F-Line to Dudley
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Re: T construction news
Pleasant St. is a horrible place for a station, and if Green were extended out it would make no more sense to span Center and Waverley with an intermediate than it does to consolidate them here on commuter rail. It's a break in the grid. The hillside on the conservation land is steep and forms a brick wall on that side of Pleasant; there's no access point. And all of the side streets off Waverley St. stub out at half-length because of the town DPW complex. So you end up with this geometrically-constrained "Automile" stretch of Pleasant. There's nothing you can really do with it to traffic calm because the street grid is unbroken, and the sidewalks have very little widening room. Buses wouldn't ever go here because there's nothing to serve here. If there's an east-west route instituted spanning Center and Waverley, it would almost certainly go by Waverley St. where the residential grid is intact.
In this particular case, I don't think there's a problem begging to be solved. "Automile" is probably the correct application for that stretch of Pleasant because it's a cavity in the street grid, and walkers/bikers have so little to gain from using it when Waverley St. on the other side retains the grid. Not all such speed traps are inherently bad when they're self-contained and all the transit/ped demand skews away from it. So I don't buy the TOD angle at all. It's a trojan horse to get a park-and-ride and overinflate parking revenue estimates that'll never be realized in the real world. Construction/procurement grifting, all over again. Ari destroys their argument into a smoking crater way better than I ever could, but the amount of effort it would take to turn this stretch from its natural state in life into some TOD narnia is ham-fisted and not all that high-value. Center and Waverley are where the multi-modal connections are. The Cutoff path will give the peds and bikers a far better alternative than the Pleasant sidewalk OR Waverley St. for getting between the two. There's no slab of contiguous land readily available and close enough to downtown to relocate the DPW lot and infill the grid; they make decent use of every corner of the land.
Sometimes the 2D overhead view of a slice of land convinces amateur planners that there's a problem begging to be solved when on the ground there really isn't a problem at all. That's how I'd describe Pleasant. This is its natural equilibrium. Force-fitting it otherwise is a planning compulsion, not a solution, because it bases its odds of success on pushing against the grain. That's a fool's errand. And somebody at the T and Wile E. Brownsberger's office is apparently banking on someone taking that bait so they can shovel a stupid amount of money into the absurdly expensive P&R for the enrichment of their construction buddies.
The good thing is that this plan is so flimsy it has almost zero chance of happening. The ADA requirement sets too low a bar for success for closing either stop to pass the laugh test, and all it takes is 1 stakeholder--such as McLean--to file a lawsuit under the ADA challenging the Pleasant combo stop's aggregately inferior accessibility to stop it dead. This isn't a "technically correct is the best kind of correct!" loophole where the P&R backers get what they want by bullshitting that they can build a to-spec accessible platform at Pleasant but not at either of the existing two. Take away the buses, take away the hospital walkability and there are too many flanks of worsened accessibility to survive the attack vectors on a suit that pits ADA arguments against ADA arguments and uses cost comparisons as a counterpoint.
Like I said, there's a reason why Brownsberger is the only one "brave" enough to go on-record with this. He's not smart enough to know that his mouth is being used as cover for the officials who are smart enough to know what words will be used against them in an ADA legal challenge. These people know they're riding a flimsy argument, but they don't have anything to lose by trying if they don't have to stick their necks out because they've convinced the dim-bulb local Sen. to stick his out again on their behalf. Again...because he proved so spectacularly useful to them as a human shield with the Alewife Rotary "let's take something bad and make it twice as worse!" plan.
Pleasant St. is a horrible place for a station, and if Green were extended out it would make no more sense to span Center and Waverley with an intermediate than it does to consolidate them here on commuter rail. It's a break in the grid. The hillside on the conservation land is steep and forms a brick wall on that side of Pleasant; there's no access point. And all of the side streets off Waverley St. stub out at half-length because of the town DPW complex. So you end up with this geometrically-constrained "Automile" stretch of Pleasant. There's nothing you can really do with it to traffic calm because the street grid is unbroken, and the sidewalks have very little widening room. Buses wouldn't ever go here because there's nothing to serve here. If there's an east-west route instituted spanning Center and Waverley, it would almost certainly go by Waverley St. where the residential grid is intact.
In this particular case, I don't think there's a problem begging to be solved. "Automile" is probably the correct application for that stretch of Pleasant because it's a cavity in the street grid, and walkers/bikers have so little to gain from using it when Waverley St. on the other side retains the grid. Not all such speed traps are inherently bad when they're self-contained and all the transit/ped demand skews away from it. So I don't buy the TOD angle at all. It's a trojan horse to get a park-and-ride and overinflate parking revenue estimates that'll never be realized in the real world. Construction/procurement grifting, all over again. Ari destroys their argument into a smoking crater way better than I ever could, but the amount of effort it would take to turn this stretch from its natural state in life into some TOD narnia is ham-fisted and not all that high-value. Center and Waverley are where the multi-modal connections are. The Cutoff path will give the peds and bikers a far better alternative than the Pleasant sidewalk OR Waverley St. for getting between the two. There's no slab of contiguous land readily available and close enough to downtown to relocate the DPW lot and infill the grid; they make decent use of every corner of the land.
Sometimes the 2D overhead view of a slice of land convinces amateur planners that there's a problem begging to be solved when on the ground there really isn't a problem at all. That's how I'd describe Pleasant. This is its natural equilibrium. Force-fitting it otherwise is a planning compulsion, not a solution, because it bases its odds of success on pushing against the grain. That's a fool's errand. And somebody at the T and Wile E. Brownsberger's office is apparently banking on someone taking that bait so they can shovel a stupid amount of money into the absurdly expensive P&R for the enrichment of their construction buddies.
The good thing is that this plan is so flimsy it has almost zero chance of happening. The ADA requirement sets too low a bar for success for closing either stop to pass the laugh test, and all it takes is 1 stakeholder--such as McLean--to file a lawsuit under the ADA challenging the Pleasant combo stop's aggregately inferior accessibility to stop it dead. This isn't a "technically correct is the best kind of correct!" loophole where the P&R backers get what they want by bullshitting that they can build a to-spec accessible platform at Pleasant but not at either of the existing two. Take away the buses, take away the hospital walkability and there are too many flanks of worsened accessibility to survive the attack vectors on a suit that pits ADA arguments against ADA arguments and uses cost comparisons as a counterpoint.
Like I said, there's a reason why Brownsberger is the only one "brave" enough to go on-record with this. He's not smart enough to know that his mouth is being used as cover for the officials who are smart enough to know what words will be used against them in an ADA legal challenge. These people know they're riding a flimsy argument, but they don't have anything to lose by trying if they don't have to stick their necks out because they've convinced the dim-bulb local Sen. to stick his out again on their behalf. Again...because he proved so spectacularly useful to them as a human shield with the Alewife Rotary "let's take something bad and make it twice as worse!" plan.
