At dawn, the invasion began. For months, outlying municipalities had prepared for Boston’s preemptive strike. Somerville thwarted green line invaders with casual joggers who effortlessly outran the trolleys and secured the perimeter. Revere flooded the Sumner Tunnel, funneling invaders onto the blue line and trapping them at Wonderland. Medford went full pyromaniac, setting the orange line ablaze and forcing panicked troops to jump in the Mystic. Above the red line, protesters jumped in unison, crashing the ceiling and burying the last wave of Boston reinforcements. Seizing this chaos, Cantabrigians cycled triumphantly over the Charles, reclaiming their rightful place as the capital of Massachusetts. By the time the sun had set, one phrase echoed throughout Beacon Hill: “MegaCambridge is inevitable.”
This is a goofy tale, of course – a reference to the annual April Fool’s joke that Cambridge should annex Boston. Still, beneath the silliness is a hint of truth: Something is wrong.
We’re one of the wealthiest metro regions in the country, with the gross domestic product of Poland and some of the world’s top universities. Yet when it comes to public transportation, we’ve been stuck. In many ways, we’re just trying to keep the system from falling apart – let alone expanding or improving it.
Meanwhile, other cities are blowing past us. Los Angeles is on track to essentially double its metro system by 2050. Seattle has been growing its network seven times faster than we have over the past 20 years. Washington, D.C., has already surpassed its prepandemic ridership. And that’s just within the United States – our global peers have been even more ambitious. At the heart of our stagnation is one persistent issue: our inability to plan and act as a unified region.
Each city has its own rules, departments and most importantly, its own narrow priorities – often defined by artificial borders. As a result, bike lanes disappear at the edge of town, bus lanes stop short of where people actually need to go and fire stations are clustered redundantly. The layers of red tape and duplicated policies make coordination nearly impossible – and extremely expensive.
Take the green line extension: It became one of the most expensive light rail projects in history. Meanwhile, Montreal is building a fully automated light metro that will connect suburbs eight miles from downtown in just 19 minutes – for half the cost per mile. And that’s after Montreal’s project hit delays and overruns. Put differently, building in the Boston region costs more than tunneling through century-old infrastructure full of unexploded dynamite.
Of course, the goal isn’t for Boston, Cambridge, Somerville and other cities to lose their identities. But we do need to act together. Bluebikes is a great local example – what started as a small partnership has grown into a multicity network that keeps expanding year after year. Or look at Seattle’s Link light rail: Line 1 now stretches more than 30 miles across six municipalities in a little over an hour, each with its own character but all better connected. Denver’s RTD crosses political and geographic boundaries too – despite local differences, the system has built 33 miles of light rail and nearly 54 miles of electrified commuter rail since 2002, the first new system of its kind in the United States.
We don’t need to wait for a sweeping policy change from Beacon Hill. Residents should be asking their local leaders – mayors and council members alike – how they plan to improve mobility, not just inside their own cities but across the region. Few of us live our lives within a single municipal border. We commute. We visit friends and family. We rely on shared infrastructure that often fails to connect the dots.
You can play a role too. This fall, the MBTA is launching its 25-year long-range plan. This is the moment to speak up. The T needs to hear your frustrations with how disconnected the region feels. Show up to meetings. Ask your legislators how they plan to fund the MBTA so these plans aren’t just dreams on paper.
Yes, “MegaCambridge” might’ve started as a goofy idea – but underneath the jokes is a real call for unity. We have the talent, wealth and creativity to fix what’s broken. What we need is the will to work across old boundaries.
Boston changed the world once. Let’s prove we can figure out how to get across town, too.
Burhan Azeem is a Cambridge city councillor. Jarred Johnson is the former executive director of TransitMatters.
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Hear, hear! We need a serious investment in public transit.
Public transit enhances cities by improving accessibility, equity, and economic growth. It connects marginalized communities to jobs and services. Dedicate bus lanes are big bang for the buck. Low cost and greatly improves bus transportation.
Economically, every $1 invested yields $5 returns. Environmentally, U.S. transit cuts 63M metric tons of emissions yearly. but much more is needed to combat climate change.
As the authors note, strategic investment, public support, and planning are key to maximizing transit’s benefits.
A reluctance to plan and act together can also hold back cities or towns from helpful changes within their own borders. Neighborhoods, squares and even smaller clusters can suffer from an outbreak of hyper-localism when a new — or even recycled — proposal is floated.
Local plans — for new schools, bus lanes, bike lanes, housing — have all encountered a buzz-saw of reflexive objections that have resulted in delays and higher costs, even when the proposal eventually moves ahead. Many of these can provide important benefits for everyone in the community, including the people who object to the changes.
Thank you, Burhan Azeem and Jarred Johnson, for putting these matters in perspective.
Here’s hoping that Councilor Azeem will work hard to add a commuter rail stop at Alewife as a required component of the MBTA’s redevelopment efforts there. Connecting the suburbs to Alewife via light rail is preferable to rebuilding the Alewife garage and its 3000 parking spaces reserved entirely for out-of-town commuters.
“Of course, the goal isn’t for Boston, Cambridge, Somerville and other cities to lose their identities. But we do need to act together”. So true, but does that include the extensive up-zoning that exacerbates transportation? Let’s get transit first, or at least have a plan before clustering towers around it. You joke about MegaCambridge, yet much of what is being explored is being supported by this councilor. MegaCambridge it is.
I’m not listening to transit improvement advice from someone who cheered when East Cambridge was going to lose three-quarters of our bus lines, with no improvement on the remaining one, because he was too fixated on the shiny keys, the claim of increased bus service, to look at the details. Thanks to the City of Somerville for going to bat for us; now we’re only losing half our buses. When the Cambridge city government remembers that East Cambridge has residents who deserve representation, too, maybe they can do half as well as Somerville does to look out for our interests.