MBTA Construction Projects

Construction schedule above indicated the tunnel to the Google exit would be opening in May. I haven't seen any granularity, but hopefully construction starts shortly after the new entrance gets opened. This is dragginggggg
 
stefal said:
Hynes Station is listed as a 2025 construction bid on the MBTA business center website under upcoming construction advertisements.
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...wait. Are they gonna finally make it 100% accessible?
 
This is incredibly specific and small I wasn't even going to say anything until I saw someone on a wheelchair using the path yesterday.

The Quincy MBTA Bus Garage project is, as most know, on the site of a former Lowes. The Lowes parking lot was a cut through for my neighborhood to access the Quincy Adams station on foot. Where Taber Street meets Penn Street is where the access to the parking lot was (the rest was blocked by a fence) and there was a curb cut there at the approach to the parking lot (the entrance was gated to only allow vehicle access if Lowes for some reason needed it. It was always bike/ped access only). When the MBTA acquired the parcel, they built a new bike/ped path on the southwest perimeter connecting to an existing sidewalk that made for an adequate substitute for the neighborhood to access the station. The path gets great use.

Sometime last week though, new curb was installed along Penn Street, and the curb cut has been turned into a hard curb. There's now no curb cut until ~100m after you've already passed the path. Cycling to/from the station it's a mild annoyance, but for someone in a wheelchair it's not an extra ~200m that has to be travelled. Just such an odd unforced error to not keep the existing curb cut so the sidewalk remained accessible.
 
KCasiglio said:
Sometime last week though, new curb was installed along Penn Street, and the curb cut has been turned into a hard curb. There's now no curb cut until ~100m after you've already passed the path. Cycling to/from the station it's a mild annoyance, but for someone in a wheelchair it's not an extra ~200m that has to be travelled. Just such an odd unforced error to not keep the existing curb cut so the sidewalk remained accessible.
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If Street View is to be believed and I understand the spot you're referring to, it appears that there was simply no curbing along Penn/Columbia St or Taber St in the vicinity of this in the past, rather than any sort of actual "curb cut" that would have been documented. Sidewalks were just slightly raised asphalt that sloped towards the road.

That's not an excuse - it should be fixed, but I can see how it got missed.
 
The T board meeting today had a presentation on plans to implement free standing mini-high platforms at the currently inaccessible commuter rail stations. It will be similar to the Lynn interim station.

I’m bothered by the challenge highlighted in the deck. Implementing high level platforms is $55-90 million and 4-8 years per station. This seems like a perfect example of the cost of not maintaining an in-house planning department.
 
RandomWalk said:
I’m bothered by the challenge highlighted in the deck. Implementing high level platforms is $55-90 million and 4-8 years per station. This seems like a perfect example of the cost of not maintaining an in-house planning department.
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LIAR LIAR PANTS-ON-FIRE!!! 🤬

Seriously...even their hopelessly over-budget consultant specials aren't costing that much. Whoever slipped that into the slide deck needs to be tarred and feathered.
 
RandomWalk said:
So this is a ploy to avoid real system-wide implementation, in favor of perma-temporary platforms?
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I lean more towards a Hanlon's Razor based conclusion, but regardless of the reason those numbers are not right. The full reconstruction of Wincheter Center and Chelsea each cost around $50 million, and those both have full high platforms so the cost for a full high platform cannot be higher than that. Timeframe estimates is more reasonable, the timelines get a bit fuzzy depending on how you want to count the planning phase vs the construction phase though, so 4-8 years between idea and opening isn't crazy. (Although the phrasing seems to suggest that they can only do one station at a time so the work wouldn't be done for another 80 years or whatever, which is obviously false.)
 
RandomWalk said:
So this is a ploy to avoid real system-wide implementation, in favor of perma-temporary platforms?
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It sounds depressingly sandbaggy. Those full-high costs are hyper-inflated to such absurdity they can't be taken seriously. There's no way you can equivocate cookie-cutter platforms at a grade crossing with the highest-end construction costs of a station that has to have complex up-and-over access. Those Reading Line stations shouldn't be costing more than $10M a pop (and that's being way generous...middle-high 7-figures should do it); there's simply not enough to do with them for costs to sail as high as vertically-challenged stations like Winchester Center. Even hideously overprised Chelsea Station at a grade crossing didn't come within $20M of hitting the low end of their scale...and that one was technically a "new" infill/swap with property acquisition costs. It's doubly disingenuous that they set the spec costs for an any-platform higher than all-new infill station with complex circulation like Pawtucket. You might as well just flash a giant billboard that says "We can't build" if these are the costs they're running with. It's not a solution, it's a scandal.

They're also skirting the law by not touching the underlying low platforms, just plunking a flimsy deck on top of precisely-measured freestanding blocks. Yes, that nets you some "almost free" years of by-the-book ADA compliance, which is good and potentially very useful if they pick their spots. But it's not very many years. The whole works starts settling and crumbling the below pavement in as little as 5-10 years, until eventually they've settled so far out of alignment that they don't meet ADA specs at all. If they don't have a near-immediate plan for kick-starting perma-designs of full-highs within about 5 years (given the increasingly long design gestation period for station renos, that means pretty much right now), you're eventually going to chew up enough time that you get a non-compliant station again in the end. At multiple stations at once when this first cluster of temp platforms all hit end-of-life.

It's a kick of the can. A potentially useful one if they get on it right away about advancing perma-fixes, but since when has this agency ever done that? It means the next administration is going to have another manufactured crisis on-hand when these temp platforms all start flunking inspections at the end of their short lives.
 
I hate how the T behaves like a kid trying to avoid doing chores. A board with backbone would call them on this and demand they show their work, if not ask them to plan the real platform work.

From memory, Concord and Kendall Green would have issues with their adjacent former stations, and the residents would probably drag out any approvals.
 
millerm277 said:
If Street View is to be believed and I understand the spot you're referring to, it appears that there was simply no curbing along Penn/Columbia St or Taber St in the vicinity of this in the past, rather than any sort of actual "curb cut" that would have been documented. Sidewalks were just slightly raised asphalt that sloped towards the road.

That's not an excuse - it should be fixed, but I can see how it got missed.
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Yes you are mostly correct, I mistakenly referenced to it as a cut because Columbia south of Taber St has had a hard curb for years, so at Taber/Columbia was the only point where the sidewalk sloped.
 
RandomWalk said:
From memory, Concord and Kendall Green would have issues with their adjacent former stations, and the residents would probably drag out any approvals.
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Yeah, this is a viable solution for the ones like Concord and Walpole that are going to be brutally difficult to design because of the historic buildings. That's a rare case where kick-the-can is going to actually be forward-thinking, because they need many years of design to get those maximally tough cases right and thrash out the community input considerations. They're not, however, an excuse for totally prefab ones like Wyoming Hill, Cedar Park, Greenwood, etc...even Lincoln if the inbound platform were flipped north of the grade crossing. They're not an excuse for ones that have been lagging for eons in design like Belmont Center (which would've put the full highs east of the building). They're not an excuse for ones with very high ridership and very minor access considerations like Franklin.
 
RandomWalk said:
The T board meeting today had a presentation on plans to implement free standing mini-high platforms at the currently inaccessible commuter rail stations. It will be similar to the Lynn interim station.

I’m bothered by the challenge highlighted in the deck. Implementing high level platforms is $55-90 million and 4-8 years per station. This seems like a perfect example of the cost of not maintaining an in-house planning department.
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I'm confused by this slide:
1716511291561.png


How can the platforms vary in length if there's only one station (Lynn Interim?) that falls into this category?
 
Maybe they are talking from the future where the system is littered with them…
 
Stlin said:
Isn't that the current (if stupid) plan for the Newton stations? (And North Wilmington & Bourne)
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No...they want to build a real poured-foundation full-high for Newtonville, but cut the length to 400 feet so it doesn't even berth the cars on all existing peak service. The other two are still nominally 800-footers due to lack of recent design updates, but who knows if they'll kneecap all three.

Bourne has one of the one-car temp stations on freestanding blocks. That was the de facto pilot for this program. They did it there because the town deadlocked on their preferred siting for a permanent station. So like the others, it's only got about a decade in it before the platform starts rapidly decaying and is no longer ADA-compliant.

Not sure if North Wilmington is freestanding/temp.
 
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