Thank you for reporting your concern to City of Cambridge via Commonwealth Connect. We have reviewed the information you provided our staff and will be investigating this issue further. This has been received as Service Request #9286.

Yes, that intersection is awful. And the whole thing is a huge waste, there are almost never buses using the bus lane anyway. We are putting hundreds (maybe thousands?) of commuters into unnecessary gridlock to benefit a much, much smaller number who ride the bus.

I agree that that intersection is challenging but FYI, the average weekday ridership of the 77 bus was 6,651 passengers in the Fall of 2019 (according to publicly available MBTA data).

The latest data in the accessible part of the city database is from 2016 and shows about 25,000 vehicles per day on that stretch of Mass. Ave. Probably a reasonable guess is 30,000 people, so in 2016 it was about 4.5X the 2019 bus ridership, and likely more by 2019. I stand by the comment, the vast majority is being inconvenienced to improve the time for a much smaller number who ride the bus. And city data shows that the substantial majority of vehicles moving through Cambridge, especially at rush hour, are commuters from outside the city – much of which has poor or no transit access – going to work in the city. Making car travel more painful will not get those people onto the bus.

There is 3 buses per hour on this section of Mass Ave during rush hour but 2500 cars during rush hour. Buses hold about 58 persons … you do the math.

Residents of Cambridge are not causing the traffic issue, but are shouldering all the punishments of gridlocked streets, additional pollution from stalled traffic and once quiet neighborhood streets used as cut-throughs for commuters from outside the area.

Why do we even need a bus lane from 10pm to 9am? There is no traffic at 10pm and no buses at 2am. Traffic starts at around 7:30 and runs for about an hour and a half for incoming traffic, and outgoing traffic begins around 4pm and is over by 6:30pm. Without the bus lanes it would be less times of dealing with pollution from vehicles stalled in traffic.

True enough, residents of Cambridge bear a lot of of the burden, as do the commuters themselves. But residents also benefit immensely from the taxes paid by the businesses those commuters work at. In any case, the immediate problem is the lane configuration and signal timing, and the Churchill Ave light often makes things worse.

This issue has been marked as a duplicate of issue 12524562.

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