Alt 3 still would require a land taking of rent a tool (or some residential) property to replace the Oak Island Rd with a new Rd with an overpass of the tracks.
Yes, substantial land takings is hyperbole depending on the plan, but so is "zero".
Edit: also on alt 4. Or alternatives, you have to consider it a taking if you block access to someone's property. Cutting off people's parking would be a taking.
No, only Alt. 3 jumps the marsh soon enough to require a separation of Oak Island Rd. grade crossing. The residents may not like looking up at a 4-track overpass + embankment, but there is indeed
plenty of room for all of it between the ROW fences. Zero land-taking and zero property-blocking is factually correct, not hyperbole. That's why it's an officially-studied alternative and the one the state unofficially prefers.
It's already been explained who owns the BRB&L ROW, so there is no taking of any private property if any short or lengthy portion of it is used. Including any of the apartment complexes that have parking lot easements across the ROW. Ocean Plaza Apartments and Jack Satter House don't have a right of refusal if National Grid has to block access to their parking areas for a construction project on those power lines. There's no complaint number to call to make the utility trucks stop blocking their driveway when the lines are being emergency-serviced after a storm; what's gotta be done has to be done. And if a major upgrade project has to dig up the easement or knock out the parking access longer-term for installation of new power equipment they can't tell National Grid to screw off, get the city to pass an ordinance blocking the utility from upgrading its own lines, and let a hyperlocal fiat harm the robustness of the power grid in 3 different cities. Utilities are regulated from on-high for a reason, and this is one of them.
What's one of the most common stress-inducers for being a home owner anywhere in the U.S.? Answer: when the town or utility has to dig up your front lawn for a sewer project cable trench, or put a dirt access road on the side to service some off-street water/electrical grid access point. And do it because
their easement on
your property says they have that perpetual legal right. It sucks...it's infuriating...it literally sends some homeowners to therapy over how much stress it induces. But there's almost nothing the homeowner can do about it unless the paperwork mapping out the easement is such a clusterfuck that nobody truly knows or can prove where the easement begins or ends. Otherwise...it's going to happen and the only thing to fight for is full and honest compensation for the disruption (e.g. making sure the town or utility competently replaces the trees/grass they cut down and sidewalk/driveway they chop up). This stuff goes on in every municipality of the state every day. It has to. Towns can't grow if the new housing subdivision a block over could be stopped dead from hooking up electricity/gas/running water because one homeowner has infallibly-affirmed legal precedent to block access through a utility easement in his yard. Even in NIMBYchusetts the inmates don't run the asylum to that extreme a degree.
And that's when it's the
infrastructure having the easement from the
landowner. It's even more cut-and-dried when the inverse is true. Utility companies are notoriously protective of their ROW's, even managing in a lot of New England to block access roads joining developments staring at each other across a 100 ft. strip of land. Or stymie potentially great trail connectivity by refusing to allow paths (even when their pre-built gravel access roads already make for de facto paths). Revere has been very lucky that National Grid has been relatively permissive about new easements on this corridor. Usually they're a lot more hostile to that.
So if it comes to a lateral conversion of infrastructure ROW property from transportation to utility and back to transportation again, the legal terms of those tenant easements don't change. This may not be a landbanked ROW with its railroad charter mothballed in perpetuity like several prospective trail and commuter rail corridors, but the property transfer carried all of that original charter's land ownership and easements intact to the present day for public infrastructure use. Going from one type of infrastructure use to the other doesn't turn the game on its head. Nobody's saying it won't be difficult to get BLX approved on any of these routings, because community input and permitting is what it is. But this notion that all abutters on a 2D Google Maps view are equally the same and equally capable of stopping it dead is incorrect.
That, in fact, is the hyperbole.
As with any public works project, mitigation horse-trading is what makes construction happen. It happens that way when there's real land-taking, like the Big Dig's massive slate of abutter mitigation measures. It happens that way when there's very little land-taking, like with the mainline portions of GLX. It can happen when there's zero/bupkis land-taking, like the thousands of feet in new sound walls erected on 128 in Dedham and Needham for the add-a-lane project. It can happen in mutually beneficial make-a-deal fashion, like the CSX/Beacon Park/Worcester land swaps or the Pan Am/Northpoint/Innerbelt land swaps. Ultimately when you construct a public works project in the name of public service, those public service considerations extend to the abutters' quality-of-life. It helps when the mitigation stays in balance and doesn't skew ridiculously in one direction, such as the pointless ransoming that warped the Greenbush Line construction to boondoggle proportions, but abutters are very much a public service constituency even when they don't suffer a single square inch's worth of property/property access loss or disruption in the public works project.
In this case, the zero property-taking Alt. 3 is probably going to have to do its due diligence on sound walls at the Oak Island Rd. grade separation, and a wide/clean sidewalk berth under the bridge that can catch some rays of sunlight underneath. That's only fair with how close the 4 tracks will come to the property lines, the embankment impacting privacy out of 2nd floor windows, the surge in train frequencies that'll come with it, and the need to minimize the 'wall' effect of erecting an overpass on that tight street. That's their public service consideration...in a zero property-taking scenario.
Any Alt. 4 or modified Alt. 3 trajectories that go through Oak Island will need to compensate the Satter House and Ocean Plaza Apartments for disrupted parking access. As a public service due diligence...
not a property-taking, as those lots and lot access are on Nat'l Grid easements that Nat'l Grid has existing rights to disrupt. If Blue's going over or under Oak Island St., then an underpass on the embankment or overpass on the cut for Ocean Plaza's back lot and working out a +12 space expansion of the back lot for taking the strip of the front lot is reasonable 1:1 compensation on an easement the apartments don't own. The Satter House would need its 86-space lot reconfigured, especially if an Oak Island intermediate stop (appearing on many BLX plans dating back to 1945) is desired. A squat 2-3 story weather-protected parking garage off to the side with walkway straight to the rear lobby is appropriate public service compensation for loss of an easement they don't own. Sound walls on any elevated embankment ROW are reasonable here.
As I described with Rent-a-Tool in the "Alt"-Alt. 3 scenario, a 40 ft. strip of property-taking--yes, a real property taking--along Dashwood Rd. alley can be duly compensated by granting new easement to an even larger 450'x50' strip of land in the back where the old freight siding used to go. Perfectly capable of absorbing the
only thing they use the displaced strip for: parking for approximately 20 electric generators on truck trailers which they lease out to construction companies. And grants them a
free expansion of their property. It is hyperbole to call a net-gain of usable private business property an undue burden. If Rent-a-Tool (if they're even around by that point) freaks out about that, so be it; may have to dig a little deeper to satiate them. Unlikely, given that it's an opportunity for RaT to make more revenue on more tool storage on land they don't need to pay for...but possible. However, the state won't need to dig deep at all for the Oak Island Rd. grade separation and tight squeeze, so the challenges are relative. That's why they study minor modified alignments; to check those kinds of variables against each other.
Painting this in simplistic black-or-white is hyperbole. That's what I'm objecting to here. Not all abutters have the same property rights when easements (and who owns the easements) are thrown in. And feasible mitigation runs the gamut from onerous to neutral to outright beneficial for the abutters. If this gets revived for detailed study they'll itemize all the possibilities, all the possible modified alignments, all the compensation angles. And it'll become a matter of balancing the ledger on these variables to come up with the best value-for-money and value-for-public service.
About the only thing we can say with certainty is that the full BRB&L routing through Point of Pines is a lot more challenging and probably won't happen unless City of Revere exhibits pretty strong transit advocacy for a stop there. But we knew that long ago. There are no such absolute statements about the Eastern Route ROW or the multiple trajectories they could take to hop over depending on how the variables square. And nothing useful to glean from taking the flat-world view that every property is exactly the same and every property impact (including the indirect impacts) exactly the same.
