Banker & Tradesman readers interested in understanding the mass transit revolution waiting to hit Massachusetts should take a trip to Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood.

There, acting Mayor Kim Janey’s administration recently unveiled brand-new bus lanes on Columbus Avenue that, unlike previous iterations of the concept seen in Greater Boston, function all day. Not only that, they run down the center of the road and have dedicated, high-quality stations that elevate the humble bus to something much closer to a subway.

Bus lanes like these hold immense promise. For comparatively little money, they can dramatically increase a route’s reliability by helping buses sidestep traffic. Along with high-quality stations – in the Columbus Avenue case, this means shelters, screens displaying upcoming arrival times and concrete barriers to protect riders from wayward cars – these improvements can draw in a certain percentage of car travelers with a viable alternative to driving for most daily trips.

In turn, this reduces greenhouse gas emissions and traffic, by condensing the space taken up by a single driver from the roughly 100 square feet occupied by a contemporary SUV to the space taken up by a single bus seat.

These lanes vault over the single biggest hurdle to expanding and improving mass transit in Massachusetts: cost. Not only are they cheap to install compared to a new rail line, their efficiency allows a transit system to operate more frequent service with the same number of buses. Even with billions in infrastructure funding headed Massachusetts’ way, the scale of the emissions and traffic problems we face means we can’t afford – in both senses of the term – to put our chips on just a few high-cost, high-impact transit expansion projects.

But with all their promise, these “red carpets” for buses are not painless to roll out. They require political leadership to take away traffic lanes on key corridors. For a society literally built around the automobile and so steeped in car usage that, for many, it is seen as the natural way of getting about, successfully dedicating lanes to transit is no mean feat, no matter that buses often carry 50 people in the space taken up by only two or three cars.

That is where the real estate community can come in. What happens to the road outside your building directly impacts your finances, so your voices carry significant weight with local officials.

Converting our current car fleet from mostly-gasoline-powered to all-electrically powered will take decades and will need a lot more power than the region currently generates. And regardless of power source, all cars cause the same amount of traffic and threaten our children equally as they cross the street.

So, make time to visit Boston’s prototype of what will hopefully be a revolution in transportation and see for yourself how well it works. You can help your communities do their part to beat global warming.

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Visit the Future in Jamaica Plain

by Banker & Tradesman time to read: 2 min
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