Is it a Reasonable Transit Pitch? Is it a Crazy Transit Pitch? No — it’s an absolute Rule-Of-Cool Fever-Dream Transit Crayon Map™. I present: Project Blue Lace.
Imgur link for full map and full ridiculousness.
(“Project Blue Lace” — rhymes with “shoe lace”. Get it? I really should be banned from making puns…)
This grew out of my Extending the Blue Line West series, in particular my discussion of where you could go after an extension to Kenmore. If you were willing to spend exorbitant sums of money on tunneling (and probably some environmental mitigation as you pass through the Fens), you could extend the Blue Line down into Longwood Medical Area… and then why not over to the Orange Line? And why not over to Nubian? And if you’ve made it to Nubian, well, why not use Melnea Cass and the Track 61 ROW to hop up to the Seaport? And since we’re spending exorbitant sums of money, why not build the third bore of the Ted Williams Tunnel to bring heavy rail to the airport? And then why not take over that branch to Chelsea that everyone wants to add to the Blue Line when they’re first making crayon maps? And since you’re there, why not go over to Wellington? (But clearly that is the place to stop — obviously an extension to Davis would be a bridge too far? Right? I mean, obviously, right?)
The extension into Longwood maybe could be justified as a moonshot investment in some super-transit-friendly political environment… maaaaaybe. But the rest of this is just pretty silly. It’s the southern half of the Urban Ring, most of which has never been proposed as heavy rail, instead preferring LRT or BRT.
But it makes for a fun map.
I developed this map in early 2022 and used it to sketch out a few other ideas that I’d been playing with. Most of these are Green Line extensions.
Usual stuff:
- Orange Line to Roslindale Village
- Blue Line to Lynn
- GLX completed
- Green Line to Needham
- Indigo Line
- Green Line to Nubian
- Green Line to Porter
- Green Line D-E Connector
- Green Line to Grand Junction
More unusual stuff:
- Green Line to Seaport
- Green Line to Back Bay
- Green Line to Jackson Square via Hyde Square
- E Line to Hyde Square is actually a pretty mainstream proposal that you see in official documents every now and then. Given that Jackson Square is a bus transfer point (that now has center-running bus lanes on the approach), I think a short Green extension further has merit
- Green Line to Sullivan and Everett
- This would be complicated. But looks cool on the map.
- Green Line subway to Allston
- We have a three-way junction with the Grand Junction, and then a branch-off after West Station, with one branch taking the pretty commonly discussed path to Harvard, and then the other taking a trip down Cambridge St, eventually terminating at Oak Square, resurrecting the A Line in part, but feeding it into West Station instead of Kenmore. (Which means, by the by, that this new Allston Line could be fed both from the Central Subway and from the Grand Junction.)
- I’ve largely moved away from this idea since developing this map, but I still think it’s interesting
- Silver Line “X” from Nubian & Jackson to Ashmont & Mattapan
- Most of this corridor already has bus lanes in use or in planning, so I think it makes sense to formally “placemake” into a dedicated “line” in the MBTA family. Each northern terminal would have a pair of routes to each southern terminal.