Markey says feds will fund part of the re-do of the turnpike in Allston after all

Important recreation and transportation amenity, for starters.

We should be buying houses in Springfield and moving people out there.

Good lord. What are you, Big Brother?

The service tracks there are in their final alignment. The T wants to build a small storage yard next to their tracks, which will be part of this project, as well as West Station, but service should be able to run normally during the vast majority of the project. I suspect there will be weekend shutdowns on occasion, and maybe some other minor diversions along that line, but it shouldn't screw up operations that badly.

So.........

There is a lot going on here.

MBTA maintenance facilities and storage

Right now, about 2/3 of the T's Commuter Rail service is provided out of South Station, but its major overhaul facility is located near North Station. The Grand Junction railroad (the railroad track behind MIT) connects the two across the Charles on the bridge under the BU Bridge (the train portion of the plane-car-train-boat bridge). So every day, the T (and Amtrak, to a lesser extent) send a few cars back and forth across the Grand Junction to get them between maintenance facilities as necessary. This process takes the better part of an hour, but there's not other nearby connection. When the Grand Junction is out of service (as it has been when the bridge needed emergency repairs, and when a stormwater outfall was being installed a few years ago) the T has to move equipment by taking it out the Fitchburg Line to Ayer, down the CSX line to Worcester, and back into Boston. With recent improvements CSX has made to this line, this is probably now a 4 to 5 hours trip; before those improvements it was closer to a full day. So the T would prefer to have this connection in service at all times, although the workaround is certainly not impossible. The connection will most certainly be included in the final design, the real question is how many weeks/months/years it is severed for during construction.

The main question for Worcester service during the project is how it is managed during the demolition of the overhead roadway. This could probably take place overnight or on weekends. If a project manager gets creative, they could fab a train of gondola cars with fold-down extensions to keep debris from falling between the cars, roll it under the viaduct on the existing tracks, and drop the viaduct into the hoppers, and then roll it back to the scrapyard for disposal, which would minimize the number of trucks of scrap going in and out and keep debris from falling on the tracks allowing them to easily be brought in and out of service.

As for the "layover yard" there, the T is convinced that they need lots of storage space for trains in the middle of the day, because they operate on the bring suburban commuters in in the morning and take them out in the evening. This model has been upended by covid, they've doubled service in the middle of the day, and need much less storage than they did before, but continue to argue that they should have a railroad yard there even though there is very minimal benefit and a lot of cost.

Connection to the river

The river has a popular, if neglected, recreational facility in the Paul Dudley White bike path (named after this guy). The problem is that if you live in much of Allston, it's nearly impossible to access. There is no access between BU Law and Cambridge Street, although if you can't climb stairs, it's a longer route than that. The Cambridge Street overpass and Franklin Street footbridge are not ADA compliant, so getting from one side of Allston to the other in a wheelchair is basically impossible. This is the whole point of the Reconnecting Communities grant, which is aimed at communities split by transportation infrastructure. One of the selling points of the whole project here would be connections across the Turnpike/railroad, both at Malvern Street (for bikes, pedestrians and transit) and further east at Agganis Way, where there is a proposed pedestrian overpass which would have direct access to the Charles.

Track alignment/service

The existing Commuter Rail tracks are in, or close to, their final alignment. (BU has offered to align them closer to Agganis Way to buy a few more feet for the narrow "throat" portion of the site there.) The Grand Junction tracks are planned to parallel them and then pass over the Turnpike before continuing across the river. The current viaduct is in place mostly because the Turnpike has to cross the Grand Junction, so we have a half-mile-long viaduct to cross one (and at some point, two) railroad tracks. (Originally it also provided service to Houghton Chemical, but they have relocated, which saves probably hundreds of millions of dollars.) Right now the railroad passes over the Charles, over Soldiers Field Road and then under the Turnpike, this would keep the roads low and the railroad high which intuitively makes more sense (unless you're MassDOT and like to spend lots of money on concrete).

In the long run, people would like to see the ability to provide transit service across the route, because it would provide a much better transit route from the Worcester Line/Turnpike corridor to Kendall Square and North Station, which is what a lot of the point of West Station is. Right now, a rush hour trip from Framingham to Kendall takes about an hour:

40 minutes South Station-Framingham
10 minutes transfer
10 minutes Red Line Kendall-South Station

The first 16 miles as the crow flies to West Station take about 24 minutes, and the next two miles (as the crow flies) take 36 minutes. (It's probably faster to get off at Boston Landing and grab a BlueBike, or even the 64 bus, rather than going into South Station and doubling back. So the train is not competitive with driving from Metrowest to Kendall, and there's a traffic jam every day to get across the river in Allston, but people will still sit on the Pike for an hour because even though the trains pass them by, the "last mile" to Kendall takes too long.

If it was instead 24 minutes to West Station, a 5 minute transfer, and a 5 minute ride to Kendall, it would be a 34 minute trip, which is about half as long as it takes to drive. For a lot of people, even considering how long it takes to get to the train station, wait for the train, and walk the last bit to the office/lab/whatever, this would make a big difference. It would mean fewer cars on the Pike, fewer cars trying to jam across the river and drive through neighborhoods, and more demand for transit. Of course, improving the Worcester Line would help this immensely; before the pandemic it was carrying as many people at rush hour as the Pike was and demand has crept back towards those levels.

Reparations for Harvard

If you want to blame someone for this, go back to 2005 and blame Matt Amorello who sold the land underlying the rail yard in Allston to Harvard mostly to spite Mitt Romney. (They are both Republicans, and they hated each other.) You could go back even further to when the Turnpike bought out the Boston and Albany; the Turnpike authority owned all of the land underlying, even the railroad.

Aside: part of the reason there's a viaduct there, too, is that the Turnpike Authority didn't get to fill in half the river in the '60s. Seriously. The Globe archives on this are wild; I should write a blog post about them in my copious spare time. The TL;DR is that the Turnpike Authority tried to eminent domain a 300-foot-wide section of the Charles River from the MDC, the MDC told them to go to hell, the Turnpike sent guys out to do surveying work, the Met Police were sent to escort them off the property, both sides sued each other, the MDC won, and the viaduct was built.

Anyway: Harvard got a bit of a sweetheart deal, and now the Commonwealth and Harvard are sort of in a long-term staring contest over who does what with the land. Harvard won't say anything because they don't want the state to say "aha, you pay for it." Meanwhile the state will propose just dumb ideas (their original proposal was a "suburban interchange") which devalues Harvard's land. So the community has to come in and say "hey, uh, guys, how about we don't fuck this up." This benefits Harvard (their land is worth more) but they did pay $75 million for this 20 years ago with zero to show for it. And the community would like it to be, you know, not a suburban highway interchange.

Not fucking up and building Seaport 2.0

All of this comes to a head when the whole site is taken into consideration. The state highwaymen want to build all of the highway lanes, both on the Turnpike (which gets along fine these days inbound with three lanes in each direction, and because of upstream bottlenecks never will need more than three lanes going outbound) and in the project area, where "how fast can we get suburbanites to their offices" seems to be the driving force behind their calculations. Apparently only 200 people per day will use West Station, because the model they use, frankly, is terrible. (It's been pointed out that way more people than that use Boston Landing, despite the same model saying no one would, and this development will have way more people and jobs based at it.) So the idea is to build a roadway network which allow necessary circulation of vehicles, but doesn't build a bunch of wide arterial roads with narrow sidewalks and basically no bicycle lanes like in the Seaport.

So hopefully we manage not to mess that up. Lucky for you, there's been a community task force for the past decade (yes, really) which, while it hasn't always been successful, has at least acted as a check on the two-headed serpent of Harvard and MassDOT.