Better Buses For Watertown? City and MBTA Plan Transit Improvements For Arsenal Street

The MBTA and the City of Watertown are making plans for new bus-priority infrastructure along Arsenal Street between Watertown Square and the Charles River in order to support future service improvements for the Route 70 bus, Watertown’s main transit connection to Allston and Cambridge.

Arsenal Street is a direct 1.8-mile link between Watertown Square and Western Avenue in Allston. On a typical weekday, over 2,000 bus riders* ride along Arsenal Street on the Route 70, which currently runs every 10–15 minutes during weekday peak hours and every 20-30 minutes at other times, according to the MBTA.

But under the MBTA’s bus network redesign plan, Route 70 would be upgraded into a “frequent-service” route, with buses arriving every 15 minutes or better all day, 7 days a week.

Several other bus priority projects are in the works for Route 70. In Cambridge, the ongoing reconstruction of River Street will add bus-only lanes between Putnam Ave. and Central Square later this year.

And in Boston, a longer-range plan to redesign Western Avenue would create a dedicated busway through Allston to serve the new high-rise apartment and lab buildings that have been envisioned for the neighborhood.

In Watertown, officials are hopeful they can improve bus service on a shorter timeline with quick-build improvements like painted lanes and traffic signal adjustments.

“The spirit of this project is to ask, what can we do sooner than later, tactically, to get improvements to bus riders and the general public in the short term?” Zeke Mermell, Senior Transportation Planner for the City of Watertown, told StreetsblogMASS last week.

Fixing an obsolete street design for a growing neighborhood

The existing layout of Arsenal Street dates back to the 20th century, with a dangerous 4- to 5-lane cross-section that has been empirically linked to higher crash rates, and is particularly dangerous for pedestrians.

According to MassDOT’s crash data, there have been at least 68 injury-causing crashes on Arsenal Street since 2021, including one fatal crash recorded at the intersection of Talcott Avenue in 2023.

18 of those injury-causing crashes afflicted a pedestrian or someone riding a bike (the western portion of Arsenal Street also includes a separated two-way bike path alongside the sidewalk on the northern side of the street, as part of the Watertown-Cambridge Greenway).

Arsenal Street has also been also a nexus for Watertown’s recent growth. New apartment buildings and mixed-use developments, including the redevelopment of the Watertown Arsenal, have begun to replace some of the warehouses, strip malls, and parking lots that historically lined the street.

To comply with the state’s new MBTA communities zoning act, Watertown recently re-zoned the neighborhoods around Watertown Square to legalize up to 1,701 new homes in the area (if every lot were redeveloped to its full zoning allowances). The new zoning also cut off-street parking requirements for new apartment buildings, from 1 parking space per home to 1 parking space for every 2 homes.

Since the new zoning took effect, developers have already filed plans for several new multifamily buildings that together could add over 250 new homes in the area.

Bus riders weigh in

The T and the City of Watertown are hosting two open houses to discuss the project with bus riders and neighbors this summer. One open house was held on May 30, and the second will be this Sunday, June 14 from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Watertown Free Library at 123 Main Street.

Lise Paul, a member of Watertown Faces Climate Change, told StreetsblogMASS that she’d attended the first open house in May, where planners discussed bus lanes, transit-signal priority, and “queue jumps” at traffic lights, where short bus lanes let buses skip to the front in lines of stopped traffic.

“We raised the issue of the need for the City of Watertown to prioritize hundreds of bus riders over the few cars that take advantage of free street parking along this congested corridor,” Paul wrote in an email. “There are ample private parking lots and garages all along Arsenal Street.”

*This story was corrected at 11 a.m. on Thursday June 11 to clarify Route 70’s ridership figures. The original story reported that the 70 serves 5,000 daily bus riders; however, that figure reflects ridership on the entire route from Waltham to Cambridge. On Arsenal Street,
on average weekday, over 2,000 people are on board the bus, and over 1,000 riders board or disembark on Arsenal Street’s bus stops.