As though the project’s future wasn’t already clear to anyone who heard about the exciting new Silver Line development announced last week – a stunning proposal involving exciting technology and transit planning known as “Driving Around The Corner To South Station” – the Feds have driven another nail into the coffin of the plan that no one outside of the Artery Business Committee er… A Better City wanted.

The Globe has more:

The cost of the MBTA’s plan to build a 1.1-mile bus tunnel under downtown Boston has now officially grown to $2.1 billion, nearly $1 billion more than the estimate from 2006. Just a few months ago, in December, the project budget was about $1.5 billion.

The current tunnel is an expensive failure. With an average speed of 12 MPH it actually takes longer to drive a bus through it than on the road above. Normally you put transit lines in tunnels because that means the vehicles in them can go faster than they could in mixed traffic, but this is Boston, this was the Big Dig and a EOT/MBTA project. So the normal rules of logic and proper planning / execution do not apply.

Take the whole idea of the Silver Line.

Initial Problem:

Replace a heavy rail line connection to downtown.

Solution:

Bus begins at either Logan Airport or the Seaport and travels block after block in mixed traffic under diesel power until it arrives at Silver Line Way, shuts down completely, starts up again under electric power, then runs at 12 MPH through a dedicated tunnel until Charles St. where it stops, shuts down again, restarts its diesel engine, then travels in a dedicated lane that disappears after a few hundred feet and becomes a normal bus line again.

Got that?

For added kicks remember that one 60′ Silver Line bus holds fewer people than one Green Line car. Keep in mind how quickly a two car Green Line train gets packed. Now keep one of the cars home and take away about 1/3 of the useable space in the one that’s left. Then give it a 50% speed reduction and zero ride comfort. Add airport passenger luggage.

That’s the Silver Line.

The first thing to remember about the bus line is that merging the two halves was never really a priority for anyone living in Roxbury. The state has continually repeated the meme that residents there long for a one-seat ride to the airport much to the confusion of people living in Roxbury who can’t remember anyone ever asking for something like that. In fact much has been made of the desire for a one seat ride all the way into downtown Boston. Proponents of such service have pointed to the abandoned tunnels running between Boylston Station and Eliot Norton Park as a possible solution. The MBTA has countered that with claims that the tunnels are too old and unusable. This flies in the face of an engineering survey conducted in 2001… by the MBTA. (See more in the Sierra Club’s report)

The now-dead-for-real-this-time Silver Line plan would have offered Roxbury residents the one-seat ride to the airport no one ever remembers asking for… except when it turned 70% of the buses arriving at Boylston back to the Seaport and Airport. Couldn’t even get that part right.

To allow this the T would need to dig up Boylston St., remove huge swaths of old growth trees on the Common, sneak in a parking garage expansion, likely undermine the foundations of Emerson College’s entire campus, do untold damage to the Central Burying Ground and still manage to put the existing abandoned light rail tunnels permanently beyond use. (See page 18) …and take at least five years to do so.

Keep in mind this is the agency that has spent just as long trying to build a bus shelter above ground at Kenmore and almost destroyed a church trying to dig an elevator shaft at Copley.

The Silver Bus Line is dead, and somehow still expanding. It refused to become anything anyone wants it to be. Roxbury residents are still shortchanged, the rail tunnels still go unused, while Seaport and Airport commuters cram onto cramped buses and enjoy a teeth-chattering 12 MPH ride in a tunnel on rutted, permanently-flooded pavement that ends up a three seat ride to the Back Bay.

Combining a heavy-rail replacement with transit service to a new neighborhood and the role of airport shuttle while ruling out rail entirely was a mistake. Building it the way it was built was a mistake.

Someday a solution will be found, but it should be understood that the Federal investment in the stop-gap plan announced earlier this week means Boston will not be getting billions more = to undo the current, “temporary” project. Not this decade, probably not the next.

Once upon a time there were plans to bury the A, B and E lines. Yes. Really. The center platform at Kenmore was dug to allow the Central Subway to be converted to heavy rail ala the Blue which would continue on into Allston, while the C would remain a streetcar line and loop over the heavy rail tracks below. Until this happened a wooden platform was built over the sunken track pits and used by A and B trains.

The E Line tunnel continued out to somewhere around the Northeastern stop. A temporary wooden incline was built until money was found to continue the subway.

The money never came, and the temporary arrangements became permanent. The track pit at Kenmore and wooden incline on Huntington Ave. were filled in. The MBTA took the closure necessitated by the rebuild of the incline to begin a “temporary” closure of the E Line in Jamaica Plain. Another “temporary” closure had begun on the A Line about 15 years earlier.

Why mention this?

If you continue along the Silver Line tunnel past South Station headed inbound you eventually come to a concrete wall. Beyond it is a stub tunnel leading out into the city. The wall, temporary. The stub tunnel waiting for a purpose.

But I think we have learned all to well what temporary means.