, you’ve paid $6 for a 16 mile round-trip commute, gas and insurance included. If someone else uses the car, you take a bus or bike in to town, pick up another one, and do it again. If this happens every couple of weeks, it’s a minor inconvenience,  and your total commuting costs might be $120 a month. It’s not a bad deal for you, but would bankrupt anyone trying to run the thing.

A couple more tidbits:

A lot of car sharers often make reservations in advance. Like, weeks in advance. Every Tuesday evening they drive to the grocery store, or their great aunt’s house, or the climbing gym. The car is where the car is and they know it will be there. With one-way rentals you don’t have any assurance a car will be where a car will be. Thus, you throw out the segment of the market which has reserved in advance. (Without throwing around any insider information, let’s say this market is below 50%, but still significant.) You could have a dual system, where some cars are round-trippers and some are one-ways, but then you have more overhead and member confusion (we’ve found that simplicity, in car sharing, is a virtue). And the logistics—people parking in the wrong spaces; people taking one-way cars on round trips, would be an administrative nightmare. Or, you could have a system robust enough that there’d almost always be a car where you wanted it. But I think I’ve given several reasons that such a system is unlikely. And you’d still need a system whereby people could take cars for longer trips and pay for the non-driving time in between to guarantee the car would be theirs.

Okay, so what about bike sharing? It works, right? Yes, but bikes are smaller than cars. A lot smaller. You can put fifteen bikes on a sidewalk without disrupting the traffic flow of pedestrians or vehicles. Try doing that with one car, let alone a dozen.

To sum up, a one-way car sharing system only works in an area well-served by transit. However, to get from one area served by transit to another, you don’t really need car sharing. Car sharing fills a specific niche where transit is too slow or inconvenient, taxicabs too expensive, and cycling too impractical. One-way car sharing would be like taxis without drivers. Except when taxis aren’t carrying a fare, they are doing one of three things: they are either parked in an out-of-the-way location, driving to find another fare, or idling (generally at a cab stand or high-traffic area) with a driver in the seat. Taxis never have to find parking. Take away the cabbie, and the system fails. As would, in my opinion, one-way car sharing.

*****

Want to find a CSO near you? CarSharing.net‘s list a pretty good list. If you are in the Twin Cities, HOURCAR is fantastic, although, full disclosure, I do work for them.

Ugh … the Silver Line

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Originally posted as a comment on The Transport Politic. I’m sure I’ll write about the Silver Line again.

The Silver Line has so many problems.

First off, there’s this bizarre notion that people from Roxbury and Mattapan need to get to the airport. All the time, forever. It’s probably not the case. I’m not one to make brash generalizations, but here’s one: the people who generally use the airport are folks from affluent and/or student-infested parts of Boston. At higher rates, anyway, than the Roxbury-Mattapan. For this community, access to downtown Boston and better-than-bus service is probably paramount. It would make much more sense to take this $114m and build a spur of the blue line in to the actual airport. Build a loop to the terminals. Heck, build it in to Central Parking, where there are elevated walkways to all the terminals. Eliminate the shuttle bus (which I once tried to take before a long weekend and it was packed to the gills with college students with dozens more waiting to board).


View Logan Blue Line Spur in a larger map

Second, the Silver Line from South Station to the airport is very slow. The tunnel is fast enough—the speed is slow but it’s grade separated, so it works. The problems arise once the buses reach the surface. The then cross D Street and proceed to drop the trolley poles and switch to petroleum. The route then takes a convoluted backtrack loop back towards South Station, across D Street, through several lights, before the bus can finally turn down in to the tunnel. $15b and they couldn’t build a ramp straight to the airport, which would have been rapid.

Then, the airport. Since Boston is the furthest northeast city in the country, Logan has never developed in to a hub airport. Thus, no one has ever built one big terminal. So the airport is a hodgepodge of terminals, each with an access road which gets choked with traffic. Sure, the buses can sometimes bypass these queues, but they still have to go through the loops in to terminals A, B, C, and E (with two stops in B—Terminal D doesn’t really exist). Ten of fifteen minutes later, they loop back in to the tunnel and a mess of roads before looping back to South Station.

I’m very glad that “Phase III” has been all but nixed by the Feds. A $1.4b tunnel would not fix the main issue that trips are scheduled to take 38 minutes to go from South Station to the airport and back. As the crow flies, this is just over a mile. A Blue Line spur to the airport, with stops at Maverick and Aquarium, would tie in to the rest of the system with trip times of maybe eight minutes, tops, with faster loading and more capacity, to boot.

*****

But that’s really actually not the worst part. Again, I’ll start by explaining that I am happy that the $1.4b tunnel from pretty much nowhere to pretty much nowhere with a couple sharp curves thrown in was not funded. From Boylston Station on the Green Line five blocks south is a disused tunnel for streetcars, and the plan was to basically decimate that tunnel to build it to bus loading gauge. Here’s the thing—the tunnel ties in to the Green Line—to a four track alignment to Park Street Station—and is grade separated, underground!, at the junction. Basically, if you turn back one line of the green line at Park Street, you could add in another without increasing capacity on the congested central subway.

And this tunnel would tie in splendidly with light rail down towards Mattipan. You build a new portal at Tremont and Oak and cut diagonally across the Turnpike and NEC from Shawmut to Washington. Washington Street is wide enough for trolley cars to not interfere with parked cars by occupying the center lanes. (Washington Street once had the elevated above it.) Stations in the center of the tracks, proof of payment ticketing perhaps, and you don’t impede traffic significantly, which could pass stopped trains.

Getting through Roxbury might be fun—but you could use the old elevated right-of-way for one or both tracks of a light rail line. Or tunnel underneath if you had the dollars. From there, Warren Street has two lanes each way plus a wide median, so congestion wouldn’t be a major issue) to Quincy Street, where you’d then have to build on a two-lanes-plus parking street to Blue Hill Avenue for less than half a mile. Cut parking to one side of the street and build wide lanes and you’d be fine.

Then you hit Blue Hill Avenue. The Avenue is three lanes each way plus a wide median all the way down to Mattapan, where you could connect with the High Speed Line. Trolley tracks could be in a separate median (like Comm Av or Beacon Street in Brighton and Brookline). In fact, this was the case in the past.


View Boylston-Roxbury-Mattapan in a larger map

For a heck of a lot less than 1.4b. (Portland can build a streetcar for $25m/mile. This is 7.5 miles. Make that $30, throw in $50 for a new portal at Tremont and $25m for a bridge across the Pike, and the cost is $300m.