WatertownCarBarn wrote:Well in some capacity it's already happening. Parts of Dorchester are being or have been gentrified in recent years (I believe Mayor Walsh is one of those residents). And with Dudley Square being primed for a new "innovation hub" (tech stuff, etc.) Roxbury could begin to follow suit as well. And it's long overdue.
The Mayor is a life-long resident of Savin Hill/Dorchester; his parents are Irish immigrants. If you mean Savin Hill is being gentrified to some extent, that would be correct.
As someone who works in Dorchester, almost everything east of Dot ave has been more or less gentrified for at least a decade now. Cedar Grove and the Lower Mills area is essentially an extension of Milton, and Savin Hill and anything north of that has become an extension of the South Boston gentrification.
Go a half-mile inland though, and it's a completely different story, and the Fairmount line cuts a path through what are more or less the poorest, roughest neighborhoods in the city. Upham's Corner, Bowdoin-Geneva, Talbot Ave, Morton Street, and Blue Hill Ave are all stops on the Fairmount, and they're the closest thing that Boston has to the bad parts of Baltimore or Philadelphia.
Given the trend towards re-urbanization, etc and the gentrification spreading from West Roxbury, Southie, Dot ave, etc, it's almost inevitable that those neighborhoods WILL eventually improve, but as it stands now, that improvement is almost a prerequisite for any increased service on the Fairmount to actually make sense.
If you actually want to give those neighborhoods the transit boost that they truly need, then build separate busways down the medians from Dudley to Mattapan Square via Warren and Blue, and from Jackson Square to JFK via Seaver and Columbia, and run prompt, proper Silver Line service across them, with traffic light triggering, etc. And make it a long-term goal of making the jump to Light Rail when the funds materialize.
Do that, and now that Fairmount line which would otherwise dump people at South Station (who have no need whatsoever to get to the finance and biotech jobs around there, nor the fancy restaurants and expensive bars), now would tie into this new BRT/light rail network at Columbia AND Blue Hill Ave, creating a transit network that actually serves the immediate needs of these communities. Only then do DMU's and clock-facing headways make sense on the Fairmount.
As to other routes, where there is a clear and demonstrable need for better service into the city, I say bring on the DMU's. With rising costs of living in every part of Suffolk County, Indigo to Chelsea/Lynn/Salem and Waltham would allow those cities to truly fill their potential roles as much-needed "safety valves" for the inside-128 urban real estate market, just as the RL did for Somerville and Quincy, the OL did for Malden, and the BL is now doing for East Boston and Revere. These cities to the north and west already have large transit-dependent populations of Latin-American immigrants who actually DO have a need to get into town (to keep the city's entire restaurant/hospitality/service industry afloat), and they also have excellent potential as locations for first-time homebuying millennials who otherwise can't afford anything remotely urban (much less with transit access) inside 128, or even 495, where you don't have to worry about getting shot.
