Never mind commuters from the North Shore, what about all the people in South Boston trying to get to work?

which addressed many of the concerns people raised in hearings for the first version (such as that it took bus service away from Somerville that people needed in order to connect to the brand-new Green Line stations). And I think the MBTA board approved it.

Is a solution desperately in search of a problem.

The history: From 2008 to 2014 Houston lost 30% of its bus ridership (old link because I still need to update my certificates). They decided that they had to completely redesign the system since it didn't serve the center of demand, they did so, and it was successful. Some consultants saw dollar signs and started pitching bus network redesigns to other agencies with bus performance issues, and some of those agencies (cough MBTA cough) thought "hey, here's a quick fix for our buses."

Only it's not fixing what's broken. The problem with the T's bus network is not that it doesn't go places that people need it to go (for the most part, there are certainly some tweaks to be made around the edges). The problem is that the buses are barely dispatched, that the schedules are unrealistic and the buses get hopelessly behind, that the T seems afraid of transit signal priority, that bus lanes that take a single parking space are nearly impossible (you know, those people driving from the Cape to Cambridge for a hair cut) and, oh, yeah, having enough drivers.

But those are hard, while throwing a few million dollars at a consultant to use Big Data to redesign bus routes is easy! I've heard some stories from this process, which has now been going for five-plus years (this early work was useful, but has not been used well). At one point they had three high-frequency bus routes converging on Newton Centre until they were told "uh, yeah, no, that's probably not a huge focus" and another route was proposed between East Milton and JFK and the consultants had to be told "yeah, pretty sure the 'demand' you are seeing are people stuck in traffic on the Expressway."

So the final map is basically the same map as today with some tweaks around the edges. Except the whole game for the consultants is "cut infrequent routes to create more frequent routes" except, again, that's not the issue in Boston. The issue in a lot of cities were infrequent, "coverage" routes which provided infrequent service to certain locations but had very little ridership. Most routes in Boston just need to be more frequent. Some routes are infrequent at rush hour but still carry full loads. Others run every few minutes but can't cope with demand. These are not problems in Houston yet the T was paying for a Houston solution. Since every route they planned to cut (at one point) had a pretty strong constituency, and many probably should be made more frequent, the T backtracked to "okay, we'll add 25% to the service levels" which is all well and good but they don't have enough buses for service today.

So instead of focusing on better operations and dispatching and making our buses and drivers more efficient, we've chased this solution for Houston for five years to get to the point where we don't have enough buses or drivers to run current service.