The fight over the right-turn ban from Broadway onto Washington Avenue has been argued for a year in terms of what it does to drivers. The MBTA’s numbers, buried in an engineer’s email in the June 22 council packet, are about what it does to buses, and they explain the design better than anything the city has said.
The failure rate
The email is from HNTB, the design consultant on the downtown Broadway reconstruction, reporting the MBTA’s review of the 75 percent plans. The bus stop on Washington Avenue at Broadway, stop 5605, serves the 111, 112, 114 and 116 routes and has one berth. Under existing conditions it “has a failure rate of 30% at the AM peak and 20% at the PM peak,” meaning that roughly one bus in three arriving in the morning rush finds the berth occupied and has to wait in the travel lane. The MBTA considers a failure rate of 15 percent unacceptable.
The 75 percent design extends the stop to two berths, which brings the failure rate to 14.9 percent in the morning and 10 percent in the afternoon, just under the MBTA’s line. The MBTA asked for three berths, which would bring it to 10.8 percent and 9.1 percent. A third berth needs the curb lane, and the curb lane is where the right turn to Fifth Street is. So the choice the engineers laid out is this: make the lane bus and bike only and end the right turns, or keep the turns and add a signal phase that delays everyone on Broadway. The nearby stops, 5606 and 5607, are already failing 12 percent of the time in the afternoon.
The timeline
The rotated presentation in the September 14 packet, transcribed for this article, gives the schedule: design complete, bid in December 2026, construction beginning in spring 2027, running 18 to 24 months. The Traffic and Parking Commission approved the plans on September 2. The council’s vote on September 14 to alter the street layouts, which we reported here, is the legal step that lets the city take the slivers of land the new curbs need.
What this means for the argument
Bellingham Square is the busiest bus stop complex in the city and one of the busiest in the MBTA system outside a subway station. A 30 percent failure rate at the morning peak is a stop that does not work, and every minute a 111 sits in the travel lane on Broadway is a minute the cars behind it sit too. The right-turn ban is not a traffic-calming flourish. It is the price of a stop that works. The city’s mistake was explaining the ban as safety when the case for it was capacity, and the MBTA’s numbers make that case in two lines.