Columbus Avenue in Roxbury getting trolley-like bus stops

First, the bus lanes did not get the community (and to be clear, I am talking immediate abutters, not the anti car crowd that don’t live on Washington Street) input. I don’t see people going along when they were not consulted.

Second, I don’t see the lane being clear as a priority while traffic is down. Outside of the Square (not part of the bus lane) there isn’t any congestion.

I’ll leave the ignorance about commuter rail pricing alone.

Permit a new modern design nuclear power plant to generate the electricity to run through that wire if you care about climate change, Baker.

This is the city of Boston setting up a bus lane. The City of Boston can reconfigure its streets with just some minor coordination with the MBTA to make sure everything syncs up properly, but to "string up an electric wire" you also have to run buses that run on electricity, and the MBTA buying more of those would be a much longer process. Electrifying buses is a thing we should definitely do (although maybe battery electric buses would be better than trolleybuses, or for that matter streetcars) but you can improve the bus lanes first and then do that when we can do that.

The first bit would be to link Nubian Square with the Pleasant Portal. This is particularly applicable because there is still an active MBTA power feed under the street which used to power the Orange Line, so electrification costs would be lower because there would be no need to build a new feed and conduit. South of Nubian is trickier since Warren Street gets narrow pretty quickly.

The Pleasant Portal is quite interesting as well. Tremont Street there was widened, and it would only require taking a small portion of the park to put the tracks back in. Because the street slopes there somewhat perceptibly, the tracks can go from underground to the surface in the course of that one block before transitioning back to the street, and the sidewalk could just be rerouted adjacent to the park. You can get a good idea of what this used to look like using some of the old maps at MapJunction, specifically look at the 1952 aerials and earlier Bromley maps. Connecting to Washington could include a diagonal bridge across the Turnpike with a station there, or maybe zigzag across with a station on Marginal Way.

There's also plenty of capacity in the subway, at least to Park Street, because everything was grade separated in 1897 when it was built. Service from the south would operate on the outer tracks, and by turning some/more service from the west back at the Park Street loop, there's no real worry that it would clog the subway north of Park.

Then there's the question of how to accommodate the SL5 into the Tunnel as well as the SL4 to South Station, but there's no law that says that you couldn't have trains and buses operating on the same right-of-way, splitting off north of the Pike. They could even use a similar power supply, with the trolleybuses using the left wire and offsetting the right wire enough that the pantograph didn't hut the return and fry the system. But those are details …

on Columbus for the past three months while they've been doing this construction. It's actually much worse right now than it will be when they're done, because it's one lane in each direction and buses block traffic completely when they stop to pick up or discharge passengers at the corner of Walnut and Columbus. Cars making an unprotected left also block traffic entirely.

I drive that stretch of Columbus/Seaver twice a day, and even with all the lane closures, it hasn't been any worse to drive on than normal. Once construction is done, I'm guessing it'll be less congested than it used to be, and bikes/bus passengers won't have to fear for their lives.