According to the T and the city, rush hour bus trips are quicker, cars speed less, and bus riders are pleased — proof that the lanes have been a “successful and impactful project,” in the words of a project summary published last February.

Attitudes among Roxbury residents and workers remain split. Some lane defenders welcome the prioritization of transit and find the lanes convenient. Some critics, however, said the lanes have sown confusion along the street, worsening safety.

Available data paint an ambiguous picture of safety improvements along the segment. The city says the number of crashes that caused injuries declined markedly. Boston police tallies indicate that vehicle collisions overall also declined on average, but only marginally. The T, meanwhile, said its buses have gotten into far more “major” collisions since 2021, an upswing that surprised some experts.

The T faulted the dangerous and illegal maneuvers of nonagency drivers for most of the crashes over the past couple of years. Only one incident, in 2023, “was considered preventable by the bus driver.”

“We are currently exploring updates to the bus lane design to make it more difficult for drivers to enter or cross the bus lane illegally,” the T said.

The agency said it’s already made some tweaks — enhancing physical barriers around platforms, banning left turns, and adjusting signal timing at some intersections, among other changes.

The T and the city plan to spend $37.3 million extending the lanes about a mile north to Ruggles. They intend to break ground in 2026, the T told the Globe.

Boston and the T also intend to carve out bus-exclusive street space along Blue Hill Avenue, in a not-yet-designed overhaul at one point priced at $44 million. The T said construction would begin in 2027 at the earliest, assuming the agency secures a still-pending Small Starts federal grant from the Trump administration worth about $80 million.

Columbus offers a rough template of how Blue Hill Avenue’s lanes may take shape.

From the sky, the lanes give the impression of a blood vessel, bound on either side by gray arteries of street and sidewalk.

There are eight stops in total, four in each direction — narrow islands wedged between the bus and general purpose lanes. The stops, outfitted with shelters, seats, barriers, and digital trip displays, are separated from the sidewalks by the shared lanes, much like some street-level Green Line stations.

Proponents promised that center-running bus lanes would free buses from thickets of traffic, improving their speed and reliability for a bus-reliant neighborhood.

Drivers bearing witness to the buses zipping by would, in time, ditch their cars and hop aboard. Confining the cars that remained to fewer lanes would enhance the street’s safety, according to advocates and some experts.

Stringing the bus lanes through the middle of the road, instead of connecting them to the curb, offers the added benefit of removing parked or turning vehicles from a bus’s path.

“It helps tremendously” with bus operation and reliability, said Zhan Guo, an urban planning and transportation policy professor at New York University.

Cities around the country have explored their potential benefits — from New York City to Eugene, Ore.

Bus lanes have recently attracted the scrutiny of the Trump administration, which this fall pumped the brakes on a bus lane project in New York City over its supposed impacts on freight traffic and emergency vehicles.

The Columbus Avenue rebuild cost $14.5 million, according to the MBTA. The corridor services three routes — the 44, 29, and 22, one of the T’s most popular, according to the agency.

The census estimates that about 30 percent of workers living in the 02119 ZIP code — encompassing much of Roxbury and Columbus Avenue — use public transit to get to work, about four times the state rate. About 28 percent of 02119 residents live below the poverty line, more than double statewide rate.

Expanding bus-specific street space is a pillar of the MBTA’s push to improve the popular service’s speed and reliability. Boston has publicly backed the effort, despite walking back bus lane installations in some parts of the city.

“The best bus-priority systems in the US have center-running lanes,” said Annie Weinstock, president of a New York consultancy specializing in bus infrastructure. “So it’s a very positive step that Boston has done that.”

Some in the Roxbury neighborhood greeted the revamp with skepticism that has only hardened since the lanes opened.

Working the checkout counter at Pina’s Grocery Store, a few yards from the dark red lanes, Maria Martinez griped about their impact on her car commute.

Martinez said she drove to work from Dorchester, a short journey that has been beset with “more traffic” since the buses ate up one lane along Columbus.

“We get to school late, we get to work late,” Martinez said in Spanish.

A city report from 2023 concluded that car trips along the nearly mile-long corridor took, on average, 20 to 40 seconds longer than they did prebus lane. Meanwhile, the study determined, bus lanes shaved around three to four minutes off bus trips during rush hour.

LivableStreets Alliance, a Cambridge transportation advocacy nonprofit, surveyed more than 150 Columbus Avenue bus riders in December 2021, shortly after the lanes went live. Around three-quarters of respondents reported faster and more consistent trips, according to a report summarizing the group’s findings. Just under one-quarter of respondents said they took the bus more frequently after the lanes were introduced.

It’s difficult to definitively pinpoint how exactly the Columbus lanes have impacted bus ridership.

“There is some evidence that with all things equal, [bus] speed increases can result in ridership increases,” said Weinstock, the bus infrastructure expert. “However, there are so many factors here and in other places that you really need to look at a lot [of] data before you can say definitively what caused what.”

Bus ridership plunged across the entire MBTA system during the pandemic — the early heights of which partly overlapped with the lanes’ construction — and has yet to fully recover. The T said the ridership recovery rate of the 22 bus has outpaced the agencywide average, but other lines without center-running bus lanes have also showcased strong rebounds. The 29 and the 44 buses, the other, less popular lines passing through Columbus, have shown weaker recoveries, according to data from TransitMatters, a research and advocacy group.

Still, some in Roxbury appreciate the bus lanes.

“They work well for what they’re meant to do,” said Sol Martinez Guevara, an employee at the Boston Public Library’s Egleston Square branch, a short stroll from where the bus lanes cease at Walnut Avenue and traffic begins to mingle again.

Despite typically biking to work from another part of Roxbury, Guevara appreciated what the lanes signaled about the city’s priorities.

“I feel like that’s just what makes more sense for being more of a public transit oriented city,” Guevara said.

Guevara’s colleague, Dorchester native Mikayla Willingham, largely agreed. She had, for a time, commuted by bus after the lanes were installed, she said.

“I feel like it’s convenient,” Willingham explained, acknowledging that confused or unconcerned drivers will sometimes trespass into bus zones.

For resident Luis Peña, that confusion feeds chaos.

“Boston City Hall’s worst expense has been to spend money on that,” Peña said in Spanish.

Vehicles barrel past the bus stops far faster than speed limits allow, he complained. Impatient drivers habitually veer into the bus lanes to slip around vehicles stationary in the right lane.

On a recent December day, some short bendable posts marking the lane-splits near bus stops were missing, snapped, or bore the marks of frequent beatings.

“It’s very unsafe,” said Peña, as he stood outside his friend’s store by the Weld Avenue stops, at times gesturing toward the road with his cane. “I don’t know why they did that and spent that money.”

The Police Department documented an average of 35.4 crashes annually along the corridor between 2015 and 2019, according to data shared by the agency. There’ve been, on average, 34.7 crashes annually along the stretch between 2022 and 2024. (BPD didn’t detail the types of crashes or their severity.)

The MBTA, meanwhile, documented 13 “major collisions” involving its buses along the Columbus corridor in 2023 and another 13 in 2024. The agency recorded only eight total major collisions between 2018 and 2022, four of them occurring in 2022.

The Globe in late November asked the T and the Transit Police for copies of the crash reports for each incident. Both agencies told the Globe to file a public records request for the documents. The Globe on Dec. 1 requested documentation for all crashes along the segment involving an MBTA bus between 2018 and 2024. The Globe later agreed to narrow the scope of its request to reports relating to the 34 collisions identified by the MBTA, but has yet to receive the reports.

More proactively identifying and punishing scofflaws could help reel in the rule-breakers, some experts said.

“More automated enforcement is a particularly powerful tool,” said Jeffrey Tumlin, a former director of transportation at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.

The agency, during Tumlin’s tenure, unveiled center-running bus lanes spanning a long stretch of Van Ness Avenue, a wide thoroughfare running through the heart of San Francisco. Buses experienced markedly fewer collisions along the segment once they began traveling through the lanes, according to an agency report published in April 2025.

Some drivers defied the rules of the new format, Tumlin said, but bus-mounted enforcement cameras helped keep them in line. The T plans to rollout a similar program in 2026.

Boston, meanwhile, maintains Columbus got safer. A July 2023 evaluation concluded that, on average, a larger share of vehicles — about 10 percentage points more — obeyed the corridor’s speed limit after the bus lanes came online.

It noted in a March report that the number of crashes resulting in injuries tumbled across the city in the years before and after the lanes opened. The decline in injury-causing crashes along the Columbus corridor was about 7 percentage points greater than the drop recorded on similar roads citywide, according to the report.

To Maha Aslam, a transit advocate in Greater Boston and bus lane believer, doubt and frustration and concern are understandable responses to drastic changes in a person’s environment.

“We see a lot of resistance from community members, because it changes the way they experience their neighborhood,” Aslam said.

She went on, “In general, people are antichange.”

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/01/02/metro/bus-lanes-boston-columbus-avenue/