Rail plan offers chance to get back on track

By Eric Moskowitz, Globe Staff
October 12, 2008

Sitting in a coffee shop on Highland Avenue, where streetcars once clanged east and west, Somerville native Stephen V. Mackey explained why the Green Line extension is a no-brainer: A century ago Somerville pulsed with enough mass transit - an intricate network of local trolleys and Boston-bound commuter trains - to develop as the densest city in New England, tight warrens of multifamily housing organized around the rails and local squares. But over time the stops got pulled, leaving local residents to rely on cars and buses.

To make matters worse, said Mackey, president and CEO of the Somerville Chamber of Commerce, the city got saddled in the 20th century with two elevated highways, and it remained home to both a massive heavy-rail maintenance yard and a matrix of tracks that continued to carry the trains that no longer stopped in Somerville.

This is a "walking, transit-oriented city, in its bones," he said. "If you believe in mass transit, you've got to bring it to the most densely populated city."

There are several reasons why the MBTA's Green Line extension from East Cambridge's Lechmere Station through Somerville to Medford's Hillside neighborhood is eagerly anticipated in Somerville, even as the reaction in neighboring Medford has been mixed. The project is expected to reduce car trips and auto emissions while spurring economic development in a city heavily reliant on residential property taxes. For those familiar with the past, though, it's as much about restoring transit as extending it. It's about correcting inequity.

"There is an opportunity here to right a few wrongs, in terms of what happened to the city," said Ellin Reisner, president of the Somerville Transportation Equity Partnership, a community group that advocates for improved transit. (Reisner, along with Mackey, also serves on the state's Green Line Extension Project Advisory Group.)

It's also part of why the state's proposal to couple the transit extension with a 24-hour, 11.5-acre storage-and-maintenance yard for Green Line cars in the Inner Belt stings. Somerville has already coped with heavy-rail maintenance for over a century, in the form of the Boston Engine Terminal, now home to the MBTA's Commuter Rail Maintenance Facility, a nearly 9-acre building on a campus of more than 30 acres, hard by Interstate 93.

Now the state is considering adding an 80-car light-rail storage-and-maintenance facility about half a mile away, at the end of Inner Belt Road, adjacent to the Brickbottom district. Local officials, business leaders, and community activists have objected unanimously to the plan, which they say would stymie future goals for mixed-use, transit-oriented development in the underutilized industrial areas.

"It's like, you hit me once" with the commuter-rail facility, Mackey said. "You're going to hit me again?"

State planners are at an important stage in the Green Line project, and the location of the maintenance facility is one of three main questions remaining to be answered, along with the nature and placement of a spur to Union Square - which sits near the Fitchburg commuter-rail tracks, not the Lowell commuter-rail tracks, where the right-of-way is to be widened to accommodate the main Green Line extension - and the nature and placement of the Medford terminus.

In Medford, which is less dense and more suburban than Somerville, residents have greeted the project with a mix of support and opposition, and officials have been lukewarm. The proposed stops there would be placed in neighborhoods that locals consider fully formed, unlike the several areas along or near the route in Somerville - Inner Belt, Brickbottom, Union Square, Boynton Yards - where local officials want to encourage development, and Medford would also cope with the traffic associated with a last stop.

Moreover, while Medford also lost transit service in the 20th century, the change was not as dramatic as in Somerville. And Medford lacks the galvanizing example of Davis Square, where a Red Line stop, Somerville's only train station, opened in 1984. It sparked the square's transformation from a shabby, boarded-up area into the city's most vibrant commercial and residential district.

"I like to call that smart growth by accident," said Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone, recalling that some in the community initially resisted that extension. "But today you see nothing but unification demanding new transit in Somerville, because we've seen the benefit of what occurred in Davis Square."

Somerville officials and activists have long helped hold the state's feet to the fire on a Green Line project that planners toyed with for years, and that the state originally committed to nearly 20 years ago to avoid a federal lawsuit from the Conservation Law Foundation. The foundation had threatened to block the Big Dig if Massachusetts did not balance the highway project with mass-transit investment.

More recently, Governor Deval Patrick and lawmakers have supported the project and pledged full funding to complete it by the end of 2014, regardless of whether Massachusetts succeeds in securing federal aid for half the cost.

"We're moving forward anyway, federal approval or not," said Wendy P. Stern, state undersecretary for transportation planning and program development, in a recent interview. "But we do feel this project is worthy at the federal level for the green light."

The state's Executive Office of Transportation, which manages expansion for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, last spring revealed most station locations as well as the possible maintenance-yard site. Immediate objections to the yard caused the state to revisit that issue; the answers to that and other outstanding questions were supposed to be presented to the advisory group Sept. 15, but the state canceled the meeting. EOT officials have said they hope to have the answers soon, but they have not yet rescheduled the meeting.

Those answers and other details - including predicted impacts on ridership, emissions, noise, drainage, and private property for the preferred route, existing conditions, and alternatives - are needed for the federal and state environmental impact reports that EOT hopes to submit for review by the end of the year. That would allow the state to keep a timetable of seeking federal funding and starting engineering next year, with construction to follow from 2011 through 2014.

With the yard issue still unresolved, Somerville officials, community leaders, and local legislators have pressed for answers and stressed the potential of the Inner Belt and Brickbottom and the harm in splitting the area with a long, narrow maintenance yard. (Among other things, the proposed facility would sit alongside the Brickbottom Artists Buildings, a 155-unit condominium complex largely inhabited by artists, the only housing currently in the area.)

In a Sept. 12 letter to EOT, Curtatone said the city "as a matter of environmental justice" should absorb no more than a 30-car Green Line yard - the number needed for the extension - and faulted the state for failing to explain why the facility cannot be placed adjacent to or even within the commuter-rail yard.

Stern and Stephen M. Woelfel, manager of statewide transit planning, said existing facilities at Lechmere and in Newton are inadequate, and the proposed site - which would incorporate an MBTA-owned property known as Yard 8 - would be comparatively cheap and easy to develop and connect to the Green Line, they said, given a desire to adhere to the project's roughly estimated cost of $600 million.

Local officials say long-term economic benefits must also be considered. "Just because they own some land there, just because it's the cheapest and easiest fit, doesn't mean we should accept that," said state Senator Anthony D. Galluccio, a Cambridge Democrat whose district includes Inner Belt and Brickbottom.

Woelfel said the EOT has looked at more than 11 sites, adding, "We're working frantically to look at a couple of new ideas that have been floated and hopefully release that soon." Still, he said, much of the area in and around Yard 8 has been rail-owned for over a century.

But that's the point, Mackey said, with one eye on history - of transit access, transit deficits, and rail yards - and another on the future.

"Once you take a government rail-maintenance facility, you're going to live with it for 150 years," he said.