Before everyone gets mad at me, notice my username and read this: I rode the Arborway car once, watched it out of school bus windows from 1979 until 1985, and wrote a bunch of letters to bring it back in the late 80s and early 90s, before I moved to the midwest. But I lived in Roslindale, and wanted to ride the trolley to Boston Latin. The only reason I wanted the trolley back was that I liked trolleys. I think it's really hard to argue that trolleys were somehow more real transit on Center Street or on the outer half of the Watertown line that buses were or could be. It's just as easy to argue that the trolleys were equivalent or inferior to buses and were just there for external reasons.
By the 60s, Boston was left with its 5 light-rail lines (BCDE and Mattapan) in private ROW, a light-rail subway, and two street-running lines that were largely on streets too narrow for private ROW. Those two lines lasted longer because they were yard leads that they used for revenue service because they were there anyway and the T had the cars. While many riders probably liked the one-seat ride and some probably preferred trolleys to buses, thats not why those lines survived longer. When the cars were needed for light-rail lines, the A came off, and so did the E part of the time in the 70s (weekdays? weekends? rush hour? I read it once and forgot). Once LRVs had replaced all the PCCs except on the E, the T didn't need the Arborway yard for anything, so they could abandon the lead, which must have made it even easier for the T to imagine bustituting the E. In the early 80s, the remaining street-running trolleys looked and felt like part of the rapid transit system to people looking at the maps, and to people riding into the subway, in a way that I assume the Dedham Line and the Charles River and the lines out of Everett and so on hadn't felt like part of the RT system back when everything was trolleys. So when the E closed, it felt like losing part of the RT system, but most of the line wasn't rapid transit.
Except for emissions and the possibility of getting more pax with fewer operators, street-running trolleys are basically equivalent to buses until you get to a private right-of-way that isn't set up for buses. This is much more true than the other way around: bus rapid transit, even in a dedicated ROW, is not necessarily equivalent to rail rapid transit. Trolleys started as little cars that ran all over the place in the middle of streets, before gasoline engines. A few busy routes got private ROW, multi-car trains, longer cars, articulated cars, etc., and became light rail. In most places, the rest of the routes were bustituted, first the twice-an-hour lines that didn't justify the cost of maintenance etc., then the other routes as car lobby demanded better pavement, buses got more reliable, etc. (Zach Schrag makes a convincing argument that NYC bustituted as a way of getting rid of the streetcar companies, and the technology was irrelevant.) For people going from Forest Hills or the Monument to the Longwood Medical Area -- a big part of the current and potential ridership, and a much busier place now than in, say, 1940, -- street-running trolleys have no particular advantage (except emissions) over rubber-tired alternatives. On some days, buses would be faster (such as when an accident blocks one lane of Center Street and buses can go around). Leaving buses on Centre St. is a lot less of a loss than not reviving the A in a private ROW as far as somplace in Newton, as Newton wanted in the 80s or 90s (right?); that would have been a new RT line, much more "rapid" than anything on Centre St. will ever be except at 3 am.
Given all this, I'm not surprised that there are JP residents who are transit activists on both sides of the issue. I've known two pro-transit, anti-trolley activists from JP personally, and one of them did not even own a car.
So for an oddball idea, why not copy BERy and build a super-easy cross-platform transfer station at MFA or Northeastern, instead of the awkward arrangement at Copley?
