Arborway Green Line Restoration
Articles

T plan will swamp Boston with buses

By Jane Holtz Kay

From The Boston Globe, 8/8/2001

IT'S SUNDAY in the park, and all is timeless summer beneath the State House Golden Dome, beside the Frog Pond, and along the arched trees of the Common. The floral papering of the Public Garden is backdrop for bridal party portraits, and the living is not only historical but lyrical.

It's Sunday in the park, and all is mostly free of the rush hour crush of cars by the Park Street station and around the edges of this green core. Despite the ringaround-the-rosy tourist buses, nothing much intrudes on a site that would sit well with Charles Bulfinch, the 19th-century architect who penned the Common's outlines and Beacon Hill.

Forget the bucolic scene. If the MBTA's ill-conceived plan to swamp the area with bus traffic, this urban pastoral is set to vanish. If its preposterous proposal to send 40- to 60-foot buses circling from Jamaica Plain downtown comes off the drawing boards, the city will smother in its own traffic.

''Honk'' if you hear highway agents in the distance. Hang a light in the Old North Church if you want to help. Planned to number 400 buses a day -- that's one every four minutes -- this fleet of chunky intruders would strangle movement in much more than this emerald core but impact communities from the periphery to the center.

The far-fetched plan offered by the T would swing from the Jamaica Plain Arborway down and around town, through Copley Square and the Back Bay. Its brontosaurus brigade would lumber between the Garden and the Common, squeezing along traffic-laden Beacon Street, narrowing to take a turn at Park Street, angling along Tremont and crushing our already traffic-snarled center.

Unfortunately, this is more than a Gilbert and Sullivan proposition. It is a litmus test of the inability of the Executive Office of Transportation, the supposedly environmental governor, and the suburban-minded mayor to conceive of decent, intelligent transit planning for the city.

This impediment masking as innovation is business as usual. Applying the faux title BRT (bus rapid transit) to these clunky intruders is a subterfuge. It's Emperor's New Nomenclature that denies modern, updated rail mobility. Refusing to recognize and supply real rail transit, the behemoth buses will increase pollution and traffic instead of reducing it.

In some ways, this ruse is not surprising in a transit system catering to commuters but disdainful of daytime trekkers, nighttime travelers, and weekenders crushed and jammed to new heights of misery this summer. Nor is it shocking in a mayor and management that have neglected the rail skeleton that built Boston and neglected the Green Line expansion that could solve the problem.

This subterfuge system not only hits the core but offers the fringes a bad deal. Jamaica Plain will have bulbous buses clogging its streets and causing dirty emissions from stalled traffic. Using the same shady semantics, the bogus buzzword BRT scraps the promised streetcars slated to replace the old elevated for South End/Roxbury and offers only unwieldy buses.

Similarly, at the seaport, the T planners, posing as managers and acting as word mavens, have created silverwash nomenclature -- the Silver Line -- to describe buses for the mobility-deprived development.

Some folks see beyond the bogus buses. Litigation undertaken by the Washington Street Corridor Coalition could secure Roxbury's promised rail service. Likewise, the threat of a suit from the Conservation Law Foundation could stop the Boston Common-bound buses. But is court action any way to run a rail system or a city?

Certainly not in other towns where streetcars are up almost 3 percent in the first quarter of the year and 21 percent in the last five years. Centers of little urbanity like Dallas, Phoenix, and Denver have opted for rail -- for the community-building, neighborhood-reinforcing systems that built Boston. Broken in spirit, it seems, as well as budget, local bureaucrats flirt with highwayesque projects with fanciful titles. A bus route becomes the Urban Ring in local parlance but remains the hard-fought inner belt to the cognoscenti who fought its highway menace a generation ago.

In the end, the 400-bus parade proposed for downtown is simply the visible flag of a flag ship that has forgotten its history. It is a token of a transit administration that can't even get normal buses to hew to reliable, readable schedules and provide good service for the communities they serve, or clean their dirty diesel engines.

That management's congested scenario for Downtown harkens back to the previous turn-of-the-century when the city's streets were so jammed that its citizens voted a municipal referendum to build the nation's first underground subway. Some 100-plus years later, that underground Green Line streetcar route -- and a car-impacted city - are ready for a second and simple widening and expanded service and a new rail era.

In ''Make Way for Ducklings,'' the whooshing mid-'50s cars threatened the heralded Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouack, and Pack till Officer Clancy came to the rescue. The far worse traffic flap about to embroil not only Boston's historic 75 green acres but the communities it serves demands a bolder rescue still.

At the turn of the last century, Boston's leaders solved traffic congestion on Tremont Street with a state of the art solution: the subway. The turn-of-this-century needs bolder heroes to stop the sham of behemoth buses and create a civilized railed city.

Jane Holtz Kay is the author of Lost Boston and Asphalt Nation.

From www.boston.com/globe.