I-90 Interchange Improvement Project & West Station | Allston

The problem is that it's (still) questionable as to whether the Feds will approve of filling in the water. And that's basically an requirement of doing the at grade.
 
Why are the Feds against filling in the river? I assume it has to do with disturbing the toxic layers at the bottom? I assume you can't just start filling without removal of toxic layers first. I suppose this work would potentially pollute the entire lower basin. Are there any reports online regarding what the issues are?

It would be nice to continue the lagoons all the way down to Harvard University or at least the Allston Landing area. Here is a print of the lagoons extending down to the Mass Ave / Harvard Bridge, the last lagoon didn't happen for some reason. The lagoons were formed with the modern Storrow Drive in the 1950s believe it or not to replace the land Storrow took. If filling in the river could happen when Storrow was built why shouldn't it happen when a turnpike pushes the park into the river. Building wooden structures for paths will wear out faster and most likely just be closed after 30 years instead of repairing them. Another good argument for landscaped isles with pathways.

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dhawkins said:
Why are the Feds against filling in the river? I assume it has to do with disturbing the toxic layers at the bottom? I assume you can't just start filling without removal of toxic layers first. I suppose this work would potentially pollute the entire lower basin. Are there any reports online regarding what the issues are?

It would be nice to continue the lagoons all the way down to Harvard University or at least the Allston Landing area. Here is a print of the lagoons extending down to the Mass Ave / Harvard Bridge, the last lagoon didn't happen for some reason. The lagoons were formed with the modern Storrow Drive in the 1950s believe it or not to replace the land Storrow took. If filling in the river could happen when Storrow was built why shouldn't it happen when a turnpike pushes the park into the river. Building wooden structures for paths will wear out faster and most likely just be closed after 30 years instead of repairing them. Another good argument for landscaped isles with pathways.
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Actually a really good question, I had always assumed it was simply ecological impact on the immediate area being filled in, but potentially disturbing the toxic silt certainly would be a bigger impact.
 
bakgwailo said:
Actually a really good question, I had always assumed it was simply ecological impact on the immediate area being filled in, but potentially disturbing the toxic silt certainly would be a bigger impact.
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Couldn’t sheet pilings be used to dewater the area to be filled in and the muck removed to take care of the contamination issue? Probably how they will install the bents of the ped bridge anyway.

My assumption was that we are in a landfill no longer political environment, in this case particularly because it would reduce the width of a ‘river’.

While in general reducing bankfull width is a bad idea, l always found the opposition to landfilling next to the throat on environmental grounds humorous because 1) the basin here is already 600’ wide 2) the lower Charles is about as natural as the Hancock tower 3) its better to reconstruct a riverfront viaduct instead?
 
Do we actually know this is about contamination? Or is it simply the perceived backlash from environmental groups?
 
beck4537 said:
commonwealthmagazine.org

Boston, Harvard, BU pledge $300m for I-90 Allston project

THE CITY OF BOSTON, Harvard, and Boston University are pledging $300 million toward the development of the $1.9 billion I-90 Allston multimodal project,
commonwealthmagazine.org commonwealthmagazine.org
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This is the first time I've noticed anyone proposing using money from the Millionaires Tax. Here Healey is proposing $450 million, out of an expected bucket of ~$1.3B per year.

I was hoping it'd go towards *public* transportation. Instead, looks like those funds will go to highway projects.
 
Charlie_mta said:
Part of it will go (indirectly) towards West Station and related bus approaches.
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Sure, but this in an infill station. The similar infill station just up the track at Boston Landing cost $20 million. This one (hopefully) won't cost anything near $450 million. This money is going to what is mainly a highway project.
 
ritchiew said:
Sure, but this in an infill station. The similar infill station just up the track at Boston Landing cost $20 million. This one (hopefully) won't cost anything near $450 million. This money is going to what is mainly a highway project.
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It is, but not a highway project to increase capacity or lanes, but to integrate a highway into a large new urban development of many city blocks including a new rail station and bus connections. That's a lot different than just building more highway lanes.
 
Charlie_mta said:
It is, but not a highway project to increase capacity or lanes, but to integrate a highway into a large new urban development of many city blocks including a new rail station and bus connections. That's a lot different than just building more highway lanes.
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Very true.
 
Charlie_mta said:
It is, but not a highway project to increase capacity or lanes, but to integrate a highway into a large new urban development of many city blocks including a new rail station and bus connections. That's a lot different than just building more highway lanes.
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Let's also not forget the potential to accommodate a grand junction transit connection. If so, then there would be an expansion on the non-auto side of things, not just rail station infill. Fingers crossed.
 
And also unlock 85 acres of land that could wind up getting developed into Boston's third satellite downtown (after Sullivan Square and the JFK/UMass-Andrew blob).
 
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:

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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.
 
This project is 99% about making Harvard a ton of money. Hopefully they will make something nice out of it. They aren't going to touch the road capacity because the Westons and the Wellesleys use the Pike to get to their office and Logan.
 
jklo said:
This project is 99% about making Harvard a ton of money. Hopefully they will make something nice out of it. They aren't going to touch the road capacity because the Westons and the Wellesleys use the Pike to get to their office and Logan.
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Yeah, I think that this is more like a land grab for Harvard Yard. With that said, I don’t think that any capacity reduction would do drivers any good. Especially those driving the Pike and/or Storrow/SFR. Commuting in and around Boston is difficult enough if you are reliant on your car for work. I would probably be on the side of those who have an animus against highways if we had a functioning T. Instead, we have a defective transit system. Put some pain on an aging station, take 3-5 years to build an ADA accessible elevator, and replace a few ballast toes between Davis and Harvard, and that’s how the T views “progress.”

A more absurdist take would be if we had flying cars like the Jetsons, then I would advocate for lots more lane reduction. We know that isn’t happening. We also know how the Commonwealth operates and this is what we expect from MassDOT, Beacon Hill and the Turnpike Authority. Alas, this project will probably be Big Dig part 2: Electric Boogaloo. I would love nothing more than to have a futuristic T and be the model for a car free region. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. So, we need whatever crumbs they will give us.

It’s these times that I would argue that the region has yet to groom a strong City and Urban Planner. We don’t have to be Robert Moses vs. Jane Jacobs. We just need someone at the forefront who can fight for public transit projects and not be afraid of the Massachusetts NIMBYS. That’s another issue that comes up so often with any project around here. Reactionary boomers with time and money will kill any smart growth potential. We don’t have a strong city planner that will stand up to these NIMBYS every single time they stamp their feet

Semi related to NIMBYism, but I’m sure you all have seen the video where Climate activists invaded Healey’s fundraiser on Nantucket. Every single time I watch the video of the guests losing their collective minds on these activists, I can only assume that these are the same people who go to their Planning and Zoning Board meetings with “not in my backyard” on their minds.

Sidebar: THIS is how you do activism. Well done, kids.
 
jklo said:
This project is 99% about making Harvard a ton of money. Hopefully they will make something nice out of it. They aren't going to touch the road capacity because the Westons and the Wellesleys use the Pike to get to their office and Logan.
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Have you looked at anything Harvard has built for the last thirty years?
 
king_vibe said:
Have you looked at anything Harvard has built for the last thirty years?
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No. These aren't going to be academic buildings though (or at least I don't think so). What they end up building probably depends on the mood of the real estate market at the time.
 
ritchiew said:
View attachment 42323

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.
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That video hasn’t been posted in here and I definitely haven’t seen it, only the renderings that came from it, so thanks for posting it.

Watching the video of the bike path from the POV angle really shows how much of an improvement this is now that they finally cut the bullshit and put the path on the boardwalk over the water. Ive ridden my bike through the throat many times and it’s truly terrible, but putting some distance between the path and travel lanes is really going to be a huge improvement especially once the trees grow in that are between the path and road on the bank of the river. The more the trees and shrubs grow in, the better the path will become.

I remember some of the options has sound barriers at ground level, for some reason they have removed them from the at grade option but that may be something that should come back. Once the greenery grows in on the bank of the river they really won’t be all that noticeable. Plus it will be better than the loud/smoggy traffic going by. The good thing is theyre not an integral part of the project and could be added at any time.
 
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