We had a town fight over a new library that I think illustrates a fundamental tension, at least in MA public projects.
- The town got a state grant to help build a new library - most of it would be other people's money.
- The town could have used a new library - the old one was small, cramped for its basic purposes, and underutilized compared to neighboring towns.
- The new plan was _beautiful_ - and expensive! It would still require a non-trivial amount of our money, partly because of how big the scope was. It was "future proofed" - we'd never need a new library again.
Since we're a town and not a city, this was the subject of a town meeting, in which there were two sides:
- People who didn't want the library because they didn't want to spend money. Their view was that the current library was totally fine, so they'd rather not pay higher taxes.
- People who wanted the new library. Their view was that the cost was small compared to the benefit.
These two groups were disjoint, and I think that's also how a project like GLX can get off the rails.
The people who want beautiful stations and bike paths are probably not fiscal hawks. They're not super concerned about the price - MA is already an expensive blue state, we all knew that coming in, and it's important to have nice public infrastructure.
The people who don't want to pay don't want to pay _anything_. They're not super concerned about the benefit, the whole project can be canceled and that's even more winning because it's even less money spent. MA is already an expensive blue state, so the right thing is to oppose everything.
The problem we have is that there's no overlap - there's no one going "yes we really should do the GLX, but also I really don't want my taxes to go up, so can we cut GLX to something minimal and not keep adding to it"?
The political constituency in MA who would say "this is too expensive" isn't necessarily motivated to show up and try to make the GLX a better value by proposing more cost-efficient changes along the way - they're motivated to try to get the thing canceled, or ignore it in the hope that it topples under its own weight.
If SFMTA has taught me anything, it’s that elevators and escalators will inevitably be broken half the time, and should only be integrated into a design when absolutely necessary. Nominal ADA compliance is asymptotic to *actual* ADA compliance.
In the Union Square example you cite (requiring elevators instead of ramps) the inevitable long-term effect is to render these stations unreliable for people who cannot use stairs (folks in wheelchairs, etc) and force them into navigating a Swiss cheese system of “which elevators aren’t working today?” where they have to travel to additional redundant stops or bus lines and then circle back to their intended destination.
This is the kind of shit that just makes me nuts. How do you tell a small-government person that "no really, government isn't inefficient!" when this kind of waste is happening? It's maddening. What are we doing?
I lived blocks from the future Union Square station on the GLX for 10 years and was on the Mayor of Somerville's committee to advise on development related to it, and a co-founder of a Neighborhood Council for the neighborhood to hand that work off to. Your choice of Union Square, in particularly, is a poor one.
In Brookline, per your example, Boston's existing Green Line trams run at grade as basically another, physically protected two lanes of traffic. The stops are close together. It acts as a bus that later goes underground and integrates with a subway system.
The GLX, however, is being constructed 100 below grade, in an uncovered below grade "deep ditch" route used by the MBTA's commuter rail. The "ditch" is being widened in places, the bridges exapnded / reinforced / replaced as needed, and the commuter rail tracks must be lifted from the center position and put on one side to accommodate the laying of the GLX tracks. This whole system is "above ground", but in a cut below grade.
This means, though, that the major commercial centers through which the GLX cuts have artificial hills built 100 years ago that cross up and over the grade. Sometimes that is just 1 road that makes the "hop" but in Union Square it's two that cross each other in an "X" at the apex of the "fake hill". The gradient on these roads are quite steep since they were built prior to the ADA, and they are on bridges that are the property of a state agency outside of the MBTA and the City of Somerville. They get icy. It gets dicey.
The purpose of the more complicated stations what to allow passengers to get to grade at the top of the hill and/or provide more direct access to the south side of the tracks. Currently the only entrance/exit, regardless of whether you are going inbound or outbound, will be on the north side of the tracks.
This is all important because this station abuts three major neighborhoods: Somerville's Union Square, which has direct access because it is to the north, and Somerville's Boynton Yards, where there are already a number of new lab and office buildings underway, and Cambridge's Inman Square which abuts Kendall Square, which is world famous for the amount of health science companies it houses.
The life science corridor from Kendall is reaching very quickly towards Union Square, but it is now basically cut off from this station from the south. The only route requires a person coming from the south, if they were standing within yards of the station, to walk up and over the significant grade and the once at level grade at the next intersection (well past the station) to double back. Total extra distance is about 0.4 miles.
This is a usability killer for transit. The jobs are there and more are coming. More workers for them are moving to these neighborhoods every day. Will they bring their cars? That depends on wither developers overbuild the parking. And at this point, the developers see these details and want to include more spaces in their plans to be able to entice new residents. The developers want to provide spaces because they fear residents will demand it. The people then bring/get/use cares because they get free parking. It's a bad cycle.
And although Union Square is the most glaring example of this, there are similarities within other stations on the GLX.
Believe me, I was among those arguing to abandon the stations if that was what it took to get the GLX. But these are not just "fancy stations". They have a point.
The real culprit is that 20+ years ago the MBTA was cut, and as a result unexperienced novices were left in charge of procurement for the project and got rolled. Because it was a project based on establishing equity for Somerville, which bore the traffic brunt of the Big Dig's driving expansion and used to be majority minority, Deval Patrick basically wrote a blank check because he was dedicated to get it done. A perfect storm!
Even once the fancy stations were removed the budget was still insane and many of use feared the project would STILL be killed. What saved it was having the whole enterprise re-bid. And my then, so much nonsense was baked in because construction was already in progress, that the only options left to significantly reduce costs were those elements that come at the very end of the project and therefore had not started yet. The stations were the biggest piece of this, and the most visible (so that the current governor, GOP Charlie Baker, could show that they were "doing something". In reality, the stations are a sacrificial lamb here. Don't blame them. It's not fair.
Your photos of the Brookline/Newton stations are even being too generous. most of the surface stops, especially along B and C lines, have no structure whatsoever, just a sign where the T stops and opens its doors. You pay on board. The huts are already for fancy major stops!
Great piece. Transit authorities seem to want to build stations that look like airports. But the nature of airports is that people spend a lot of time there, hours, sometimes many hours. People generally spend no more than a few minutes in a transit station. If they don’t have a place to sit or there isn’t much shelter, it jut doesn’t matter.
I think the emergence of Urbanism as a "prestige hobby" creates a kind of conceptual inflation as well. Too much brainpower chasing too little real need. Its not clear the consultant grifting would find so much purchase were there not such an intellectual market for it
I can compare the stations of the subway systems of Lisbon, Amsterdam and Berlin from when I lived there. Lisbon and Amsterdam have small subways with large to very large stations, especially newer ones, while Berlin has a large subway system with frequent and small stations without centralised entrances, automatic gates or even ticket selling machines in most of them.
It is not just that small stations are easier to build and you can build more of them with the same budget, it’s also that small stations are much more ergonomic. Large stations create unnecessary commute time inside the station, the time wasted going through the station paired with the fact that larger stations are always further apart, means that an Uber/taxi ride is much more appealing in Lisbon and Amsterdam than in Berlin.
Transit attractiveness varies wildly based on journey time, the size and complexity of a station can increase that time by a lot in short trips or longer trips when you need to switch lines.
I must say that as someone who lives around the corner from one of the new Green Line station, I liked the nicer ones better and think they would have been worth it. But your essential point surely remains: Given a political reality that won’t raise taxes to fund high quality infrastructure, I’m much happier with stripped-down stations than I would have been with the project’s cancellation.
Your point about the contractors and such still being able to do (and charge for) the same amount of work if there's less grift involved is powerful.
Your final point about "what are we doing here?" also basically haunts me. When the politicians and unions treat transit like a way to make visual statements or like a jobs program, everyone who actually relies on transit to get places suffers, and it's awful.
The 86th St station in NYC, part brutalist airport & Chuck Close exhibition, is perhaps my favorite public space in the city. And a perfect example of everything wrong with our transit spend for the reasons outlined.
Never thought I’d see a DC-based political journalist write about the little hut at the Newton Centre T stop. Very cool! There is something nice about that station where you basically just walk right up to the train (its outdoors, not far below street level, and no turn-styles). It’s very well integrated into the surrounding environment, as opposed to “you are now the entering the train station” kind of vibe (especially at the DC metro stations). Would be cool if that’s replicated in Union Square, etc.
I do think that things like bike parking, and even public bathrooms (cities just need more in general) are nice to have from a customer experience standpoint. But I imagine those aren’t the most expensive part of the plans. If the goal is to get people out of their cars, planning these stations needs to have a “human-centered design” component where it is simple and seamless to use. It sounds fancy and consultant-y, but that could mean a lot of really cheap design tweaks or actually simplifying the design of the station.
My guess is that American planners (outside NYC) feel that each time they build a new rail station they need to “sell it” to people in the area to convince them it’s a better way to travel than what they did before (usually cars). It would make more sense to just focus on putting it in a good location and making the trains run on time and frequently. But certain design tweaks — like secure bike parking or protection from bad weather — could outweigh their cost by attracting more loyal riders. I don’t think a fancy mezzanine is going to pay for itself by attracting more loyal riders.
How do you disincentivize dumb? What’s the oversight mechanism/feedback loop to get this under control? If we just rely on the self awareness of individual bureaucrats then we may as well call it quits.
Any structural ideas here?
Asking for a friend who is horrified by the $29 billion gateway proposal.
John Hickenlooper was one of the few people, briefly in the national spotlight, emphasizing government efficiency and service quality as a core agenda: https://durangoherald.com/articles/166290
I am not saying he's the guy to do it. I am just shocked this mantle hasn't been taken up by more candidates. It seems like catnip for the theoretical swing voter. Gettable voters are most likely less ideological and more focused on results.
Every issue in this category is a layup. Nobody was ever opposed to getting more for less. Nobody ever protested improved quality in government services. On the contrary, it's praised as quite an anomaly. Large stations seem like an obvious box to check.
Matt, you make the offhand comment that above ground light rail is not that different from busing, and that the stations are not that different from bus stations...remind me why we're building all of this rail service that is functionally the same as a bus but drastically more costly and less flexible? Do you have any insight into why bureaucrats have this weird rails fetish? Buses are the unloved step-child in every city's mass transit system.
Freeman Dyson wrote an essay relevant to your excellent point. While mentioning a wide range of stupid "cadillac choices," he focused on an African water project that required a choice a simple-and-cheap option and a complex-and-very expensive option. The latter was chosen, to a predictable catastrophic end. Dyson concluded that the politician making the choice was more concerned about increasing his prestige than about providing convenient safe water.
We had a town fight over a new library that I think illustrates a fundamental tension, at least in MA public projects.
- The town got a state grant to help build a new library - most of it would be other people's money.
- The town could have used a new library - the old one was small, cramped for its basic purposes, and underutilized compared to neighboring towns.
- The new plan was _beautiful_ - and expensive! It would still require a non-trivial amount of our money, partly because of how big the scope was. It was "future proofed" - we'd never need a new library again.
Since we're a town and not a city, this was the subject of a town meeting, in which there were two sides:
- People who didn't want the library because they didn't want to spend money. Their view was that the current library was totally fine, so they'd rather not pay higher taxes.
- People who wanted the new library. Their view was that the cost was small compared to the benefit.
These two groups were disjoint, and I think that's also how a project like GLX can get off the rails.
The people who want beautiful stations and bike paths are probably not fiscal hawks. They're not super concerned about the price - MA is already an expensive blue state, we all knew that coming in, and it's important to have nice public infrastructure.
The people who don't want to pay don't want to pay _anything_. They're not super concerned about the benefit, the whole project can be canceled and that's even more winning because it's even less money spent. MA is already an expensive blue state, so the right thing is to oppose everything.
The problem we have is that there's no overlap - there's no one going "yes we really should do the GLX, but also I really don't want my taxes to go up, so can we cut GLX to something minimal and not keep adding to it"?
The political constituency in MA who would say "this is too expensive" isn't necessarily motivated to show up and try to make the GLX a better value by proposing more cost-efficient changes along the way - they're motivated to try to get the thing canceled, or ignore it in the hope that it topples under its own weight.
If SFMTA has taught me anything, it’s that elevators and escalators will inevitably be broken half the time, and should only be integrated into a design when absolutely necessary. Nominal ADA compliance is asymptotic to *actual* ADA compliance.
In the Union Square example you cite (requiring elevators instead of ramps) the inevitable long-term effect is to render these stations unreliable for people who cannot use stairs (folks in wheelchairs, etc) and force them into navigating a Swiss cheese system of “which elevators aren’t working today?” where they have to travel to additional redundant stops or bus lines and then circle back to their intended destination.
This is the kind of shit that just makes me nuts. How do you tell a small-government person that "no really, government isn't inefficient!" when this kind of waste is happening? It's maddening. What are we doing?
I lived blocks from the future Union Square station on the GLX for 10 years and was on the Mayor of Somerville's committee to advise on development related to it, and a co-founder of a Neighborhood Council for the neighborhood to hand that work off to. Your choice of Union Square, in particularly, is a poor one.
In Brookline, per your example, Boston's existing Green Line trams run at grade as basically another, physically protected two lanes of traffic. The stops are close together. It acts as a bus that later goes underground and integrates with a subway system.
The GLX, however, is being constructed 100 below grade, in an uncovered below grade "deep ditch" route used by the MBTA's commuter rail. The "ditch" is being widened in places, the bridges exapnded / reinforced / replaced as needed, and the commuter rail tracks must be lifted from the center position and put on one side to accommodate the laying of the GLX tracks. This whole system is "above ground", but in a cut below grade.
This means, though, that the major commercial centers through which the GLX cuts have artificial hills built 100 years ago that cross up and over the grade. Sometimes that is just 1 road that makes the "hop" but in Union Square it's two that cross each other in an "X" at the apex of the "fake hill". The gradient on these roads are quite steep since they were built prior to the ADA, and they are on bridges that are the property of a state agency outside of the MBTA and the City of Somerville. They get icy. It gets dicey.
The purpose of the more complicated stations what to allow passengers to get to grade at the top of the hill and/or provide more direct access to the south side of the tracks. Currently the only entrance/exit, regardless of whether you are going inbound or outbound, will be on the north side of the tracks.
This is all important because this station abuts three major neighborhoods: Somerville's Union Square, which has direct access because it is to the north, and Somerville's Boynton Yards, where there are already a number of new lab and office buildings underway, and Cambridge's Inman Square which abuts Kendall Square, which is world famous for the amount of health science companies it houses.
The life science corridor from Kendall is reaching very quickly towards Union Square, but it is now basically cut off from this station from the south. The only route requires a person coming from the south, if they were standing within yards of the station, to walk up and over the significant grade and the once at level grade at the next intersection (well past the station) to double back. Total extra distance is about 0.4 miles.
This is a usability killer for transit. The jobs are there and more are coming. More workers for them are moving to these neighborhoods every day. Will they bring their cars? That depends on wither developers overbuild the parking. And at this point, the developers see these details and want to include more spaces in their plans to be able to entice new residents. The developers want to provide spaces because they fear residents will demand it. The people then bring/get/use cares because they get free parking. It's a bad cycle.
And although Union Square is the most glaring example of this, there are similarities within other stations on the GLX.
Believe me, I was among those arguing to abandon the stations if that was what it took to get the GLX. But these are not just "fancy stations". They have a point.
The real culprit is that 20+ years ago the MBTA was cut, and as a result unexperienced novices were left in charge of procurement for the project and got rolled. Because it was a project based on establishing equity for Somerville, which bore the traffic brunt of the Big Dig's driving expansion and used to be majority minority, Deval Patrick basically wrote a blank check because he was dedicated to get it done. A perfect storm!
Even once the fancy stations were removed the budget was still insane and many of use feared the project would STILL be killed. What saved it was having the whole enterprise re-bid. And my then, so much nonsense was baked in because construction was already in progress, that the only options left to significantly reduce costs were those elements that come at the very end of the project and therefore had not started yet. The stations were the biggest piece of this, and the most visible (so that the current governor, GOP Charlie Baker, could show that they were "doing something". In reality, the stations are a sacrificial lamb here. Don't blame them. It's not fair.
Your photos of the Brookline/Newton stations are even being too generous. most of the surface stops, especially along B and C lines, have no structure whatsoever, just a sign where the T stops and opens its doors. You pay on board. The huts are already for fancy major stops!
Great piece. Transit authorities seem to want to build stations that look like airports. But the nature of airports is that people spend a lot of time there, hours, sometimes many hours. People generally spend no more than a few minutes in a transit station. If they don’t have a place to sit or there isn’t much shelter, it jut doesn’t matter.
I think the emergence of Urbanism as a "prestige hobby" creates a kind of conceptual inflation as well. Too much brainpower chasing too little real need. Its not clear the consultant grifting would find so much purchase were there not such an intellectual market for it
I can compare the stations of the subway systems of Lisbon, Amsterdam and Berlin from when I lived there. Lisbon and Amsterdam have small subways with large to very large stations, especially newer ones, while Berlin has a large subway system with frequent and small stations without centralised entrances, automatic gates or even ticket selling machines in most of them.
It is not just that small stations are easier to build and you can build more of them with the same budget, it’s also that small stations are much more ergonomic. Large stations create unnecessary commute time inside the station, the time wasted going through the station paired with the fact that larger stations are always further apart, means that an Uber/taxi ride is much more appealing in Lisbon and Amsterdam than in Berlin.
Transit attractiveness varies wildly based on journey time, the size and complexity of a station can increase that time by a lot in short trips or longer trips when you need to switch lines.
I must say that as someone who lives around the corner from one of the new Green Line station, I liked the nicer ones better and think they would have been worth it. But your essential point surely remains: Given a political reality that won’t raise taxes to fund high quality infrastructure, I’m much happier with stripped-down stations than I would have been with the project’s cancellation.
Your point about the contractors and such still being able to do (and charge for) the same amount of work if there's less grift involved is powerful.
Your final point about "what are we doing here?" also basically haunts me. When the politicians and unions treat transit like a way to make visual statements or like a jobs program, everyone who actually relies on transit to get places suffers, and it's awful.
The 86th St station in NYC, part brutalist airport & Chuck Close exhibition, is perhaps my favorite public space in the city. And a perfect example of everything wrong with our transit spend for the reasons outlined.
Never thought I’d see a DC-based political journalist write about the little hut at the Newton Centre T stop. Very cool! There is something nice about that station where you basically just walk right up to the train (its outdoors, not far below street level, and no turn-styles). It’s very well integrated into the surrounding environment, as opposed to “you are now the entering the train station” kind of vibe (especially at the DC metro stations). Would be cool if that’s replicated in Union Square, etc.
I do think that things like bike parking, and even public bathrooms (cities just need more in general) are nice to have from a customer experience standpoint. But I imagine those aren’t the most expensive part of the plans. If the goal is to get people out of their cars, planning these stations needs to have a “human-centered design” component where it is simple and seamless to use. It sounds fancy and consultant-y, but that could mean a lot of really cheap design tweaks or actually simplifying the design of the station.
My guess is that American planners (outside NYC) feel that each time they build a new rail station they need to “sell it” to people in the area to convince them it’s a better way to travel than what they did before (usually cars). It would make more sense to just focus on putting it in a good location and making the trains run on time and frequently. But certain design tweaks — like secure bike parking or protection from bad weather — could outweigh their cost by attracting more loyal riders. I don’t think a fancy mezzanine is going to pay for itself by attracting more loyal riders.
How do you disincentivize dumb? What’s the oversight mechanism/feedback loop to get this under control? If we just rely on the self awareness of individual bureaucrats then we may as well call it quits.
Any structural ideas here?
Asking for a friend who is horrified by the $29 billion gateway proposal.
John Hickenlooper was one of the few people, briefly in the national spotlight, emphasizing government efficiency and service quality as a core agenda: https://durangoherald.com/articles/166290
I am not saying he's the guy to do it. I am just shocked this mantle hasn't been taken up by more candidates. It seems like catnip for the theoretical swing voter. Gettable voters are most likely less ideological and more focused on results.
Every issue in this category is a layup. Nobody was ever opposed to getting more for less. Nobody ever protested improved quality in government services. On the contrary, it's praised as quite an anomaly. Large stations seem like an obvious box to check.
Matt, you make the offhand comment that above ground light rail is not that different from busing, and that the stations are not that different from bus stations...remind me why we're building all of this rail service that is functionally the same as a bus but drastically more costly and less flexible? Do you have any insight into why bureaucrats have this weird rails fetish? Buses are the unloved step-child in every city's mass transit system.
Freeman Dyson wrote an essay relevant to your excellent point. While mentioning a wide range of stupid "cadillac choices," he focused on an African water project that required a choice a simple-and-cheap option and a complex-and-very expensive option. The latter was chosen, to a predictable catastrophic end. Dyson concluded that the politician making the choice was more concerned about increasing his prestige than about providing convenient safe water.