ABC Co-sponsors "Hub & Spoke" Report on Future MBTA Capacity

June 18, 2012

It’s a busy season for transportation. Last Monday, some of the region’s most prominent Mayors came together at South Station to call for more funding for transportation. While that was happening, the state legislature released its final bill to help the T close its budget gap for the coming fiscal year; the House passed the bill on Wednesday, and the Senate will take it up next week. But what we want to focus on this week is a very interesting bit of research that ABC played a role in, which was released at a very successful event on Thursday morning. You may have read in the Globe about this report, which was done by the Dukakis Center at Northeastern University and released by the Urban Land Institute. (MAPC released a companion report the same day.) This “Hub & Spoke” report, which ABC co-sponsored and helped edit, mapped places in the MBTA system where there is congestion – where we have more people wanting to ride the T than we can or will be able to accommodate –against areas where we expect future development to happen. The good news is that we have a lot of folks wanting to ride the T – 1.3 million trips every work day now, projected to go up to between 1.4 million or 1.7 million by 2020. We also have a lot of development coming on line, both in the “hub” (Downtown, the Back Bay, Kendall Square, Longwood, the Seaport) and out along the “spokes” of T system. By MAPC’s count there’s room for 75,000 new housing units and 130,000 jobs near transit stations, by 2035. Of those, 30,000 housing units and 45 million square feet of commercial real estate are already being planned or under construction.   So that’s the good news. The bad news is, unless we invest in improving the capacity of our transit system, it’s likely the T won’t be able to handle the influx of new riders that all these Transited Oriented Development (TOD) projects will generate. And this is not a theoretical problem. Right now, major parts of the core of the subway system are at or near capacity, meaning that, during peak times of day, riders are being left standing on the platform because there’s literally no space for them on the trains.

There are two ways to fix our capacity problems: make our existing system work better, and pursue targeted expansion to take pressure off the key bottlenecks. Both of these approaches involve a significant investment. Fixing the existing network will involve buying new cars for the Orange, Red and Green Lines and upgrading signal and power systems so that we can run trains with greater frequency. (More trains running more frequently equals more capacity.) Many of these types of projects fall under what the T calls “state of good repair”, and right now, the list of projects in that category totals more than $3 billion. The T would have to spend a quarter of a billion more than they’re doing right now, every year, to make a dent in that list. The other approach to increasing capacity is to take pressure off parts of the system where congestion is worst. One way to do that would be to create new transit service between the outlying spokes, so that riders can move around the periphery of the system without having to travel into the core and back out again. ABC has long been a proponent of the Urban Ring, bus routes that would do just that.

  Ultimately, we’re going to have to do both of types these interventions if we want the T to be able to handle the kind of ridership we’re expecting. Paying for all that, though, is going to require a significant investment above and beyond what is already spent on the T. And it’s important to recognize that there are serious problems on the highway side: crumbling roadways, dangerous interchanges, structurally deficient bridges. Municipalities have yet to receive their money from the state this year to do important local road projects. Hopefully, the reports and events this week will add to the public awareness of the problem, so that we can push for a solution this fall and going into next year.      

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