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An MBTA project to boost A Boston Herald Editorial Monday, December 11, 2000
The conversion of the MBTA's Readville commuter line into something resembling real rapid transit through Dorchester and Roxbury to South Station is such a good idea one wonders why it hasn't been done long before this.
At the urging of the agency's Advisory Board, the T will spend $50,000 for a consultant to outline ways to get it off the ground.
Outside rush hour, trains run once an hour on weekdays with only three intermediate stops on the nine-mile line. The advisory board envisions adding six stations with service at least every 15 minutes every day.
There's a very large potential inner-city market which now must take buses to stations on the Red or Orange lines for trips downtown, or endure even longer bus trips.
Officials caution that they'll have to identify a source of money for the work, and nobody yet knows how much it would cost or what the best design would be.
The MBTA already devotes a third of its revenue to debt service to pay for past capital projects. A watchdog committee earlier this year cautioned that the T cannot undertake all the projects it would like because it needs to conserve resources just to keep the existing system in good shape.
Still, our guess is that if subjected to a good cost-benefit analysis, the Readville project would rate much higher than some other things the T wants to undertake - like trains to Fall River and New Bedford.
One other thing: The Advisory Board is calling this the ``Indigo Line'' project. The T has Red, Green, Blue, Orange and Silver lines and uses purple on its maps for commuter rail, but there are unused colors before it has to dive into the lipstick cabinet for a name. What's wrong with that good old primary color ``Yellow''?
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