Alright, I should have elaborated.
Millionaire's Tax: I bring this up because as I remember the messaging around it, proponents were saying that pile of money could be used to fix the T. Some suggested it could be used for more reliable public transit funding. That was probably naive, but we can also say for sure that's not how it's panning out. And regardless what people said then, basic triaging of our transportation systems shows the T needs money. The Allston Viaduct needs fixing or replacing
soon. But the T is a daily, ongoing catastrophe, with no end in sight. It's easy to lose sight of just how bad it's gotten, but it's lost ~500,000 daily riders. In terms of decreased mobility, that's kind of like if we banned cars on both interstates in Boston. It's hard to compare those scenarios exactly, but it is that order of magnitude problem,* and there is no urgency to fix any of it. So when we have some new pool of money for transportation (and education), it's wild that money isn't being offered up to fix the current, much bigger problem.
Probably someone here knows better how the Millionaire Tax money is actually working. My impression is that in reality that money (which is supposed to just be for education and transportation) is just dumped into the general revenues. This year there didn't seem to be any special effort to specially allocate that money for those purposes, or see that they get some boost in funding. As long as we spend that much money for them anyways (which we already did) we'll just say that money went to transportation and education. That makes it much stranger when the state now offers $450 million specifically from that pool to fix the viaduct. It seems like some political slight of hand, but regardless, we're not willing to do the same for the T.
Is this a "highway project?": Yeah, I think so. That's where the money is going. This is what they're building:
I encourage you to listen to the music MassDOT added to this rendering. It makes 12 lanes of car traffic sound so happy and epic.
Anyways the ~$2B for this project is going into rebuilding an 8 lane highway, plus 4 lanes of SFR in the throat as part of expensive staging to keep all 12 lanes open as much as possible. If we were willing to cut lanes (which we should), or even cut more lanes temporarily during construction (which we should), that could cut the cost of this highway project a lot. And those cuts are super plausible. Some local org, I forget which, was pushing MassDOT to cut the Mass Pike here down to 3 lanes each direction. The Pike is already that size just a couple exits east of this spot, and even more of the Pike has been restricted to 3 lanes for a while because of recent air rights construction projects. It's been fine. There have also been discussions on this forum about the feasibility of reducing or eliminating parts of SFR and Storrow Drive. It seems like yeah, maybe, debatable. That would be a good thing to figure out as it might save $100s of millions on this project (plus hundreds of millions more on upcoming projects like the Storrow Drive Tunnel or Bowker Overpass). MassDOT has studied none of this, so far as I can tell. Because the plan is to keep the highway as it is, damn the expense. Because this is a highway project.
I hear you all about the new train station, which is good, and the land this will open up for TOD, which is fantastic. But if those are the goals, there are much better and cheaper ways of doing that (other than cutting back on all the highway costs here). First and foremost, spending the money to just get the T working again. There is such potentential right now for more TOD along existing stations if only the T part actually worked. Then there are other, cheaper infill stations cities have actually wanted built for TOD. South Salem Station comes to mind. Cambridge wants one around Fresh Pond, I think. <Ahem> Lynn is a city with no commuter rail at the moment. They could really use an infill station. Trying to build TOD in this part of Allston is so expensive for the state because it will cost $10s of millions for the infill station, then ~$2B to rebuild a highway. Because, I think, this is a highway project.
I can see how this is uniqely valuable land because of its location, and maybe this highway rebuild is the best we can do, and so maybe this project will be worth it. But it does look obvious to me that the reason this is so expensive, the reason this is prioritized, and the reason we're willing to spend on it is because it's 90% about maintinaing a highway.
*I would argue it would have been much less disruptive to shut down 90 and 93, if we still had a high functioning T. Inconvenienced drivers could, to a really large extent, just take the T, or find alternative routes. Heck, fewer cars around would mean the buses would be faster and more reliable, even. It has been terrible the other way around. Lots of T riders don't own cars, and it's not even possible to put hundreds of thousands more cars on the roads around Boston anyways.