Support for Lechmere changes unifies green line extension meeting
Support for remaking the Lechmere T area into “Lechmere Square” when the subway stop is moved and opposition to a wider Monsignor O’Brien Highway there helped push a meeting on extending the MBTA green line to an epic three-plus hours last week, even with a two-minute limit on public comments and a smaller than usual crowd.
“We can come together on something that is really going to be a gateway, not just to Cambridge but to Somerville and beyond,” said Sam Seidel, one of four Cambridge city councillors (although Tim Toomey was unable to appear in person and sent a staff member) and among at least a dozen people who spoke on the Lechmere area issues.
They drew the most united comment, along with condemnation of a delay in construction for the farthest T stop planned. While the audience should have been packed with residents of Medford as well as Somerville, since both communities are to get several T stops by Dec. 31, 2014, there were few Medford residents commenting.
The meeting, held at Somerville High School, was billed as a chance to discuss the extension project’s final environmental impact report, but many of the issues had little to do with the report. Instead, proponents or opponents of some aspects of the plans used the lengthy public comment period to plead their case.
Switching a maintenance facility to “Option L” from “Yard 8” was considered a victory, but Scott Allen, general manager of the family-owned M.S. Walker Inc., said Option L could very likely put his wine, spirits and cigar distributor out of business after 77 years in Somerville, forcing 330 people out of jobs.
“We do support this project,” said a subdued Allen, “but we would hope you would look at other options out there.”
Pattern of unhappiness
Beyond criticizing the widening of the highway as a disincentive for alternate forms of transportation, the Lechmere plans also didn’t refer much to environmental concerns.
Private developers had grand plans in 2003 for the T stop as part of the development of the 45-acre NorthPoint area, including moving the station to the far side of the highway and building a footbridge for pedestrians, but legal conflicts put the plans in limbo. The state took over the station with a bare-bones approach lacking a footbridge, meaning pedestrians would have to cross a potential seven lanes of traffic. A recent court decision settled the standoff without relaunching development in NorthPoint.
“When I look at these plans, the thing that keeps coming to my mind is the classic video game ‘Frogger,’” East Cambridge resident Heather Hoffman said. “Widening a highway so we can extend a transit line is crazy. It serves nothing except for concrete companies and paving contractors. It doesn’t do anything to make traffic better, because right down the way there is a bottleneck you can do nothing about. What it does is make it much, much harder for people to get to and from the station.”
Bill Deignan, transportation manager for Cambridge, said before the meeting that the traffic patterns were necessary and, with a large median and proper electronic signals, he believed people could cross safely. Adding to the complication were two needed left-turn lanes, he said. But he didn’t speak to the meeting, and his views weren’t reflected by the elected officials who did. (“Let them sit in traffic if they have to,” said councillor Craig Kelley, a noted foe of transportation by car.)
A request for more information was made to Deignan on Thursday morning, but he hadn’t replied by Tuesday.
Stopping before Route 16
In addition to moving the Lechmere station closer to the NorthPoint development, the project includes a one-stop spur to Union Square in Somerville, roughly where Prospect Street and Webster Avenue meet, and several stops in Medford, including to Brickbottom, Gilman Square, Lowell Street, Ball Square, College Avenue and finally to Route 16, to a site near the Starbucks, Whole Foods Market and U-Haul depot. Officially, all but the outermost stop are to be built by 2015, and the decision to move the Route 16 stop to a second phase — because it’s not paid for in the first — drew much criticism.
A recent state cost estimate put the extension project at about $932 million without a Route 16 stop. Transportation officials say the project will be tackled when funding is available.
The move “is a mistake, it’s an example of a false economy,” said John Kyper, transportation chairman of the state’s Sierra Club chapter.
Better flow of trains promised
There were also concerns about how the extension would affect green line traffic elsewhere in the system, but project manager Katherine Fichter said commuters would experience either little change or improvement. “We’re developing an operating plan that retains existing headway,” she said, meaning at peak times there should still be trains every three to five minutes, and nonpeak waits of 10 minutes for a train should also be unchanged.
Of the four green line trains, only the E goes all the way to Lechmere. Commuters on the other lines have to get off before Lechmere and wait for an E line train to come. But plans for the extension add D line trains to the mix, which double riders’ chances to catch a train all the way to Lechmere, and there will be more vehicles put into the system. The spur at Union Square is an in-out, Fichter said, which speeds trains back to Lechmere, and she reinforced that the station is designed with the potential to extend it to connect to the red line at Porter Square.
Let me start with the compliments before I start picking nits. Thanks for the best coverage of this meeting that I’ve seen, and thanks for making me sound good (at least to me).
On to the nits. There is not an equal number of trains on each of the current four branches of the Green Line. My observation, based on years of waiting at Government Center hoping for a Lechmere train, back in the days when E trains and many D trains went there, is that E trains make up only about 1/8 of the trains at most. Most trains turn around at Government Center, others turn around at North Station, and the few, the proud and the very crowded go to Lechmere.
I would have agreed with your notion about what an environmental impact report should include but for the fact that I was directed by members of STEP (Somerville Transportation Equity Partnership, home of people who really know this transportation stuff) to read the letter from the Secretary of Environmental Affairs (https://www.commentmgr.com/Projects/1228/docs/006_DEIR-EA_V1_EENF_Certificate.pdf) that set forth the scope of the report (that part starts on page 5). It turns out to be a whole lot broader than laymen like us would have expected, definitely broad enough to encompass nearly all of the comments made at both the meeting on the Draft EIR and this one on the Final EIR.
The plans for a footbridge (actually, I think it was more like the crossing between Harvard Yard and the Science Center) were part of the original land swap deal between the MBTA and the B&M Railroad. Neither the developers nor the city raised them in any of the public hearings on NorthPoint; rather, they were peddling a grade crossing of the O’Brien Highway the whole time (there was a mention at some point of the possibility of having a covered elevated walkway between the hotel planned for the current station site and the new station, but the grade crossing was the alternative being pushed). In fact, that, the old NorthPoint plan, as near as I can tell, is the genesis of the ridiculous idea of widening the O’Brien Highway for two blocks between the old and new Lechmere Station sites. They keep telling us that it’ll be just fine crossing seven lanes of highway because they’re going to get the lights all perfect and there’s going to be a 20-foot-wide median (for us to camp on?), and we’re just going to love it, honest. Considering the disaster that was the crossing of just four lanes of much slower Cambridge Street at First Street until the developers of One First finally got a usable light cycle set up there, I don’t believe a word they say. I think it’s going to be much more like the “improvements” made a couple of miles north at the McGrath Highway and Broadway in Somerville (by Foss Park) to accommodate the redevelopment of the old Somerville Lumber into a Super Stop & Shop that have led to pedestrians giving up in despair and just sitting on the median while they try to figure out how they can get to the other side of the road without being hit.
As a whole, I think the plans for the new Lechmere Station blatantly ignore the reality of where people are going to and coming from when they use that station, not just the subway part, but the bus part as well. The destinations are overwhelmingly on the neighborhood side of the O’Brien Highway, and the T is refusing to consider actually serving those destinations in a way that is remotely comparable to what they do now. Specifically, none of the Somerville buses (80, 87 and 88) will come down to Cambridge Street any more but will instead turn directly from the O’Brien Highway into the new station, and the 69 bus (Harvard Square-Lechmere) looks as though it will be turning left at Third Street instead of continuing on to the newly extended First Street, which would serve the CambridgeSide Galleria, the registries of deeds and probate, the Middlesex County Probate Court, the jail still located in the superior courthouse and, last but not least, neighborhood residents. I can come up with no rationale for depriving us of decent service on the excuse of extending service to the people of Somerville and Medford; the two are not mutually exclusive, no matter what the T says.
Finally, I would like to thank everyone who spoke up for us, including Councillors Cheung, Kelley, Seidel and Toomey and people who don’t live East Cambridge but like to visit here. In my remarks I referred to Councillor Cheung’s observation that this needs to be seen as an economic development project, not an engineering project. Of course, there’s a major, complex engineering component, but there’s no reason to do this if it doesn’t improve the economic development of all of the areas it goes through. That includes East Cambridge. The state shortchanged the T and the public by not having its own economic development people weigh in on the design of this project (I confirmed this specific point with Secretary of Housing and Economic Development Bialecki, who, by the by, worked on NorthPoint as a lawyer for the developers). As was observed that night, we only get one try to get this right, so let’s not blow it.
People have until July 23 to make comments. Please do.