Worst Infrastructure Proposal Nominations

[George_Apley]

All members are encouraged to nominate an active proposal for an infrastructure project in the Boston area that is not yet under construction that they believe could make the biggest negative impact on the urban environment.

Infrastructure includes public transit, roads & bridges, port & airport facilities, utilities, and parks & public accomodations.

 

[Scott]

The Long Island Bridge. They say it's needed to house the homeless but is providing services on an island full of decaying buildings far away from medical facilities really the best idea for that population? People often went on and off the island via ambulance to get services. That's not good care, it's expensive and unnecessary. We need a new facility built near City Hospital. In the nice weather the water shuttle could stop at the island and it could be used for recreation.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

East-West Rail Study. Tankapalooza effort solely to sow political division, and takes a steaming dump all over the damn-near perfect NNEIRI (a.k.a. the "Springfield Hub" project) study that preceded it in the effort to confuse and obfuscate. Over-expensive, paltry fake ridership stats because it willfully omits all the would-be transfer traffic @ SPG Hub that NNEIRI was predicated on, and the service plan stopping at Pittsfield without continuing to Albany is complete nonsense that Amtrak has already publicly stated it refuses to run.

I'll repeat it till I turn blue: $1M was lit on fire for the expressed purpose of tanking the damn near perfect preceding NNEIRI study so Baker didn't have to commit to building anything anywhere ever. And now we've got a mighty mess of political battle lines to clean up in the aftermath. High-achievement feats in gov't-eats-itself for this turd.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Also...can't believe I'm the first to chime in with this one given how much scenery it chewed on the main thread during Calendar Year '20:

Mass Pike Allston 'Throat' Realignment

Or rather...what failures of process fucked up 9 ways to Sunday what should've been a straightforward decision, to point where it looks like absolutely no one is going to get even a modicum of what they want. 2020 was the put-up-or-shut-up deadline for locking down Final Design, and we absolutely squandered it by following the pettiest of stakeholder infighting straight down a black hole.

 

[theSil]

DOT's 2020 BUILD Grants. Unsurprisingly, the Trump admin's grants heavily favored rural and suburban highway projects over public transit. In the Boston area, that meant selecting an I-495/I-95 interchange project in Hopkinton over Blue Hill Ave BRT in Dorchester.

Washington Snubs Dorchester Bus Riders In Favor of a Suburban Highway Interchange

New bus lanes on Blue Hill Avenue would benefit roughly 20,000 bus riders in Dorchester and Mattapan, reduce their collective commuting times by 800 hours every day, and allow the T to make over 10…

mass.streetsblog.org

 

[Equilibria]

DOT's 2020 BUILD Grants. Unsurprisingly, the Trump admin's grants heavily favored rural and suburban highway projects over public transit. In the Boston area, that meant selecting an I-495/I-95 interchange project in Hopkinton over Blue Hill Ave BRT in Dorchester.

Washington Snubs Dorchester Bus Riders In Favor of a Suburban Highway Interchange

New bus lanes on Blue Hill Avenue would benefit roughly 20,000 bus riders in Dorchester and Mattapan, reduce their collective commuting times by 800 hours every day, and allow the T to make over 10…

mass.streetsblog.org

I think calling it a "suburban highway interchange" kind of undercuts it - this is a critical piece of interstate freight infrastructure. This isn't the thread to argue it, though