Officials from the City of Everett, MassDOT, and MBTA joined transit advocates in Everett Square this morning to celebrate new bus lanes and other mobility improvements along Broadway, Sweetser Circle, and Main Street.
Everett was one of the first communities in the region to welcome bus lanes on a major city street, when it piloted its peak-hour bus lane on Broadway in 2016. As of Monday, a new bus lane has been dedicated for transit on the outbound side of Broadway during the evening peak hours, and new 24-hour bus lanes have been painted along the outer edge of Sweetser Circle, a major regional bottleneck.
The new bus lanes will benefit multiple high-ridership routes, including the 99, 105, and 106 on Everett's Main Street, and the 104, 109, 110, and 112 on Broadway.
"We already knew MBTA buses were critical to our community, carrying 10,000 people per day pre-COVID," said Everett Mayor Carlo DeMaria during this morning's press conference. "Our bus routes have held some of the highest levels of ridership throughout the pandemic – a clear sign that buses in Everett are an essential service for essential people. It is our moral imperative to keep them moving."
Responding to high demand, and in an effort to avoid crowding, the MTBA added additional service to routes 104, 106, 109, and 112 in its fall service adjustments. Buses on those routes now arrive even more frequently than they did before the pandemic.
The new bus lanes in Everett are one of several regional bus prioritization projects that were funded by the MBTA earlier this summer. But the city is also leveraging a $170,000 "Shared Streets & Spaces" grant to supplement the project with traffic calming on surrounding neighborhood streets, plus new "mobility hubs" with bikesharing docks, real-time bus arrival screens, multilingual wayfinding signs, and parklets with outdoor seating in Everett and Glendale Squares:
