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Drive along the Mass Pike at rush hour and there’s often a commuter rail speeding into South Station. After 50 years of bypassing Brighton, the train is once again stopping in that neighborhood at a new station called Boston Landing.
“It says 16 minutes on the schedule,” said Daniel Jepson, a Brighton resident who commutes to Post Office Square in Boston. “I used to walk to Brighton Center and then the express bus would take nearly an hour, so this will be a huge improvement.”
In some ways, this is an 'everything old is new again' moment for Brighton. Before the Mass Pike was built, the neighborhood was home to three stops along the commuter rail. The new Boston Landing station is a welcome return to the neighborhood’s public transit roots, and at a time when the state struggles to meet demand for expanded public transit service, it is something of a surprise.
“If you look at the Green Line extension, which we’ve been hearing about for so many years and is seemingly still not happening," said Jepson, "it’s pretty great that we heard about this a couple of years ago and now here it is already up and running.”
The Boston Landing train stop represents a new way of funding local public transit projects. New Balance, which built its new global headquarters alongside the train tracks in Brighton, paid for the $20 million station.
“There certainly has been plans to bring back commuter rail service to this neighborhood,” said Keith Craig, director of New Balance Development Group. "But with an owner like New Balance, there was a way we could make it happen faster.”
Craig’s job has nothing to do with sneakers or athletic gear. He’s in charge of turning a patch of old manufacturing buildings that surround the New Balance facility into a destination neighborhood. Like the train stop, it’s called Boston Landing. It features the new Boston Bruins practice facility. Construction crews are also building a training center for the Boston Celtics, along with restaurants, lab space, offices and a 295-unit apartment complex.
“There’s a lot of incentive for developers, employers, business owners to use transit to attract customers, residents and employees because they know people want transit,” said Josh Fairchild, founding board member of the nonprofit Transit Matters.
Fairchild ticks off other developments where private investors have been in talks to pay for transit upgrades including Harvard University in Allston and Winn Casino in Everett. He says private-public partnerships that may emerge from these large-scale developments are important, but not a panacea for the larger transit system.
“Most of the network will not have large employers or huge real estate development that can fund this type of partnership,” said Fairchild. “I don’t think it’s going to be the majority, or even a new model, for what we’re going to see because it simply can’t fund the entire network. There’s only so many opportunities for it to be feasible.”
Paying for much-needed transit repairs, says Fairchild, will cost billions of dollars and he says it’s likely taxpayers, not private industry, that will pick up that tab. He says investment in public transit is imperative not only for companies looking to be competitive, but cities, too.
“This region is suffering from a horrible investment in transportation. I think we’re 47th or 48th in the country in congestion and the state of our system,” said Fairchild. "At the same time, other cities across the country are embarking on investing billions and tens of billions on reinvestment in their system, and we need to be doing the same thing here.”
