New low-floor vehicles with level-boarding platforms will reduce dwell time, and all-door boarding would also help; are there any plans for that?

Dedicated/semi-dedicated ROW should absolutely be considered. Planners should be improving mobility, not parking.

The plan does actually discuss possibility of dedicated transit lane. Pages 50-59 specifically detail plans that include dedicated transit lanes.

Here is the report https://www.dvrpc.org/Reports/15014.pdf

The first low-floor cars in the USA arrived in Portland, Oregon, in the mid-1990s. These Philadelphia cars are from Kawasaki and were delivered in the early 1980’s.
European systems tend to obtain new equipment more frequently due to the higher investment in transit there and the political power users there have and flex.

San Francisco light rail (if you want to call it that) is similar to Boston’s green line with the exception that the underground stations here are high platforms. It would cost billions and huge disruption to the one tunnel in SF if they were modified for low-level boarding.
As for stop consolidation, that’s another issue here in SF where there is a vocal backlash at removing any of the stops, most of which are only a couple hundred feet apart along the mixed-traffic surface routes. Talk about slow in the self-proclaimed tech capital of the world.

You mean Philly streetcars DON’T allready have all-door boarding?

You don’t have to get rid of car lanes near tram track to offer level boarding. In the case there is no other option, Prague (CZ) uses raised car lanes leading continually through tram stops, where the height differrence of platform is between tram track and car lane, not as usual between car lane and sidewalk.
You can see tram approaching this type of platform on the picture:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4002ade1e2cbc217fa685a3a39af4677835c326ef0d3eb3b17f6b98c99b63413.jpg

Oh yes. I have ridden the Green Line many times on my visits and experienced delays and slow as molasses service.

“SEPTA expects to buy vehicles with floors about 14 inches above the ground and buttons on the outside of cars to allow people with mobility issues to automatically extend a ramp.” Are European streetcars lower than 14 inches?

One way to make stop reduction more palatable is to use much longer trams. 177 ft long trams are essentially same a 4-car light rail train. Muni 2-car trains will be about 160 ft long, but a 4-car train would be 320 ft long. This makes platforms longer and spacing less of an issue.

That’s from, I feel, four GL branches running six minute headways each on two tracks. We need another four tracks — regardless of the line — from at least Hynes to Boylston. Using the Blue Line to prune a branch (maybe Huntington Ave. to Riverside) would help. So would running the commuter rail like an express subway on the urban core. [With infills at West Station and perhaps a BU Bridge, Comm. Ave. would get absolute rights of way like Huntington Ave. would if you send the Blue Line under there.]

That said, the Green Line is sloooow, but it serves its purpose (kind of): it runs the best route of all the lines (though I’d break up the Green Line at Boylston with the Boylston St. Subway going to South Station/Seaport/Southie and the Tremont St. Subway going to Dudley/Mattapan/City Point), and connects to the entire system.

Only in underground stations where they are inside fare control. On the street boarding is the same as for buses.

That’s exactly the point that needs to be hammered home. It seems that a lot of officials, and people in general, don’t care how much it costs in wasted passenger time or operating inefficiency so long as a a potential fare evader has to walk past the operator to do so.

Such a stop design is also common in Austria. An additional advantage of such stops is they encourage motorists to slow down as they approach – since the roadway is raised at such locations.

I don’t understand why spacing has to go up from tram every 6 mins to every 8 mins with longer trams. I mean, they are longer, but not anywhere near THAT much longer.

Type 8’s have a bridge plate that extends out and offers level boarding from ground level.

When the Type 7’s are phased out in another decade or two, you’ll have achieved accessibility overnight at many of the stops that aren’t currently marked “accessible”, or could do so with minor platform alterations.

The ones which will remain inaccessible have platforms too narrow to ever realistically let a handicapped person maneuver on them.

Some of them might be able to have travel lanes/infrastructure shifted in a rebuild to get a little more platform space, a small number will never realistically be able to be accessible.

The ADA recognizes that it can be infeasible to make certain pieces of existing infrastructure accessible, the small handful of stops which fit that category will be left as-is.