Getting There

By Jane Holtz Kay

As the crow flies, it's a flap of the wings. As a human walks, it's 20 minutes. As the nation moves, it's a mile in distance. As a region thinks, it's an heroic enterprise in coordination, connection and conviction.

The 'it' is the North/South Rail Link, a silver bullet of a train route that would link Boston's great transportation void: the severed land between North and South Stations. By connecting these two transportation oases, this rail tunnel could hook the densest transportation corridor in the nation--30 million riders from Maine to Florida and a million citizens of 2lst century Boston--with a green and gilt-edged way to move.

In a city under siege burying the Central Artery, cleaning the harbor, and expanding the airport, it is hard to conceive of yet another project to streamline and update the metropolis. And, yet, after three generations of struggling, this is the season that could push forward the Little Engine That Could mend the gap and make them all worthwhile.

Today, the plan to build the last lap of the nation's most viable rail corridor still sits waiting for funding after winning authorization in Congress' new transportation (TEA-2l) bill. This fall, the long-delayed $4 million federally-financed report on the North/South Rail Link will emerge with a "go for it" label. Even now, as the jackhammers stutter and the Big Dig rattles into subterranean realms, the Central Artery project has safeguarded a slot below the highway tunnel to hold this rail route.

"It couldn't possibly be more timely," says Bob O'Brien, Move Massachusetts representative and co-chairman of the Citizens Advisory Committee reviewing the three-year study. To add technological serendipity to the prospect, tunnel boring techniques have appeared to make this visionary link both a financial possibility and plus.

This is, one should recall, not a new vision. Just after the turn of the century in 1909, Bostonians looked at the obvious: they couldn't get from north to south in one piece. Maine and North Shore travelers stopped at North Station. New York, Rhode Island, and South Shore riders were equally immobilized docking at South. The space between was a void. Train-riding, not to mention carriage-driving, car-riding, bike-riding Bostonians, struggled to remedy the roadblock.

It was no go. The taxi industry who "made good money carting baggage" between the orphaned stations combined with the northern rail lines to quash the competing New Haven Railroad's plan, historian George Sanborn recalls. So it went thereafter from the Depression on. Sparse funds, railroad rivalries and the car-based convictions of the auto age snuffed efforts.

Not much more than a decade ago, however, the logic of filling the break made its way forward as burying the Central Artery took hold of Boston's imagination. In fact, at the Big Dig's beginning, the rail tunnel, also due in 2004, was an integral part. Yet the federal government offered 90 cents on the dollar for the road, a dime for rail. The road won. The plan languished. Today, it is otherwise. As automobile traffic bloats, and commuter and national rail riders grow, the report's major investment study and environmental impact statement --sound the wake-up call.

In the Sierra Club office where the rumble of the red line below grade punctuates her conversation, Susan Hamilton compares the rail that runs along the fault line of the Big Dig to a salve on a wound. Not only nationally from the prosperous Northeast Corridor heading south, but locally, "the north-south link is a boon to all of New England to tourists as well as residents who need or want to travel without a car," she says. The link would make the hub a true hub, north to south, east to west, Cape Ann to Cape Cod, Woburn to Westwood by rail and compass points within -- satisfying airport, seaport and urban ring ambitions.

Reinforcing North and South stations plus adding a Central Station near the Aquarium, the Rail Link would strengthen the state's web of mobility, Hamilton goes on. Today, she says, you come from the North Shore, from Chelsea or Everett to a job. You dead end at North Station. You struggle from Quincy or Weymouth and are stymied at South Station. The inefficiency of multi-changes is daunting personally and expensive economically.

Is this anyway to run a railroad?

What happens with the north-south link is that you move seamlessly through the missing mile, Hamilton continues drawing her finger across the map of the metropolis. Pay the entry fee at any of the metropolis' 125-plus rail stops (16 stops in Boston alone) and you can reach the others faster, smoother, without transfers. "You just make a cross platform change." And as you do so, it profits more trains to come. "It's just kicking off frequency of service." It is an axiom. More trains, less wait. Less wait, more riders get off the road and onto rail, easing highways and congested MBTA cars alike. According to the forthcoming report, the link would relieve the roads of 24,000 drivers daily and release 45,000 seats from the T's crowded rapid transit.

In the midst of the clanking construction, advocates insist that this last ditch under the Big Dig could be the leading economic and environmental legacy of a city gouged out, carved up, scraped, displaced, and barricaded for Boston's fin de siecle future. To some of the most foresighted transportation thinkers in the region, the Rail Link is the magic bullet. To other, it still remains unseen, a "guerilla operation," in the words of John Bok who sits on the report's advisory committee. Yet on second glance, it is the most compelling transportation project of late century. "It's a great idea," says Bok. "It's time is peculiar because we've got the Central Artery. Once you look at it, though, it's so obvious."

The space saved below the Artery at a cost of $20 million is waiting, according to MBTA deputy manager Philip Puccia and the Central Artery's Michael Lewis. It represents the state's commitment, says Puccia. The new technology allows crews to excavate the dirt underground without digging more holes in the city as part of the big dig. No mess, no fuss.

More than space, statistics and sentiment have attracted a rail constituency from environmentalists concerned with the car's exactions, to urbanists eager to reduce asphalt, to transportation experts worried about congestion. "It's a very seductive project," says Bob O'Brien. "The people who get into it become converts because it tends to exceed expectations at every level. The costs move down and the benefits move up," he describes the study results. Such converts range from the 30,000 "North/South Rail Link" bumperstickers (for cars!) spread around the city to some 80 national and local environmental, public transportation, construction, and civic groups from restaurateurs and bricklayers, to chambers of commerce and Les Otten, ski resort developer.

The new energy and increased ridership of Amtrak--the arrival of its Portland train from the north late this fall and its highspeed rail to New York from the south the next--further bolster this connector. Infrastructure leader, Sen. John Chafee of Rhode Island, has given it a nod. Likewise Sen. John Kerry. So have 193 out of 200 Bay State legislators, "It's not just local. You can't accuse it of being parochial," says Rep. John Businger, chairman of the North-South Rail Link legislative caucus. "It just has layers of larger, regional benefits."

Will the state calculate those benefits? In the midst of the din of building, does the metropolis have the will to handle the trouble and the financial toll? Or will it slip into a bunker mentality and forget the vision?

The problem is, of course, the fear of cost and chaos. The Boston Business Journal calls the link an "expensive railway tunnel" but the $60 million to complete the final design/engineering process and set the pieces in place right now is not. And the final cost ranges between one and two billion over time with possibilities of private and other states' support. Compare that to l billion spent on merely modernizing Logan. With funds shared by the Northeast states and private cooperation, it's also money saved, says O'Brine. "It's self-financing." It's a trinity: money saved in land, money saved in logistics, and money in transportation.

Land savings start with 10 acres released around North Station, more in Somerville and other plots freed from rail clutter between north and south stations where trains, denied a through route, must now back in and out. Land savings include new stations creating construction sites around the rail. They also offer an environmental way out for builders now under the EPA gun to clean the air or stop projects.

"The rail link can generate money instead of using it," Peter Roudebush president of the Association for Public Transportation describes it. "We can identify 10 billion in value added and accessibility," he says. After gatherings of representatives from the Federal Reserve Bank to Salomon Smith Barney, he sees it as a means to leverage public tax dollars as in times past and Europe today. Frederick Breimyer, chief economist at the State Street Bank, shares his sense of the rail as the extension of a marketplace, "the one missing block, the keystone," to make "the hub of the universe a hub."

"Logistic" savings come when trains no longer idle or congest but move smoothly from site to site for maintenance and operations and pick up more passengers with the same fleet. They come from seamless commuter rail connections that save the MBTA pricey expansion at jammed South Station and elsewhere.

"Car cost" savings come from reducing highway funds which often absorb as much of 44 percent of road budgets for new widenings, not repairs. It means preserving our walkable centers and stopping the sprawl that congests the suburbs and fringes with cars. It means remembering Boston--and New England--as a place made to prosper around the walkable arc of the station not the sodden wasteland of the highway.

Politics, of course, remains the biggest obstacle as state officials scramble to secure money for the Central Artery. Persuading congress to hand out money to Massachusetts makes parochial politicians, MBTA officials and Central Artery bureaucrats twitch instead despite national parallels in Philadelphia, Florida and Milwaukee.

But politics is also the art of the possible. And when better than the century's turn to confront those possibilities? A last lap of rail could become millennial Boston's milestone--gliding, connecting, creating a streamlined system underground that supports the city upon a hill. To do so is no technical stunt, all agree. The space sits waiting.

Originally published in The Boston Globe, focus section, May 31, 1998.

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