The Green Line Extension is currently planning the new route and T stop locations. Locations under consideration are in or around Brickbottom, Union Square, central Somerville (Ball Square, Magoun Square), Tufts, and Mystic Valley Parkway / west Medford. They’re holding a series of community meetings starting this week to discuss the possible routes & station locations and find out what people want.
The web site has a flyer [PDF] listing the meetings and summarizing what they’re about:
- Mon, Jan 28, Somerville High – focusing on stations proposed for Washington Street, Gilman Square, and Inner Belt/Brickbottom neighborhoods.
- Tue, Jan 29, VNA – Magoun Square and Ball Square neighborhoods
- Thu, Jan 31, Tufts – College Ave & Winthrop Street neighborhoods, including Tufts campus
- Wed, Feb 6, South Medford Fire Station – Mystic Valley Parkway area
- Tue, Feb 19, Cummings School – Union Square area
As always, there also remains the chance that they won’t extend the Green Line at all. In addition to finding out what they’re planning and giving them your opinion about where stops should be, high turnout will make the extension more likely; low turnout would indicate lower interest and increase the chance that it won’t happen. If you care about expanding public transportation, please try to show up to one of these meetings!
Edit: STEP (Somerville Transportation Equity Partnership) has a Google map of proposed routes & possible stops being considered.
I’m probably going to the one tomorrow at VNA, and/or the one on February 19th.
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p>I used to live in Magoun Square, and have to walk 45 minutes to the Commuter Rail or take a bus to Sullivan into the city to switch to the red or green, to get various places. Dealing with commuter rail & bus schedules made it more complicated and less spontaneous to get anywhere.
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p>I also used to live halfway between Union Square and Harvard Square; both were fairly short walks from home, and both had restuarants and other things that interested me, but I went to Harvard Square at least 20 times as often because it was conveniently on the way to/from the T.
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p>I’d like to see both of these places get T stops and have some sense of how it would affect them.
but I may try to go anyway, just for solidarity.
The plan to terminate the green line a half mile short of the West Medford commuter rail stop, so as not to annoy the neighbors, is a major shortcoming. Useful mass transit is all about the network and making connections; this plan breaks the link in a big way from the start.
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p>Highway planning puts the cars first, but when it comes to bicycles or pedestrian access or mass transit the immediate abutters get to pick the tune that will be paid for by all taxpayers.
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p>I’m not convinced the green-line extension will happen (though having a plan makes it more likely), and I’m afraid that I’m increasingly less sorry about that. Maybe by the time there is actually money for this we’ll have a better system of setting priorities, and can do it right.
Remember the Green Line does connect to North Station, so people can always go the other direction and catch the Com Rail there. As far as I could tell, the objections of the West Medfordians were:
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p>1) Currently there are some street level rail crossings that in West Medford. They didn’t want these being closed every time a Green Line trolley came through. I think the T wanted to avoid the cost of building bridges there, which would remove this objection.
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p>2) They didn’t want the character of their neighborhood changing. This seems to be a perennial objection to Mass Transit and is why the Red Line doesn’t go to Arlington. Davis Square certainly changed when the Red Line came in, but I think this is more the exception than the norm.
…maybe the commuter rail stop can be moved a half mile south to meet up with the Green Line?
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p>It’s not like the commuter rail stop is a proper station, after all. Currently there is nothing there aside from a couple of benches at the backside of a pharmacy.
I don’t have any idea, just curious…
I just wonder if they will.
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p>The current proposed terminus is separated from a nearby urban center (and a rail connection) by a highway.
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p>There aren’t many places in the metro area that you could call “in the middle of nowhere,” but this comes close. And of course there’s specifically no parking, since that would make local traffic worse. Hard to get to, in other words, by any means.
and I asked one of the consultants there about this.
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p>There’s a number of problems with extending the Green Line to West Medford. First, there’s a lot of environmental impacts from crossing the Mystic River. At least from an environmental stand point, the damage to watershed is greater than the benefits of having the T go there. Second, there’s the issue of the surface level street crossings in West Medford. Both High Street (Route 60) and Canal Street cross the train tracks there. The traffic impact of having a few commuter rail trains a day come through is apparently fairly bad already and the area couldn’t really take those roads being closed every time a Green Line trolley goes through. The right of way is too narrow to allow the construction of bridges or tunnels to avoid this problem and the T is very reluctant to take any private property.
Wrong thing to do for transit. One of the (many) reasons the T is in the hole is because of lawsuits. Many of them are for silly stuff (trying to deny marijuana ads), some are for racist stuff (injustice/preferential treatment among workers) but a big portion of the debt is due to lawsuits brought about by neighborhoods, especially on the Greenbush line.
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p>One lesson the T learned, especially from the Greenbush debacle, is that unfortunately even when you’re doing the right thing by putting in a new rail line, if the neighbors are going to sue you until the messiah comes, don’t build it.
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p>I don’t know for certain all the reasons of not going to the commuter rail station (though some reasonable statements below in the thread) but I feel certain the T is thinking about the cost of lawsuits as well.
but how much of the T’s budget is going toward lawsuits? I’d guess that when compared to debt service, wages, health care, pensions, and energy costs… it’s puny. In which case, I’m not sure how relevant that line of thinking really is.
All the items you listed (probably each individually) cost more than most of the lawsuits. Those are all operating costs though – after the rails have been laid down.
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p>Before the T can even put down any rails they get the heck sued out of them, with legal costs running into tens of millions of dollars (as in Greenbush case) and delaying the project years.
Do you have any specific reason to believe the same thing will happen here, with Somerville being so overwhelmingly supportive of the extension?
I was under the impression that the oldest part of the Green Line tunnels– between Boylston and Park Street– is already at capacity. That is to say, if more trains are added, either by expanding the schedule or one of the lines, that expansion can only be accomodated by (i) causing the trains to get through that bottleneck more slowly (at which point it would be faster to walk), or (ii) spending a gazillion dollars to enlarge the tunnels in downtown Boston.
The other option is to turn the trains around at Park Street (or Government Center). Currently, only the E line trains go past North Station anyway. I don’t think there are any bottlenecks that you would hit if you turned the trains around at Park Street, although Government Center might be a better option. It would basically separate the Green Line into two separate systems that use the same trains and (sometimes) the same tracks. But I doubt anyone is interested in taking the Green Line from Medford to Brookline/Newton anyway. It will not be faster than current options for that anyway.
Imagine the Medford half to be the A and E lines. Then, you’d have the A line Medford to Gov’t Center/Park, the B, C, D would go to Gov’t Center/Park from the other direction, and the E line would go end-to-end.
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p>This way they have some trains that go the whole way, but also have the flexibility to adjust the A line timing to keep the two sets of schedules evenly spaced.
I still think they should bring the A branch back.