There isn't room. There's a reason there's been so many conceptual cross sections presented. We've been through this time and time again. Unless the proposed Pike cross section losses lanes and/or they decide to build the pedestrian/bike path out over the water, there is not enough room to fit everything in with the existing constraints.
You're not moving buildings. You're not doing much on BU's property other than small easements.
Yeah...even if you wanted to negotiate with BU for land-swappage, that negotiation bureaucracy is an above-and-beyond time chew that overshoots feasible project scheduling. It can't be overstated: this thing needs to be locked-and-loaded like
yesterday to go into full design-build and pinned to a calendar date or else that first pure 'waste' funding dump of interim patch repairs has to immediately be programmed into the CIP to buy the necessary extra time. That's the no-give cutoff we face because it puts us into the same vicious cycle I-84 in Hartford is at digging out of a patch-repair hole that perpetually drains resources straight from ever mounting the perma-fix...at such a slippery slope for unbounded further delay and existential navel-gazing that we'll have a devil of a time trying to stop-loss it at only
one 'waste' cycle of interim patches if it goes there. The sheer torturedness of this process to-date has already proven beyond reasonable doubt that the stakeholders are not capable from their own volition of staunching that vicious cycle once it's started snowballing, so the urgency to fish or cut bait
now is paramount. We aren't going to be able to tighten up and still weigh nice designs after that first slip into interim patches, so fundamentally the Throat is at now-or-never for voting on a new concept. Past-due, actually, because the punt earlier this Fall on final concept has already raised the odds past majority threshold that we aren't going to be able to lock it down by end of ongoing FY21 to stave off the first waste cycle.
BU doesn't negotiate
anything bang-bang quick...ever...for any reason. They're so plodding and bureaucratically top-heavy that no land-related transaction ever happens under that braintrust in any less than 5 years of pre-planning. Usually much longer, based on gestation periods of most recent campus builds or any home-run swings like the Wheelock College acquisition (jeez...that was hot rumor for full decade before it actually consummated they were sniffing around it so long). So it doesn't matter if the prospect only requires nipping at the fringes around Student Village; the negotiation timetables are already diametrically opposed at each side of the table. That right there is functionally the end of this prospect. Second...when you tally up BU's utter disappointing disinterest in the Beacon Park slab there's a major inertia problem. They already wouldn't stan for a second spanning street from their grid; they already wouldn't comment on the inverted/alienating positioning of West Station to their side. And there's no cooperation whatsoever between Big U's on redev possibilities on the slab; it's hands-off Harvard's baby from their perspective. So where's their sense of altruism on the Throat design sourced from if there's no apparent internal source of it on the biggest-prize land? Nevermind the primary concern of it being a time-criticality mismatch for MassDOT; the follow-through upside...doesn't follow here at these nipped fringes around the Throat if they already ain't been feeling for it very long time now re: the "prize" Beacon Park slab. BU has long expressed little strong opinion about viaduct vs. at-grade because the viaduct is largely non-impactful to them facing mostly loading docks, service driveways, and rear-packed athletic facilities. They simply have little inherent motivation to nip at those fringes, and thus they are unlikely to bat an eye at even the minor upside of those land swaps for this Alt. The fact that there is indeed 'some' minor upside to them is not inherently motivating enough in a vacuum to float this proposal. If that were true and it
did follow them to the negotiating table with some matching sense of time-critical haste...wouldn't they have already been knee-deep in involvement on the big-prize BP slab for years/decades now instead of implicitly throwing shade at it the whole-shebang via their conspicuous disinterest?
They're not involved...so it doesn't follow that some fringe-flex land swappage is going to sway BU at any timetable that's going to matter for the Throat decision. They'll consider anything presented to them, no doubt...but only on their own glacial internal timetables. And those timetables are several orders of magnitude too slow for this project decision. We're well into patch-job appropriation vicious cycling if BU is the only card-holding prayer for an at-grade resolution. I know the intent of pitching this BU-swappy Alt. is so we can get out of this project-fatal rut of ponderous navel-gazing, but it doesn't accomplish that. The M.O. of the required players is too well-known, well-set, well-predictable. It conversely ends up sticking in the same closed loop of navel-gazing paralysis by assuming BU's going to act at the state's level of urgency and not BU's immaculately well-established level of urgency. Too big a mismatch in 4D time to be plausibly different from all the other existential implausibles the stakeholders are deadlocked on. When time is the only driver that truly matters now, the newest solution pitch has to front-and-center that. Anything that involves critical BU dependencies simply isn't going to compute vs. time.
