It’s a familiar story in Boston. It’s 5:15 p.m. on a Wednesday and you’re at Copley station. You wait for a train, craning your neck to peer down the tracks at any hint of headlights or a whistle. Your heart skips a beat as a train pulls into the station. It sinks when it is not the line you need to get home.
Rinse, repeat.
Avoiding the mess that is rush hour between Kenmore and Park Street on the Green Line is, for many, the stuff of dreams, but a plan long in the works by Wentworth Institute of Technology students Brendan Cioto, Cody Gibb, Cody Palmer, Kirsten Wilde, Susana Vasquez and led by James Lambrechts, associate professor of civil engineering and technology at Wentworth, might be able to turn the Boston commuter’s fantasy into reality.
“We want to get people into Boston better and faster,” said Cioto, the project’s student leader who will graduate this summer with a Bachelor’s of Science and Civil Engineering and is headed to U.C. Berkeley to begin a graduate program in civil engineering this fall.
The solution? Add Blue Line train service parallel to the Green Line in the most problematic areas, knock out the D Line and extend Blue Line service west to Riverside.
“We saw an opportunity to create redundancy (a benchmark of transportation efficiency) in the system,” said Lambrechts.
Despite previous expansions, the center of the Green Line (represented by the black oval in the screenshots, below) remains a – congested – point of contention.
Two weeks ago Cioto, Lambrechts, Gibb, Palmer, Wilde and Vasquez met with the Department of Transportation and Hatch Mont MacDonald, a consulting engineering firm, to discuss the logistics of extending the Blue Line to Riverside and cost estimates.
Today, the Wentworth team met with Young Professionals in Transportation, a group of local transportation, civil engineering, urban development and land planning professionals, at 60 Temple Place to discuss their Blue Line to Riverside plan in detail, answer questions and have a discussion about the potential and pitfalls to the plan.
“Whenever people see a big project they think, ‘Oh, another Big Dig.’ This won’t be the Big Dig,” Cioto said.
It will, however, be expensive.
Hatch Mott MacDonald priced the 3.5 miles of Blue Line extension tunnel at $13,000/foot, or $600 million for the tunnels. New stations rang in at $1.5 billion. The total price tag, including the engineering fees, would come to $3.3 billion.
But one-third of that budget has already been allocated to other MBTA projects that this could take the place of, Lambrechts said. “The state house says ‘well, why should we do this instead of the other projects?’ and I say ‘because this one makes the most sense.’”
And not all funding would necessarily have to come from the state.
With Mohegan Sun opening a new casino in Revere, a destination reached by public transportation only on the Blue Line, it might interest the company to consider investing in a project that would create a main line from downtown Boston to their slot machines, Cioto said. Logan Airport and MassPort could also benefit from this sort of expansion.
“We’re inching along… we need to get [the plan] out there,” said Lambrechts.
Last August the group left a meeting with the MBTA with no promises but directions to go promote the Blue Line extension project and see what turns up. Today’s meeting is one of many the group hopes to have with community members and transportation advocacy groups in coming months.
