Initial estimates assess the whole project at about $3 billion. But given that the Big Dig has ballooned over budget, the costs of the urban ring could possibly end up far greater than this initial figure.
Meanwhile, the MBTA is operating in considerable debt, with one-third of its budget going to debt service, according to Glen Tepke of the Mass. Taxpayers Foundation.
“We’ll have to rely on federal dollars,” DiZoglio said.
But with the Big Dig now a four-letter word in Washington—most notably with fiscal conservative John S. McCain (R-Ariz.), the ranking Republican on the Senate committee that controls transportation funds—that money will not be easy to come by.
“It’s going to be a pretty tall order to sell this project to the feds,” Tepke said.
But supporters of the project say that plans should go ahead even if sources of funding are unclear.
“We can’t lose our nerve,” Lee said. “This is a region that has always thrived on big projects—filling in Back Bay, the construction of 128, the Big Dig. The ability to put this project in place would make [the region] all the more attractive to people who create the next century.”
Historically, the urban ring corridor has been home to working-class families and neighborhoods. The median income for the corridor is 62 percent of the median income for eastern Mass. and 40 percent of the residents minorities, Garver said.
Gentrification and potential displacement of residents should also be concerns in the urban ring discussion, said Penn Loh, a Roxbury-based environmental justice advocate.
“We need to plan with people in mind and we need to involve those people in the planning process,” Loh said.
The idea of an urban ring is not a new one. The proposed project would trace a similar past as old plans for an Inner Belt Expressway—a highway project proposed in the early 1970s that then-Governor Francis W. Sargent cancelled in 1972.
But while there has been substantial growth over the last 30 years, the transportation system has remained basically the same.
In the last 12 years, support for an urban ring has grown. This spring, the Conservation Law Foundation, an influential environmental group known for suing the state to clean up Boston Harbor, added its name to the list of supporters when it published a paper calling for the development of urban ring transit.
The Kennedy School of Government’s Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston sponsored the discussion and will publish a working paper on the urban ring proposal in the fall.
—Staff writer Stephanie M. Skier can be reached at skier@fas.harvard.edu.