Lots to chew on in this report on the Alewife station closure:
*Repairs will be upward of $1M, but how much are the shuttling ops, and loss of time/productivity of thousands of station patrons having to remap their entire transpo patterns?
*Alewife apparently has 2,471 spaces to store crash-machines. How many people could we house in that space?
*Crash was intentional. Let's name/shame every news outlet that called this an "accident."
*When's Alewife reopening?
As a former resident of the Alewife area, it's also sad to me that this article (and seemingly everyone else) thinks of Alewife only as an end-of-line station that exists solely for Lexington's benefit.
*Thousands* of people live within a short walk of the station now, including residents of the 500+ affordable units at Rindge Towers. One guy paid his $9, and for reasons unknown, used his car to shut down a critical transpo mode for those thousands of people. When do their voices get heard?
@wordshaper a red line extension should happen, and not only for the reason of adding a better end-of-line place -- there's plenty of transit-supportive density potential in Arlington. But i agree, it will never happen, because Arlington.
@bikepedantic Oh, there are many reasons the red line should be extended beyond just end-nodiness for suburban commuters, yeah. Sadly all those good reasons aren't sufficient to extend the red line because Arlington. Stupidly (though sometimes you can take advantage of stupid to do necessary things) I suspect that "add another stop to the red line for those pesky suburban commuters who keep messing up your nice neighborhood" may actually be enough reason to get it done.
OK, fine, probably not, but it's got a better shot than all the other reasons. (It's a real shame that elevated tracks are so damn expensive, otherwise I'd say just run the extension along Rt 2 a bit with the terminal station on a platform above it but... yeah, no, too science fiction-y)