The center-running bus lane proposal has been championed by the administration of Mayor Michelle Wu.

Center-running bus lane plan faces ongoing community opposition

Two Boston city councilors see opportunity for bold solutions in the ongoing community fight over the city’s proposal to build a center-running bus lane down Blue Hill Avenue.

At a June 23 press conference, District 4 Councilor Brian Worrell and District 7 Councilor Miniard Culpepper asked officials to consider an extension to the Orange Line that could run from Ruggles to Mattapan Square as an alternative to rapid bus transit design championed by the city and the MBTA.

The city councilors said the extension would bring much needed transit improvements to the area while providing an alternative to the proposed bus lane proposal, which has faced intense community pushback due to concerns that it will increase traffic and negatively impact local businesses.

“This is a train desert,” Culpepper said. “There’s no train that goes through the Black community from Mattapan to Grove Hall to Nubian to Ruggles.”

The press conference followed a meeting where the councilors pitched their proposal to Phil Eng, general manager of the MBTA and the state’s interim transportation secretary. Culpepper said Eng agreed to study the proposal and Worrell called it a “very productive meeting.”

The MBTA declined to comment on the proposal or the meeting and referred the Banner to a Massachusetts Department of Transportation spokesperson. That spokesperson confirmed the MBTA would incorporate studying the proposed extension into its Program for Mass Transportation process, a 25-year vision that evaluates the major infrastructure projects proponents wish to see built in the future.

The center-running bus lane plan that Culpepper and Worrell are looking to replace has faced growing community opposition since it was announced in February 2024. A final design of the city’s proposal has yet to be released but has been anchored by a pair of bus lane that would replace the median on Blue Hill Avenue and include efforts to improve access for pedestrians and cyclists alongside general maintenance and beautification work.

The project would also require a reduction of lanes for cars or the removal of parking space. Opponents have raised concerns that those changes would increase traffic and could impact business along the major corridor.

“We just want no center bus lane,” Culpepper said. “Not only do we want to pause [that plan], we want to take [it] off the table, we want to pull it down.”

The center-running bus lane proposal has been championed by the administration of Mayor Michelle Wu. Wu did not attend the meeting with Eng, but Culpepper said he had discussed the proposal with her and that she said she liked the idea but considered it a longterm plan. He said her absence from the meeting didn’t indicate a lack of support and described the meeting with Eng as the first step of a process Wu could be a part of later.

“We will sit down and talk with the mayor; we will sit down and talk with the governor,” Culpepper said. “But this is the first step in the process, and it’s a successful first step in the process.”

At least off the bat, buy-in from the Wu administration for a plan that would use an Orange Line extension instead of other Blue Hill Avenue work may be an uphill battle. In a statement, a city spokesperson said that it is “always looking to expand public transit access” in partnership with the MBTA but suggested that the timeline and price tag for an Orange Line extension posed challenges.

“Digging new miles of subway tunnel under city streets would take many years of evaluation and likely well over a billion dollars in federal investment,” the spokesperson said. “Today, Boston has an opportunity to deliver more immediate improvements and beautification of the Blue Hill Avenue corridor with nearly $150 million secured in state and federal funds.”

If the MBTA decided to pursue the process, it would probably be a long one. For reference, the Green Line extension, which saw service on that line extended on existing commuter rail rights of way from the existing Lechmere stop to Union Square and to Tufts University, took more than 40 years from when research first began through its completion in 2022.

A separate proposal to extend the Orange Line from its current Forest Hills terminus to Roslindale Village using existing commuter rail tracks could take more than 15 years to complete, according to a 2017 brief from the City of Boston. A spokesperson for the Massachusetts Department of Transportation said the department, in partnership with the MBTA, is conducting a feasibility study for that extension proposal, which could include running Orange Line trains or more frequent commuter rail trains for future rapid transit options. The spokesperson said the team expects to release a report detailing an analysis of the proposal by the fall.

In contrast, Culpepper and Worrell’s Orange Line extension proposal would require the construction of a new underground rail path, where other extension projects have touted the ease of converting existing railways for subway service.

The price, too, could be hefty.

The Green Line extension to Somerville and Medford had a price tag of $2.3 billion. The city’s estimate for the Roslindale Orange Line extension was, in 2017, priced at $500 million.

In a 1978 report, the MBTA estimated a version of a Blue Hill Avenue Orange Line extension along a similar route would cost up to $800 million — more than an estimated $4.3 billion today.

That large cost would come as the regional transit system faces potential shortfalls of $239 million by the end of this budget cycle and a potential funding gap of $732 million in fiscal year 2028.

With their proposal, Culpepper and Worrell have revitalized a decades-old idea of extending rail service into Dorchester and Mattapan.

When state officials looked to take down the Orange Line from the aging elevated train infrastructure that ran down Washington Street and planned to move it to the Southwest Corridor, where the Orange Line runs now, officials promised a reliable transit alternative to serve the communities that were losing access.

Those promises never panned out. Ultimately, the MBTA launched the Silver Line with dedicated bus service down Washington Street between Nubian Square and South Station. That service has long faced concerns and complaints.

“We’re saying we want them to live up to the promise from 40 years ago, so that we can have the same efficient transportation,” Culpepper said.

He pointed to a 1979 report released by the Boston Redevelopment Authority tracking development history and opportunities along the Blue Hill Avenue corridor, as the city and state considered how to move the Orange Line and what the impacts might be.

That report referenced a proposed option underground extension of the Orange Line but identified fixed-rail trolley service at street level — like what runs along the Green Line branches on the southwestern side of Boston — as its preferred solution instead.

An underground tunnel would bring higher costs and disruption in implementation, it predicted. The 1979 report also predicted that, with most of the infrastructure underground and more space between stops, there would be less community revitalization outside of the areas directly around the stations.

It ultimately called for a replacement to be selected “promptly,” to be implemented shortly after the closure of the elevated rail — which never happened. The MBTA instead opted to pursue an above-ground trolley line that would have connected to the Green Line, but in 1987, the federal government declined to fund it. The project died.

A separate feasibility study produced for the MBTA in 1978 also considered tunnel transit replacement along the route, but determined ridership probably wouldn’t be high enough and an underground subway most likely wouldn’t be faster enough to merit the significantly higher cost.

A spokesperson for Culpepper said that the key point in highlighting the report is that neither the Boston Redevelopment Authority nor the MBTA ruled an Orange Line extension as impossible. The spokesperson said the councilors believe Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan should have the same opportunity to imagine bold transportation futures that other parts of the region have had, without cost being an immediate dealbreaker.

“To dismiss the Orange Line extension based on outdated assumptions would be a great disservice to residents who have already faced 40 years of broken transit promises and unreliable services,” Culpepper said in a separate statement regarding the two reports from the 1970s. “The residents of Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan deserve the same standard of modern analysis given to any other major project.”

As the pair of city councilors push for their Orange Line expansion plan, a separate community push is looking to slow progress on the city’s proposal to add a center-running bus lane to Blue Hill Avenue. A coalition of community members sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Transportation asking it to withdraw $80.3 million in funding the department obligated, and Congress awarded, to the MBTA in February to pursue the project.

In the May 26 letter, its 14 signers said their outreach to the federal government was spurred by a lack of communication or reception from the city government. It also pointed to the center-running bus lane on nearby Columbus Avenue, suggesting that change in infrastructure has made pedestrians less safe and affected businesses in the area. The letter linked to a petition opposing the Blue Hill Avenue center-running bus lane that was signed by more than 2,100 residents over the past two years.

The letter called the city’s Blue Hill Avenue plan “the most wrongheaded, destructive and universally opposed federal project proposed in Boston since the failed I-95 highway project of the 1960s.”

Dianne Wilkerson, a former state senator and one of the signers of the letter, said it was spurred after community members felt that they weren’t being heard by the Wu administration and they felt the mayor wasn’t willing to meet with their city councilors as well. She called the plea to the federal government “an act borne out of exhaustion … and frustration.”

“Lord knows that to get to a point where a group of almost totally Black and brown people write a letter to this current federal administration under the secretary of transportation saying, ‘Help,’ you must know is the result of some major disconnect here,” Wilkerson said. “We have gotten to the point where we have to go ask the Trump administration for assistance, because our own city government mayor will not speak to us.”

The funds were awarded by Congress in the February spending bill that partially ended the partial government shutdown. Because the funds were signed into law by Congress, the U.S. Department of Transportation may be limited in its ability to withdraw the funds.

Culpepper and Worrell, alternatively, proposed that the $80 million be used to fund their rail proposal, but transportation experts have said that shift most likely would not be allowed.

Wilkerson said she views an underground Orange Line extension as a reasonable way to expand service to the area but recognizes that some people have concerns about the feasibility of the idea. If neither the center-running bus lane nor an underground train line were to move forward, she said she thinks a compromise should be able to exist between the two.

A city spokesperson said the city is “working closely with community leaders, residents, and the MBTA” to deploy the $80 million in funding. The spokesperson pointed to priorities concerning beautification, speeding up commutes and expanding opportunities for small businesses, and said “designs for the roadway improvements will continue to evolve.”

In a March interview with the podcast DotLife, Wu said when it came to the redesign plan, including the center-running bus lane, “nothing is set in stone.”

However, since the city announced its proposed plan for a center-running bus lane in February 2024, it and the MBTA have largely kept that lane at the heart of its work. The joint memorandum of understanding the city and MBTA submitted that launched the process for the $80 million submitted to the federal government highlighted a center-running lane as a priority.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Transportation said the department had received the letter and was reviewing it. Wilkerson and other signers of the letter are scheduling a time to meet with the federal government.