If you’re commuting to the South Boston waterfront, you already know how horrible the traffic is. But starting Monday, there’s a new route that might help. Just don’t expect a warm welcome from the other drivers who’ve already been using it for years: Truck drivers. A pilot program is beginning on Monday that will test out whether two very different worlds can share one road in South Boston.
Inal Olmez takes public transportation most days to get to his job at the advertising firm Partners & Simons on the waterfront. But some days he needs to drive.
“Ah, it’s pretty much a nightmare, it really is.” he says. “You just kind of have to be in the mindset that you’ll get there when you get there. You can’t rush it.”
Olmez says he was happy to hear that starting Monday he can take the South Boston Bypass Road, which runs from I–93 almost straight to his office. Until now, the road was only open to trucks.
“Anything that avoids that middle area, around exit 20, like 18 to 20,” says Olmez. “If you could bypass that area, it would be really helpful for any sort of commuter coming from the south.”
Nearby, a truck driver named Bob, who didn’t want to share his last name, sits in the cab of his idling truck.
“I don’t think they should let regular traffic use it.”
He uses the bypass road every day.
“We have a hard enough time making deliveries as it is.”
He admits he’s usually on the road around 3am, so he’s not sure if the plan to open it to commuters between 6 and 10 in the morning will really affect him.
“I don’t know. We’ll see,” he says.
Neil Fitzpatrick shares his concern. As he drives his car in South Boston, Fitzpatrick stops at a light and points out a small sign which reads ‘Commercial Vehicles Only.’
Commercial vehicles are Fitzpatrick’s business. He’s president of Boston Freight Terminals, which moves cargo to and from the port here in South Boston. And his trucks use this road all the time.
“If you’re coming up 95 you’re coming in the Expressway, you’re feeding in, and we do a lot of exchange with the port of New York and New Jersey, and so do many other truckers coming in. They’re dependent on gaining access to this area,” says Fitzpatrick.
And the bypass road is how they get here. Fitzpatrick says moving goods quickly is crucial to his business.
“Timely service, and not being stuck in jams and forcing truckers to find alternative routes when things happen,” he says. “We have cut times at the airport. The airlines have firm, hard cut times. And a delay there, you’re missing a day’s flight.”
And that’s why the 6-month pilot plan to open the bypass road to morning commuters worries him.
“It’s a slippery slope,” Fitzpatrick says. “Can it work? Is there excess capacity on the truck route right now? I think it would be unreasonable to say there is not. There is. But how and how much can that work and how can you enforce it?”
Fitzpatrick says if the bypass road starts looking like every other backed-up street in South Boston, some out-of-town truck drivers who don’t know better might start looking for alternate routes to get to the highway.
“Water will seek the path of least resistance. And that’s the big fear,” says Fitzpatrick. “That’s why the truck bypass road was built in the beginning, was to keep the trucks off the residential streets of South Boston.”
The bypass was first built to accommodate trucks during the construction of the Big Dig.
Richard Dimino says it’s necessary to open the road. He’s president of the policy group A Better City, which created a development and transportation plan for South Boston.
“So the good news in the South Boston waterfront is that since 1997 there’s been 29 million square feet of development in that area,” says Dimino.
He says one reason for that was investment in transportation infrastructure. And it created a lot of jobs.
“The challenging news is that there’s another 17 million square feet that still wants to happen there.”
And that, he says, will generate 63 percent more trips through the neighborhood over the next 20 years. So Dimino says there needs to be more long-term investment to accommodate that growth. But for now, they can do things like opening up the bypass road.
“There is a challenge to accommodate mixed use, residential, a commercial development and maritime industries in one sub-district of any area,” he says. “But while that challenge exists, it actually is what makes that part of the state and part of the city, I think, one of the most successful economies in the Commonwealth.”
Tom Tinlin is the highway administrator for the state department of transportation. He says they hear the truckers’ concerns, and they’ll make sure regular people stay off the road outside of 6 to 10 am.
“In the initial, as opposed to handing out a moving violation, they’ll be handing them and educational flyer to really help let them know what is happening, what time they should be on these roads, and how we feel it will help ease their commute.”
Tinlin points out that they’re only opening the bypass road to general traffic going in one direction, and most trucks at that hour are going the other way. “I think it’s important to remember they have sole access that road on the other 20 hours a day,” he says. “This area has taken off in a way that I think people could have only dreamed of, and it’s expanding a lot quicker than a lot of people had anticipated. So we’re all in this together.”
Tinlin says he doesn’t see this as an example of two worlds colliding in South Boston.
“I think that the vision for that waterfront has always been the blue collar and the white collar living and working side by side and I think this is indicative of that.”
John Quill is one of those white collar workers. He commutes from the South Shore to the law firm Seyfarth Shaw on the waterfront.
“It’s unpredictable, it’s busy every day, there’s a lot of accidents. So it’s a tough commute.”
And he’s not all that optimistic the bypass road is going to improve things.
“I think it will be marginally helpful, I don’t think it’s going to have a huge impact on the traffic on the Expressway.”
Having said that, Quill says he’ll take the bypass.
“If it’s going to free up a few more minutes in my day, then absolutely I’ll take it. I just don’t think it will be significant.”
In February, state officials will evaluate whether the plan is helping commuters, without harming the truckers.
