Arborway Green Line Restoration
Articles

TWO VOICES
Road Rage
Are trolleys a prize or a curse? Neighbors can't agree.

By Janice O'Leary

From The Boston Globe Magazine, 4/11/2004

It's a debate playing out across Greater Boston: Do trolleys offer a faster, more convenient trip downtown, or are buses, with their ability to maneuver in traffic, the better alternative? The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority is talking about restoring the Green Line's Arborway trolley line in Jamaica Plain, which was suspended in 1985 and replaced with bus service. Some neighbors can't wait for the trolley's return; others fear it will cause traffic jams and delay emergency vehicles. We asked two JP neighbors to air their differences: Elizabeth Fixler, owner of the shop Indigena on South Street, wants the trolley service restored, while Paul Schimek, a homeowner who lives around the corner from her shop, envisions a sophisticated bus system instead.
   

FIXLER Restoring the trolley means sustaining small businesses by bringing people in from other areas. The trolley would increase tourism.

SCHIMEK The street is narrow on Centre Street and narrower still on South Street [two streets on which the trolley would run]. There's only room for one lane of traffic in each direction, if there is parking on both sides, and everyone agrees there needs to be parking. That means the trolley has to run in the same lane as everybody else. People are concerned that's going to delay car traffic. Other people are concerned it's not going to help with transit service, either, because the trolley is going to get stuck, with everybody stuck on it. Yes, it can be difficult for buses, too, but the issue is that the trolley has to run on rails - buses can maneuver a certain amount if someone's double-parked or there's an emergency vehicle coming.

FIXLER In 2001, the MBTA hired a group to do information studies. And the product of those information studies was that the trolley would not impact traffic any differently than buses do, and that was a reaffirmation of what came out in 1987.

SCHIMEK What do you consider good transportation?

FIXLER Good transportation meets current needs and future needs. Buses cannot meet our future needs. They can barely meet our current needs capacity-wise, whereas trolleys can. You've got huge, 60-foot buses running now. Capacity is what, 95 on these 60-footers?

SCHIMEK Yeah, there's 55 seats and standing room for 40.

FIXLER But if you go 12 feet more, 72 feet in the trolleys, you'll get about 175 passengers. If I'm standing in the freezing cold in the middle of winter, and a bus goes by because it's full, I'll be very happy if there's more room on a trolley, because I'll be able to get on.

SCHIMEK Say that I increase the frequency of the buses. Will I still have a capacity problem?

FIXLER You will. They've started to run the buses at very low intervals of seven minutes. And you really can't go below that, or you may as well tie their bumpers together. Every train line has dramatically increased ridership. Ridership on the bus line has been flat. What is it now?

SCHIMEK We don't know, because the T counts them every five or six years, and the last count was in 1997. It was about 17,000 then.

FIXLER Well, it was about 19,000 in 1985.

SCHIMEK I've looked carefully at the numbers put forward, too, and they were taken from public documents, but the documents were wrong.

FIXLER And there's zero emissions with trolleys. In this city, where people are dying of asthma, zero emissions is what I want to do for my neighbors.

SCHIMEK When you lobby for expensive projects that are not the best way to reduce emissions, you're taking money away from less-expensive, quality projects [like cleaner-burning diesel buses] that really do reduce emissions.

FIXLER The trolleys have been mandated, the money is in place, we're going forward. You'd have to break the law to do what you want to do.

SCHIMEK Trolley advocates are saying it's already been decided, it was decided years ago, it was included in the litigation of the Central Artery, you can't go back on the commitments. That's wrong.

FIXLER [On the proposed trolley line, unlike on the buses] going inbound requires a fare and coming out aboveground is free. If you have something that's free coming home, a lot of people will take it. As a merchant here for 30-odd years, I remember people stopping at the market here on the way home, and they would get back on the T because it was free. They'd also come across the street and browse in my store.

SCHIMEK And the T couldn't make the bus free on the way back? If we put the effort into planning the buses that we put into planning the trolley, we can have more ridership than we do today. And we have the Orange Line, which will get you downtown in 15 minutes.

FIXLER The majority who would ride this line are not serviced in any way by the Orange Line. We have major universities and hospitals all near the Green Line. And people do not take the Orange Line to get there.

This is an edited transcript.
© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.

From www.boston.com/globe.