Top Five MBTA Rapid Transit Lines

Okay, so there are only five to begin with, making this list both the top five and the bottom five, but I'll put them in order.

1. Red Line
The Red Line has the most spacious trains of all MBTA lines. It also runs quite frequently during rush hours (though maybe less so during off-peak times, especially if you specifically need an Ashmont-bound or Braintree-bound train). It also covers a vast amount of territory, traveling the length of Cambridge, through downtown Boston, touching Southie, then either into Dorchester or through Dorchester en route to Quincy and Braintree. Now that they got rid of those annoying exit fares at the Quincy Adams station, the park-and-ride from south of Boston into downtown or Cambridge is the best transportation value in the city. Also, the sector that goes above-ground to cross the Longfellow Bridge is arguably the most scenic part of the whole system.

2. Green Line
The Green Line is the most varied (or schizophrenic) part of the system. Downtown, it acts like a standard subway with underground tunnels and fare-controlled stations. The B and C lines operate at grade in a reservation in the middle of the road, stopping as often as a bus and being subject to traffic lights and the like. The D line is almost like a commuter rail line, with a dedicated right-of-way. As for the E line, it's the last remaining part of active street trackage in Boston -- trolleys and cars use the same stretch of roads. The good thing about the Green Line is that you can take it pretty much anywhere you might want to go in Boston, Allston, Brighton, or Brookline. It also touches most (though not all) of the villages in Newton. The bad thing is that the small cars get very crowded and the at-grade portions can be glacial, between the frequent stops for traffic lights and the one-at-a-time boarding through the single door with a farebox.

3. Blue Line
I don't have much of anything bad to say about the Blue Line, but I don't have much of anything good either. The portion of the Blue Line that goes downtown can be covered on foot almost as quickly as it can underground. Unless you want to go to Eastie or Revere, there's not much point to the Blue Line. It does stop at the airport (well, technically, at a station near the airport where you must transfer to a bus), but the Silver Line has made the Blue Line Airport station partially irrelevant. The cars are short, the frequencies are less than optimal, and some of the downtown stations are in less than pristine shape (soon to be renovated though). However, I've never found the Blue Line particularly crowded.

4. Orange Line
The Orange Line gets awfully crowded during rush hour. Thank goodness it's the one time of day they actually run trains more than once every 12-15 minutes. Other times of day, the wait can seem interminable. The stations on the northern sector of this line are classic examples of early 70's-era concrete architecture and the southern stations are in one long trench, so there isn't much to look at on this line (except maybe the Boston Sand & Gravel rock piles). You can use the Green Line to reach anything of interest downtown that the Orange Line happens to go near, so unless you're looking for a sightseeing trip to Malden, Roxbury, or Jamaica Plain, you should skip the Orange.

5. Silver Line
The Silver Line is Boston's pathetic excuse for the old Washington Street elevated. When the Orange Line was rerouted in 1987, some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city had their rail service replaced with a bus. After years of promising an improvement, the MBTA came through in 2002, replacing the bus with a newer bus. The MBTA calls it bus rapid transit, since part of it runs through a designated bus-only lane, but it only takes one double-parked jackass to gum up the works. Also, in the downtown sector, there are no dedicated lanes, so the buses are just as subject to normal traffic conditions as passenger cars are. To be fair, the Waterfront branch does provide three stations in a dedicated tunnel before the Silver Line becomes a regular bus. Also, I like that the Silver Line provides a one-seat ride from South Station to your airport terminal of choice, if you can manage to dodge the people trying to snake gigantic suitcases down the narrow aisle of a 57-foot articulated bus.