Boston Begins Late Night T Service

Trains to Run Until 3 AM on Weekends

Starting on March 28th, Boston will join the handful of cities with late night subway service. The T will operate until 3 AM into Saturday and Sunday mornings. This late night service is being piloted by the MBTA for one year at a cost of $20 million, but if the service is popular, it will likely be extended into the future. I strongly believe that this will prove to be a great investment by the city. 

Youth Appeal

One of the most frustrating things about weekends in most cities is the fact that there is a mismatch between the time that bars and clubs close and the time that public transportation stops operating. That's if you are lucky enough to be in a city with public transportation at all! Before this new late night service goes into effect, the MBTA generally stops running at around 12:30 AM, but many bars and clubs are open for an extra hour. This can cause all kinds of problems related to drunk driving and the like.

Keeping the T operating until 3 AM will help Boston to offset some of the potential for getting stranded at the bar, drunk and with no easy way home. While we can't be sure how this will be received until it actually starts, I can only imagine that the new service will be wildly popular with young people. In Boston's quest to prove itself to be a world class city, late night T service is one of the best ways to compete with areas such as New York and D.C. 

If you want the late night hours to stick around, make sure to get out and take advantage of them!

Why Do Commuters Choose Cars?

Driving Through Traffic: The Car Effect

Everyone that I know hates driving in traffic. Most people claim that they wish that there were ways to avoid traffic, but everyday we get into our cars and drive the same familiar clogged routes to and from work. It may seem that this is the only option, but in many cases this is not true. A study has recently uncovered the "car effect" which shows that people tend to take cars over public transit even when it is less efficient and more expensive to do so. 

This chart may at first seem difficult to understand, but it is the result of a car vs. metro decision study. The graph oh the left shows the percentage of commuters who chose a car each day. The two lines through the graph represent different levels of traffic. Traffic becomes "annoying" at the lower line and "unbearable" at the upper dotted line, depending on how many people are in their cars. The chart on the left shows the cost each day of taking the car vs. taking the metro. In general, cars were more expensive due to traffic gas costs.

Applying this to Boston

I am not familiar with the public transportation options available in all cities across the country, but I can speak to Boston. If you ever need to get into the city at rush hour, you will notice that no matter what highway you are on, I-90, I-93, I-95 or I-495, you will be stuck in traffic unless you leave your house before 6 A.M. Here is a map so you can visualize the structure of the highways in and around the city. As you can see, only I-90 and I-93 even head directly into the city, but all four of the routes that I mentioned are extremely congested.

The second map that I have added is a map of current traffic in the city; by now rush hour is over and you will see that there is still extreme congestion. Without traffic it would take me 45 minutes to get downtown, but if I were to leave at 7:30 it would take me until 9:00.

So why do Boston commuters put up with this rush every day? They don't need to. The reason that I wanted to focus on Boston is that the city has an impressive network of subway stops and commuter rail stations. This following map shows the entire commuter rail and subway network together; you will see that the stops listed stretch even beyond I-495 all the way to Worcester and Providence, typically accepted as the furthest typical daily commute locations.

Coming to and from Boston, commuters in almost any town have the option of taking the train to and from work. A recent study on Boston indicated that a 1% decrease in road traffic would lead to an 18% decrease in traffic congestion time in the city. This is huge, if there were just a 1% increase in train traffic, commutes for those who did choose to drive would become much more manageable. Not to mention that when you choose to take a train, you will usually save money; no need to worry about tolls, gas or parking costs in the city. Some people even can start their day early and work on the train. To me, this seems like the perfect solution.

Boston's Urban Ring Project

For anyone who routinely rides the T in Boston, you probably understand many of it's problems. The green line routinely breaks down, trains never seem to stick to a schedule and there always seem to be interruptions in service. These things are all annoying, but by far worse is the fact that when riding the T, in order to change routes, you must ride all the way downtown. For those of you who are not familiar, I will share a map.

This picture shows a map to scale of the T. The white circles in downtown Boston are the only interchanges between lines. This makes the T practical only for those who need to get from their homes to downtown and back. For example, to get from Riverside at the end of the green line to Alewife at the end of the red line, you would need to travel 40 minutes inbound on the green and then another 20 outbound on the red. This seems illogical. 

The current setup of the T restricts commerce. If it were easier to move between the cities surrounding Boston, these areas would experience higher economic growth rates and the entire metropolitan area could prosper. Funneling traffic into just one place only creates congestion and frustration.

One idea that has been suggested is known as the Urban Ring Project. This is a proposition to expand T service to connect the current lines in a ring, allowing for easier access to areas that are not just downtown. This is a map of the proposed expansion.

The ring project itself is the new yellow line. This would make travel so much easier for people in and around Boston. You will notice that this full expansion would also expand existing lines and create a new purple line. These new routes can be hoped for, but the ring I believe is most crucial to economic success. The cost of building a new subway line would be very high, but Boston has a history of expensive public works projects. In fact, Boston is home to the first subway line in the country. With a subway that started in the late 1800's, it seems that it is time for a modern upgrade so that Boston can continue to be a pioneer of urban success.