I-90 Interchange Improvement Project & West Station | Allston

I get that the political context for the funding pull could most generously be described as "uncool." But in a parallel universe where MassDOT does nothing different and DOT instead pulls the grant for general incompetence and cluelessness, am I upset with the Feds here? I'm not really sure I am.
 
Tallguy said:
You do realize that you can't do the throat and Beacon Yard pike separately?
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It's doable. I pasted the preferred Pike-on-the-surface Throat option onto Google Maps and got this. It looks like they'd be no spatial and connection problems with building just the Throat section first and tying it in with the existing Allston Pike interchange.

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TheRatmeister said:
I get that the political context for the funding pull could most generously be described as "uncool." But in a parallel universe where MassDOT does nothing different and DOT instead pulls the grant for general incompetence and cluelessness, am I upset with the Feds here? I'm not really sure I am.
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It's not the end of the world, because as it stands there's almost no freaking way the first shovel was going to be turned during the Trump administration the way they're choking it all away. Chances are we're going to see a flip in Congress in '26 that might push back on the punitive cuts, and '28 is a whole new ballgame. If the prior fed funding had been time-bombed we probably would've been risking it regardless at the pace they're going.

The main question is whether this is going to be enough of a shock to the system to actually change the leadership. I have severe doubts it will given the way they've circled the wagons around utterly unworkable and half-baked designs, but if MassDOT is forced to clean house to get unstuck we've probably got a better shot of getting something done than we did even with the feddy bux.
 
So, you're nearly 1000ft West of the throat. That's about 1/3 of the distance from the "mouth" to Cambridge Street. The viaduct part is the expense part. The Yard part requires no diversion mitigation and is only about 20% of the project length and maybe about 10% of the cost, exclusive of West Station. The Cambridge bridge rebuild is, while a good idea, not essential to the overall project.
 
Would it be any easier or cheaper to phase as East-bound and Westbound, rather than Throat and Yard?
 
okin15 said:
Would it be any easier or cheaper to phase as East-bound and Westbound, rather than Throat and Yard?
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Doesn't there have to be east-bound, west-bound phasing to keep the roadways open during construction? Isn't that a given for the project?
 
sm89 said:
I feel like an email update or news item would have sufficed instead of a "meeting". The presentation had not one chart, graph, image, map, etc. Just text text text. It consisting of all sentence fragment bullets also made it especially hard to read through.
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Wait...now we're looking for 8 trains to layover again? The last several sets of Beacon Park renders cut it down to 4. Jeezus...would it kill them to have just a *little* bit of consistency in whatever the hell it is they're asking for here??? They're making it clear as mud.
 
Amtrak/MassDOT are planning for only 5 tpd on Springfield -Boston. To provide early commuting capacity W to E, At least one, probably two, trainsets should be stored in the West, either in Albany or Springfield. Even if all five necessary trainsets needed to be stored in Boston, one ,the LSL, already is. That leaves four five car consists of 500ft long. They would be the only trainsets short enough to be stored at Southampton Front Yard. This is all the multi-year campaign to expand SS, whether present operational plans warrant it or not.
And I won't relist the multiple options that TM has pointed out again and again for storage in Boston
 
citydweller said:
I don't see this project moving forward until Federal funds are reinstated after the next administration takes office. Meanwhile, Trump wants to increase the defense budget to 1.5T annually.
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I blame Trump for this, but I also blame MassDOT, Harvard and the city. The project study, public involvement, and design started about 12 years ago, and there is no excuse for the project to not have completed, by the time Biden left office last year, all the design, NEPA, permits, plus construction contracts awarded. Diddling forever and ever on a project ends up with nothing.
 
Charlie_mta said:
but I also blame MassDOT, Harvard and the city. The project study, public involvement, and design started about 12 years ago, and there is no excuse for the project to not have completed, by the time Biden left office last year, all the design, NEPA, permits, plus construction contracts awarded. Diddling forever and ever on a project ends up with nothing.
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Yup. MassDOT sure loves their studies.

There's no guarantee that a new administration would be interested though. On the surface it's very much a highway project. There's no guarantee that Harvard would still be interested in doing the development.
 
Also let's not forget the "director of megaprojects" we hired who was supposed to figure this stuff out, and not, I don't know, not do anything
 
Longfellow said:
to call us names
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Harry Mattison, what you doing here? Joking aside, it's wild that the incident was less than a year ago. It feels like a lifetime.

Trump is darkness embodied in politics - he's going to try to extract a pound of flesh from every state and almost nothing will happen otherwise until he dies or is voted out.
 
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