Big ideas for future of RIPTA

Imagine taking a train from Olneyville Square to downtown Providence, through the abandoned East Side rail tunnel and over the now-stuck-in-mid-air Seekonk River bridge to East Providence.

Or riding a bus that speeds past rush-hour traffic in its own travel lanes from Central Falls to West Warwick, the CCRI Knight Campus and T.F. Green Airport.

These scenarios are not pie-in-the-sky daydreams, according to Rhode Island Public Transit Agency planners drawing up a master plan for the future of public transportation in the state.

They've included these big ideas along with more modest investments, like creating six high-frequency bus routes similar to the R-Line on Providence-area streets such as Elmwood Avenue, Hope Street, Reservoir Avenue, Broadway, Chalkstone Avenue and Beverage Hill Avenue.

By early next year, the transit agency intends to pare down the menu of ideas into a set of recommendations to guide the next two decades of transit policy.

That final report will also include cost estimates of the various transit projects being considered, something that isn't yet in the scenarios RIPTA laid out this fall.

"This is an opportunity to get people excited about transit and what the needs are," said Greg Nordin, RIPTA executive director of planning, about the different options planners have come up with. "The scenarios are meant to be a tool to facilitate the discussion."

While the master plan focuses on the neighborhoods around Providence and bolstering RIPTA's services, documents released at the end of October also endorse the vision of faster, more frequent commuter rail service to Boston that's become a major regional goal.

To get that better service on the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority's Providence Line, the RIPTA documents suggest building high-level platforms at all stations, allowing passengers to board from all doors, using electric trains, integrating fares with Amtrak and, as Gov. Gina Raimondo has suggested, running express trains to Rhode Island.

The RIPTA documents released in October came after the agency received feedback from community meetings and from other agencies, including the Department of Transportation. They include three scenarios with different levels of expansion.

The most modest scenario would bring existing bus lines up to a minimum arrival frequency, create six high-frequency "rapid bus" routes, add a few local and express routes across the state, and build pedestrian-friendly "mobility hubs" around key stops and transfer points.

A more aggressive scenario does those things, plus adds "modest" increases in service frequency across the system and three "bus rapid transit" routes running on bus-only lanes. The three rapid bus routes would be Olneyville-to-East Providence through the East Side tunnel, Central Falls to T.F. Green via New London Avenue and CCRI, and downtown Providence to T.F. Green via Broad Street and Post Road.

Finally, the most aggressive scenario would add "major" increases in frequency across the system, plus new routes and the addition of light rail (think Boston's Green Line) on the proposed Olneyville-East Providence and Central Falls-T.F. Green routes.

All the scenarios have a few things in common: making service more frequent and focusing the largest investments on areas with high potential transit demand.

That future demand was sketched out in a study of population and job density released earlier this year that pointed toward adding service in Cranston and Warwick, as well as adding more "crosstown" routes that run east to west through the Providence area.

Even mass transit advocates may be surprised at how far from Providence's urban core RIPTA's most ambitious proposed routes for light rail and bus rapid transit go. The north-south line starting in Central Falls passes Garden City in Cranston and follows New London Avenue all the way to Natick village in West Warwick before looping around to CCRI and the airport. (The state just secured an $8 -million federal grant to build bus hubs at the University of Rhode Island and CCRI Knight Campus.)

"There is a band of demand from Central Falls to Warwick and the airport," Nordin said. "We are showing that one of the most underserved commuter flows is between West Warwick, Warwick and Cranston."

After it crosses the Seekonk River, the east-west line from Olneyville would run along Waterman Avenue almost to the Massachusetts border.

Unfortunately for fans of the permanently upright, but recently condemned, Crook Point Bascule Bridge, Nordin said the idea of saving it and reopening the abandoned East Side tunnel, while possible, is looking unlikely to make the final master plan. The cost of construction is one reason, but the biggest problem causing that idea to "sink" in the eyes of planners was the feedback from East Side residents who don't want the route to bypass them.

Nordin said RIPTA has studied a "baseline level of geometry" on the proposed routes and determined that the new light rail and rapid transit lines would fit but more detailed engineering would be needed to take the plans further.