Category: resources

Another version of the MBTA map

Posted on by Riverside

Last year, I attempted to redesign the MBTA’s rapid transit + key bus routes map. My first iteration was just downright ugly (and yet somehow I still decided to post it), while my second iteration was a bit better, though still unsatisfying.

This year, I have returned to this concept, with the same goals as before, to design a diagram that includes:

  • Key (frequent) bus routes, designed into the map from the start
  • All stops on the Green Line branches
  • Walking transfers, such as State – Downtown Crossing and Brookline Village – Riverway
  • All stops on the Fairmount Line (future-proofed for its eventual conversion to near-rapid transit standards)
  • All information included on the present map

And achieve all of the above while fitting into a square and attempting to comply with relevant ADA visual design requirements by using the same canvas and font sizes as the official diagram. I also set a goal of having all labels appear on a solid background, not intersecting or overlapping any lines or other visual elements, and having all labels be horizontal for readability.

While I hestitate to trust my own judgement (like I said, it did somehow seem like a good idea last year to post my previous redesign), I do think that this iteration is more successful.

screenshots below are from the initial version of the diagram and have some minor differences

Design details

Many elements from last year’s version are carried over here, including:

Alignment of bus routes

Stations are aligned so that connecting bus routes form strong visual links

Color-coded bus routes

Bus routes are given colors based on the transfer hub they operate into; in the example below, orange bus routes feeding into Ruggles are contrasted with the green routes that feed into Kenmore/Longwood or Back Bay; the two routes in red both go to Harvard:

The transfer system at Park St & Downtown Crossing

The proposed realignment of SL4/SL5 will relocate its Downtown Crossing stop to Chauncy St, where it will provide a good transfer to the Red Line, but a more distant transfer to Orange; Silver <> Orange riders will be better off transfering at Tufts Medical Center. I’ve attempted to convey that here, along with the Red <> Blue walking transfer at State

Coequal bus routes

The most important change is that this diagram incorporates the key bus routes as coequal “stakeholders” in the design of the map, meaning, for example, that the complexity of the bus network in Longwood was treated as equally important to accommodate as the complexity of the subway network in Downtown. This meant, among other things, that labels for bus stops were sized identically to labels for rapid transit stops.

An organic by-product of the coequal emphasis on bus routes is an expansion of the “grid” formed by Park-DTX-State-GC downtown:

  • The parallel Red and Blue Lines, horizontal on the Cambridge Seven diagram, are now joined by the parallel lines of:
    • the 9, 8, 1, 15, the Longwood-Nubian bus corridor, the 23, and 22.
  • The historically vertical Orange and Green Lines are now joined by:
    • the Ashmont Branch, the 16, Fairmount Line, portions of the 8 and 1, SL4, the 32, the E Line, the Brookline Ave bus corridor, and the D Line

In particular, the lengthy parallel alignment of the Ashmont, Fairmount, SL4, and Orange Lines created a strong “ladder” effect, where the complex Dorchester bus network can be articulated in terms of which anchor stations a route connects to. For example, my diagram more clearly articulates that Newmarket sits on the same cross-street as Mass Ave and Symphony, and that Uphams Corner sits on the same cross-street as Nubian, Roxbury Crossing, and Brigham Circle.

(The fact that the Uphams Corner <> Brigham Circle street changes names four times — Dudley St, Malcom X Blvd, Tremont St, Francis St — points to the utility of a mildly simplified visualization of Boston’s [apocryphal] cow paths.)

Complexity and tradeoffs

Now, it has to be said that this diagram is complex and still rather visually overwhelming. In general, I argue that’s inevitable with this much information being put into this little space. Fellow ArchBoston contributer TheRatmeister has created a gorgeous map that presents an elegant counterargument, as his map does indeed show all of the above information while still looking amazing.

A key difference between our maps is that his utilizes non-horizontal text and overlapping text. (His text is also slightly smaller than mine, although I believe it still falls well within accessibility guidelines.) So this highlights a tradeoff: the visual complexity of overlapping/non-horizontal text, vs the visual complexity of a highly visible bus network.

Lines on a map

An earlier draft of this map took the emphasis on coequal bus representation even further, by depicting the very highest frequency bus routes (as currently planned in the Bus Network Redesign) with visually distinct medium-thickness lines (nearly as thick as the rapid transit lines) bisected by a thin white line.

This iteration made the Longwood-Nubian corridor too busy. It also ultimately is misleading — the differences in proposed frequencies between my “thick” and “thin” bus routes just aren’t that stark.

However, this version of the diagram presents something worth closer examination: a visualization that vaguely suggests what the subway map might look like if the T’s most important bus routes were full rapid transit:

(no high res link because I didn’t build out a high res version of this, just a screenshot as a proof-of-concept)

As a political position, I submit that we should not tolerate “slow zones” on the bus corridors depicted above — important enough that they have a legitimate claim to being “on the map” — any more than we’ve been willing to tolerate slow zones on the subway.

Boston, the “Hub(s) of the Universe”

Both in my final map and in the proof-of-concept screenshot above, it is Back Bay that sits visually centered. On the one hand, this is partially an artifact of compression that I implemented on the northern half of the map. On the other hand, that compression was only possible because the T’s system is less complex (and less robust) on the north side. The network out of Longwood/Nubian alone could be its own map.

The fact is that Boston no longer has a single downtown, but at least three, if not more: Downtown, Back Bay, Longwood, and arguably the Seaport, and maybe Kendall Sq. To depict the full breadth of the T’s system, a diagram can’t be solely focused on the historical Park-DTX-State-GC core.

In the past, I’ve argued that a poorly understood aspect of the Urban Ring proposal was the extent to which it was actually designed to provide radial transit services to Boston’s “other” downtowns. This diagram illustrates the pluricentric nature of the region’s transit needs.

A Map-Making Note

With respect to avoiding overlapping text, one of the key pieces, I discovered, is finding the “critical triangles” — places where the horizontal label is constrained by the two legs of crossing triangular lines. I found at least three such triangles on this diagram:

Prudential: bound by the E and the 1 (and the Central Subway too)

Chinatown (or Tufts Medical Center, depending on font size and spacing tweaks): bound by Red/Silver and Orange/Silver, and hemmed in by the commuter rail as well

And finally Longwood Medical Area: bound by the E/39 and the Francis St buses

These “critical triangles” in turn govern both stop spacing and line spacing.

For example, the “Prudential critical triangle” needs to also place the Prudential stop marker itself roughly halfway between Copley and Symphony, thereby setting up a general “cadence” for the stop spacing.

In this design, I found that the “LMA critical triangle” ultimately forms the lowest denominator; the spacing of everything else on the entire map unfolds from the stop spacing between LMA and Brigham Circle arising from that critical triangle:

  • Brigham Circle <> Longwood Medical Area need to be far enough apart to fit labels, but also need to be roughly as far apart as Longwood Medical Area <> Museum of Fine Arts
    • (I cheated a little bit here: the stop icons are unevenly spaced, but the texts of the labels appear less severely unevenly spaced)
  • In turn, Brigham Circle <> Museum of Fine Arts need to be roughly as far apart as Roxbury Crossing <> Ruggles — the Orange Line stop spacing becoming twice that of the E
  • Museum of Fine Arts <> Northeastern <> Symphony needs to match up with Ruggles <> Mass Ave, again emphasizing the Orange Line’s stop spacing being 2x that of the E
  • …which gets recapitulated again with Symphony <> Prudential <> Copley needing to broadly match Mass Ave <> Back Bay
  • The “ladder effect” I described above then in turn means that the Fairmount Line’s Uphams Corner <> Newmarket spacing needs to match Roxbury Crossing <> Mass Ave, and Newmarket <> South Station needs to broadly align with Mass Ave <> Downtown Crossing — giving the Fairmount Line 4x that of the E

Now, obviously, there’s a lot more nuance than this. Both the Orange Line’s and Fairmount Line’s stop spacing get mildly compresssed toward the outer sections of the map — I didn’t rigidly copy-and-paste the spacing. But in general, the principle holds that the “atomic” spacing unit for most of the map derives from the E Line. I hesitate to draw too strong of a conclusion here, but I suspect that this principle will hold true for any T map that seeks to show all of the surface stops on the E Line.

Mapping Boston’s 1921 Subway-Streetcar Network

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Last summer, I wrote that 2022 marks the (true) centennial of the Green Line, with the 1922 opening of the Lechmere transfer station commencing a transition from the “local streetcar network” model to the “rapid transit” model. I point to the rapid demise of the streetcar network in the ensuing two decades as evidence of an intentional transformation. 

Understanding the pre-transformation network

To understand the scope and scale of that transformation, it’s worth looking at what the “subway-streetcar network” looked like immediately before that transformation. One might think that that would be a simple task: simply Google 1921 BERy map boston and this is the first result:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1921_BERy_system_map.jpg

Except… this map doesn’t tell the whole story. A little bit of further digging reveals that many of the surface lines on this map didn’t actually operate into the subway – the far-flung lines in West Roxbury, for example. Moreover, this map omits the foreign cars that weren’t run by the Boston Elevated Railway but still operated into the subway, turning at the Brattle Loop. 

Finding the “subway-streetcar routes”

Identifying which routes operated into the subway 101 years ago is actually not a simple task. Again, I believe this is a consequence of how BERy saw the Tremont Street Subway: it wasn’t a rapid transit line and it wasn’t a “trunk” of the network – it was just a way to get streetcars off of congested streets in downtown. From what I’ve seen, it probably never would have even occurred to BERy officials to publish a map of the “subway-streetcar network” – they were all just “surface lines”.

Making matters more difficult is that BERy also did not (to my knowledge) publish public timetables for specific routes. There were internal timetables, though my understanding is that they were very internal indeed, and are difficult to parse a century later. Most notifications of changes in routes, for example, appear to have occurred in newspaper announcements. 

The Map

Here I am indebted to the labors of love of numerous local transit historians. Building on their work, I have created what I believe is the first map of its kind: a full diagram of all BERy services that offered one-seat rides into the downtown subways in 1921. 

Click to enlarge

Applying the anachronistic visual language of today’s Green Line and Blue Line, I’ve framed the 1921 network with modern points-of-reference, to make it easier to understand its scope and complexity.

Again, it’s important to understand that this diagram does not represent how BERy officials or riders would have conceptualized their system. However, thinking of the streetcar network in these terms is also vital for understanding the decline of Boston’s streetcar network (which began much earlier than we often think of it as.)

List of Routes

The routes operating into the subways included the following (note that many routes had short-turn turnbacks, the same way some trains on today’s E Line terminate at Brigham Circle); I have included some modern comparisons based on today’s routes in parentheses:

Kenmore Portal lines

  • Watertown (57)
  • Lake Street [Boston College] via Commonwealth Ave (B)
  • Reservoir [Cleveland Circle] via Beacon Street (C)

Ipswich Street lines

  • Chestnut Hill and the Cypress St Carhouse (55 + 60)

Huntington Ave lines

  • Lake Street [Boston College] via Village Sq [Brookline Village] (E + 65)
  • Jamaica Plain Carhouse (just south of Jamaica St) (E + 39, but not all the way to Arborway/Forest Hills)

Pleasant St Portal lines

  • Egleston (43)
  • Dudley [Nubian] (similar to SL5, but on Dover St [East Berkeley St] from Washington to Tremont)
  • City Point (9)

East Boston lines

  • Central Square, Cambridge via Joy St Portal (no equivalent, but somewhat similar to the proposed Blue-Red Connector)
  • Jefferies Point (120)
  • East Boston and Chelsea (114/116/117, 112, and 121)
  • Orient Heights (120)
  • Revere Beach (paralleling the route of today’s Blue Line on Bennington St and Ocean Ave)

Lechmere lines

  • Harvard (69)
  • Davis, and Clarendon Hill, via Somerville Ave or Highland Ave (87 and 88)

Canal Street Incline lines

  • Sullivan via Main St (92)
  • Sullivan via Bunker Hill (93)

Foreign streetcars

  • Beachmont (using part of today’s 119)
  • Revere Beach (116 and 117)
  • Lynn (probably most similar to today’s 455)
  • Salem and the North Shore (450)
  • Woodlawn (111)
  • Melrose Highlands via Malden & Chelsea (I believe roughly using today’s 131 north of Malden Center)

Acknowledgements

This has been a gargantuan project, far more perhaps than the map itself would suggest. The details needed to pinpoint the system exactly as it existed in 1921 are numerous and scattered. As in my previous post, I must heartily thank the army of transit historians who have come before me, including Ron Newman, Bradley Clarke, O.R. Cummings, Frank Cheney, and Anthony Sammarco.

I want to extend a special thanks to DAS, who has expertly collated the primary source material upon much of this map is based, enabling us to expand, contextualize, and occasionally correct the work done by Newman, Clarke, Cummings, Cheney, Sammarco, and others. His expert review caught many errors of mine, answered numerous arcane questions of mine, and uncovered the fine details at the margins of this project to ensure this map was as accurate as possible.

When I was a child, reading the copy of Trolleys Under The Hub my parents had given me, my imagination was enchanted by the idea of a “Green Line” that apparently had so many branches. This is the map that I had wanted to see then, so it is a profound delight to finally see it brought to life; as such, I offer my profound thanks to all those who helped me create it.

Notes and Further Reading

As printed in the image:

  • Services on this map operated into the Tremont Street Subway and the East Boston Tunnel in 1921.
  • Street names included here are illustrative and not exhaustive; some routes used additional streets not marked.
  • Additional transfer points existed but are not shown here.
  • Huntington and Ipswich services ran at street level along Boylston, paralleling the subway below.
  • Additional surface-only services ran over shared stretches of track, but are not marked here (for example, an Allston-Dudley service that ran through Village Square).
  • Services intermingled in the Central Subway, and sometimes were through-routed on to new routes once exiting the subway as needed.
  • Occasional additional suburban services may have been through-routed in the subway (for example, from Arlington), but these services appear to have been irregular.
  • Some foreign transfers may have been available at additional locations than are marked here (e.g. Watertown, which likely almost certainly had transfers to the Middlesex & Boston Street Railway).

I recommend the following books on this topic:

References

Tracking down which routes were running into the subway in 1921 was surprisingly difficult. When possible, I’ve used primary sources, but in some cases have relied on secondary sources, particularly since some transit historians have obtained access to archive materials that are more difficult to access remotely or as a member of the public.

I did a poor job of cataloguing my references when building this map. As such, I am currently in the process of rebuilding the reference list for this post. My WIP reference list is available as an appendix to this post.

Mapping the Orange & Green Line Closures

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Over the past week, I’ve been iterating on modified versions of the T’s official subway map to illustrate the closures and shuttle services that begin tonight and will continue for 30 days. This map will likely continue to evolve, and I will continue to post the latest revision here. As always, please note that this is not an official map — always refer to the MBTA’s website and to the City of Boston’s website for up-to-date information.

Notes for transit and design nerds

This exercise started relatively simple: show the Orange Line and northern Green Line in some alternate manner to indicate the bustituted segments. This was relatively straightforward: I borrowed design language from the Arborway bustitution in the late ’80s, with a colored outline, white fill, and colored circles for the stops.

On the further advice of someone with better aesthetic sense than I, I shifted the white fill to a lightly colored fill, to better differentiate the lines, and avoid the perception of a total absence of service. The light fill seemed to strike a good balance between maintaining the line’s identity, showing the continued existence of service, and also indicating a significant difference in service.

But, as happens with many projects, I kept on thinking of, “Oh, just one more thing I can add!”

Which brings us to the current design, which pushes the original map’s information design to the limits. I wanted to show:

  • The bustituted segments
  • The un-bustituted segments
  • Text notes on significantly relocated shuttle stops
  • The one-way service at Haymarket
  • The early-morning/late-night shuttle to Chinatown and Tufts Medical
  • The bus routes the T suggests as alternatives to the Orange Line (39, 43, 92, 93, CT2)
  • The suggested walking transfers between Orange Line and Green Line stations

That is a lot of information to cram onto a diagram that was originally designed to be rather sparse. The current official subway map is an evolution of a design from the early 2000s that primarily showed the rapid transit routes, with commuter rail and ferries being shown secondarily, and limited-access highways being shown tertiarily. In the late 2000s, the key bus routes were added, and a subsequent redesign shifted some parts of the map around while maintaining the same visual language overall.

Evaluating my attempts

Was I successful? Ehn.

I was pleasantly surprised when an earlier version of this map gained a small amount of traction of Twitter, so it’s nice to know that at least some people found it useful. But at a certain point, I fear the level of detail hinders rather than helps. Part of the brilliance of Cambridge Seven Associates’ original “spider map” design was in its simplicity; even if you didn’t memorize the whole thing, the visual concept was highly memorable: four lines, crossing each other in a square and radiating out. That basic schema was easy to recognize and recall, and created a foundation to understand the rest of the system, even if it wasn’t put into one single map.

The eventual addition of commuter rail lines, key bus routes, and now all of the additional information I’ve added here is all very reasonable, especially when done incrementally. But I find myself questioning the ultimate usefulness of the diagram I’ve created. Is it really useful enough for journey-planning? Or is it too confusing to parse?

Simple maps and specific signage

Ultimately, I’ve come to believe that clear and specific wayfinding signage in and around stations is much more important than a detailed system diagram, both under ordinary and extraordinary circumstances such as the Orange Line Closure. (This despite my own love for detailed system diagrams.) In that way, perhaps my earlier, simpler diagrams were more effective.

Shuttle routes only

In this simplest version, the shuttle routes are shown and nothing else:

The advantage of this design is how minimally it alters the original, and (hopefully) how starkly clear the changes are: the most important thing is that the Orange Line and northern Green Line are different and need to be planned around. The question all of this hinges on: can the diagram provide enough information to adequately re-plan the journey? And that’s the part I don’t know.

Walking transfers

The second-simplest iteration added the walking transfers:

Including the walking transfers worked better than I expected. Quite frankly, I’d like to see these added to the official map (though hopefully a little more elegantly than I’ve done here). There are a lot of walking transfers that ought to be indicated on the system diagram, such as the ones I’ve included here, but also additionally:

  • State – Downtown Crossing
  • Government Center – Park
  • Riverway – Brookline Village
  • Reservoir – Cleveland Circle – Chestnut Hill Ave
  • Kenmore – Lansdowne

These transfers would not be suitable for everyone — and it should be noted that they are not free transfers under the current model — but if you are able-bodied and have a monthly pass that doesn’t charge per ride, these transfers are useful, speedy, and potentially can relieve congestion on key sections of the network.

Adding these transfers to the map is a good idea in general, but does it help in the case of the Orange Line & Green Line Closures? Again, I’m not quite sure. In most of these cases, I would guess that regular commuters are pretty familiar with the areas in question, and likely are well-aware that, for example, State and Gov’t Center are practically a stone’s throw apart. And if you aren’t a regular commuter… well, the pretty clear (and dire) direction from both the City and the T has been, “Please, stay away.”

Concluding Thoughts

Working on this diagram has been fun. It also has been nice to see positive response from numerous folks on Twitter. (Shout out to Jeremy Siegel at WGBH for sharing it with his followers!) And at least some of those positive responses have made comments to the effect of, “This is easier to understand than the materials the T has put out.” A few comments on Twitter aren’t necessarily a representative sample; however, the negative reaction to the T’s materials have been widespread and resounding — the Boston Globe going so far as to publish a parody of the official closure diagram.

That negative reaction suggests that there is room for improvement in how the T communicates these closures. I’d argue that the positive reaction to my diagram has been driven by its recognizable similarity to the “normal” map, combined with the clear-and-obvious differences that are blatant and draw attention to themselves.

With rumors swirling of partial shutdowns of the Green and Red Lines later this year, perhaps the T might consider adopting a similar strategy to what I’ve presented here.

Mapping the MBTA Bus Network Redesign

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Background and Goals

For the vanishingly few of you who both read this blog and are unfamiliar with the MBTA’s Bus Network Redesign, you can check out the details of the proposal on the MBTA’s website.

In short, the MBTA is undertaking its first bottom-up redesign of its surface transport network in 100 years. The vast majority of the T’s bus routes once were streetcar routes; some routes have seen minor-to-moderate modifications in the ensuing decades, but the need to avoid disrupting the live system — which governs the day-to-day realities of thousands of people — has always capped how much could be done. As part of the long-running Better Bus Project, the T has conducted a deep dive review of its existing routes, including their ridership and reliability (see the Better Bus Profiles) and user research speaking directly to riders and community members.

Years in the making, the T this month released a proposed redesign of its bus network — details at the first link. This is a massive undertaking, and I give the redesigners credit for very clearly trying to avoid the “We’ve Always Done It Like This” Syndrome that plagues so much of American transit planning (especially in Boston).

Like any proposal, it has its imperfections and flaws. From my perspective, there are some things I like, and some things I don’t. There already has been some initial community feedback, and the T has a docket of public meetings (in-person and virtual) through mid-summer to collect feedback.

For the most part, I don’t intend to use my platform here to evaluate the merit of these proposals. The most important voices here are those of community members — their opinions should be listened to first, and given paramount consideration. Instead, my hope is to add to the discourse by providing additional ways to view and conceptualize the redesigned network — mainly through maps.

(There is one area of the proposal which received swift and strong public criticism. I have a post, and a pair of maps, in the works on that, where I will attempt to illustrate the flaws that have been pointed out by the community, and hopefully offer some modest suggestions to improve the proposal to address those problems. Stay tuned.)

In this post, I will share a map I have created to illustrate the Redesign’s “15-minute network”: a series of bus routes that are proposed to have 15-min-or-better headways all day from 5am to 1am, seven days a week. I’ll use the map to highlight some system-level features of the Redesign, and hopefully provide a framework for deeper discussion.

The Previous 15-Minute Network

Some of you may recall that I made a similar map of then-current all-day high-frequency MBTA bus services in the past. My methodology was a little different, so it isn’t a perfect comparison, but it is a useful starting point for our discussion today.

I also wrote on ArchBoston a detailed analysis of this network and its notable features, as well as a follow-up analysis specifically on the Dorchester network. There were a few things that stood out in that analysis:

  • Very few circumferential or crosstown corridors — almost everything was radial
  • Morning peak frequencies were often higher than afternoon
  • The bus network “breathes”
    • An entire subnetwork of high frequency services turns on and off during the peak, providing much more comprehensive service during rush hour, but a signficantly sparser network during middays, evenings, and weekends
  • The entire northern quadrant of the network — everything between the Red Line and the Blue Line — was bereft of (intentional) high-frequency all-day routes, with the sole exceptions of the 111 in Chelsea and the 116/117 in Chelsea/Revere
  • Some communities, like Everett, don’t show up on the “Gold Network” (high freq all day) because they are instead served by a more diffuse number of routes spread across the city, operating at lower frequencies
  • The absence of the North Shore network — meaning the absence of consistent high frequency service — was conspicuous
  • The Dorchester network is one-of-a-kind, with features that don’t exist elsewhere
    • The network itself is actually three networks superimposed: a “10-minute all-day network”, a “15-min peak, low off-peak network”, and a “low frequency network” — most routes fall very cleanly into one of these three buckets

(Interestingly, that last point about the Dorchester network[s] seemed to be on the mind of the Redesigners as well — they’ve also adopted three primary tiers: a “≤15-minute all-day network,” a mid-frequency network that I’m guessing will be “15-min peak, 30-min off-peak”, and a low frequency network that, like Dorchester’s, would mostly see hourly services. I won’t really go into much detail here, but in my previous analysis, I did note consistent characteristics about each of the Dorchester subnetworks, and I see many of those ideas applied systemwide in the Redesign.)

I mention all of these points because I believe the Redesign recognized these features as well, and explicitly designed their proposal to address them.

The Proposed 15-Minute Network

The Redesign calls for a series of 26 high-frequency routes that would see 15-min-or-better headways all day everyday from 5am to 1am. This proposal goes much farther than the system I described above — in particular with its commitment to late night and weekend service. Vanishingly few corridors see any level of service approaching this currently. Routes on this network would be indicated by a “T” prepended to their route number: the T39, the T111, and so on.

I’ve spent a while digging through the weeds of the Redesign, and have concluded that the 15-Minute Network is composed of three kinds of routes.

Radial Routes

These are straightforward: routes that radiate out from the core, and which feed into major transfer stations such as Harvard or Forest Hills. On my map below, I have used a dark blue for these routes. Most of these routes are unsurprising, and many of them are identified on my Gold Network map above.

Circumferential Routes

These routes offer crosstown service that goes around the core rather than pointing toward it. Some of these routes behave like radial routes as they approach their terminals; for example, the southern half of the T96 essentially radiates out from Porter and Davis. So these routes still will be used by commuters going to downtown — but they also will enable journeys between multiple subway lines that can avoid going all the way to downtown. The T1 is a classic example, connecting Roxbury and Cambridge without requiring riders to change at Downtown Crossing.

Two exceptions

There are two proposed routes that do not fit cleanly into the categories above or below: the T109 and T101, both running through Sullivan. North of Sullivan, they behave clearly like radial routes, to Medford/Malden, and to Everett/Malden. South of Sullivan, they do something that bus routes historically have not done: continue on from one transfer station to another.

Traditionally, these would be considered circumferential routes. However, I have mapped them as radial routes — I believe the Redesigners are trying to reconceptualize these corridors as radiating instead from Harvard and from Kendall, passing through Sullivan somewhat incidentally. I of course have no insight into their actual thought process, but I think it reflects general trends they’ve shown in favor of longer routes that pass through multiple quadrants of the system.

Longwood Medical Area Routes

This is by far the most seismic shift in the redesigned network. For the first time, Boston is proposing a transit network that acknowledges that Longwood is a major employment center, a third “downtown” equivalent to Back Bay and the Financial District. See for yourself:

Full size version here; data source: https://onthemap.ces.census.gov/

The current network requies riders to rely on employee shuttles, bus transfers at Ruggles, funneling riders on to the E Line and D Line, and lengthy walks. Despite being less than 2 miles away, commuters to LMA from Warren St currently have a single one-seat option — the 19, which only runs to Longwood during peak hours, mostly falls short of 15-minute headways during peak, stops running altogether by mid-evening, and offers no weekend service. (And it was no better pre-pandemic either.)

The Redesign proposes extending most major routes from Ruggles beyond to Longwood; it extends Cambridge crosstown service beyond Central to Inman, Union, and Porter; it adds a new crosstown route to the Seaport; and it increases frequencies on most existing routes.

When I did my analysis in 2020, the Kenmore-Longwood-Ruggles corridor saw 15 buses per hour during the morning peak, 4 per hour midday, and 6 per hour during the evening peak. The Redesign notes that exact routings through LMA are tentative pending further study, but by my count, the number of buses per hour between Longwood and Ruggles, Nubian, or Roxbury Crossing is proposed to increase to at least 20 buses per hour, all day.

I’ve colored the Longwood routes in dark red on the map. Some also act as radial routes to other hubs, and some do double duty as circumferential services in the larger network. But Longwood is undeniably the center of gravity, and makes for a distinct subnetwork, worthy of its own identification.

The Map

A few additional notes here:

  • This map is my creation, based on materials published by the MBTA; it is not an official map and any errors are mine. I recommend using my map as a jumping off point before reviewing the official materials.
  • Each route is marked separately and indicates a minimum of 15-minute headways (4 buses per hour) all day every day — I am sure that many if not most routes will see significantly higher headways during peak
  • Certain major bus stops are indicated, largely for the purpose of indicating transfer points to rapid transit; stop placement is not exact
  • Some potential “transfers” would require some walking, indicated by a dotted black line
  • The proposed Blue-Red Connector and potential Silver Line Extensions are indicated with dotted lines
  • Some corridors see high-frequency service provided by layered mid-frequency services; these are mostly indicated by the line splitting and ending with arrows
  • This map is not precise and is meant to illustrate the overall network, not detail individual routes
  • Some routes have been simplified to reduce clutter. For example, the T39, T9, T70, and most of the routes in Chelsea, all have significant stretches where the route splits on to parallel one-way streets; most of these, I have simplified by drawing the route through the block in between the streets

And voilà:

Massive full-size version here

If the full-size version is killing your browser, here is a link to a slightly lower-resolution version.

Here’s a detail view on Back Bay and Longwood, probably the most visually cluttered part of the map:

Conclusion

I do want to emphasize again that I am not trying to evaluate the quality or suitability of the Better Bus Project’s Bus Network Redesign proposals. There are elements of the proposal that I believe are transformative in that they are shifting the conversation in ways that are vitally necessary: centering Longwood, insisting on consistent high frequencies all day everyday, and creating wholesale new corridors that do not descend from the old streetcar network.

But the devil is always in the details, and there are many details to sort through in this proposal. My hope is that my overview and map can make it easier for you to wrap your head around this sprawling project, and from there, dive into the details, well-armed with a larger context.

NYC’s Super Commuter Rail Network

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Some time ago (before the pandemic), I considered taking a job in New York City. Having no desire to relocate, and understanding that there would be some flexibility for how often I actually needed to be in the office, I pondered whether I would be interested in becoming a “super commuter”.

What is a “super commuter”?

According to most definitions I’ve found, a super commuter is someone who lives in one city/metropolitan area but works in another. This seems like a somewhat uselessly vague definition, at least in the Northeast Corridor, but (with apologies to Justice Potter Stewart) you definitely know a super commute when you see it. 

A 2012 report by Moss & Qing out of NYU gives an excellent overview of common super commutes in the US, which include journeys like:

  • Boston to NYC
  • Pittsburgh to Philadelphia
  • Dallas/Fort Worth to Houston
  • Bay Area to Los Angeles

As well as more modest journeys such as:

  • Philadelphia to NYC
  • Albany to NYC
  • Milwaukee to Chicago
  • San Diego to Los Angeles

Most super commuters do not go to the office five days a week, which is one reason they are willing to make the longer journey. For my part, I’d argue that a super commute is one which takes, let’s say, 2.5 hours or more one-way. 

This definition probably encompasses more commuters than Moss & Qing’s analysis did, but it seems to me that travel time is more likely to affect behavior than raw distance or crossing MSA boundaries. Philadelphia-NYC takes 1h50m by Amtrak, but numerous Metro North journeys are comparable, such as from Poughkeepsie (1h50m), Wassaic (2h), Danbury (2h), New Haven (2h), or Waterbury (2h45m). 

Amtrak schedules for super commuters

In any case, as I began to ponder this lifestyle change, I started looking at the Amtrak schedule. From what the hiring officer had told me, it would be alright for me to do some flexible hours when I showed up at the Manhattan office — for example, it’d be fine to arrive around 10:30, and then either leave at 3 on a short day, or put in the extra hours and leave around 6 or so.

Morning inbound journeys

Christopher Juckins’ Amtrak schedule archive lets us review Amtrak timetables from before the pandemic (and before Amtrak stopped publishing PDFs on their website). As can be seen on the Boston-Washington Northeast Corridor schedule, getting into Midtown from Eastern New England for a 9am start is barely doable, but additional options open up as the morning goes on:

A screenshot of an Amtrak timetable from Boston to New York; the key journey times are listed in the text below

In summary, journeys which arrive in NYC before lunch included:

  • 5:05am to 8:47am
  • 6:05am to 9:47am
  • 6:10am to 10:22am
  • 7:15am to 10:47am

I figured I would probably aim for those 6am departures, maybe with some of the 7:15’s mixed in. That seemed manageable to me. 

Afternoon & evening outbound journeys

So then I took a look at the trip home. There are too many trips to took a screenshot, but in summary:

  • 3pm to 6:46pm
  • 3:30pm to 8:12pm
  • 4pm to 7:40pm
  • 5pm to 8:50pm
  • 5:38pm to 10:10pm
  • 6pm to 9:45pm
  • 7pm to 10:50pm
  • 7:50pm to 12:20am

Now, to be fair, some of those later trains really do get you home quite late. But that 4pm trip in particular struck me as perfectly fine — especially if your job is one where having uninterrupted time at the beginning and end of the day is valuable (for example, time to write or read). That could really work (and held some real appeal to an introvert like myself).

But the other thing that struck me was, “Damn. that’s a better schedule than the MBTA Commuter Rail.” Hourly departures, predictable journey times, a couple of extra trips layered in? Not bad!

The map

And this got me thinking… there are several other corridors that feed into NYC; do they all have frequencies to support this super commute?

And by now, you surely can guess that that is true (otherwise there would be no post!). I have some further observations in the appendix below about individual routes (which I think are worthwhile reading, as they illustrate what a behemoth the Northeast Corridor is), but the main reason I’ve written all this is as prelude to a map:

A diagram of Amtrak services running into New York. Services to Boston, Springfield/Greenfield, and Virginia are in red; services to Albany are in orange; services to Harrisburg via Philadelphia are in light blue. The legend indicates three "tiers" of stops: "most trains stop," "some trains stop" and "few trains stop", and a note at the bottom says "Not all trains stop at all stations. Consult individual timetables before travel." A textual description of which tier each station on each services falls into is included at the end of this post.

This map treats Amtrak’s services into New York like commuter rail services — and I would argue that they essentially are indeed a “super commuter rail” network. All of the stations and routes marked on this map have the ability to support the kind of “super commute” I was considering for myself: leave home early, get to New York mid-morning, leave New York mid-afternoon-ish, get home late, repeat once or twice a week, depending on distance.

Scope of the network

As you can see, it’s actually quite a sprawling network — stretching from Albany to Washington, Boston to Harrisburg, close to 200 miles in each direction. Boston, with the itineraries I listed above, is actually on the extreme end of the network, with its ~4h travel times; a place like Wilmington, DE is a mere 1h40m journey, comfortably below Metro North’s longest journeys (and in significantly more comfortable seating). Hartford, CT and Lancaster, PA are both about a 3h journey.

All of the journeys depicted on this map are available via services with modest frequencies (to enable flexibility) and a short enough travel time to accommodate a same-day round trip.

Local and express tiers

One of the things that was fun about making this map was poring over the different timetables to look at which stations were frequently served. For example, the Northeast Corridor schedule for NYC-Washington lists out a whole bunch of stations, which most trains then skip. Despite the timetable listing 8 stations between New York and Philadelphia, most trains only stop at 4: Newark Penn, Newark Airport, Metropark, and Trenton.

In this way, Amtrak builds an informal tiered network akin to a local-express model. Virtually all trains stop at places like Stamford, Trenton, and Rhinecliff; some trains skip stations like Kingston, Poughkeepsie, or Downington; and then there are some stations, like Princeton Junction and Newark, DE, which may only get one train a day, or even less (spiritual successors to “whistle stops”). Acela service mainly restricts itself to the major stations, leaving the Regionals to pick up the leftovers.

The big picture

Amtrak (and/or the City of New York) would do well to publish a formal map like this, one which highlights that these are routes with high frequency service, modest journey times, and flexible schedules, and one which likewise differentiates between different service levels at each station. This network is a tremendous success story for Amtrak, and for American rail in general. 

A map like this also illustrates what is possible with a strong piece of core infrastructure — in this case, the Northeast Corridor. Even communities which aren’t directly on the Northeast Corridor, such as Harrisburg, Springfield, or Albany, are able to benefit, as it becomes possible for them to “tag along” for the ride. 

When advocates talk about high speed rail in places like Texas, Florida, or the Piedmont Corridor, it’s not just about connecting Atlanta to Charlotte, but about building a core piece of infrastructure that then enables branch lines to be built to Birmingham, Chattanooga, and Augusta. High speed rail infrastructure not only enables long-distance travel (for business or pleasure), it also enables daily commutes — and super commutes.

Further analysis, as well as a text version of the map, available in the appendix.

Useful Things page created

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I’ve created a page called “Useful Things“. There is an incredible wealth of information available online these days, some of it produced by official agencies, and some created by devoted enthusiasts. This list is my effort to draw attention to particular resources I’ve found useful.

Some of these materials are relatively well-known — Vanshnookenraggen‘s marvelous track maps, for example. Others are, I believe, more obscure — tucked away in massive collections, or legacies of earlier days of the internet. My list is hardly exhaustive or comprehensive, nor is it a “who’s who” of our transit enthusiast community; we are very fortunate to have such an active community, and I could never hope to list everyone.

If you have suggestions of other resources similar to the ones I’ve listed here, let me know!