Bringing the nation’s oldest and most heavily used light rail network into the 21st Century

Boston’s Green Line with 66 stations, 22 track miles, 205 cars and four branches carrying nearly 250,000 passengers each weekday is the busiest and among the oldest light rail systems in the nation.  Much of the network has been in place since the 1800’s originally opening as early as 1856 with horse drawn trolleys. Portions of the downtown tunnel network are the oldest subway in this hemisphere.  The Green Line can be proud of its long and distinguished history but most of its surface stations reflect a bygone era and do not fully meet expectations for a modern transit service. 

On April 21, 2017 at the National Planning Conference of the American Planning Conference, Jacobs

Engineering and the Institute for Human Centered Design, will be presenting the methods and findings from their 2016 project to develop conceptual designs for 26 stations that had gone decades without upgrade or significant rehabilitation.  The new stations would meet all modern codes related to accessibility, emergency egress, passenger comfort and convenience while minimizing the costs for required upgrades and impacts on adjacent transportation services (roadways, parking, sidewalks and bike lanes) that share right of way with light rail network.

The presentation will review the principal challenges and solutions developed to upgrade the stations with the least cost and impact to adjacent transport services.  Key considerations included:

·         Comprehensive Design Criteria: Accessibility regulations, building codes and railway design standards needed to be integrated and reconciled;

·         Evaluation of Existing Conditions: Where the service runs in a median reservation, the reservation was generally too narrow to provide passenger platforms of sufficient width. Some stations are on curves too tight to allow for level boarding. Nearly all stations required additional paths for emergency egress.  Four street running stops had no formal station at all.

·         Development of Design Options: The study team developed four general station designs that were adapted as appropriate to the 26 locations, and

·         Station Consolidations: Where right of way geometry would not allow for level boarding proposals to consolidate adjacent stations at a point between the two substandard stations were advanced and evaluated. 

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