Never mind commuters from the North Shore, what about all the people in South Boston trying to get to work?

The Fairmount Line is not single-tracked, although technically the end is up at Readville. And, no, it has a train every 45 minutes in each direction, so about three trains per hour. Add that to six trains per hour (in and out) on the Old Colony at rush hour, which is the max they can do with the single track there.

And sure, the line wasn't for Southie, but then again, it wouldn't have helped at all with what OP posted about.

If you know it's going to be hot, its pretty easy to bring a change of clothes and change before your work day.

When they designed my office building in the mid-90's, the powers that be insisted on 1 shower room per floor and plenty of bike racks outside. My 5 mile daily ride is only possible because I can shower at work. There should be a zoning code that mandates some number of showers per floor/worker in new construction or renovation.

Show me where somebody said people should be forced to bike. You are having a conversation with nobody when you raise these "not everybody can bike" talking points. Granted and acknowledged -- not everybody can bike. Other people who can, might consider the option over the Southie bus situation.

You have misstated my point entirely.

I said that one does not need to exert his or herself on a bike anymore than they do on foot. So if you can walk to work without a sweat problem, you could bike to work without a sweat problem. Maybe you'll have a sweat problem either way, but that's not a reason not to bike either then.

And for those with difficulty with reading comprehension, no one has said that "nobody else will have a problem [on a bike]."

My signature was to share my personal experience, it was not a guarantee about what others will experience or what they must do.

Is biking feasible for many -- yes!

If you hate bikes -- don't bike!

Is this all clear?

If everyone from those images doesn't bike or skips taking the bus, they'll have to drive and that could get pretty rough on traffic if they all hop into single occupancy vehicles.

Isn't assuming they can drive just as bad as assuming they can bike?

Just because people CAN drive, doesn’t mean they want to. Typical crank mentality.

But it's weird to act like it's the equivalent of gathering an expedition of voyageurs to search for the Northwest Passage, as opposed to something that millions of people across a wide range of fitness levels and economic classes do as some part of their daily commutes.

I do feel I am better than a lot of the commenters here. A willingness to consider alternative transportation is part of that. Reading comprehension is another.

which addressed many of the concerns people raised in hearings for the first version (such as that it took bus service away from Somerville that people needed in order to connect to the brand-new Green Line stations). And I think the MBTA board approved it.

Is a solution desperately in search of a problem.

The history: From 2008 to 2014 Houston lost 30% of its bus ridership (old link because I still need to update my certificates). They decided that they had to completely redesign the system since it didn't serve the center of demand, they did so, and it was successful. Some consultants saw dollar signs and started pitching bus network redesigns to other agencies with bus performance issues, and some of those agencies (cough MBTA cough) thought "hey, here's a quick fix for our buses."

Only it's not fixing what's broken. The problem with the T's bus network is not that it doesn't go places that people need it to go (for the most part, there are certainly some tweaks to be made around the edges). The problem is that the buses are barely dispatched, that the schedules are unrealistic and the buses get hopelessly behind, that the T seems afraid of transit signal priority, that bus lanes that take a single parking space are nearly impossible (you know, those people driving from the Cape to Cambridge for a hair cut) and, oh, yeah, having enough drivers.

But those are hard, while throwing a few million dollars at a consultant to use Big Data to redesign bus routes is easy! I've heard some stories from this process, which has now been going for five-plus years (this early work was useful, but has not been used well). At one point they had three high-frequency bus routes converging on Newton Centre until they were told "uh, yeah, no, that's probably not a huge focus" and another route was proposed between East Milton and JFK and the consultants had to be told "yeah, pretty sure the 'demand' you are seeing are people stuck in traffic on the Expressway."

So the final map is basically the same map as today with some tweaks around the edges. Except the whole game for the consultants is "cut infrequent routes to create more frequent routes" except, again, that's not the issue in Boston. The issue in a lot of cities were infrequent, "coverage" routes which provided infrequent service to certain locations but had very little ridership. Most routes in Boston just need to be more frequent. Some routes are infrequent at rush hour but still carry full loads. Others run every few minutes but can't cope with demand. These are not problems in Houston yet the T was paying for a Houston solution. Since every route they planned to cut (at one point) had a pretty strong constituency, and many probably should be made more frequent, the T backtracked to "okay, we'll add 25% to the service levels" which is all well and good but they don't have enough buses for service today.

So instead of focusing on better operations and dispatching and making our buses and drivers more efficient, we've chased this solution for Houston for five years to get to the point where we don't have enough buses or drivers to run current service.