Seems like a golden opportunity to build a walkable, urban entrance to the Alewife neighborhood, a ton more housing and retail, and keep a larger, modern garage hidden behind urban facades.
The way Cambridge keeps zoning boxes with big private parking garages all around there, it's getting to be too little too late for "walkable and urban" feel at Alewife. The path connectivity is awesome and improving by leaps and bounds, but the suburban development mindset the city stuck in out there after all these years is positively maddening. I lived a stone's throw just on the other side of Danehy Park for 9 years until fleeing the rising North Cambridge rents a couple years ago, could see the congestion spiral further out of control almost in real-time...and watched as they just kept greenlighting more parking for every new building and perma-ruined Acorn Park with the stoopidest massing decisions known to man.
There's nothing wrong with Alewife station on-spec. Yes, MassHighway could and should be doing more to de-gunk the 2 rotary...but that's not for lack of practical but unacted-upon proposals the T itself can't decide on. The location is exactly where you want a major parking sink at a rapid transit stop to suck up the cars...in same vein as Riverside, Quincy Adams, Braintree, and Wellington. Short of poking an uncooperative MassHighway and City of Cambridge with a stick to agree to realign and compact the Cambridgepark/Rindge intersection for signaling sanity and do something more substantial with the rotary than the most recent ineffectual lipsticking-on-pig, the actual configuration of the station works about as well as it could. It's just been falling apart almost since it was built, and they let it go beyond the pale. That includes the disappointing retail selection, which is less a factor of configuration than fact that the storefronts themselves are also leak-damaged dumps due to the compromised garage above.
Properly maintained, the functioning of the station shouldn't be an issue. Cosmetic looks can always be cheaply updated to spiff up the dim concourses and uninviting storefronts to something that feels nice and modern. It's more a matter of whether the T is doing all that's necessary with the upcoming few $M package of structural upkeep, which seems very limited in scope given how
thoroughly and
continuously the decay has advanced across the structure over decades. We need an end to band-aiding here, and it doesn't seem like they've budgeted nearly enough in renovations to achieve that. The rest of the neighborhood's disappointing aesthetics is a crayon you'd have to remove from City of Cambridge's brain.
As for actual load relief...nothing on the horizon in the near-term, but they really need to get moving soon on that public-private pitch for a Fitchburg Line multimodal stop at the 128/20 interchange serving the Polaroid redev. That's the only build that will actually peel traffic off of 2 heading into Alewife, and you'll need that ASAP because so much new
intra-128 demand is slamming that garage that it'll very soon no longer have any capacity to spare for commuters coming
from-or-beyond 128 unless they get in their cars in the wee hours of the morning. It'll be full at 6:15 every day instead of 7:15. Unfortunately, lot of players to coordinate out by the Waltham/Weston town line for station siting and access to that Fitchburg stop (incl. MassHighway who are floating new frontage roads from the interchange to Route 117). The state hasn't yet had much interest in sitting down with the interested biz & civic parties pushing it, so relief for Alewife overload won't come nearly soon enough via that (otherwise promising-looking) vector at 128.
