West Cambridge / Alewife Area Infill & Small Developments

[George_Apley]

So.......we shouldn't be building residential next to subway stations according to some posters?

More like "we shouldn't exacerbate terrible urban planning and design".

 

[Equilibria]

I agree with your first and third points, but I don't understand the second. How else are people going to get to work from the northwest if not driving on Route 2 at least to Alewife if not further? We absolutely could and should narrow Route 2 east of 128, but that's not going to solve the traffic problem at Alewife because the extra width is not inducing demand. Driving is literally the only real option for people who don't live close to the Fitchburg Line or the Lowell Line.

Narrowing Route 2 is worth it if you're trading lanes for Red Line tracks (and F-Line has pointed out how challenging it would actually be to run the Red Line up -or inside - that hill). Otherwise, it's just reducing utility.

More like "we shouldn't exacerbate terrible urban planning and design".

What's good urban planning and design here, though? More bridges across the tracks, sure. A station for RUR, sure. But at the heart this is still a bus hub, with Red Line access, pretty close to Downtown. The acknowledged challenge of Alewife is that Route 2 dead-ends into substandard roads. If we hadn't rejected the extension of Route 2 to Union Square (and the Inner Belt) and this was just a park-and-ride next to a freeway exit, would that planning have somehow been better and more worthy of densification?

 

[Rover]

More like "we shouldn't exacerbate terrible urban planning and design".

I would have liked to have been born independently wealthy too so I wouldn't have to work for a living. Problem is that didn't happen, so now I have to deal with the situation as it is, not as I'd like it to be. Cities need to build housing near existing transit. Cambridge is doing so. I fight this commute every day so I do have a stake here, but I applaud the city for stepping up unlike most of the metro area. If a handful of people are doing the reverse commute out to 128 or wherever so be it.

 

[George_Apley]

Narrowing Route 2 is worth it if you're trading lanes for Red Line tracks (and F-Line has pointed out how challenging it would actually be to run the Red Line up -or inside - that hill). Otherwise, it's just reducing utility.

Yeah, the Red Line isn't worth extending if it's not hitting Arlington Center and Heights. Could *try* to tunnel to Rt 2 from deeping in Arlington, but that's also unlikely for a whole host of reasons. We've talked about it in Crazy pitches a bit.

 

[Equilibria]

Yeah, the Red Line isn't worth extending if it's not hitting Arlington Center and Heights. Could *try* to tunnel to Rt 2 from deeping in Arlington, but that's also unlikely for a whole host of reasons. We've talked about it in Crazy pitches a bit.

It's worth it if your goal is to reduce congestion at Alewife, since a lot of that congestion is generated by the Park-and-Ride facility. Move the park-and-ride out a couple of exits, and traffic at Alewife probably eases quite a bit. Extending to Arlington Center and Heights accesses more new riders, but it doesn't help Alewife at all.

 

[George_Apley]

I would have liked to have been born independently wealthy too so I wouldn't have to work for a living. Problem is that didn't happen, so now I have to deal with the situation as it is, not as I'd like it to be. Cities need to build housing near existing transit. Cambridge is doing so. I fight this commute every day so I do have a stake here, but I applaud the city for stepping up unlike most of the metro area. If a handful of people are doing the reverse commute out to 128 or wherever so be it.

I don't disagree with any of that, but the City of Cambridge has totally fucked up planning for this area. Good for them they're approving housing for the ass-end of the city on a cul-de-sac by the Red Line. Housing is good. But that doesn't mean it's good for overall planning and development.

 

[JumboBuc]

This has been discussed a bunch before, but I have a really hard time seeing the benefit of a Commuter Rail station (or whatever you want to call it) at Alewife. The Red Line is already there, and there's already a Fitchburg-Red link at Porter just one mile / two stops down the line.

It totally makes sense to better tie that whole area into Alewife Red (e.g., footbridges), but adding Alewife CR just seems redundant. Adding CR at Alewife makes about as much sense to me as, say, adding CR at Assembly. I'd be surprised if the marginal benefit to the people who use it exceeds the marginal cost to all Fitchburg riders who don't.

 

[Arlington]

How else are people going to get to work from the northwest if not driving on Route 2 at least to Alewife if not further?

More bus is called for (separate from adding RUR @ Cambridgepark)

We absolutely could and should narrow Route 2 east of 128,

Rather than remove that capacity, I'm going to make an "all day weekdays" HOV lane, particularly from Rt2's crest (at Mormon Temple) to Alewife's "The Delta Star" (can't call it a rotary any more).

That's not going to solve the traffic problem at Alewife because the extra width is not inducing demand. Driving is literally the only real option for people who don't live close to the Fitchburg Line or the Lowell Line.

Kinda. Can we agree that Rt2's slack is what guarantees perma-block on ABP from Mass Ave to Concord Ave? People who might go via Mass Ave or Concord Ave are drawn to and through the DeltaStar because they're looking forward to being on Rt2.

{EDIT} There's also induced demand coming from Rt 16, which is "uncongested enough" between the UHaul (Med/Som) and Mass Ave (Arl/Camb). I think a fair number of people pinch through Alewife because it is to/from their race I-93N{/EDIT}

My bus plan:

• Park & Ride 2&128
• Park & Ride Lex/Arlmont
• Bus lanes from Mormon Temple to Alewife DeltaStar
  (some might be peak direction only)
• More "ALE" and "LEX" service from Lexington to Alewife
• Add (lay new asphalt) in an exclusive HOV lane on parkway between "Rotary & Mass Ave"

 

[dhawkins]

This has been discussed a bunch before, but I have a really hard time seeing the benefit of a Commuter Rail station (or whatever you want to call it) at Alewife. The Red Line is already there, and there's already a Fitchburg-Red link at Porter just one mile / two stops down the line.

It totally makes sense to better tie that whole area into Alewife Red (e.g., footbridges), but adding Alewife CR just seems redundant. Adding CR at Alewife makes about as much sense to me as, say, adding CR at Assembly. I'd be surprised if the marginal benefit to the people who use it exceeds the marginal cost to all Fitchburg riders who don't.

Long term planning, the Porter commuter stop could be pushed to Alwife when the the Green Line union square line is extended to Porter.

 

[JumboBuc]

Long term planning, the Porter commuter stop could be pushed to Alwife when the the Green Line union square line is extended to Porter.

Why?

Fitchburg at Porter is directly on top of the RL ROW. It’s a fast, easy, efficient connection right down an escalator/elevator. With a GLX to Porter, the same could also be said there for Green. At Alewife, Red Line and Fitchburg tracks are separated by about 425 meters at their closest point. Any realistic path between Red and Fitchburg platforms would be significantly longer. That is far from an easy transfer. The walk from Fitchburg at Alewife to Red at Alewife wouldn’t be quite as long as that between Red at Charles and Blue at Bowdoin, but it would be close. Plus, Fitchburg at Alewife would have no connection at all to Green, while Porter would have an easy one with GLX.

And putting aside transfer distance, the only station on the entire Red Line that is closer to Alewife than to Porter is Alewife itself (consider Davis a wash). So by pushing all Fitchburg-Red transfers out to Alewife from Porter you’re adding about 4-5 minutes of Red line travel to the journeys of every single Fitchburg-Red transferring passenger who is travelling south of Davis.

So basically, moving the Fitchburg-Red connection to Alewife from Porter after a GLX to Porter might benefit Fitchburg-Alewife transfers, but it would severely impede transfers from Fitchburg to every other Red Line stop and every GLX stop. For someone who travels from the Fitchburg line to, say, Harvard Square, it would probably add about 15 minutes to their journey each way. Even if such a project were totally free I’d still advise against it.

 

[Vagabond]

Why?

Look again at the size of the development footprint in Alewife. We're talking thousands of jobs, which will be primarily supplied by SOVs because there isn't another viable transportation option. A suburbanite working in Fresh Pond would have to take CR to Porter, then a RL ride to Alewife, then walking over the bridge - simply not palatable to the majority of the population. It's just not. This is already one of the most congested areas in all of Greater Boston. You have a prime opportunity to add a high-demand station to an existing line, where there is a ton of room, and preemptively relieve traffic while boosting the feasibility of a prime TOD location.

The second benefit is that there is a TON of housing development, and the population are expected to hop on an already crowded red line to get downtown. The CR would cut a huge number of riders out of that over-congestion just by being an express track. Are most commuters getting on the Red at Alewife heading to Cambridge, or to Boston?

Why are we locked into having CR/RL connection in Porter? A GL/RL connection is a more natural connection, and by placing a future Union-branched GLX to Fresh Pond, you supply not only a more appropriate population coverage, but also a CR connection to the rest of the system. I'd also question if there is room for both a GL and CR platform in Porter.

TLDR: The green line should connect in Porter and on to Alewife, and the CR needs a stop in Fresh Pond to support the promised massive developments.

 

[stick n move]

Yea green and a CR stop would go a long way towards easing congestion in the area and both would be easily achievable for the amount of benefit.

Has anyone thought about putting a park and ride on the CR line at 95 past Brandeis? Rt 20 and 95 are both right there with an exit that goes over the tracks, along with the pike 1 exit away. This could soak up a whole lot of commuters from all 3 major roads close by.

 

[Arlington]

Has anyone thought about putting a park and ride on the CR line at 95 past Brandeis? Rt 20 and 95 are both right there along with an exit and this could soak up a whole lot of commuters from both.

Archboston certainly has. It goes by several names. MAPC likes "Fitchburg Line/ Route 128 Multi Modal Transit Center" others just call it "Weston station consolidation" I call it a "Route 20 Rotary Park and Ride"

We've discussed most recently in the RUR thread, (it also comes up in Crazy Transit Pitches as a terminus for extending the RL from Alewife or the GL from Union Sq)

 

[dhawkins]

Why?
Cambridge is a City and the more the subway can expand to different areas a city with more efficient modes of public transportation, why not? CR should be utilized for transport of suburban dwellers that come into downtown. Alwife is the edge of Greater Boston, so that should be the last stop before running directly downtown. Porter Square has been sold short with a CR stop since 1840, isn't it time to bring this area into the multi-modal model that everyone wishes for in Boston?

 

[dhawkins]

Archboston certainly has. It goes by several names. MAPC likes "Fitchburg Line/ Route 128 Multi Modal Transit Center" others just call it "Weston station consolidation" I call it a "Route 20 Rotary Park and Ride"

We've discussed most recently in the RUR thread, (it also comes up in Crazy Transit Pitches as a terminus for extending the RL from Alewife or the GL from Union Sq)

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The Biogen and Monster campus would be a great location for a station / stop, plenty of parking already. How long before Indeed buys out Monster? Bio-gen should be downtown. Brandeis students can Lyft over to their campus. If the site became available, it would be a great opportunity.

 

[Arlington]

Not for this Cambridge thread, but Rt 128 is a big enough barrier, and Brandeis is a big enough demand center that the T can afford to stop on both sides of 128 (Weston-side Park n Ride, and Brandeis-side TOD), particularly if it happens in conjunction with some much-needed stop-consolidation in Weston.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Look again at the size of the development footprint in Alewife. We're talking thousands of jobs, which will be primarily supplied by SOVs because there isn't another viable transportation option. A suburbanite working in Fresh Pond would have to take CR to Porter, then a RL ride to Alewife, then walking over the bridge - simply not palatable to the majority of the population. It's just not. This is already one of the most congested areas in all of Greater Boston. You have a prime opportunity to add a high-demand station to an existing line, where there is a ton of room, and preemptively relieve traffic while boosting the feasibility of a prime TOD location.

The second benefit is that there is a TON of housing development, and the population are expected to hop on an already crowded red line to get downtown. The CR would cut a huge number of riders out of that over-congestion just by being an express track. Are most commuters getting on the Red at Alewife heading to Cambridge, or to Boston?

Why are we locked into having CR/RL connection in Porter? A GL/RL connection is a more natural connection, and by placing a future Union-branched GLX to Fresh Pond, you supply not only a more appropriate population coverage, but also a CR connection to the rest of the system. I'd also question if there is room for both a GL and CR platform in Porter.

TLDR: The green line should connect in Porter and on to Alewife, and the CR needs a stop in Fresh Pond to support the promised massive developments.

This is an incoherent argument.

You can (will someday?) have ALL THREE rail modes AND the 77 at Porter separated by nothing but platform escalators, with unified fare control for Red, Green, and Purple. And they will fit by Green transitioning from 4-track ROW to in-situ duck-under shallow tunnel from an incline starting at Beacon St., wherein the tunnel roof lowers then forms the new trackbed for the CR level (the lowering of the trackbed in turn enabling an air rights capping of the CR level from Beacon to Mass Ave.). From the Charlie Gates at the RL lobby: 10 steps upstairs to CR, 10 steps downstairs to GL. None of this is speculative voodoo; STEP's own GLX-Porter advocacy calls for exactly this build shotgunning the GL extension with the air rights considerations to help heal the street grid gash around Lesley U.

At Alewife the walking distance between the would-be CR platforms (any permutation...sides or island) and Cambridge Park Drive up/down an ungodly tall set of switchback ramps, across the bridge, and down one side of the embankment is literally longer on the stopwatch than bypassing the area entirely inbound to transfer at Porter and take Red 2 stops out where it's right outside the door. Fare control, even at a timed transfer, is impossible to implement because of the accessibility inequities. And because of egress positioning vs. sides of the bridge the walk ends up several minutes longer in one direction vs. the other, leaving terrible inequities based on which side of the parkway a job is on vs. the other...and even (in the case of side platforms) several-minute walking difference by commute direction. It's a no-good, terrible no-man's land siting for a station with no physical means of bringing closer. Green to Alewife doesn't help that situation at all; it's pigeonholed to the same location with the same craptacular walking transit and 5-10 minute (depending on fast vs. slow legs) transfer disconnect to the Red + bus terminal. To cover up for those foot-traffic shortfalls you'd have to start running a shuttle bus route on the parkway to connect the job pockets at Cambridge Park, Fresh Pond, and Concord Ave. together...like a "74A" to Belmont and/or Watertown that runs out of Alewife instead of Harvard. But how well is a circulator like that actually going to perform in real life when it's in sitting in the same rotary traffic hell as today with all the single-occupancy cars the City keeps lizard-brained inviting with all those rubber stamps of new building garages? Borderline useless unless you can succeed at actually removing some parkway traffic.

If you want to flank the area with transit, yes...you can consider doing Green up the Watertown Branch with a Fresh Pond stop closing up what's now a 3500 ft. walk on-foot to Alewife. Someday...if you don't let that mission creep slow down the core mission of just getting Green to Porter in the first place. And provided you're willing to first find a solve for the damn near impossible-to-eliminate Sherman St. grade crossing which the City crimped it's way out of options by allowing new condos to mass up to within inches of the ROW property lines. At my best guess it might be eliminable on Green with a quick duck, but the CR side will always have to retain the crossing because of the lack of running room to change elevations and the ruination of sightlines on a dangerous road. But, please, there's no "superstation" to be had with 1000 ft.'s lateral and 30+ ft.'s vertical separation in Alewife-area transit facilities. If you're going to divide and conquer the area, it's going to be by flanking new transit on the opposite end of the neighborhood catchment...not by trying to unify the impossible-to-unify.


Alewife's problems are the product of 25 years of bafflingly bad development decisions by City of Cambridge to keep packing the area with evermore car-centric unsustainability. How does throwing a bad -performing transit build at that problem while making no changes to the thrust of bad dev decision making (look at every Cambridge Park construction crane continuing to lay ground-floor garage steel!) end up helping the problem? That's not even asking the right set of questions! No transit is going to loosen the congestion vice grip as long as the forces of induced demand continue inviting single-occupancy trips unabated. Fight the real enemy: crap like this continuing to sprout up like weeds all over the place.


FWIW...the Arlington Center extension is underrated as a load-reliever. And that's because all the Route 2 buses that have adopted Alewife as a kind of ugly-hack hub with constrained directional distribution will move out to a more opportune jumping-off point for WNW suburban coverage. Instead of wasting too many equipment cycles on route duplication on the frontage roads you can have real diverging routes and a rebooted western route distribution that plugs some of the gaping Yellow Line gaps in Belmont and the whole northeastern quarter of Waltham, adds useful crosstown coverage between Arlington and Medford/Winchester, de-skews some of the Lexington locals away from hugging Mass Ave. to the exclusion of much else, and implements all-important express service to Hanscom & Burlington. As a multimodal hub Arlington Heights is a big get. One that significantly lowers the temptation to do any sort of ham-fisted Alewife CR stop a hike-and-a-half away, because so many of the bus routes will vacate Alewife if the line is extended to AH. Now...whether that actually helps the Alewife traffic situation has far less to do with the Red Line's new terminus than whether the City is willing to pull its head out of its ass on these continuing godawful car-centric planning decisions and can start catering the actual buildings to something other than single-occupancy car trips. The Red Line garage and parkway rotaries are never going to get unfucked any other way, so let's quit pretending that skirting the issue from afar with this ill-fitting "superstation" tangent is actually going to deflate the induced demand that's slowly choking the area. The only thing that's going to tame the induced demand is to start pursuing master plan -level dev strategies that aim to take the hot air out of the over-encouragement of suburban car work trips that the City's been binging on for quarter of a century against all better judgment.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

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The Biogen and Monster campus would be a great location for a station / stop, plenty of parking already. How long before Indeed buys out Monster? Bio-gen should be downtown. Brandeis students can Lyft over to their campus. If the site became available, it would be a great opportunity.

Why are we talking about this like it's a wheel-reinventing Crazy Transit Pitch? That is literally the proposal the big biz money and the impacted municipalities are pushing right this second. . .

http://www.mapc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/128_Report.pdf
https://www.weston.org/DocumentCent...ntation---1265-Main-Street-Development?bidId=
http://www.128corporatealliance.org/projects/multi-modal-transit-station

 

[dhawkins]

Do they have a suggestion box at 128 Corporate Alliance?

 

[jklo]

FWIW...the Arlington Center extension is underrated as a load-reliever. And that's because all the Route 2 buses that have adopted Alewife as a kind of ugly-hack hub with constrained directional distribution will move out to a more opportune jumping-off point for WNW suburban coverage.

Arlington Center doesn't seem very accessible from Route 2, I think they would stick with Alewife. It would be useful for buses north and east though, and if close enough it could get some synergy with the Lowell Line and boost that because Kendall is that important.

What would make a difference is Red out to 128, in any direction. Not happening yes.