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?
Still stewing over this whole deal. I get that a big chunk of repair cost is likely restoring the atrium glass roof, but damn, that garage is literally rotting, and the MBTA just keeps throwing money at shoring it up. When is it not only good urban planning, but good cash flow management, to put it on the joint-development fast-track?
And @inliuofjoan asks a great question - is this closure moving up any SGR work that was planned for later shutdown periods?
@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.
@bikepedantic What'd be *really* awesome would be if those utterly useless country clubs at the end of the D got turned into medium density housing, and the Riverside stop itself got a parking garage and better access to 128 so more folks who drive could just *stop* driving into Boston, and hopefully for a lot of them just stop driving altogether. But that's not gonna happen either unfortunately.
@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)
@wordshaper @bikepedantic Not to say that the red line shouldn't be extended (it absolutely should), but I suspect the best way to make the parking garage obsolete is to electrify and increase the frequency of the commuter rail. While there definitely needs to be more connectivity between the two systems, at least for the red line/Fitchburg line it works pretty well.
@mgruar @bikepedantic The fact that our commuter rail isn't electrified still boggles my mind, and we really need to fix that.
Given People, and the installed base of stuff, I suspect a multi-pronged approach would be the best way to... still not get anything done. Extending the red (and green!) line and making it a better edge node is one prong. Electrifying the commuter rail and running cars more frequently is another. (TBH we should just buy the same cars the MTA uses to get into NYC and save all the design/testing/whatever hassles) Adding in more electrified rail in the first place is another. Rezoning in the suburbs around the rail stations to encourage more mixed-use medium density housing is yet another. Switching a bunch of streets in the metro area to be more bike/pedestrian friendly and run more T lines down them is another.
Not gonna happen, but I can dream. Or hallucinate, I suppose, depending on how you look at it.
@mgruar @bikepedantic And yeah, I really miss centre ville de Montpellier, which while not perfect by any means (P-traps are a thing!) was *so* much better transited and more pleasant to live in than most of the Boston metro are.
@wordshaper @bikepedantic Definitely, 100% agree on dreaming/hallucinating, haha, it's why I'm participating in local government with probably more optimism than is justified, at least on the bike/ped front.
@bikepedantic It's also not even that useful as an end-of-line station. I tried driving to Alewife a number of times; since it wasn't first thing in the morning, about half the time the garage was full & I couldn't park. After a while, I gave up & just drove all the way into work.
(After like 6 months of that, said "fuck this" and moved to Somerville.)
2500 cars makes a lot of difference congestion-wise, because they're so space inefficient. But that shouldn't be a goal..
@bikepedantic they are planning on doing some work + weekend shuttling at the end of February from Alewife and I really hope they have evaluated if they can move a bit of that work to now to reduce future shutdowns.
@inliuofjoan that would be a nice upside
@bikepedantic doubt they've thought about it and instead I get twitter randos making excuses for the T for not doing that.
@inliuofjoan All I know in my soul is that if they treated full closures as service tragedies that disrupted people’s lives as much as they do, MBTA would find a way to cram in some extra work right now.
@PaperCities they’re running shuttle buses to the next station (which does not have a big garage)
@bikepedantic I can explain some of the rationale here. It’s more logistics than anything. Are there DMs on this thing?
NBC10 just reported that they’re partially reopening the Alewife garage tomorrow, but still not running any trains? What? WHAT?