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Readville residents wonder: Can an apartment complex across from a commuter-rail station really be transit-oriented?
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There are 2 stations at Readville
I can't see why Readville residents couldn't just walk to the other side of the station area and hop a Fairmont train. Yes, it is still Zone 2 (an interesting complaint by McCarthy, but since the rates are set by distance, not too much that can be done) but you're guaranteed a seat since it is the first stop.
I love my industrial spaces, and I love creating new housing in the city, so I am torn.
(note, my original subject line reflected Adam putting the wrong photo with the article.)
Depends on where they're going
The fairmount trains go to south station, but not back bay, but the Franklin and providence line trains which stop at readville go to south station and back bay. So if you get on in readville and go to back bay (which a fair number of Hyde park, Dedham and Milton residents do) you don't get a seat and if the trains are delayed (which they are more often than not these days), sometimes you can't even get on the train.
That said, it would be nice if something could get built there and the area made more pedestrian friendly land less hectic to drive through, if any, or all, of that is possible!
chicken & egg
There is a chicken and an egg problem with the service levels. If full trains mean no new riders then they will never have the impetus to add trains/frequency. Adding riders to already full trains should (in a world with competent management) change the frequency/size of trains. Did they say if they have worked with the T/Keolis about potentially improving service if the project is approved?
There's more than one project.
I think there's one right next to the Fairmount station. Given the loads from both of these projects (and future ones sure to be proposed) they will need more cars.
Those double deckers seem to give a lot of bang for the buck.
The day of an F40 pulling three dead buddliners, each with its own unique livery, is long gone.
Fairmount project's kind of small, though
27 units. I'm wondering when somebody will get the idea to put apartments on the other side of the tracks, where that condemned old factory used to be.
Lewis Chemical
Before that, a tannery. I know they did some remediation work in the eighties or nineties, but I think if you start digging for foundations you will hit a hundred years of 'really bad stuff' from the tannery days.
Not sure anyone wants to stir it up.
I understand it's set by
I understand it's set by distance, but it's frankly ridiculous that there are neighborhoods of the city of Boston paying 6$ for crappy commuter trains when far flung suburbs like Malden have real rapid transit. Especially when the MBTA justifies not providing real, reliable, and FREQUENT service to these neighborhoods by pointing at the CR. Anywhere in the city should be 1A, no exceptions.
its a bit ridiculous
to call malden 'far flung'
Using Park St as the hub of the transit system...
It gets a bit more ridculous when one considers that Malden is 4.8 miles from Park St and Readville is 8.9 miles from Park St. Arbitrary municipal bounds notwithstanding, it is Hyde Park that is the far flung suburb.
The whole conversation is
The whole conversation is ridiculous because neither is far-flung by any stretch of the term.
When can we annex everything inside of 128 and make that all Zone 1A across all modes?
It's a bit ridiculous to call
It's a bit ridiculous to call the Orange line "real rapid transit"
It's not the BTA
It's the MBTA, not the BTA. There's no logical reason against non-Boston communities paying less for rides than some Boston communities, especially if the Boston community in question is almost twice as far as Park Street Station as the non-Boston community in question.
The article mentions
that it isn't safe to walk to the Fairmont station. I'm not familiar with the area, but that certainly seems like a problem someone (cough BTD cough) should be fixing.
And the problems with Dedham just bring up ongoing issues about regional not city planning. It will never happen, as long as businesses can play towns off against each other, but it would certainly be better for most people.
The developer's traffic
The developer's traffic engineer showed a pretty good plan to address traffic and pedestrian safety around Readville station. He missed the need for a pedestrian crossing of Hyde Park Ave, but otherwise I thought it was spot on. They couldn't explain how the changes were going to get implemented (ie who pays), but the plan was good. The neighborhood booed the traffic plan, though. Presumably because adding two stoplights would ruin their lives?
I don't know this spot at all but
this seems like a perfect example of what needs to happen to move forward on untangling this Gordian knot of not enough housing, too many cars, and getting people happily and comfortably on foot or on the train. I know I join in anti-car rants here frequently but this is exactly the problem--if people don't feel safe walking to a spot ten minutes away or they have to pay $12.50 a day to get to work, who can blame them? We need some dedicated transport/planning geeks to get together on something like this and find a way to make it work.
It's industrial zoned.
Very industrial. Where the bus company is used to be the New Haven car barns. It was a huge repair facility. It was a lumber yard after that. All along the ave was industrial exposures.
Granted, no one will propose another asphalt plant, but they could.
This type of housing is the wave of the future. Energy efficient, close to transportation, it does tie it all together.
I think the big picture for the future would be to improve the commuter rail. Maybe some local trains, run the suburban, full trains to Back Bay/South Station and run local trains that start in Readville. There must be plenty of storage in the Wolcott Sq yards. I guess. Maybe longer trains with improved stations.
Now that the proposal is out there, figure out what the problems are and solve them.
And most recently, a broom company
Which is neither here nor there, but I used to like the "Atlantic Broom Co." signs. Part of the charm, right up there with the giant tire and Grandma's Coffee Cake (which has a retail outlet, which I always imagine being like the ice-cream place in Roslindale: You can't buy anything smaller than a 25-lb slab of coffee cake or something).
I could use a 25 lb slab of coffee cake right now.
That Grandma's is good stuff. Hmm. Maybe they sell like...scratch-and-dent coffee cakes.
You could make a lot friends with that slab
n/t
Grandma's
Hey! They DO sell scratch and dent cakes! They ahve some good deals there - you should check it out. One of their big customers is Henry Winkler (Fonzie).
This type of housing is the
Except for the proposal for more than more than 1.5 parking spaces for each housing unit. Cut the number of parking spaces from 400 to 240 and we're on to something.
Your comments on this article
Your comments on this article and the earlier one on the industrial character of Hyde Park Ave aren't lost on the residents. Several people spoke up that they had fought to keep that stretch zoned for light industry and want to keep it so.
Ayup!
Like the guy from CPR (Committee to Preserve Readville, I think?). Not everybody wants to work in a cube downtown.
And as mentioned last night, there are some projects coming in - the M.S. Walker liquor facility at the old Stop&Shop property (in another one of those stupid Dedham/Boston things - the facility sits in Dedham, so they get all the tax money, minus the tax break they gave Walker, even though all the traffic will come through Boston), and the Readville Yards project aimed at small, "maker" companies down past the train station.
In my notes, it was "Citizens
In my notes, it was "Citizens for the Protection of Readville," but Google has no results for that, so I'm probably wrong.
CPR
Committee for the Preservation of Readville, I think.
Put 'em all together, and you
Put 'em all together, and you get "citizens for the preservation of readville," which DOES have some Google results.
Committee...
...does show up in stuff from 2009, but later references favor Citizens.
You are correct in saying
You are correct in saying that the residents of Readville want to keep this parcel as a light industrial zone. This proposal with the apartment complex is totally unreasonable and unsafe for the residents of Readville.
Why unsafe?
Not sure I get it--why would an apartment building make anyone unsafe?
When did Kurt Russell join a
When did Kurt Russell join a barber shop quartet, for Chrissakes???
McCarthy on traffic
Since he is up for reelection is would be great if he could make traffic in his district a main item!
Transit Pricing
This got me thinking of transit pricing, don't we have it backwards?
Shouldn't the pricing in the city core be 6.25, and the pricing at the edges be cheapest to influence people to use it more for what it's best at, moving people from the edges to the city core? High pricing in the core likewise might make some people think twice and you know, walk instead of using their connection from park state street, to park street, to DTX and clogging up the major connections.
Maybe someone more transit oriented can say why this is a bad idea. Seems to me in conjunction with congestion pricing, it be smaht.
Interesting idea.
Though I'm still staggered--$2.10 to $6.25 seems like a crazy leap--where's the intermediate $4 fare zone?
"where's the intermediate $4 fare zone?"
Hop a conrail off Truman Highway.
Ya, I know...it's a 'parkway'. But that is a crazy leap.
uh...
One issue that would create is that the people who use use the most of the service then pay the least to do so.
And wouldn't that encourage sprawl as well by rewarding people who move out to the outer 'burbs?
Is sprawl a problem in Boston's case?
With Boston's issue with affordable housing, I would think getting people to move farther out would help alleviate some of the pressure in high density areas. I could see it being problematic if these people commuted with cars but if they were mostly coming through on public transportation wouldn't create as much of a negative impact.
But how do they get to work?
That was the issue that struck me last night (obviously, since I went with a headline that on its face sounds absurd).
Hyde Park, parts of Roslindale and much of West Roxbury are pretty sprawly when compared to other parts of the city. And as we saw last night, people out this way can have issues with public transportation - even when there's a train station right there, possibly enough to get them into their cars, which, of course, defeats the purpose of transit-oriented development.
At the margins, commuter rail
At the margins, commuter rail is effectively priced like that. From Newtonville, it costs $5.75 to go to Yawkey/Back Bay/South Station and... $5.75 to go to Worcester. Within 1A, you have the $2.10 fare, but that's as much because the 1A stops are viable destinations for commuters/students from the suburbs or places where you can change to subway.
Readville could be rezoned to 1A if Franklin Line and Providence/Stoughton Line trains no longer stopped there (leaving just Fairmount service); or at least stopped only to handle transfers to/from the Fairmount line. Inner stops on long commuter lines are pricey because they decrease the value of the service to the longer-distance (and thus more valuable) riders in two ways: coming out of Boston, they make it harder for the long-distance riders to get seats and in both directions, the very fact that they're stopping at Readville adds about 90 seconds to the train's time. Essentially, every n passengers to/from Readville (especially if they're from/to Back Bay or South Station; reversed traffic is somewhat different) means one fewer passenger past 128/495.
Of course, if the buses and commuter rail were better integrated with transfers and scheduling/dispatching, taking a bus to a 1A commuter rail station would be viable. That sort of integration is just a management and/or software problem: it should be easier to fix than something that requires steel/concrete, but the MBTA isn't much/any better at fixing management/software than steel/concrete...
NO
Shouldn't the pricing in the city core be 6.25, and the pricing at the edges be cheapest to influence people to use it more for what it's best at, moving people from the edges to the city core?
Most particularly in the core, you want people to use transit rather than drive or take taxis/Uber/Lyft in order to relieve automobile congestion on downtown streets. (For that reason, it is sometimes argued by transit experts that transit should be entirely free in the core, although that is unlikely to happen for a bunch of reasons.)
To the extent that trains are crowded in the core, the cause isn't congestion -- too many trains, not enough rail -- but not enough trains.
The T could implement
The T could implement congestion (rush hour) pricing to alleviate crowding and raise more revenue. The DC Metro uses congestion pricing.
We have a serious housing
We have a serious housing shortage.
We should be building 3- to 5-story apartment buildings like crazy. That's the only way to keep rents from spiraling out of control.
The best place to build these buildings is near transit stations and neighborhood downtowns. A commuter rail station isn't a perfect spot, due to the terrible schedule and high fares. But it's better than giant apartment complex in the woods a mile from a Route 128 exit, where everyone will have to get in a car just to leave the property.