Transpostructure

Thursday, October 9, 2008

The meeting was at the Hynes auditorium (well, that's what everybody calls it), which Back Bay Association president Meg Mainzer-Cohen called "the jewel that brings a lot of business into Boston."

And, as nice as the new Boston Convention & Exhibition Center on the South Boston Waterfront is, the Hynes is one of those rare buildings government has built in recent decades that you can admire architecturally.

The Back Bay Association, which has represented business in the district since 1923, invited Cohen to talk about all the issues he's wrestling with in transportation, from a lack of money to the Turnpike's challenges to the MBTA -- which thanks to high gas prices has a lot of riders, but which the riders of course pay only about a third of what it costs to operate.

Talked about mixed blessings.

Cohen recalled the days when he was a journalist in Boston, and the early-1980s comprehensive piece he did for Boston Magazine on Copley Place. That complex development, groundbreaking for "air rights" construction over the Turnpike, makes for a fascinating story, and Cohen told it well.

"I didn't get paid a lot of money for it. That was a labor of love. It was a fun piece to work on," he said.

Having later gone into transportation and worked at the MBTA and in New York, he now runs the transportation show in Massachusetts for Gov. Patrick. He gets paid a lot more, but then he's got almost insurmountable problems to solve too.

He started with the good news. "We are blessed with an extraordinary transportation infrastructure here in the City of Boston. I've worked in New York and Philadelphia, and we are every bit as competitive," he said, though our systems are smaller in scale.

The Central Artery project has become a symbol of mismanagement, and "in my view an embarrassment," he said. "But it has opened up the waterfront in ways that are astonishing."

The state has reached a final Big Dig closeout plan with the federal government, winding down the contracts. "We have a settlement with Bechtel Parsons that is going to give us money to go back and do the remediation program," he said.

"We have a lot more to do to fix that project."

MBTA ridership, a barometer of economic activity, is "going through the roof," Cohen said. The T is dealing with these capacity issues and trying to speed up the purchase of new trains.

Logan airport had 28 million passengers in 2007, Cohen said, a record, and back to pre-9/11 levels. There were 90,000 flights, a reduction, meaning less noise and pollution and fewer empty seats and less waste.

Traffic is down 4 percent so far this year, but a spurt of international traffic has helped keep the loss from being worse.

MassHighway has advertised $88 million in bridge work, to start to fix the 250- 300 of the state's 550 bridges that are substandard, and prominent ones like the Longfellow are in that early pipeline.

Many or most taxis now have transponders to pay Pike tolls, he said, having ridden with one driver recently who had that little box on the windshield and helped avoid a long line at the Ted Williams Tunnel. "He got a good tip."

The requirement that all commercial vehicles, including taxis, have transponders was long overdue for enforcement. In the Big Dig planning days one of the selling points was that the policy would reduce congestion -- yet taxi owners resisted getting transponders for a decade after the 1995 tunnel opening, and passengers were delayed and paid more in fares.

So that's good.

"The bad news is we have a legacy of neglect in this state that goes back a long time," he said. "Them chickens are coming home to roost."

Not only don't fares pay for T operating costs, but 30 cents of every dollar it takes in goes to debt service, the highest rate of any major system.

"Forward funding" -- which was supposed to resolve the T's money woes by giving it one cent from sales taxes collected -- "was not successful."

The Pike is $2.2 billion in debt, of which $1.6 billion was for the Big Dig. It has $100 million a year of debt service.

When the authority took that debt on, Cohen said he's been told convincingly, "Everyone who was involved back in the '90s knew that was not sustainable." (That's not what they said at the time.)

Discounts on tolls were offered that cost the Pike a lot and still do. "Political decisions were made to take tolls down in the western part of the state."

Deals were made with investment banks, including UBS and Lehman Brothers, "for some quick cash, without anybody really understanding" them, he said. And, today, "The big elephant in the room is new resources."

Still, it's too early to call for a gas tax or some other way of finding those needed billions, he said. "We need to demonstrate we have cleaned house" of waste first.

There are salary freezes at the Pike and the T -- except for those under collective bargaining agreements.

"We've come to conclude that the Turnpike authority is not a viable entity anymore," he said. Cohen is coming up with a plan to get rid of it, and Patrick plans to file legislation in January, he said.

Addressing the Back Bay's problems, Cohen has restarted a study to look at providing better access to the neighborhood from the Turnpike. There once was to be a Chinatown exit westbound from the Turnpike built as part of the Big Dig, but some in Chinatown didn't like the idea, Mayor Menino backed them, and managers of the already over-budget Big Dig welcomed the opportunity to save $35 million or so by eliminating it.

So now you can't get there from here.

"We all recognize that the inability to get on and off the Pike in this area creates traffic problems and congestion," Cohen said.

The final environmental impact statement will be done by the end of this year for Silver Line III, which will connect the two separate parts of that bus-rapid- transit system -- linking Boylston Station and South Station, and ultimately Dudley Square with the waterfront and Logan airport.

Interim repairs on the Storrow Drive tunnel, costing $4.5 million, are supposed to be done by spring, but permanent repairs under the Department of Conservation and Recreation are years away.

As to new projects, some have wondered why the Turnpike recently issued requests for proposals for four of the air-rights blocks between Kenmore Square and the Hynes auditorium in this economic climate. "There have been expressions of interest from a number of development organizations, and I'm hoping we will get good proposals," he said.

Cohen said the state also needs to look at innovations like congestion-pricing on the Turnpike.

"I don't think Massachusetts has been particularly inventive historically."






COLUMBUS CENTER?

The big mixed-use Columbus Center, slated for the fissure that exists between the Back Bay and the South End, got its initial go-ahead early in 1997. That's coming up on a dozen years ago.

The Massachusetts Turnpike Authority gave a WinnDevelopment entity the right to build over roadway air space at Clarendon Street and Columbus Avenue and on toward the east. Eventually a fourth air rights "parcel" was added, and the project was designed to be constructed all the way up to Tremont Street, essentially extending the Pru tunnel a good distance toward the expressway.

As we all know, the project went through hell getting designed, permitted, and into construction -- which started early this year.

Construction costs skyrocketed, some in the neighborhood vigorously opposed it, and eventually it was modified. Even at an estimated cost of $800 million -- hundreds of millions of dollars over the original figures -- it seemed doable. But things went wrong, including the credit markets going south about a year ago -- precursor to the larger economic issues we're wrestling with now -- and work stopped.

For weeks, the area along the Pike remained a messy construction site, though work had halted.

As the Globe reported, another development team, The Beal Companies and Related of New York, is now taking a look at whether the project is viable in some form. Turnpike drivers and neighbors will notice that the site has been cleaned up in a big way, and while the project gets sorted out is not the eyesore it was.

Neighbors and the city pushed for that, and city officials credit Beal and Related, which are also building The Clarendon project nearby, with that good deed.

We should know what will happen with Columbus Center, though more than a decade after the starting gun went off, sometime this year.

(Enthusiastic and continuing full disclosure is something we're committed to in this Journal. Along those lines, Beal and Related are clients of McDermott Ventures, the home of the Journal. As is noted above, Tom Palmer is an independent communications consultant and writes in this space under a contract with McDermott Ventures.)