Posted May 16: At the Mass. Av. BRT Pilot Community Forum.

[randomness]

Note added here today: This was kind of relevant to bikeshare. The Q&A for this presentation ended up including arguments over the bike lanes that were painted onto Mass Av. a couple of years ago, after much debate. Both sides took advantage of this venue to reopen an issue I thought was settled already. Clearly some people still want the lanes to go away, and the people who got their lanes want to keep them.

I left after that because it seemed like the discussion was going to be about bike lanes rather than BRT.

Comments

[redbird]

From what adrian_turtle tells me, a lot of it was people saying "what we could really use is a rush hour express bus service" and the presenter(s) saying that wasn't an option.

Adrian also pointed out to me that part of the plan is to give buses priority in left turn lanes. Stretching the definition, the 77 makes one left turn inbound, into the Harvard busway, and one outbound. (The outbound 79 and 350 make a left onto Mass Ave from Alewife Brook Parkway, and the inbound 350 makes a left onto Mass Ave.) So, yeah, that sounds like they're solving the problems of some other bus route.

[randomness]

Yes, E observed to me that the presenters spent quite a lot of time describing the various features of BRT and then reassuring us that of course they weren't going to do that aspect of it here.

One questioner also observed that most of the delays on the 77 were caused by congestion on Mass Av. past Alewife Brook Parkway. Which is in Cambridge. Cambridge does have a BRT pilot of its own, but it's a joint project with Watertown, covering the 71 and 73 on Mount Auburn Street.

The answer to that question was basically "Well, the intersection of Mass Av. and Alewife Brook Parkway is in scope, so we hope that will help some."

There will be more presentations at the end of the summer and we were told there would be more details then.