By far the most ill-conceived transportation project in Boston was Phase 3 of the Silver Line, a proposal to link Phase 1 (a silver-painted bus down Washington St) to Phase 2 (the bus tunnel from South Station to the waterfront), for no particular reason that was obvious to anyone other than that these two completely unrelated projects were called "Silver Line". Building a bus tunnel would have cost over a billion dollars required tearing up part of the Boston Common and demolishing an out of service Green Line tunnel that coincidentally goes to the same general place, and has the advantages of being a train tunnel and already being there. And nobody ever made a very convincing case that there would be any significant ridership from Dudley to the South Boston Waterfront (as opposed to, say, Park Street). Well, there's some good news.
The MBTA and the state government have officially endorsed a different extension of the Silver Line, a much cheaper and more useful proposal to extend the Washington St. Silver Line to a surface terminal at South Station and convert the #28 bus into another Silver Line-branded bus rapid transit line. While still not ideal (doing both routes as Green Line branches would have been better), this project is at least both useful and within the means of the MBTA to actually build, and is a huge step in the right direction for the MBTA planning process. Now all they have to do is admit that light rail is in fact sometimes better than a bus :)
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