I-90 Interchange Improvement Project & West Station | Allston

[millerm277]

Agree with much of what you said. This seems like a continuous waste of energy and money. This point I excerpted, however, is a big one - MassDOT needs to operate as a DOT, not a highway agency. This is a major transportation node, and there's no need to spend hundreds of millions to billions to build our highways to capacities we seemingly can't physically support, fund, design, or construct while every other mode of transport here gets sidelined.

I will point out that this project budget does include (to my knowledge) building out the (possibly overbuilt) streets + infrastructure for a pretty substantial new chunk of city. I don't think that justifies the current cost, but it is more than just the highway, too.

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I'd be rather interested to hear how much cheaper and simpler a "maximum disruption" budget along the lines of what the T has gone through recently for repairing the subways would be. As in a "yes, the Worcester Line, I-90, and Storrow will be closed for a month and after that the different services will be closed/very limited at different times for weeks/months on end during the construction period"

In concept - to me it shouldn't cost this much to build a couple miles of at-grade highway through a space that's relatively unconstrained by anything other than the infrastructure you're trying to replace, and so I am starting to wonder just how much of the costs here are being driven by the phasing/demands to the fewest construction impacts.

Which is to say - I wonder how much the "keep 12 lanes open throughout construction" demands are the cost driver rather than the "build 12 lanes" that seems to be the thing certain groups are perpetually focused on.

 

[BeansTheCat]

I'd be rather interested to hear how much cheaper and simpler a "maximum disruption" budget along the lines of what the T has gone through recently for repairing the subways would be. As in a "yes, the Worcester Line, I-90, and Storrow will be closed for a month and after that the different services will be closed/very limited at different times for weeks/months on end during the construction period"

As far as I'm aware, there has never been a professional estimate given to the public. There's a chance A Better City or Harvard has commissioned one internally, but that's all conjecture at this point.

If anyone knows, it's almost certainly @StreetsblogMASS who has done great reporting on this project. I'd also be interested to know if the viaduct preservation ended up using a staging plan similar to what Harvard/A Better City provided in 2023. There's a chance that the project cost has not been updated to reflect any savings that could come from that. Or MassDOT could have thrown them out and shot themselves in the foot again.

 

[Harry Mattison]

The most recent and complete budget that I know of was included in the Reconnecting Communities grant application. Since then they added replacing the Cambridge Street Bridge to the project ($150,000,000) which increased the total project budget to $2,069,956,880.

MassDOT did make some changes to the initial plans for the viaduct rehabilitation project, but I don't know of any significant savings that would bring to the overall project.

Budget_RCN_Allston.pdf

drive.google.com

 

[BeansTheCat]

MassDOT did make some changes to the initial plans for the viaduct rehabilitation project, but I don't know of any significant savings that would bring to the overall project.

Streetsblog's reporting in the article you shared yesterday showed how A Better City thought the viaduct funds could be used to help adjust the staging, saving time and money. This in particular is what I was curious about. As far as I'm aware (but I'd love to be corrected), MassDOT has not discussed these potential staging changes since the viaduct funding was approved.

Under Harvard's Influence, MassDOT Approves $86 Million Contract to Rehab Allston Highway Viaduct - Streetsblog Massachusetts

"It’s concerning that Harvard, an institution that has historically been opaque in their plans to develop in Allston, has control over the major infrastructure that impacts thousand of residents here, without having a clear and transparent process to share what those conversations are," said...

mass.streetsblog.org

But if MassDOT plans to rehabilitate the old highway viaduct, "you can keep the elevated structure open to traffic while you build a new road underneath it. You don’t need to build a temporary viaduct or shift lanes, which saves a lot of time and money," Dimino said.

A Better City's construction staging plan recommends that MassDOT build new at-grade roadways alongside the Charles River's banks to accommodate westbound Turnpike and Soldier's Field Road traffic, consistent with the Allston Multimodal Project's longer-term recommendations for the area.

Once those new at-grade westbound lanes are built, westbound I-90 traffic could move off the viaduct onto the new roadway, and the westbound lanes of the viaduct can be torn down. Then, in the space where that piece of the viaduct used to be, MassDOT can then build additional at-grade highway lanes to do the same thing for the eastbound part of the viaduct.

 

[Plen-T-Pak]

I agree with a lot of what you said, but there isn't much time pressure if they lose the grant because MassDOT just spent approx $80 million to "preserve" the viaduct for at least another decade

Under Harvard's Influence, MassDOT Approves $86 Million Contract to Rehab Allston Highway Viaduct - Streetsblog Massachusetts

"It’s concerning that Harvard, an institution that has historically been opaque in their plans to develop in Allston, has control over the major infrastructure that impacts thousand of residents here, without having a clear and transparent process to share what those conversations are," said...

mass.streetsblog.org

https://www.mass.gov/doc/allston-viaduct-bridge-repairs-and-related-work-proposed-contract-presented-to-the-board-on-march-15-2023/download

https://www.mass.gov/doc/staff-summary-for-the-allston-viaduct-bridge-repairs-and-related-work-proposed-contract-presented-to-the-board-on-march-15-2023/download

I wonder if we can just spend $80 mil every 10 years and "preserve" it a couple dozen times. I think we'll be dealing with a different set of problems by then, possibly sooner.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

I wonder if we can just spend $80 mil every 10 years and "preserve" it a couple dozen times. I think we'll be dealing with a different set of problems by then, possibly sooner.

That's basically what Hartford is doing with the I-84 Aetna Viaduct after choking on the very bigness of the process involved with their proposed replacement. It's morphed into a neverending cost drain of neverending patch jobs, with the perma-fix seemingly never further off than it is now.