Watertown Mall Redevelopment | 550 Arsenal Street | Watertown

Equilibria

Senior Member
Joined
May 6, 2007
Messages
6,781
Reaction score
7,538

The source for that was Alexandria's Q1 earnings call. The term "megacampus", FWIW, referred jointly to this property and the athenahealth campus.


Plans for the future development of the Watertown Mall are currently not yet known. Anchor tenants Best Buy and Target have long term leases. Target's lease is through 2033, according to Watertown Community Development and Planning Director Steve Magoon.

Honestly, the time to start planning for some sort of high-capacity transit connection to Arsenal was yesterday.
 
Last edited:
Honestly, the time to start planning for some sort of high-capacity transit connection to Arsenal was yesterday.

I always thought that the Blue Line was too crazy an idea to work but this changes things.


Realistically this could just be a light rail line from Harvard Sq to Watertown in some form (like Mattapan). Getting the Blue out there will take far more time and the line could be built for future conversion.
 
I work off Arsenal st the traffic is bad all ready can’t imagine what it’s going to be like when everything is built and open , they’re building a huge complex next door along with everything else on Arsenal st
71A1BACE-5B51-4754-95FD-D059509E3B9B.jpeg
 
The A Branch didn't go anywhere near the Arsenal Mall. Also most of the commuting between Watertown is to Cambridge, not downtown Boston (as much) so a line from Harvard Sq, through Allston, makes the most sense.

If I could deep-bore it, I'd aim for Central, not Harvard. That allows Cambridgeport to get a station, and Western is a better transit corridor than North Harvard (just more going on). The dream is to have a "Lower Allston" station that's walkable from Allston Landing, Boston Landing, and the Western Avenue Corridor, all at once. Crazytown, of course, but this is the ideal way to serve Arsenal (and then keep going with your TBM to Watertown Square and Waltham - it's it fun to dream?).

1619816355675.png
 
The branch that ran on the now watertown greenway went through arsenal. Itd be a pretty roundabout route, but at least the ROW is already there leading to the fitchburg line, which has glx to union now and a possible extension to porter.
 
The branch that ran on the now watertown greenway went through arsenal. Itd be a pretty roundabout route, but at least the ROW is already there leading to the fitchburg line, which has glx to union now and a possible extension to porter.

I'm aware of that, but the desire line isn't Arsenal-to-Union Square, it's Arsenal-to-Central/Kendall. I'm not sure that Arsenal/Kendall with a transfer at Porter would be faster than a bus to Central and walking wherever you're going.
 
Here is the job destination map for Watertown and Allston.

No surprise that the Financial District is #1 but Watertown fills out the rest. Looking at Cambridge we see Harvard and Kendall. Finally we have 128 in Waltham, Longwood, and Back Bay.

So.... the usual suspects.

But what this tells me is that sending the line to Central would miss Harvard. Not to mention you've got HBS and all those students in Allston as built in ridership. Harvard wins.

It's worth noting that this data is literally just where people live and where they work. There are many other factors too but I don't really see that swinging in Central's favor.

You can draw a pretty straight line from Bowdoin Sq to Waltham. It would just be a very expensive line.
 

Attachments

  • Screenshot 2021-05-01 035422.jpg
    Screenshot 2021-05-01 035422.jpg
    665.4 KB · Views: 128
I agree that Harvard is preferable for its destination draw, but Central is not a terrible consolation prize. Those Harvard-bound commuters will transfer to outbound RL trains in the morning, which are significantly emptied out after passing Kendall. And vice versa in the evening. A Harvard routing misses Lower Allston and the development explosion brewing there post Pike rebuild. By the time trains are running, Allston might equal or eclipse Harvard as an employment center.
 
Let’s pilot some kind of “super Seventies” bus with limited stops, painted lanes, signal priority.

In an ideal world, it would originate in Waltham at a new Fitchburg line superstation hub at US 20.

knowing it would deliver direct service to Harvard and an easy connection to the red seems to solve all the other issues with a two seat ride
 
Let’s pilot some kind of “super Seventies” bus with limited stops, painted lanes, signal priority.

In an ideal world, it would originate in Waltham at a new Fitchburg line superstation hub at US 20.

knowing it would deliver direct service to Harvard and an easy connection to the red seems to solve all the other issues with a two seat ride

Yeah. As much as the Watertown Branch serves up an eventual layup*, it hasn't so much as been studied at any deep level. So it's not exactly pick-up-and-go in its current crayon-draw state, and you need to have the pump primed for much more in the way of immediate and continuous all-around improvements. BRT'ing the 70 and 71 with express layering, dedicated bus lanes where available, signal priority, and 60-foot vehicles is going to be much more immediately applicable. Both corridors have the layout to accept prodigious amounts of upgrading. That really should be a *now* study effort. It's starting to become problematic that said studying isn't a *now* thing. If Everett can do that type of planning comprehensively now, why is Watertown still being a little slow on the uptake???



*But, yes...when it's time for rapid transit you will have to drop the perfectionism about Harvard-or-Central termini because the ROW flat-out doesn't go there, and there are no dedicated ROW's you could build that wouldn't get God-mode expensive, kludgy, and fatally bogged down on their own community input process to those endpoints. Accept Porter as path of least resistance because it's pretty good unto itself as a big-time multimodal hub and greases the skids for enough of the highest-demand linked trips to do the job with ample all-around convenience. Perfect becomes the enemy of good in a hurry if there's temptation to stan too hard for Harvard/Central with a "not-even-in-50-years" moonshot and overlook what could be done orders of magnitude sooner/cheaper. Keep in mind if you drag GLX out here the BRT'd 70/71 are still going to be major load-bearing complements simply because there are so many divergently different directional mouths to feed here. There is no single-direction rapid transit killshot with how much of a hub in its own right Watertown is...not even close.
 
Forgive me for always going straight for heavy rail ideas. Obviously a BRT route is the way to go, especially with the Trackless Trolley infrastructure already there. A major issue is street width. Arsenal St and Western Ave look like they have the space for bus lanes fine but North Harvard is tight, as is JFK St. You could use Mt Auburn St instead but then you miss Allston which is half the reason for such a line. Getting weird and using Soldiers Field Rd might help a bit but Anderson Bridge and JFK St. are gonna be a bottleneck.

* F-Line, while I appreciate your deep well of knowledge, your overly rational pessimism does more harm than good and you use a lot of words to come up with simple excuses. Focusing on "cheap" ROWs is one reason why the rail transit we build in this country is so abysmal. We talk ourselves out of better ideas because of strawman NIMBYs instead of doing the hard work an engaging the community. All mega projects see cost issues so going cheap just means you'll get a worse product that still costs too much. If you extended the GLX thru Porter to Watertown it would still cost billions but now be less useful. Too many people are focused on the hard numbers without understanding what they mean. Cost per rider is far more important and building a tunnel thru Allston costs an extra billion but buys you 10s of thousands of more riders then it's worth it. Perfect may be the enemy of good but starting with a compromise guarantees you start with bad and never get to good.
 
* F-Line, while I appreciate your deep well of knowledge, your overly rational pessimism does more harm than good and you use a lot of words to come up with simple excuses. Focusing on "cheap" ROWs is one reason why the rail transit we build in this country is so abysmal. We talk ourselves out of better ideas because of strawman NIMBYs instead of doing the hard work an engaging the community. All mega projects see cost issues so going cheap just means you'll get a worse product that still costs too much. If you extended the GLX thru Porter to Watertown it would still cost billions but now be less useful. Too many people are focused on the hard numbers without understanding what they mean. Cost per rider is far more important and building a tunnel thru Allston costs an extra billion but buys you 10s of thousands of more riders then it's worth it. Perfect may be the enemy of good but starting with a compromise guarantees you start with bad and never get to good.

"Less" useful ≠ not-useful. Did your post-before-last not dump a mound of data explaining the multi-directionarity of Watertown demand??? Such that we were talking about how it's not-at-all clear *which* potential Red Line transfer station would be the best performer because the linked-trip firehose ends up spraying in both directions on Red. How did this get reduced in 1 post's time to "My Awesomesauce RT Corridor is better than Your Nothingburger RT Corridor, and here's a bunch of stat garbage fed into the toplines and bottomlines to make pure hyperbole out of the comparison"??? Let's please not paper-over that there are enormous degrees of difference at work in tackling Watertown transit. And refrain from putting a whole lot of loaded words in other people's mouths in the process. You lob the accusation of plying rhetorical fallacies here, but ^this^ statement above is so chock-full of strawmen as to provoke an allergic sneezing fit. You're better than that, Van. Way better than that.:rolleyes:


Now let's start with how we landed on this discussion in the first place :
Honestly, the time to start planning for some sort of high-capacity transit connection to Arsenal was yesterday.

"Yesterday"...so we were talking about things that can get cued up immediately, right? BRT pretty much, if opening up the 4-year CIP budget *today* for programmable funds is a starting point. Settled: BRT'ification of the 70/71 in the immediate-term, or else the real-estate boom is going to choke on its own overloading before it ever gains traction. OK, on to rapid transit most-feasibles: Union-Porter is already a major advocacy thing for S.T.E.P. that could be fast-tracked. Maybe we also cue up a comprehensive Watertown Transit study a la the Mystic Working Group that can work up the Porter LRT routing in a way that combines forces with S.T.E.P.'s advocacy for Union-Porter and get something shovel-ready for decade's end and hopefully open for business by the early-2030's. That'll in turn amp up the value-capture of the shorter-term BRT'ing of the 70/71 corridors and guide our boom towards permanent stability. Walk-and-chew-gum is good!

Trans-Allston HRT...boy we *REALLY* haven't got a clue how that one's going to work. The Pike ate the shared HRT portion of the B&A Riverside ROW studied back in '45, so we're starting from scratch on how to route it and where to even source it from. Blue from Kenmore would work pretty well in theory, but we've first got to figure out how to get from Charles to Kenmore when we haven't even funded Bowdoin-Charles...clearly not gonna happen overnight. Branching Red @ Central or Harvard is going to be spectacularly messy, many potential blockers...at minimum probably requires megaproject-level reinvestment in Red mainline capacity to even be possible. Without a firm starting point the corridor development is going to need a longer scoping gestation period just for refining its core concept...so what amongst this is in the realm of our control *now*??? OK...we add a longer-range study component to the other walk-and-chew-gum things we're doing to train Trans-Allston's conceptual development into following a set pace that might net us actionable results after it's gone through a few iterations. Maybe the initial scoping ends up encouraging some join-hands S.T.E.P. analogue; that would be good.

And ^^so^^ on. Prime that pump with solutioneering today, tomorrow, *and* the far future. Multitasked.


How did it come to pass where any of those paralleling efforts--short-term, medium-term, long-term--from a starting premise of "Where do we start now with a multi-directional hub needing thick net of multimodal solutions feeding off each other?"...got perverted into killshot-routed winner-take-all 1-on-1 in the span of 1 post? The argumentative fallacies required to reframe it that way boggle the mind. In no way/shape/form was this thread angling for Crazy Transit Pitches streetfight...until, apparently, now. How literal "perfect is the enemy of good" can you get stawmanning this into winner-take-all gladiatorial combat, Megaproject weight class???

Fine...if that's what you want to talk about, talk about it. You allude as such in your intro. But at least be a just a *smidge* honest about it. This level of deflection is hot garbage.
 
Last edited:
You're right, I haven't showed all the work. Let's look:

Where workers from Watertown and Allston are going:
Screenshot 2021-05-01 035422.jpg


Where workers are coming from to jobs in Watertown and Allston:
Screenshot 2021-05-02 151006.jpg


Now let's look at two alternatives:
Screenshot 2021-05-02 163343.jpg


The GLX from Union Sq to Watertown via Porter is just about 6 miles. The line would run along the old ROW until halfway between Arlington St and School St since the rest of the ROW has been mostly built up. From there it runs on the street, preferably in dedicated lanes.

I'm estimating costs based on the cost/mile of the current GLX ($530 million) and the high end of street running light rail ($100 million). This brings the GLX cost to about $2.6 billion.

The black line is a new tunnel connecting to the abandoned Brattle Yard lead tracks which, theoretically, could be converted into a light rail terminal. The tunnel only needs to run to Western Ave, along which and out to Arsenal St it would run along the street (again, preferably in a dedicated lane). The tunnel is just shy of a mile so we can peg it at $1 billion. The rest of the street running costs $300 million. Total: $1.3 billion.

If we wanted to simply run light rail on North Harvard and JFK Streets (into the bus tunnel) we are looking at a total of $390 million.

Not shown, but for sake of the argument, would be a street running light rail line from Watertown Sq to Central Sq. At 4.3 miles that comes to $430 million.

There is obvious demand west of Watertown Sq but any service there relies on figuring this part out first, so I've excluded it from the analysis.

There are a lot of ridership factors we aren't including here, mostly trips to school and non work related trips. But I think the jobs numbers paint a pretty clear picture as to where people are going. There looks like possibly a couple thousand workers coming from north of Harvard Sq into Watertown and Allston. There is virtually no one commuting from Cambridgeport or Kendall. But most people work close to home so a solid east-west transit line through Watertown and Allston, not up to Porter, is the clear winner.

The question is where do we send it after? There is demand to Harvard but not north of Harvard. Saying riders can go to Central Sq and backtrack isn't going to be popular, especially when it would be cheaper to just go to Harvard. Kendall, via the Grand Junction, could work too, but then commuters coming from north of Harvard are stuck since they'd have to go all the way to Kendall and double back (which they just wouldn't do).

Harvard looks like the winner. Building anything past Harvard, north or south, just adds cost and travel time. We can build a transit corridor in stages, first BRT, then light rail, then add a tunnel if need be. Extending the GL past Union Sq might be very useful for relieving the RL but it seems to me to be a stretch to suggest that it would help Watertown (not to mention completely miss Allston). If so much of the Watertown/Allston ridership is headed to central/southern Cambridge and downtown Boston then why make them transfer up at Porter? It just adds time to their trip and most of the ROW runs around every place these riders want to go, not to where they want to go.
 
Building to harvard seems rather silly. The trip demand to get to Harvard is miniscule compared with the much larger numbers headed downtown. Western Ave cuts through land that will be heavily developed in the coming years, rather than North Harvard St which is all fields on one side. There's also a non-negligible number of people who work along the river in the office parks on Mem Drive, which a Western Ave route is better poised to serve. At any rate, people who wanted to get to Harvard could have a slightly longer walk or a v short bus ride from stops in either lower allston or Cambridge (imagine a station at Western and Putnam....it's almost Harvard!).

In return you get a simple, cut and cover-able corridor, one way more poised for BRT or LRT, and that is dramatically simpler to comprehend.
 
Building to harvard seems rather silly. The trip demand to get to Harvard is miniscule compared with the much larger numbers headed downtown. Western Ave cuts through land that will be heavily developed in the coming years, rather than North Harvard St which is all fields on one side. There's also a non-negligible number of people who work along the river in the office parks on Mem Drive, which a Western Ave route is better poised to serve. At any rate, people who wanted to get to Harvard could have a slightly longer walk or a v short bus ride from stops in either lower allston or Cambridge (imagine a station at Western and Putnam....it's almost Harvard!).

In return you get a simple, cut and cover-able corridor, one way more poised for BRT or LRT, and that is dramatically simpler to comprehend.

Screenshot 2021-05-03 003018.jpg


Harvard just makes more sense since it's a larger hub. Anyone coming from north of Harvard isn't going to go to Central and double back. If this is a BRT route then it really isn't a big deal, it's just paint on the street. But once a tunnel is involved you need to be really sure. You say there is a "non-negligible number of people who work along the river in the office parks on Mem Drive" except... there aren't. There aren't as many jobs along Mem Drive as you think. There aren't no jobs here but if you look at the raw numbers heavy rail seems like over kill. True, Allston will build out more so I suppose we can't really know what the patterns will look like until that happens.

I'd say what could really swing my view is if we had a long term goal of extending the Blue Line this way. Going from MGH to Kendal and then up Broadway, turning down Prospect to Western, then down Western. That is obviously a very long range plan but there certainly seems to be ridership demand.
 
Fair on the people coming from the north. How Lower Allston develops seems key here (and if the eastern half of Western Ave gets a lot denser!)
 

Back
Top