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?
@bikepedantic This does kinda emphasize the issues with changing population densities. We really do need good edge nodes for the T, because like it or not we've got 70 years of suburban development and all the other options for them (and, sadly, the entire region as a lot of 128-adjacent development demonstrates) right now are worse than edge nodes into the T network.
On the other hand, there's a lot of current and ongoing development for a more sustainable and sensible future that's happening right around Alewife conflict with using it as an edge node for suburban commuters.
What'd probably be best is to extend the red line one more stop so the edge-node parking is better positioned, but given how much of a nightmare the green line extension was I suspect that'll never happen.
@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)