Friday, February 22, 2008

A Sad Trend in Boston

All around the country cities are trying to add light rail lines, yet some cities have the infrastructure and are failing to see the value. The Arborway is no different. In one of the first posts on this blog I discussed why buses sucked compared to reinstating the streetcar when tracks already existed. Seems like we lost the battle, but not the war. Switchback has more.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I just can't get that worked up about the rails being buried. Like the article says, any good restoration of the Arborway leg would need to be reserved guideway, and the old rails would probably be removed in that case anyway.

Now, paving over the A line, *that* was a mistake; those rails could have easily been converted to reserved guideway, should the A line have ever been restored.

It *is* an outrage, however, that the Arborway restoration limbo continues, just as the bad half of the Silver Line (Washington St) has been a poor long-delayed substitute for the loss of the original Orange Line stretch on Washington St.

Pantograph Trolleypole said...

Yeah I agree but reading Bill's post makes sense too. Mentally when people don't see the tracks anymore there is no memory of what was there. So it makes it harder to put the tracks back in.

The silver lie is ridiculous and now they are trying to build a phase three that will connect the two parts. There is a perfectly good rail tunnel that sits unused that will be destroyed because of it too.