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You might have another decade to ride the old PCC trolleys on the Mattapan Line
By adamg on Wed, 06/21/2023 - 9:17am
The Dorchester Reporter provides an update on the MBTA's plans to replace the current 1940s trolleys on the Mattapan Line with more recent Green Line trolleys: It could take a decade to get everything ready and would involve the elimination of the current loop track at Ashmont.
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Comments
So 2053?
The design of the old Ashmont Station was great. Did it need to be renovated? 100%
The design of the new Ashmont station, not so much.
Nice job spending all that money not so long ago for not so much MBTA.
Solutions in search of problems
Old Ashmont Station was a good BERy-designed transfer station: optimize transfers for both minimizing the distance people would have to transfer and the number of stairs they'd have to traverse (preferably zero). So Mattapan-Ashmont cars rolled into the station, people got off and crossed a platform onto the Red Line, the car ran around to the other side, gathered passengers, and rolled back to Mattapan.
The new station has the orphaned little loop which requires everyone transferring to go up and down stairs, plus, it is on such a tight curve that there's no way to have level boarding (good thing the new station wasn't designed 15 years after the ADA or anything). So now the T would be returning to a straight alignment, but only on one side of the facility, which would be somewhat better than what's there now but still worse than what we had from the 1920s to the early 2000s.
(This is not the first time the T has downgraded transfers. Most of the old Main Line El stations had excellent cross-platform transfers. Harvard retained its unique ramped system mostly to use the bus tunnel, but the T has managed to mess that up as well with its electric bus "plan" which is going nowhere fast.)
Yep
When I lived in Hyde Park, I often took the Red Line to avoid the crowds at Forest Hills (and it was a straight shot to Harvard, where I could then pick up the trolleybus to Watertown), and up until 2004, once you got off the trolley at Ashmont, all you had to do was swipe your card and you were on the train.
As the years went on, the MBTA went to into converting BERy conveniences to MBTA architectural adventurism, some for the sole purpose of attracting developers to build luxury apartments and market those apartments as "transit friendly". The newly rebuilt Ashmont station is an example of that - the design is wide-open to the elements, and it's not exactly ADA friendly.
Speaking of the Bus Network Redesign Plan - I've been following this since it began, and I have the feeling the BNRD plan won't deliver as good as the MBTA says it will, and for all its feel-good intentions, it won't come close to improving service. I see it as more sleight-of-hand to keep passengers off the rapid transit lines, and thus convert those lines into rush-hour only service. They were supposed to roll out some of them in the summer schedule, but they didn't.
I love that Red Line
I love that Red Line extension route. I was looking forward to the higher elevation the new Green Line trolleys would offer but I'll miss the old trolleys. They were one of a kind on the current T.