Boston.com19%
Transit advocates call the Orange Line extension proposal 'not very serious.' Two Boston councilors say it's overdue. 33%
By Samantha Genzer10%
7/24/2026, 9:00:00 AM
Keywords: Orange Line, Neighborhoods, Mattapan, Mbta, Dorchester, Boston City Council, Transportation, Roxbury
BS Summary: This article contains 36 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Authority, Framing Effect, and Availability Heuristic, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 9% saturation with 167 hits. Analysis detected 2,076 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,859 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 41.3% and a BS Rank of 33% (14,787 of 21,886 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 67.60% of the article peer group.
Two Boston city councilors recently proposed extending the Orange Line as an alternative to the divisive center-running bus lane planned for Blue Hill Avenue, igniting a debate over whether the city should pursue immediate bus improvements or a decades-long rail expansion.
“We should have the community decide, and what we’ve heard from community members is that they do not want the center-running bus lane down Blue Hill Ave.,” Councilor Brian Worrell said of the proposal he made alongside his colleague, Miniard Culpepper.
“So if they don’t want the center-running bus lane, let’s provide them with multiple different options.”
Blue Hill Avenue runs through Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan — neighborhoods with some of Boston’s largest Black populations.
Situated between the Orange and Red lines, the corridor is home to some of the city’s busiest bus routes, but lacks rapid rail service.
In 2024, the city, MBTA, and federal government committed roughly $44 million, in addition to an $80 million federal grant, to redesign the part of Blue Hill Avenue between River Street in Mattapan and Warren Street on the border of Dorchester and Roxbury.
The project would include the center-running bus lane, with construction scheduled to begin in 2027, per the MBTA’s Blue Hill Avenue Transportation Action Plan.
Unreliable buses, frequent crashes on Blue Hill Avenue point to need for improvements
As detailed in the MBTA's Blue Hill Avenue Transportation Action Plan, the corridor between River and Warren streets serves 10 highly utilized bus routes.
Riders make about 20,000 bus trips along Blue Hill Avenue each week and collectively lose 3,056 hours sitting in traffic.
The corridor also sees a crash requiring EMS response every three days, on average, according to the MBTA.
For Jackie Jones, of Dorchester, unreliable bus service has become part of her daily routine.
Jones, a Boston Public Schools bus driver, relies on the Route 31 bus from Mattapan to Morton Street to get to work by 5 a.m.
Recently, she said buses have been arriving as much as 30 minutes later than expected, causing her to be late for work.
She said she regularly reports the delays to the MBTA, but has grown frustrated by the response.
“Sorry” ain’t cutting it,” Jones told Boston.com.
“I can’t keep telling my boss that I’m late for work, and I told them, ‘If I get fired, who’s gonna pay my bills?’
Not everyone is sold on a center-running bus lane
While few disagree that Blue Hill Avenue needs improvements, residents remain divided over the city’s proposed solutions.
While shorter-term investments have already been completed, the center-running bus lane intended to expedite service and improve safety is meant to be the centerpiece of the 2024 redesign.
Opponents argue the bus lane would reduce traffic lanes, eliminate street parking, and hurt small businesses that rely on customers arriving by car.
In June, residents opposing the plan asked the Trump administration to rescind the $80 million federal grant, with more than 2,150 people signing a petition calling for the center-running bus lane to be scrapped.
Jones said she worries narrowing the roadway could create safety issues, particularly as scooters and other vehicles share the corridor.
Instead, she said she’d rather see buses become more reliable without redesigning the street.
Culpepper, who lives near Blue Hill Avenue on Seaver Street, echoed those concerns.
“It’s highly congested with the two lanes at Blue Hill Avenue,” he said.
“Can you imagine what it’s going to be like if it’s cut down to one lane?”
A new proposal shifts the debate
Rather than redesign Blue Hill Avenue around buses, Culpepper and Worrell want to bring rapid rail service back to the corridor.
The councilors’ proposal would branch the Orange Line at Ruggles, with new underground rail stops at Nubian Square, MLK Boulevard (and Warren Street), Grove Hall, the Franklin Park Zoo, Harvard Street-Blue Hill Avenue, Morton Street-Blue Hill Avenue, Walk Hill Street-Blue Hill Avenue, and Mattapan Square.
Culpepper and Worrell said the proposal grew out of residents’ opposition to the center-running bus lane.
“We knew that the community was strongly opposed to the center-running bus lane,” Culpepper said.
“It’s been years that we’ve been fighting that, so we wanted to present an alternative that the community could get behind.”
The expanded Orange Line proposal remains in its early stages.
Following a June 24 meeting with interim MassDOT Secretary and MBTA General Manager Phillip Eng, Culpepper said Eng agreed to have the proposal reviewed through the MBTA’s process for evaluating potential rail expansions.
Culpepper said Eng also emphasized that underground rail offers the fastest and most reliable service because it avoids conflicts with vehicle traffic and pedestrians.
“The underground rail is the most efficient.
That’s what we want,” Culpepper added.
“We want what every other community has, and there’s no reason why we can’t have that.”
Mayor Michelle Wu’s office, however, is striking a more cautious tone, as indicated by a statement sent to Boston.com shortly after the councilors unveiled their proposal.
“The City is always looking to expand public transit access for our residents in partnership with the MBTA.
However, digging new miles of subway tunnel under City streets would take many years of evaluation and likely well over a billion dollars in federal investment,” a city spokesperson said.
“Today, Boston has an opportunity to deliver more immediate improvements and beautification of the Blue Hill Ave corridor with nearly $150 million secured in state and federal funds,” the spokesperson continued.
“As we continue to work with community members to incorporate feedback into the proposed project design, we are focused on ensuring improvements to speed up commutes, expand opportunities for small businesses along the corridor, and boost quality of life for families in our neighborhoods.”
Transit advocates say bus improvements shouldn’t wait
While the Orange Line extension would take 15 to 20 years, the bus project is a more “near-term improvement,” said Cole Lewis, Bus and Mobility Hubs program manager for TransitMatters, a pro-public transit organization.
“We want people who use transportation in Dorchester, in Mattapan, in Roxbury to have quality and dignified access to transportation, and they shouldn’t be deprived of that just because they’re not served by rail at the moment,” he said.
“They should be able to depend on when their bus will arrive … The amount of time that someone’s stuck in traffic [or] delayed on a bus should not be measured in hours.”
Lewis and the organization’s executive director, Caitlin Allen-Connelly, questioned whether the councilors’ project is ready to move beyond an idea.
“We don’t see it as a very serious transit proposal,” Lewis said.
“They had the map, but it didn’t have things like operations considerations, funding considerations, any sort of timeline, and so we didn’t see it as something that was immediately actionable.”
Culpepper said the councilors have not yet developed a cost estimate for the proposed extension.
Allen-Connelly acknowledged that there have been previous discussions about extending the Orange Line to Roslindale, but that proposal differs because it could make use of existing rail infrastructure.
Building an entirely new subway beneath Blue Hill Avenue, she said, would require significantly more time and investment.
Instead, Lewis said, the city should focus on making bus service faster and more reliable for the thousands of riders who already depend on it in the corridor.
During rush hour, he noted, bus passengers make up more than half of the people traveling along Blue Hill Avenue.
“Only cars are being prioritized, and a lot of those cars are people coming from the suburbs or just passing through,” he said.
“What we want to see is an investment in bus riders and a prioritization of bus riders that are making up such a huge amount of people who use the corridor.”
Councilors say the issue is more than just about transportation
Worrell and Culpepper announced the Orange Line proposal as a “long-promised-but-never-delivered transit expansion.”
“The first subway was here in Boston in 1897 and for it not to be in Mattapan, Dorchester, and Roxbury in 2026 is completely mind-blowing and just shows the lack of seriousness when it comes to this corridor from our executives,” Worrell said.
Culpepper pointed to history, explaining that the Orange Line served the neighborhoods beginning in the early 1900s until it was demolished in a Southwest Corridor project in the 1980s.
“When we lost that, we lost any semblance of rail transportation for our community,” he said.
Some of these included the planned Green Line branch that was ultimately swapped for a Silver Line bus route and the delayed Fairmount Line stations.
Officials were legally mandated to add Fairmount Line stations after a massive highway project in the 1990s generated air pollution and increased traffic.
Three of the four “promised” stations opened in 2012, but the stop on Blue Hill Avenue wasn’t installed until 2019.
“When you look at the different rail investments around Boston and not in the Blue Hill Avenue corridor, that’s what you call a disparate impact,” Culpepper said.
Allen-Connelly, however, said the councilors’ focus on past issues, while “understandable,” is ultimately a “distraction” from providing corridor residents with the immediate transit improvements they need.
“I think a scenario where you’re improving people’s lives today is a better path forward than focusing on an option that’s not really realistic and is more a distraction to the conversation than is actually adding value to people’s lives and putting forward a plan,” she said.
What happens next?
According to city officials, the transit project that includes the center-running bus lane remains in the design phase, while the MBTA notes construction is set to begin next year.
Wu’s office declined to comment further on its progress.
On the project’s website, city officials have specified the redesign “does not have to include center-running bus lanes.”
“The City does have an opinion on the benefits of bus priority and center-running lanes,” the page notes.
“The City will only spend public money on a project with public support.”
Nearly three weeks since the Orange Line extension proposal, the city still appears to be focused on making more immediate improvements.
“It’s important to be honest that a proposal to dig new miles of subway tunnel under City streets would take years of evaluation and billions of dollars of federal investment to make it real,” Wu’s office said in a statement to Boston.com in mid-June, adding that the city can “deliver more immediate improvements and beautification” with current state and federal funding.
Even as they advocate for the Orange Line expansion, Culpepper and Worrell said the city should move forward with certain immediate, short-term solutions.
Culpepper suggested that short-term funding could be directed toward beautification investments, pedestrian safety, and ADA compliance.
“There are things that can begin now that they have the money for,” he said.
Worrell said the city could be focusing on implementing signal prioritization, fixing street lights, and improving crosswalks.
He also recommended implementing an express bus stop at the highest ridership sites.
“There’s a whole host of recommendations that can be sought out prior to locking us into a bus-only future,” he said.
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