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Are big buses better buses?
By adamg on Tue, 06/22/2010 - 8:02am
The MBTA holds a meeting on Wednesday to discuss plans to start running larger hybrid buses on the 28 line between Mattapan Square and Ruggles. The session on the articulated buses starts at 6 p.m. at the Mattapan BPL branch.
The T says the larger buses can hold more people and will pollute less. But new stops for the longer buses could mean elimination of dozens of parking spaces along the route, which has some merchants concerned, the Herald reports.
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Comments
Gee...
It sure would be nice if someone would design a bus that could hold more people but didn't need a bigger footprint. Maybe they could make it taller instead of longer. I wonder why no one has come up with such a thing.
Sure they have
Of course, they're red and the driver's seat is on the right. Oh, and they tend to be found only in London.
Some must've gotten really lost...
Because I swear I seem them running from Boston to NYC. And they were somehow defaced and now all say MegaBus. Who'd have thought that a private entity would have found a way to provide more service at a similar price (I don't know what a double decker costs to buy or maintain, but they still only require 1 driver and everything a human employee entails), while reducing the number of large vehicles on the road. Maybe this is a trend that will catch on.
Low-clearance issues?
Are there places in the MBTA system where a higher bus won't fit? I don't recall any such places on the #28 route, but I wonder about the Harvard Square bus tunnel, the Jackson Square busway, and maybe a few railroad underpasses.
When Megabus first introduced double-deckers, they had to leave South Station and move to Back Bay for a few months, until some pipes could be moved in the South Station bus terminal.
How to lie with statistics
The most amazing thing about this is that when asked to justify eliminating the parking spaces, Richard Davey, the General Manager of the MBTA, said it's a good idea because 91% of people who ride the bus on Route 28 approve of it.
Yes, that's right, it's a good idea to get rid of car parking spaces because bus riders say so.
What's next? Are they going to ask people with cars whether it's a good idea to change bus schedules?
I wrote about this asininity in more detail on my blog.
That's not too bad. After
That's not too bad. After all, the more people who take mass transit to get places, the fewer private cars there are on the road. This means there's less need for parking spaces.
Plus of course, it's a good idea to get rid of parking, to reduce road capacity, and to keep a tight lid on development outside of the city, in order to make it more appealing to people to live in the city and take mass transit (if not bike or walk).
I've seen green/blue/yellow and black/yellow double deckers
But they were in Dublin and Berlin. I think Las Vegas is the only US city that uses double deckers at the moment. I'd love to see them on the chronically overcrowded #1 bus.
I wonder if these concerned
I wonder if these concerned merchants have the foggiest clue on how their customers arrive at their store.