What Gives, T?

And now for the flip side... For the past three years, I've been going to work through Wellington station on the Orange line. My daily travels have generated some observations about how this station could be improved.

When the northern portion of the Orange line was rerouted and extended out to Oak Grove in the early 1970s, perhaps the station's design made sense. I'm not really talking about the aesthetics, because there are none; it's just a big lump of concrete. I mean the functionality, the ways that people and vehicles approach and exit the station.

For pedestrians, entering the station is needlessly difficult. There is only one entrance, with eight steep steps up from curb level, which slows people down. The station doors are almost never propped open, which slows things down more. Once you get up the steps, the corridor is too narrow for the volume of people using it at rush hours, and then you have to make a 90-degree left turn to get to the fare gates. The entire area leading up to the gates is a giant choke point. It seems like every aspect of the on-foot approach was designed to be as difficult as possible, to thwart the movement of people in and out of the station.

There is a ramp, which was probably added later, that is easier to walk up, but the bottom of the ramp is situated away from the doors, away from the direction people are moving. This entrance also serves people coming in from the parking areas. It could be widened and extended outward and made so the whole thing was a ramp instead of stairs. (The ramp could not be built inside the existing structure because of the clearance needed above the train tracks.)

But before people can even get into the station, they have to pass through other obstacles. Most buses enter from the eastbound lanes of Route 16, requiring a tight right turn that also descends a grade. Then they have to stop for crossing traffic coming from a road that runs under Route 16 (some of which is heading into the station's parking areas, some to get on 16 going east), make a left turn, and pull up to the station to drop off passengers.

I think the biggest problem is that buses coming into the station have to mix it up with vehicles near the entrance. There should be a way to establish some sort of priority for incoming buses. I think the best way to accomplish this would be to build a dedicated roadway for buses leading into the station. An elevated viaduct could funnel buses off Route 16 and into the station above and parallel to the train tracks; they would not have to contend with crossing traffic, and passengers could then descend to station level instead of climbing up stairs. Buses would then loop around to pick up passengers where they do now. Access to the roadway would be controlled by transponders in the buses that would activate a gate or bollards (those pop-up pillars used in European parking facilities).

I realize this is just idle daydreaming. It's unlikely that any of this will ever come to pass, especially given the T's always-precarious financial situation. But the station is probably going to have to be overhauled and refurbished at some point. Why shouldn't we imagine how it could also be improved?