jonnhrr wrote:Transit gets screwed again as usual.
So let's do more development but not provide adequate transportation to accommodate it. The story of urban transportation in the US.
Jon
Screwed if there isn't another shoe to drop with parallel negotiations at Widett Circle. That's the key. This doesn't make any sense if it's negotiation in a vacuum on an guaranteed easement they cannot be pressured to give up. But it makes a lot of sense if these are multi-party talks involving trade-in for space
better than Beacon Park...and the study did ID the various parcels around Widett as operationally and capacity superior if other parties were willing to facilitate the land acquisition. See the second PDF linked in that post, and scroll to page 19. The total train storage available at Widett if the Food Market and cold storage warehouse were relocated blows away the maximum possible storage on the BP easement: 30 trainsets vs. 14. At far more opportune location that doesn't require burning deadhead slots through Back Bay and Yawkey all day. They not only wouldn't need BP for train storage at all if those parcels became available, but they also wouldn't need
Readville for terminal-district storage at all...just the end-of-line layover for Fairmount & Stoughton. That would be enormous...the 100-year solution for southside terminal storage. With the only above-and-beyond capacity add--North-South Rail Link--putting its equivalent terminal yards out by Route 128 instead of downtown. A much smaller BP easement or repurposed Readville could be banked for space for full-service southside maint facility and/or MOW yard instead of storage-storage...functions that wouldn't chew up as many daily deadhead slots.
The state has always wanted Widett most as perma-fix for the SS layover, dating back almost 20 years. And they've been willing to use Massport's Marine Terminal redevelopment as bait to relocate the Food Market to new digs next to the seafood warehouses at end of Southie Haul Road. At superior facilities to the poor land use in the Widett 'bowl' hastily constructed when Mayor White kicked all those vendors out of Faneuil Hall in the early-70's. But the Menino Admin. was over-the-top hostile to the idea, and it became a pile-on with opportunistic Southie city councillors and rudderless Boston Redevelopment Authority. When the Pike straightening opportunity came up, they had to cling to this easement as a default go-it-alone choice because City-level institutions were absolutely useless at basic cooperation. Not because the negotiations would've been extremely difficult, but for simple indifference by the City.
After the collapse of the 2024 Olympics "Midtown" development concept decking over Widett the city and BRA/BDPA never stopped talking about that site. The fatal mistake that upended the Olympic bid redev was that they expected one "Master Developer" to front the entire cost and risk of decking over the Widett 'bowl'. That was an absolutely senseless decision, because roping in MassDOT with a permanent transit easement on the lower level could've underwritten the cost of the decking and not scared the potential developers away. It never occurred to anyone on the Boston 2024 committee to put 2 and 2 together. After all, Cabot Yard on the Red Line was built with tracks spaced for air rights pegs and cover-over for some mid-60's urban renewal tower that never came to fruition at request of the same BRA. They could easily re-space the 24 tracks on the 'bowl' portion of that schematic around similar allowances for air rights pegs and let the property taxes fund an infrastructure bank for constructing the air rights deck. Nope...never considered that. And they also failed to adequately communicate with the Food Market on relocation. Massport was shut out from the B24 committee and couldn't make a sales pitch to the spooked food vendors on Marine Terminal, so the reaction was instantly hostile.
If they've learned anything from the B24 debacle, the parties would be putting their heads together and talking about obvious synergies between the redev interests, the transpo interests, and the commercial interests. City institutions have already spoken remorsefully of the missed opportunities with B24's big whiff @ Widett...such as Mayor Walsh pointing to the need for a better regional food distribution master plan (inspired by NYC's Hunts Point) that upgrades the Food Market's presence rather than just unilaterally looking for lazy land grabs. And the working group behind the Pike realignment (check
The Amateur Planner blog for updates, as the author is on the Pike committee) is pushing hard for better street grid connectivity across the realigned Pike...a task severely complicated by the fat midsection of the T easement. If Captain Obvious has gotten the message through a bunch of thick City skulls with the babiest of baby-steps like realizing where B24 screwed the pooch...then the obvious transpo synergies with potential land swaps should by all logic be conversation fodder right now.
If MassDOT's willingness to
voluntarily talk about ceding some BP acreage is any indication, these kinds of synergies may...belatedly, at long last...be getting a few returned phone calls from the City. It's early, and it's always prudent to take the City institutions' penchant for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory with generous skepticism...but it makes too much sense that any discussion of BP acreage be rooted in a different set of discussions about trading up elsewhere. If nothing else it's a slown-burn development worth watching when it periodically comes up in FCMB meetings.