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After a decade of halting progress and disagreements over the design of a $2 billion infrastructure project in Allston, a coalition of government officials and advocates tasked with finalizing the proposal is under pressure to do so over the next year, or risk losing their federal funding.
But a recent switch-up by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, which oversees the project, has embroiled that coalition in fighting.
With little time to lose, many key players in the project are up in arms over a plan to effectively add a holding yard for trains onto the final project, which is meant to realign the Massachusetts Turnpike and create a new neighborhood inside Allston. Last March, the project received $335 million in federal funding, but the grant comes with a deadline in late 2026 to spend the funds.
“The clock is ticking on this federal grant, which has some specific deadlines to keep the money,” said Harry Mattison, a member of the I-90 project’s Rail and Transit Working Group.
The train layover plan was added to the Allston I-90 Multimodal Project in December and will serve Amtrak and MBTA trains. But it was widely condemned by nearly every other party to the project at the time, with activists arguing it undermined the spirit of creating a more liveable and environmentally-friendly neighborhood by introducing air and noise pollution.
At a MassDOT meeting late in January, the scope of the problem only grew when Harvard appeared to subtly threaten its funding to the West Station part of the project.
“Harvard did increase our funding commitment for West Station from $58 million to $90 million,” Harvard’s senior manager for transportation Albert Ng said. But that is “really contingent upon layover being removed from Beacon Park Yards.”
“We would love not to have train layover yards there,” said Barbara M. Parmenter, a member of the Harvard Allston Task Force, “So we’re united on that point.”
The tensions running in the meeting came to the surface when a government-hired consultant on the project cursed at Mattison as he grilled officials there on the need for the layover and a lack of progress on the final design. MassDOT has since removed that consultant from the project.
Allston Civic Association President Anthony P. D’Isidoro said that “the activists, the community, Harvard, the Mayor’s Office” were “all in agreement that we do not want a layover yard in Beacon Park Yards.”
Such agreement over the project design has been rare, he said: “It doesn’t happen often.”
In a statement to The Crimson, a MassDOT spokesperson appeared to leave the door open to scrapping the layover. The agency “remains committed to working with all project partners and the community,” she wrote, adding that it will “continue to gather feedback from partners and the public and remain open to exploring potential design changes.”
The addition of the train layover has proved even more frustrating to activists because the state previously appeared to promise that it would not be including one in the final proposal. Last April, Massachusetts transportation secretary Monica Tibbits-Nutt told an advocacy group that the layover “will go away.”
Boston City Councilor Elizabeth A. Breadon, who represents Allston, criticized the layover in a statemnet.
“If finalized, this will have serious negative environmental impacts on the Allston neighborhood and will significantly reduce the amount of land that can be used to create much-needed transit-oriented housing,” Breadon wrote.
Several neighborhood activists who said they had been part of an earlier meeting with Governor Maura T. Healey ’92 wrote a follow-up letter this week criticizing the state’s commitment to the layover plan.
“Our understanding of the outcome of this discussion on December 9th, which was underlined in that meeting by Mayor Wu and Majority Leader Moran, was that you supported our request to study a no-layover, no-bypass alternative,” D’Isidoro, Mattison, Galen Mook, and Jessica Robertson wrote.
“Unfortunately, MassDOT is only advancing a single design which includes both layover and bypass tracks,” the four continued. “MassDOT most recently confirmed this at the January 31 Allston I-90 Rail and Transit Working Group meeting, eliciting objections from Allston residents, Harvard University, the Conservation Law Foundation, A Better City, the City of Boston, and other stakeholders.”
—Staff writer Angelina J. Parker can be reached at angelina.parker@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @angelinajparker.
—Staff writer Emily T. Schwartz can be reached at emily.schwartz@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @EmilySchwartz37.
