Ha! But again, remember there could be a new mayor come November. Pundits have already dubbed it a so-called "race to watch."
But yes, something like an Exit 26 commuter rail superstop could be the long-term ticket for bridging the 128/downtown disconnect and improving overall transportation equity in this subarea.
That said, a quick consultation of the MBTA commuter rail map shows that the Brandeis stop is only 1,000 yards from the Exit 26/Route 20/128 junction.
Is there precedence for having commuter rail stops only 1,000 yards from each other? I honestly don't know. Not even Yawkey and Back Bay are that close to each other... or are they?
Well, crow-flies distance is moot in this case because there's no street grid putting Exit 26 and Brandeis/Roberts anywhere near each other. You have to go down 20 to South St. to get there, which makes it a nearly 2.5 mile trip from the exit. Useless. By comparison Wedgemere and Winchester Center are 900 ft. platform tip to platform tip--two of the closest mainline railway stations in the world--direct-connected by a walking path and exactly 1/2 mile up Mystic Valley Parkway from each other.
Two of these are not like the other two. Not even in the same universe.
Also depends on exactly where you site the 128 stop. And since it hasn't been formally studied we don't know what the preferred alternative would be. A lot of it's going to depend on wetlands.
Option #1. You could do it at Sibley Rd. right underneath the rotary, taking the Weston Shooters Club property:
https://goo.gl/maps/lO2dG. But you can see Stony Brook runs immediately adjacent to the outbound track. Potential problem. And the access is a little yucky...no direct pedestrian link to the Central Mass, Route 117, or Polaroid sides because of the narrowness of the rotary overpasses the tracks pass through. And Sibley Rd. is awkwardly placed vs. the rotary so the modifications necessary to square Sibley up with the Biogen driveway for all-around access ends up a little construction-invasive with additional tricky EIS'ing for how close it would have to swing to the reservoir.
Option #2. The actual Biogen campus:
https://goo.gl/maps/TQQr0. Stony Brook still hugs the outbound track, and passes under the ROW at the north tip of the property. However, this is potentially MUCH easier EIS'ing because until 8 years ago the Biogen property was a dirty, dirty asphalt quarry:
http://historicaerials.com/?layer=2005&zoom=16&lat=42.372765137510825&lon=-71.27618551254272. The two ponds are environmentally remediated drainage pools leftover from the quarry, and the swamp is a remediated natural pond re-seeded with vegetation. Everything but Stony Brook itself is a post-2008 human creation.
So...there's Biogen's high-capacity access road, Biogen's parking lot, and then the big empty access road snaking around the artificial ponds to the solar panel farm at the tip of the property and access point to the NStar power lines that run along the Central Mass ROW. To do this station you would:
-- Need to square permission with Biogen for use of the access road and cut a deal to replace their private parking lot + north mini-garage for a taller south mini-garage for 1:1 compensation of their strictly private parking capacity.
-- Take the north lot + mini-garage as station parking, and the driveway/parking row closest to the tracks as busway/kiss-and-ride.
-- Build a secondary lot at the top of the property on the grass and on the solar farm plot.
-- Build a standard 800 ft. full-high island platform. South tip at the end of the current trackside parking row, north tip right before the slight curve in the tracks. This site is a bit easier than the Shooter's Club site for platform construction because you can shift the inbound track here a few feet towards the lot to create room for the island without touching the outbound track or swinging any closer to Stony Brook. Down by Shooter's Club you're pinned in by the narrowness of the rotary overpasses from doing much track realignment to fit the platforms and may be forced to do side platforms that get very close to the brook on the outbound side.
-- Island platform would have the usual ramp + overpass to the parking lot, like new Littleton station has. You *possibly* can fork that overpass to bridge
over the brook to the Care.com HQ and have a kiss-and-ride on the Route 117 side if Care can be dealt with and EIS'ing for putting the walkway on stilts over the brook checks out. Here I would say scuzzy Route 128 Auto is a potential future parking expansion site when this station gets more established OR if not as much space is available as they'd hoped on the Biogen site. I think you do at minimum provision for an overhead walkway over the brook that you can later bolt onto the immediate parking lot walkway, if for whatever reason that isn't built for Day 1 (e.g. think of the missing west ped entrance to Anderson RTC as the analogy to the 117 entrance here being punted off til later build).
-- Trail the Central Mass from Main St. to the rear parking lot (or the Care.com driveway + ped overpass) with a lit paved path. There's the direct ped/bike access to Polaroid, Route 117, and the Waltham Shuttle bus to the office parks up Bear Hill Rd. to Totten Pond.
-- Modify the 70/70A's terminus to go through the rotary and wrap at the station instead of looping at Tavern Rd./Stow St.
-- Seek a ped/bike path easement--if you can get it--down Lover Field Rd. from Church St. and Kendal Green station. Connect it to the Central Mass trail and rear parking lot entrance to compensate Kendal Green riders for relocation of their station with a grade separated and safe 2000 ft. walk. Re-pave Lover Field Rd. and install lighting on it. I'm not sure what those two complexes are at the end of the street...whether they're private businesses or town DPW lots. The dirt lot certainly resembles a typical DPW lot from the air, so if it's municipal and not private that's a win.
-- If Weston screams bloody murder about losing KG, promise them not to whack Silver Hill or something chintzy and symbolic like that. At least SH is grade separated and has a snowball's chance in hell of having a cheap ramp and mini-high installed for real ADA compliance, unlike commuter rail's single most dangerous stop at Hastings (which should've been abolished years ago). Weston is not allowed to make a pointless wedge issue out of their 3 shitty boutique stops when they have as much to gain as Waltham from the new one.
I think Option #2's the far superior siting, and probably the far easier EIS'ing because of all the extremely recent origin human reshaping + remediation of what barely 8 years ago was a polluted mess of very nasty stuff. Biogen shouldn't be hard to square with cash. Like they wouldn't be tickled pink with a commuter rail station and high-frequency bus stop 50 paces out their back door for what that would do for their hiring prospects. Just protect their parking capacity at the south end with a compensatory private garage and maybe a gift of climate-controlled overpass into the building and they'll be fine. Otherwise this is slam-dunk for all the public-private ties in the surrounding office park environs. There's going to be a lot of big players lining up in support if it's a site they can shuttle-bus or walk to.
Study of course has to square out the preferred alternatives, but those are the overwhelming Top Two sites. Any new administration in Town Hall is going to have to engage Weston, however. The Sibley Rd. site straddles the town line, with driveway access to 20 in Weston. Town line at the Biogen site is literally in the Stony Brook water with the platform, parking, and access road in Weston and the Central Mass ped path entirely in Waltham. Biogen being the primary stakeholder in an office park does cut out most of the interference Weston local-yokels can run. Their only injection point for an Operation Chaos is the intersection of the access road with 20. Maybe the Gifford School complaining that the compensatory south garage construction obstructs their view of Venus, maybe Summer St. residents just...screaming for the hell of it? But it's inoculated by the fact that any bombs they lob at the state, T, or Waltham hit Biogen as friendly fire. And they'll think twice about pissing off one of their largest recent scores of new tax revenue. The new regime in Waltham just needs to be not-"spazz" enough to play the right irritating people off of each other to neutralize them. Then a good organized advocacy probably gets them their way.
