MARTIN L

Blog

  • MBTA: Struggles of the Silver Line

    As a transit aficionado, my Roman Empire is the MBTA Silver Line. The Silver Line is a BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) that the MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority) tries to parade as a rapid transit line, despite the fact that it has five separate routes and runs almost half of it’s routing in mixed traffic. It even has dedicated space on the Subway map, and prominently features in signage at South Station, the MBTA’s busiest transit hub.

    Last week, I got the chance to finally fly into Boston’s Logan Airport, which meant I got the pleasure of taking the Silver Line into the city. The SL1 connects the airport to South Station for free, which was great for someone like me who forgot to bring their old CharlieCard from 2022.

    My Experience

    SL1 services all airport terminals, so it was easy to exit the baggage hall and straight to the Silver Line stop. Loved that! The Silver Line is supposed to come every 10 minutes at the time I wanted to take it, and although tracking said a bus would be coming in around 3 minutes it did end up taking 10. The boarding experience was smooth, all door boarding (because you don’t need to pay), and a lot of seating was taken out for luggage racks. Ridership was also pretty decent, the bus filled up by the time we got to the last terminal station.

    The bus then drives out of the airport and through the Ted Williams Tunnel, linking East Boston to the main city. The strangest part of the trip begins here: the bus takes the exit to Seaport District, Boston’s super strange gentrified yuppie neighborhood (please watch out for my note on whatever Seaport is), and proceeds to stop outside the World Trade Center Station. Pretty normal as of now, but it continues to drive a couple blocks eastward until it reaches a tunnel portal.

    Past the tunnel portal, the bus dips down into traffic at a speed I can only describe as treacherous. Despite having a completely enclosed pathway, the bus runs at what seems like a snail’s pace. Also, the bus stops AGAIN at World Trade Center, but this time underground? The bus then continues crawling through the Seaport District, making another brief stop at Courthouse before ending it’s trip at South Station. Overall, the trip took around 40 minutes, which was around 10 minutes longer than I was expecting. The connection with the Red Line was great though – just a set of stairs downwards to the subway.

    What I liked

    The Silver Line is ultimately still public transit infrastructure, and although it may be the world’s slowest underground busway, plenty of people still use it. Three lines run along this underground portion, and with pretty decent frequencies, you can expect a bus to show up every two minutes. The permeance of the infrastructure means that development in the area has sprung around the stops, although as of now it’s mostly just shops you’d find in any major luxury mall and offices.

    I also got to ride the Silver Line down to East Berkeley Street, which was just a regular bus, but it was a decently frequent bus! The Silver Line does have good frequencies on paper, which does make it a decently reliable link for riders. The fact that it’s just a bus also gives it more flexibility on future expansions, which are desperately needed in a city like Boston, where the population has grown by hundreds and thousands since the Silver Line opened with very few infrastructure projects to show for it.

    What i Disliked

    The Silver Line is a weird branding exercise for two completely separate bus line GROUPS: The Waterfront Lines (SL1 to 3) serve South Station to the Airport, Design Center, and Chelsea, while the Washington Street Lines (SL 4 and 5) were built to replace an old interurban railway line from Downtown to Nubian. The strangest part is that the two line groupings don’t really connect. They were supposed to connect as an extension of the transit tunnel from South Station down to South End, but with that project cancelled, the bus line exists in limbo. It makes no real sense to group all of these lines as “Silver Line” when they don’t even really operate as a proper line.

    Other than the existing criticisms of the line (it’s not really BRT!), the Silver Line seems to face a lot of surprising infrastructure creep: stations in the Seaport are built as colossal palaces of transit with very little ridership to show for it. The stations are much larger than pretty much every single MBTA subway station, despite there being very little need for a bus station designed for 100,000+ people. No real idea why they decided to build palaces instead of spending that money on building that downtown connection that is desperately needed for the Silver Line to be a proper bus service.

    On my way back to Logan Airport, I decided to take the Blue Line to the Airport instead, which somehow proved to be a much faster journey despite requiring a bus transfer. The Silver Line is not competitive coming from Downtown Boston since it still requires a fare, but it’s slower and requires a transfer for most users.

    What to do?

    Overall, the Silver Line is a great start to BRT, but it’s an inadequate service for the residents and visitors of Boston alike. Twenty plus years later, I’m not sure if it’s been able to keep up with the region’s growth. Despite it’s subway-like branding, it fails to meet up to the standards of rapid transit, and needs to be upgraded to better serve the marginalized and gentrified communities along it’s corridor.

    Learn more about the Silver Line at mbta.com.

  • Retrospective: East Chinatown Food & History Walk

    On August 17th, 2025, I hosted my very first Food & History Walk! These walks are a initiative created for a variety of reasons listed below:

    Intention

    To introduce local perspectives, stories, and challenges to visitors of new places.

    Invitations

    1. Three stories of East Chinatown residents and informers that introduce the past, present, and future of East Chinatown
    2. Using food to build on these stories; highlighting imported flavors to each story
    3. Creating opportunities to connect with each story, imploring on the impact on the community.
    4. Opening a window to explore additional stories in new places.

    Desire

    For visitors to see the neighborhood beyond its Chinese identity, and rather a place where people from all over gather and draw inspiration from its past & present into the future.

    Experiences

    What happened?

    On this tour, we were able to visit a plethora of different sites, restaurants, and look at some of the community revitalization initiatives that have taken place since the 2010’s.

    Restaurants

    • Que Ling
    • Issho Coffee
    • Onyx Chocolates

    Sites

    • Dr. Sun Yat-sen Statue, East Chinatown
    • Charlie’s Meats Original Site
    • Hubbard Park
    • Toronto Chinatown Archway (Chung Hwa Men)
    • Murals of the Wonders of the World
    • Chinatown Architecture

    Stories

    • The Pioneers of Chinatown: The move to Gerrard & Broadview
    • Waves of Influence: Exploring the cultural changes in the Chinese Diaspora
    • Immersion of Diaspora: How this generation of East Chinatown residents have melded this space into their own
    • Grasping of an Identity: Suburban Chinatown to Now (story was not told)

    Feedback

    • Tour was great, particularly enjoyed the framing of each story from past, present & future
    • Liked all of the historical backgrounders that aren’t evident in today’s East Chinatown

    Reflection

    • Reduce talking portions to engage with the audience with questions and pondering periods
    • Be cognizant of the time and set time limits at each stop
    • Food stops need to be scattered throughout the tour and not primarily focused at the later portions of the tour
    • Dedicate more time to flesh out the characters of each story and ensure they are incorporated at each stop & location
    • Reduce rambling, and ensure you are incorporating each food stop into specific stories along the tour
    • Prepare photos of each reference to the past, or things you point out
    • Be confident during the talk, no self-depreciation.

  • Biidaasige Park: Highlights FROM Toronto’s latest parkland

    Last Sunday, I had the pleasure of visiting Toronto’s latest waterfront park, Biidaasige Park. Biidaasige, which roughly translates to Sunlight Shining Towards Us in Anishinaabemowin, is the flagship park of the Port Lands Redevelopment program. The program is a decades long project to redevelop the Toronto Port Lands into a livable, mixed-use community, whilst restoring the Don River to a more naturalized form.

    The park is a 60-acre green space lining the Don River’s new river mouth, with a variety of amenities to encourage playful interactions with our natural environment.

    What I loved

    There’s a lot of love about this park. The park is intended to be a centerpiece of a massive trail system in the Port Lands, which connects all corners of the city. I particularly liked the variety of trails, which are segregated between faster modes of transportation (bikes) and hikers / walkers. A variety of road surfaces were used as well, which really helps encourage different activities and speeds throughout each area of the park.

    The children’s areas were also playfully designed, with a great variety of swing structures, and even a whole cable structure for kids to play with! There’s also a outdoor fitness center, which is perfect for adults to take advantage of the open space around us.

    The park also features many connection points to the river, which gives it an innate connection to the water. On my day at the park, I saw a lot of people sitting at the river edge, and surprisingly a lot of paddlers. It’s a park that faces the water instead of retreating from it, which I hope helps people realize the connections we have with the land.

    Overall, the park was well designed, with a lot of natural interaction spaces between different groups of people. Although it lacks the traditional open space you’d see in most city parks, it still promotes open play with the large variety of different hang out spaces. The two addition of open leash areas are also useful for fencing off dog areas, which is important as not everyone is a fan of dogs.

    What I Disliked

    Surprisingly, there’s not a lot of things I dislike about the park, but one important thing to remember is that the park is the centerpiece of a community that doesn’t exist yet. As a result, it is very difficult to get to this park. There’s ample connections on the Martin Goodman Trail, but very limited transit access. On the day that I visited, many visitors chose to drive to the site. Currently, it’s a 15-ish minute walk from the closest residential development, which makes it hard to access. This will eventually improve with the development of the community, but serves as a slight barrier of access to the rest of the city.

    Bike Share access also leaves much to be desired, with only two bike share stations nearby (not even at the park). I wish the Toronto Parking Authority was more coordinated with the launch of the park to build out two Bike Share stations nearby. I saw many people waiting for Bike Share slots to open up since it was crowded and many people chose to use Bike Share to the park.

    What I Learned

    Building a park is hard and people will probably be critical about it, no matter how nice the park is. Also, Bike Share is 100% a victim of it’s own success, and I’d appreciate it if they could be better at bike distribution during large, preplanned events. Thanks!

  • My Ideal Weather

    weather

    It’s a partly cloudy day, with a low of 60°F and a high of 72°F. Wind is a maximum of 10 mph gusts. Dew point is around 50°F – 55°F. Slight moments of shade but still really great lighting.

    FEELING

    The temperature should be on the cusp of feeling a bit chilly if sitting still. It should feel comfortable with a 30 minute walk without sweating. At night, it shouldn’t feel explicitly cold, but chilly at times.

    Wear

    Layers should be possible for tops, bottoms can be shorts or long pants. Sweatshirt with shorts weather.

  • Two months later: Embracing the silly life

    Around two months ago, I decided to embrace the silly life by creating silly goals for myself. Today, I am here to provide a update to this article, and reflect on whether or not these goals had an impact on how I live my life.

    For May, I chose goals that were a bit easier to accomplish to ease me in (for example, talking to a stranger, which I do all the time). It was a great way to ease me into this experience as it did remind me to put more of my focus onto searching for these types of experiences. Unfortunately for me, it was also a bit too easy to accomplish these goals, as I finished all of my goals by early May, and the mindset flew out of the window after I no longer needed to look at a list of goals.

    In June, emboldened by May’s progress, I created six goals in a variety of topic areas. These included things like: “Have a picnic with friends” and “Stay off social media for twelve hours”. I only accomplished two out of the six goals this month, mainly due to a very busy schedule that took these goals out of my mind. Overall, I will say that June was not very successful for this reason alone, as I didn’t encompass the silly mindset.

    Lessons

    1. Create goals that don’t depend on other people to accomplish: your goals cannot be contingent on the existence of other people helping you accomplish your goals. The goal of these goals are to embrace creativity
    2. Make it easy, make it hard: your goals should challenge you, but also be approachable in steps. Don’t force yourself to climb up a floor without building the staircase first.
    3. Keep the silly top of mind: It can be hard to embrace the silly energy without prioritizing it. Since it’s a mindset, keeping it in focus by incorporating it into your life is a must.

    Overall, I am still continuing this experiment throughout the summer, and as always, I am inviting y’all to join into the adventure! My goal for July and August is to incorporate this reflection into my life, and get a bit sillier for once!