Latest plans for Arborway bus yard include eight acres for housing or other community uses

In the first two meetings, a lot of people were up in arms because the MBTA built a multi-story garage and with a salt pile for the DPM. This time, the T kept the new building to one story, and reserved some of the land for resident use.

Once built, the T would bring back Route 28 and 39 buses back to Arborway, and employ 60 foot buses for the 32.

the recharging buses "building" calls for the vehicles to be outside, not enclosed, with some sort of overhead canopy. It will be open air. Also it will have a smaller enclosed building for repairs.

The T has been on this site for over 120 years while someone, let's call them Evan, who has been on Brookley Street for 2 after moving here from Seattle and before that Grand Forks.

The T wants to ensure greener transportation for a large chunk of the SW areas of Boston and Brookline for the future in an area with no other land alternatives this size. There are very limited options for other places.

Residents - How dare the T use this site for public transportation uses when Evan wants a park there next to the all the other parks.

The loss of indoor bus parking is unfortunate. Busses exposed to the weather when parked have a much shorter lifespan and break down more often than those properly stored. I wouldn't be surprised if the same is true for the charging equipment.

Also, bring on the 15 story buildings! Tall buildings along both Washington and centre/ South!

This is the wrong place to put a bus yard, but the state, the T, the City and the neighborhood all sort of work together to make it the only place to put a bus yard.

It's the wrong place to put a bus yard because bus yards are 24/7 facilities that no one really wants in their backyard, and a large site next to a transit node is a great place for a lot of people to have their backyard. The T will say "we need it here so that buses are near their routes" which is not entirely wrong, but really, they need it nearby, and there's a site which is as good if not better down on American Legion Highway which is currently home to a bunch of mulch piles. It's about halfway in between the JP/Rozzie/Hyde Park/Westie routes and the Dorchester/Mattapan routes that this garage would serve, so just as well-sited. And also not near anyone's home. This is owned by the state, which would have to initiate an internal land transfer, and that would require someone a bit higher up the chain to be interested, which they aren't.

As mentioned above, the T is also in the "it's always been used for transit" camp, which is true, but doesn't mean it always has to be used for transit. Heck, they sold off the Lechmere site for housing after GLX, and moved the old Bartlett Garage site in Roxbury which precipitated this whole ordeal. The T doesn't seem to buy into the fact that if there were a lot of people who lived there many would be T riders and pay fares and that those tokens (well, taps) would add up over time, because it's easier to just do what they've always done. (There was a button people wore in MassDOT at the end of the Patrick admin which had the phrase "we've always done it that way" with a big red "x" over it but that seemed to disappear when Baker came in.)

The City could be the kingmaker here to force them to look at a different site, but the only reason that would make sense would be if it would then allow the city to build a lot of housing on the Arborway and from what I've heard, the city is worried that they would spend a lot of political capital with the T to get them to make changes only to have the neighborhood come in and NIMBY any housing down to like 35 units because reasons and then they City would have egg on its face. This is sort of the City's fault: they could try to be more proactive and say "we are zoning this for 2500 units, deal with it" but mostly the neighborhood, because the neighbors don't have a great track record. (Heck, in the OP story there's one resident saying "That’s just what we want: 15 stories of housing with 951 units in it where we pack people into it, which was done in the past, and those people have suffered for it." Because we all know that people in tall buildings suffer. Unless they're rich people, in which case they are selfish. Or something.)

So, onto the neighbors. Back in 2014, someone proposed pretty much this solution. It got some momentum: Stony Brook supported it, a Globe columnist suggested it had more value as housing and the then-recent viaduct removal made the land more valuable. Even the DCR, which doesn't own the land there but has some control over it, was amenable (yeah, I know!).

But the neighborhood got in the way. What neighborhood adjacent to American Legion Highway? Somehow, Roslindale. Sure, sure, you can point out that technically that site is in Mattapan, and closer to JP, Roxbury and Dorchester than it is to Rozzie. And that there are no houses in Rozzie closer than 1/4 mile, and that's only a couple of dozen houses off of Walk Hill next to the cemetery on Paine Street, and that most of Rozzie is a mile away, and what do they actually care? Yancey was outraged that there had not been more consultation with Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan but the real culprits seemed to be the Karens who showed up from Rozzie with "Ask Roslindale" stickers worried about their "quality of life" of a bus yard being build in place of a mulch pile in a different neighborhood and no one had anything coherent to say about why, just that the white people in Roslindale had opinions and how dare they not be considered?!

Now, we can't entirely blame them because—back to the T here—windbag extraordinaire Joe P said:

“The MBTA has invested a lot of time and money over the years on designing a new bus facility for the 500 Arborway site,” he said. “To go back to square one and start all over with a new site, new community, new engineering and site concerns will cause a major delay in the project and will increase the cost to construct this project.”

And that's the same excuse you'd get today. I mean, sure, okay, that was 9 years ago, and 14 years into the project, and it sure seems like the only thing that has changed since then is the price tag. But the T decided it was to go there in 1999, and once there was an ounce of disagreement thanks to some folks who lived a mile away (Lisa Beatman, quoted in the article, lives on the other side of Mount Hope Cemetery, about 4500' from the American Legion Site) it was all they needed to say "look, the neighborhood disagrees we want to build it here."

So here we are, 9 years later, the T does their drawings, the City won't move its salt pile (come on, JFH) and we get a few hundred apartments along the site of the site instead of more (good thing there's not a housing crisis or anything) because everyone is afraid of their shadow. Imagine if the "Ask Rozzie" people had kept their yaps shut in 2014 and the City, DCR, State and T had all rowed in the same direction. On 18 acres there would be room for, say, 2000 apartment units, a proper grocery store (plugging a huge grocery store hole, the nearest grocery store is more than a mile away; imagine the housing built around/above a Trader Joe's or Market Basket or Rochies) and perhaps even the functions they want to retain at the Shattuck but closer to the T, which would allow the Shattuck site to be re-parkland-ified since it was originally part of Franklin Park.

This is a twenty-five year case study in "why we can't have nice things" and why we wind up with lipstick on a pig like this.

An aside: my guess as to why the bus charging has been moved under a canopy is that the electric buses are prone to, you know, blowing up. The cost to put fire suppression in a building is super-expensive for this kind of thing, so they will park them under a canopy which is sort of a happy medium (no word on exactly how they'll do fire suppression, but the regulations are probably less if it's not "indoors"). It's probably also a function of cost: buses have extremely high per-axle loads, so building a multi-story facility for them requires a lot more steel and concrete than a single-story facility, which adds a lot to the cost (since the walls and roof of a facility are not very expensive since they don't have to hold much up).

BTW: "ESH" is "Everybody Sucks Here" from Reddit AITA posts if you don't know.