The presentation and report is posted. The key figure is 800 to 1200 riders per weekday - somewhere near the top 10 stations in 2024. If they get to 30 minute service on the Fitchburg line nearly 2200 riders which would be near the top 5 of stations in 2024. Lots of hemming and hawing in the report. Did anyone attend the meeting to see how it was presented? This would be pretty convenient for my trips out west - even with a smaller Alewife Red Line garage in the future, I could just park and go west to Concord and Fitchburg.Meeting for if alewife should get a commuter rail station. Theres going to be a presentation on the feasibility study.
Transit Advisory Committee Meeting - February 2026
Transit Advisory Committee Meeting - February 2026www.cambridgema.gov
The last feasibility study projected 60 riders per day, so I smell a big waft of B.S. on the projections. Regional Rail increases ridership, but it doesn't take dregs-of-the-system stations and turn them into Top 10'ers instantly. West Cambridge (I can't in good conscience call this thing "Alewife" given how far it is from the existing station) hasn't grown that much, and there are still a lot of access challenges to this siting like the length of the walk (down Terminal Rd. or up a ludicrous number of switchback ramps) to get to the Parkway.
It can't be for transfers to the Red Line. It's a minimum 1500 ft. walk from an outbound side platform to the fare lobby...probably longer. And it's >2000 ft. from an inbound side platform or island with switchbacks. I think they're basing this totally on TOD, or someone's imagination of absolutely scalding-hot TOD. The Fawcett St. side of the neighborhood has grown a real lot since the last study, and Cambridgepark has grown a bit too although it was already pretty built out as of the last study. So there's ingredients available. But there's a finite amount of density in the neighborhood because of its car centricity, and access challenges to a lot of other surrounding development because of the positioning of the ROW in a relative dead zone (the electrical substation + Keolis maint facility + Parkway/Mall parking lot) breaking up the parts of the neighborhood from each other. So it's not through-the-moon levels of passenger swells for a minimum 15-minute headway (and hourly until we reach that stage) service that has much more limited trip-pairing potential vs. the neighborhood's Red Line orientation. Their ridership projections don't add up by an order of magnitude. I wouldn't rank this one in the Top 15 most needed CR infills at all.
Can you share the link?
Looking at the slides and report now. It seems like it's a Route 2 (major) and Essex county (minor) travel market. The use case though is dependent on the next development cycle -- the Cambridge zoning plan has development projections showing:
I haven't seen a feasibility study for this area before. When was it studied?
CTPS, 2 decades ago. Yeah, it's dated...but they were leaning hard back then on Cambridgepark being all built out by TOD by the time it opened so that growth was anticipated. Fawcett St./Concord Ave. development wouldn't have been factored back then at all because the land wasn't available for redev and that's a significant source of ridership a new study would pick up, but even allowing for that their math is completely fucked all over that report. It overstates the density of what has been developed to truly absurd degrees. Like...have they ever laid eyes on the Alewife area before? It's single-mindedly designed to draw people in cars. That doesn't translate frictionlessly to instant walkability from a CR station in the dead zone subdividing the neighborhood. And yet they direct-compare it favorably with several population- and job-anchor "squares" of big regional renown. Totally bananas stuff.
Looking at the neighborhood comparison table in the report, it seems like there may be a case to have some moderate level of ridership even with today's nieghborhood. Population stats within a half mile of CR Alewife is roughly like JFK/Umass (1,095 riders) and employment stats within a half-mile roughly Boston Landing (1,266 riders).
Fresh Pond would be good - especially with the mall taking the name right there. Given the MBTA's penchance for a secondary name, I wonder if the following half joking ideas that popped in my head would work : Fresh Pond/SSA, Fresh Pond/Alewife Brook, Alewife Circle, Fresh Pond/Cambridge Point, Fresh Pond/Shiva for Senate.
Oh, bravo...
There's a couple things at play here though:
This is a great point. This also brings up how important nsrl would be as far as redundancy. For a personal anecdote I used to work in alewife and would take the red line from jfk. If something happened to the red line it would be extremely complicated to get from jfk to the new cr station. With nsrl it would be as simple as going to jfk as usual and just getting on the cr instead of the rl. Quite a few of our rapid transit lines share right of ways with the commuter rail so this would add redundancy across the entire system.
It's way too late to un-ring the bell of the car centricity of Alewife. A quarter-century of car-brained planning around parking capacity and garages makes it what it is. If they cared about transit access to the Fawcett/Concord Ave. side of the neighborhood, they would've put more movement on building the footbridge to the existing rapid transit station. Or cared more than they do(n't) about troubleshooting the existing rapid transit station and its dysfunctional environs. They didn't...they've been fucking the chicken of trying to sack all that cost on private developers who are completely uninterested in either the footbridge or the station redev because...duh...they built their empires to insane parking ratios. Traffic is worse than it's ever been, and the coalition of City and developers just won't adjust no matter how loudly the ward complains about traffic. They're pounding the sunk cost as hard as they ever have. Their brains are totally broken.