Honestly, I've started taking the bus a lot more recently and it's been a really good experience for me.

Moar

The 77 is great and should run more frequently, and the city without a doubt should keep these bus lanes.

Great graphs in the article

I live right off N. Mass Ave in this area and was super impressed with the graph/data and results! The suburban car commuters can get bent. The bus lanes and bike lanes are a huge improvement.

I have seen the po po relatively frequently enforce these bus lanes too, which is a nice change of pace for the city.

Full report (from last November) here:
https://www.cambridgema.gov/-/media/Files/Traffic/2021/20221118_northmassavepostimplementationanalysis.pdf

lol @ their folder naming conventions

It's a shame there are no longer any businesses along that stretch of Mass Ave, for all those bus riders to enjoy... \s

Edit: sarcasm flag before OP comes to my home to do me harm

I live there and have absolutely no idea what the fuck you are talking about. They are all still open. Even the biggest moaners like Fast Phil's and City Paint are still around. Season To Taste moved into a larger building with zero parking in a more expensive part of Cambridge.

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And frankly, many of the businesses in this stretch of Mass Ave suck big time and despite living literal footsteps from them I refuse to patronize them because they offer awful products or services.

Great outcome but it boggles my mind the amount of resources put into “studies” and “research”. Like yea if you add a bus lane no shit it will run faster. That’s like saying “if you have less traffic, you can drive faster”. Imagine if the money spent doing these studies was just put towards construction of actual infrastructure.

Updated plz don’t hurt me

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Think of it as an investment. The results shown in the graph are pretty clearly supportive of just how helpful these bus lanes can be while not having a significant impact on car drivers. That latter point is something that might be helpful in speaking to/convincing car drivers who don't like bus lanes.

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It's frustrating that this is called a bus lane when it's a parking lane for 21 hours (bringing traffic down to one lane for both cars and buses). How can we allow one single car to create a bottleneck on traffic by literally parking in the middle of Mass Ave instead of having them park on the side street? Buses don't stop running at 9am!

IT'S WORKINGGGG!

Sorry the bullshit from the residents around here drove me nuts

Forever '21

Because when people come to meetings and go "bike cabals ruining my bakery rabble rabble rabble" they can say "no you're wrong and here's proof, shut up".

When? I almost never see them in the mornings. I wish they’d be there every morning, I’m sure they could fund the PD with ppl illegally driving in the bus lanes.

Shouldn't you want to have a more precise idea about how much faster , and what effects it has on other travelers, for future implementation?

The full analysis linked from the article does look at car travel times. The TL;DR of it is: Compared to a control street they increased immediately after installation, but have since stabilized and show little difference.

I have definitely seen them on Northbound side in the evening, on motorcycles, lurking among the flex posts. They definitely aren't there every day, but I have seen enforcement often enough that it probably makes some difference.

Comparing 2019 and 2022 seems like a real apples and oranges situation. So much has changed. Overall T system ridership is still down by almost 30% vs 2019. A lot has changed, not just the lanes.

You guys really need to get over this bakery thing.

If you're concerned about showing a complete picture you'd have to look at more than just travel times. Add in account for for safety, noise, environmental impact, cost, air quality, etc. Buses will be a clear winner.

There are other costs than just time to transportation, ignoring the fact that their analysis showed little overall change to car traffic

No, it’s funny

Nah she needs to get over the bike lane thing. Until then, she's gonna keep being a meme

"Inbound buses (headed toward Harvard while the dedicated bus lane was in effect) traveled 31 percent faster on average"

How did bus travel times change during the hours when there's only a single inbound lane for cars and buses?

When are they going to expand bus service? If they're dedicating a lane to buses, it should get more service than just a 77 to Arlington Heights every 10 minutes.

They should look at the places people are driving to, and start some bus lines there, or at least to park-and-ride lots along the way.

Seems a little bit obsessive, no?

Freak out harder.

That's a casual joking reference. Obsession would be replying to every negative mention with something like "FAKE BIKER REVIEW NOT A CUSTOMER".

The 77 was only down 8-16 % in ridership (from the analysis), which is less than the bus system overall. It would be nice to have some comparison to one of the other key bus routes with out dedicated lanes, if they could find a good control.

fake biker post, pay no attention! /s

I rode my bike by Fast Phil's a few weeks ago when it was warm, and the dude sitting out in front (Phil?) waved and said hi to me... I was surprised because I've seen them listed as one of the biggest crybabies about the bike lanes... signs of a thaw?

Honestly he is a friendly and chatty guy, and seems like a good human being. I think if he wants his business to succeed he can’t live in the past, which is what all these businesses are trying to do. Despite me liking him in general, I don’t get my hair cut there lol.

My only exposure to this nonsense is through the people who keep posting about it in this sub. Seems a liiiittle much.

Agree on the control, but the route's own ridership isn't the only thing that the system ridership drop indicates. Commuting overall is down. For example, peak traffic levels in Boston are down by almost half between 2019 and 2021 on some days of the week. (See https://www.tomtom.com/traffic-index/boston-traffic/)

Nice to see some data. It does feel a bit cherrypicked (or alternatively maybe an advertisement for how nice the routes could be if more than a few blocks had bus lanes) to only consider a tiny portion of the overall route. Anecdotally (I (try to) take the 77 a lot) that route seems to get bunched up and come more like two to three busses every 30 minutes than what the actual schedule says, and it's faster to walk between Cameron and Porter in practice about half the time.

What I would like to see instead of bus travel time as a metric is person travel time - something like given a random distribution of humans arriving at the bus stop, how long on average does it take, including waiting for the bus, to get to a given destination.

I hope this data supports extending the bus lane all the way to Porter, so least. Traffic tends to clear after that

And this is without police even enforcing the bus lanes. Can you imagine, telling a Boston area driver that there’s a lane they can use because it’s used by a bus.

They should add an express bus that hits the more used stops but much fewer of them. The CT1 was a great idea but the T set it up to fail.

Yea. I would like a bus that goes straight from Cameron to Porter to Harvard lol but I doubt it Will happen

Well, you need about a quarter of the stops for an express bus, and you run them more during rush hours. The CT 1 fails because they didn’t advertise it, they treated as a separate bus on running the same route, they ran 1 bus for every 10 regular #1 buses, and it stopped at Central Sq, not Harvard.

The CT2 is successful and still running, but ran a separate route connecting multiple subway lines.

Now they just need to ticket themselves when they park in a bike lane

Me too. I think it won't be reliable until it's extended through Arlington though.

Maybe you spend too much time on reddit.

I just can't get over the fact that we had funding all lined up and everything to extend to the Red Line all the way to Arlington, then blocked it. And forty years later we are talking about maybe doing an express bus route.

How do you peasants have patience for that hogwash

Doesn’t take much patience these days your highn-ass

Livin life on normie mode Holmes

Who got time for buses who

You?

You got time for that crime?

Killin your time

Killin your mind

Just so you can do your grind