So Gov. Patrick's administration is already trying to put off the Somerville branch of the Green Line another two years to 2016 (in order to get federal $$$ to help pay for it). But now is Transportation Secretary Bernard Cohen hinting that it doesn't actually need to happen at all? Via Casey, here's a letter from Cohen:
“(The administration) is currently moving both the Green Line extension to Somerville and Medford, and the Red-Blue Line connector projects,…through the environmental review process, and will continue to aggressively pursue all project milestones,” Cohen wrote.
Then, the letter gets more interesting (I’ll let you read between the lines): “As a point of clarification,” Cohen wrote. “the legal commitment (as part of the Big Dig) is to the required air quality benefits, and not to individual transit projects. Should (the administration) anticipate that it will be unable to meet any of the project deadlines…it will move expeditiously and in good faith to implement alternative measures for achieving the necessary air quality benefits.”
My emphasis. That's actually not all that subtle. I'm going to go under the assumption that the administration intends not to fulfill the state's bargain to extend the Green Line through Somerville and Medford, which is a huge disappointment.
I do not quite comprehend all the excitement over bringing even more of a failed system into places that don’t have it. Greenbush (they don’t need it) will be an extension of the perpetually-late, filthy, unreliable, and corruptly run commuter rail. Bringing more of the green line to Medford and Somerville will provide a slow ride on an equally mismanaged, dirty, unreliable and corruptly managed system.
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These communities who want public transportation would be far better off investing their energy into flushing the MBTA as we know it first, or by doing the job themselves by forming their own transit agencies.
or at least a bit of evidence.
and that became a set of specific projects. Now, you can read the worst into it [they won't do the projects since they have to clean the air] or you can read the best in to it [if they delay the project two years to get federal funding, they'll do something additional in the interim to comply with the commitment].
I don't have a crystal ball, but I think they'd have a hard time finding other projects that will pass all the hoops and be sufficiently air cleaning and be able to do it on time.
This is the same thing we've seen time and time again. When CLF got the state to sign onto a set of air quality mitigation requirements everybody got excited that it was on paper. Right there, in black and white with signatures, the state said they would do some mass transit work.
Then the state changed the contract, but it was still in writing. We won't do that project and the other one but we'll still do stuff. Then they changed it again… and then again.
There have been a series of broken promises that started a very long time ago. Add to the equation this: The MBTA has to pay for all of these mitigation projects. Why? Because the state wanted to build a road tunnel and agreed to mitigation in order to get it to happen.
“What” you ask? The MBTA is paying billions of dollars to subsidize a road project? That's right boys and girls, the MBTA has been held responsible to pay for the Big Dig mitigation projects that includes, among other things, expansion of the green line.
The green line expansion funds aren’t going to come from the MBTA coffers. The money is supposed to come from state bonds and now may end up incorporating federal funding as well. But the T isn’t paying for this particular project.
has that changed. The state recently said that they would bear the burden of the cost for this and some other expansion projects.
Of course the state said they'd follow through on promises to mitigate too….
…this contention over the extension of the MBTA to Somerville.
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If the Muenchners had to put up with such contention, they would never have been able to build their wonderful S-Bahn system http://en.wikipedia…. which they are continuing to extend. Without contention.
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The only contention here in Munich is whether to build what they refer to as Transrapid, but what is known in the US as a magnetic-levitation train. The reason for that is that, although it will cut the time for the transit from the Munich airport to the city’s central train terminal by about 30 minutes (40 to 10), it is essentially parallel to an existing S-Bahn link.
…if the short mag-lev link pans out, it is probable that it would be expanded to Nurnberg, Augsburg, Stuttgart, the Frankfurt/Main airport, and maybe the net will be expanded to Hamburg, Rostock and Berlin.
Someone at EOT needs to go to the bookshelf, dust off a copy of the Beyond Lechmere Northwest Corridor Study (August 2005) and give it to Secretary Cohen to read. Nine alternatives for transportation projects for improving air quality in the region were thoroughly analyzed, and the enhanced Green Line extension to West Medford and Union Square was far and away deemed to be the best alternative for improving air quality, increasing ridership and converting trips from autos to transit. Forget the alternative measures and get this project – which this year has inexplicably fallen more than four months behind the “new” schedule that extended the deadline to December 14 – back on track.