orange1234 wrote:
What about inbound? What if people don't want to go to Haymarket or beyond? What if somebody wanted to get from Malden to Sullivan Square?
The MBTA could split the Orange Line shuttlebus service into four routes:
a) LOCAL: All stops between Haymarket and Oak Grove, one vehicle every 10 minutes
b) SULLIVAN EXPRESS: Haymarket to Sullivan via I-93
c) WELLINGTON EXPRESS: Haymarket to Welington via I-93 and Rte 28
d) MALDEN EXPRESS: Haymarket to Malden Center and Oak Grove via I-93, Rte 60, and the standard route between Malden/Oak Grove
Benefits for MBTA operations: Instead of running full shuttlebus capacity all the way to Oak Grove, they would get to turn about 50% of the trips at either Sullivan or Wellington. That means the MBTA gets more shuttlebus trips from Haymarket per vehicle, so they can reduce the cost-per-passenger of shuttlebus service. Since most trips are express on I-93, the round-trip times would be even shorter than you'd expect by simple short-turning of the Sullivan and Wellington busses.
Costs for MBTA operations: The ridership might not divide evenly into these four routes, so some busses might run under full capacity. But this problem could be eliminated with some simple rules. Send out full express busses, and when there aren't enough passengers to fill another express bus to a given location, tell people to either (1) wait for the next express, or (2) take the local. This would limit the operation to one under-capacity bus on the local route, per batch of busses that is sent out from Haymarket, much like the current design.
So I think this plan would save money.
I suppose there may be times when the MBTA wouldn't be sending out whole fleets of busses at each Orange Line headway kerchunk, because the ridership is lower. If that happens, just cut it back to the local-only. The express service is just an add-on to make the trips more efficient for both the MBTA and the ridership when it makes sense to sort the passengers by destination.
