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SkiingAway t1_j8n3u1w wrote

Reply to comment by Stronkowski in Most towns are going along with the state’s new multifamily housing law. Not Middleborough. by TouchDownBurrito

No, you're not understanding the situation, and Boston.com's description is wildly misleading.

Middleborough is entirely in the right to be furious with the state. The state built a MBTA station in 1997. Middleborough did exactly what the state wants them to do - built a significant cluster of higher density transit oriented development in walking distance from the station, built a big park + ride lot, and did solid ridership numbers.

Now the state, for their idiotic South Coast Rail Phase I plan (SCR could be useful, but not this plan), is closing the station and moving it to somewhere else that's not walking distance from any of that existing housing/where they'd been building.

Middleborough is not upset about having a train station, Middleborough is upset about doing the right thing and getting royally fucked by the state for it. Now they've got a pile of apartments with unhappy developers/owners that are vastly less attractive and the new station location will be far more challenging/disruptive to develop around.

All for a plan that's an idiotic waste of money and will not provide them any benefits.

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homeostasis3434 t1_j8najrw wrote

Looks like you're right

https://www.mass.gov/service-details/south-coast-rail-project-corridor-maps

The map shows the current line ends in Middleborough. Google maps shows the town does indeed have a large commuter lot, and a fair bit of apartments/townhomes immediately adjacent to the current station.

Now, the state is proposing to move the station to a junction about a mile north so it ties into the line in Taunton.

Honestly I get the frustration on the towns part but in the grand scheme of things, the new line with provide services to tens of thousand of people as opposed to a few hundred that might live in those apartments.

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SkiingAway t1_j8ng4ky wrote

The new line is the typical MA thing of spending 75% of the money of doing it right, to get 25% of the value of doing it right. And likely poisoning the well for ever doing it right.

It's going to be an incredibly long ride, service levels are shit, and the routing/scheduling requires a ton of wishful thinking to think it's not going to collapse the entire Old Colony lines into delays in reality - since, among other problems, they have single-track chokepoints and the proposed schedule basically requires everything to be perfectly on time to not have cascading delays. Good luck with that.

And for the limited service they're going to run - they really ought to have picked just one endpoint for now rather than splitting frequencies by branching. One big city with tolerable service > 2 with shit service.

The "full-build"/Phase II (PDF warning) - which would go to Stoughton and inbound from there, is a fine enough concept and could be a useful service. This half-assed one is not. And when the ridership is utter shit, it's going to kill the chances of actually finishing the project properly.

What should be happening is building SCR to Stoughton from day 1 and extending the Middleborough line to Buzzards Bay - with a couple a day over the bridge like the Cape Flyer does seasonally. That would actually be useful and effective. This is not.

Anyway, back on topic.

Middleborough can't even plan for developing at the new station either, because if the full-build/"Phase II" gets built, they'll likely switch back to the old (current) station site instead and the new station will be abandoned. If they actually follow the rules and rezone around the new station....they're risking creating this whole situation again in 10 years for a different set of lied-to people.

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RailRoad_Candy t1_j8nomer wrote

So you're saying Andrew Brinker of The Boston Globe wrote a hit piece. Imagine going through life as a political puppet...yeesh.

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alkdfjkl t1_j8nzo7u wrote

The South Coast Rail plan is super dumb. No arguments there. But the town just has to change zoning near the station to comply this the law. It's up to private developers/builders to decide whether they actually want to build or not.

Where does the "Asking us to add another 1,500 units, essentially double what we’ve built recently, is absurd,” come from?

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