TomNelligan wrote:octr202 wrote:Your plan does make perfect sense from an operational point of view. However, with the amount of attention that accessibility has gotten recently, this is a matter where political perception will outweigh operational practicality.
Indeed. This is Massachusetts, where political correctness often trumps both rationality and economics. But Neoplans versus Flyers aside, couldn't some diesel trips just short-turn at North Cambridge to restore the 77A without a need for additional equipment? I assume that a given bus could make at least two North Cambridge round trips in the same time it would take for one RT to Arlington Heights. I guess there's still the issue of increasing the number of diesel trips through the Harvard Square tunnel.
That would be completely pointless to use a diesel for a short-turn on an electrified ROW with extra vehicles available. And, yes, environmental concerns would trump all there. They do have to control the exhaust in the old tunnel, which they can't do with CNG's because it's a tunnel and because of the overhead wires. The residents of the new old folks' home built in front of North Cambridge yard would be none-too-pleased to have diesel runs in their backyard when the selling point of that place was that the vehicles going in/out of the yard are emission-free and near-silent. And you'd probably start seeing residents on Mass. Ave. complaining about a spike in diesel runs. What could work is doing an express to A. Heights, but the Cambridge corridor is operating at air quality capacity without the CNG option in play, and I bet the Arlington NIMBY's get a bug up their asses fast about added noise and fumes too. So they've got to be careful before the residents start looking at their legal options. That's a more affluent and politically active corridor than disadvantaged JP and Roxbury where they have been dogged by unresolved air quality disputes. The TT infrastructure is their main leverage to keep the peace and they can do it without costing themselves anything. Any service tradeoff for diesels where TT's can equally do the job is going to rankle, including the ADA advocates who are going to start worrying about air quality disadvantaging the handicapped.
Re: political correctness. Perspective, please. We'd be talking 2-4 more Flyers spread around ALL lines at peak hours...less on off-peak...to boost short-turn service. Is anyone, even the most nitpicky ADA advocate, even going to notice that if you have no more than 1 extra TT assigned to each line. You may see more Flyers out there on a given day
today if there are Neoplans out of service. How many times recently have you seen Flyer after Flyer on a route before getting a Neoplan? It wouldn't happen here, either. That would be splitting hairs to an extreme for an improvement of service that's only going to involve extra runs being added to a route that's semi-official operating even to this day. Is anybody going to quibble with that, especially if it frees up space for a wheelchair on a 77 at peak-time crush.
No question the T wants to ditch the Flyers...they're 30 years old and can't be upgraded in any way. But new TT's are expensive (so expensive that they sank Neoplan with the last orders), and the surplus of Flyers are being held for active service and spruced up for a reason...and not because they're deathly afraid of offending someone by taking one out for a revenue run in a non-emergency setting. It improves service to have extra runs available. Nowhere in the ADA does it say that service cutbacks are a requirement to compliance when you don't have the money to upgrade it all in one fell swoop. If it were, you could kiss Mattapan goodbye in an instant. That's the whole reason why they have the relaxed-schedule grandfathering for old infrastructure. Whole transit modes would go away in agencies around the country without it.
Given that the T purchased a whole new fleet of low-floor TT's anyway when they could've just cut down the wires and run more diesels shows they're committed to ADA accessibility on the TT's. It's orders of magnitude better than it was just 3 years ago. But no one can be such an absolutist about compliance to expect infrastructure to be overturned overnight and for the T to either cut back service or junk perfectly reliable needed vehicles when they can't immediately afford to. They're in the process of replacing the entire bus fleet with low-floors, outfitting virtually the entire 110-year-old Green Line with ADA stations and low-floor cars, and adding high platforms to key CR routes. That's a ton of crucial upgrades which take precedent. Can't expect every place on every mode to hit absolute 100% compliance on the same schedule when there's that much ongoing work that has to be prioritized. They can buy some spare TT's when it's time to find a new manufacturer to expand the dual-mode SL fleet, or when they do studies about electrifying the whole 77 (since Arlington's starting to warm to that idea). If they can improve service in the meantime by mixing in a couple revenue Flyers that'll be ready to run for a few more years, it's only going to help everyone to do the sensible thing. I don't see how anyone could make a convincing argument that fewer runs, less service, and passing up existing capacity actually improves accessibility in any way.
