Greater Boston faces a new traffic crisis, not even a decade after the more than $15 billion Big Dig carved a tunnel under downtown Boston.
Route 128, the region’s economic dynamo, is already well over capacity, with run of the mill snowstorms or even fender benders enough to trigger hours of gridlock.
Now, amid explosive growth in its trademark technology and life sciences industries, the corridor faces a further 71 percent surge in traffic over the next two decades, the Massachusetts Area Planning Council warns in a recent report.
We are looking at a looming traffic meltdown here, one that could have catastrophic consequences both for our local economy and for the developers looking to 128 as an oasis of demand in an otherwise lackluster economy.
And unlike the Big Dig, there is no practical way – and no money, either – to build our way out of this mess.
“With the rapid growth of the high-tech industry along Route 128 from the 1960s to the present, the area has increasingly experienced traffic congestion that will discourage further economic development,” according to the MAPC.
Route 128’s greatest strength – attracting new ventures and companies from around the globe – is also shaping up, trafficwise, to be its greatest weakness right now.
The number of car and truck trips each day on the Burlington to Waltham stretch of 128 has steadily escalated over the past two decades, and now stands at 200,000.
That’s up from the 140,000-to-150,000 vehicle trips a day the now half century year old highway was designed to handle when it was rolled out through what were then fields and farmland in the 1950s.
Bad To Worse
Route 128 rose to prominence in the 1980s as a tech mecca, riding the boom sparked by Digital Equipment and other early computer giants.
Today, life sciences companies are driving the growth – biotech companies now occupy more office space along the highway than software and other tech firms.
A steady stream of life sciences companies have made the move out from Cambridge, including Shire, which is building a huge campus along 128 in Lexington where Raytheon once had its headquarters.
Literally dozens of new development projects are either in planning or in construction, including a major redevelopment of Waltham’s now empty Polaroid campus into hundreds of thousands of square feet of office and retail space.
It is new growth vital for the future of both Greater Boston and even New England, with the promise of tens of thousands of high paying jobs in the decades to come.
But to take this growth for granted – or assume it is bound to happen just because there are lots of new development plans in the works – would be a major mistake.
If the Route 128 traffic crisis is allowed to escalate from gridlock to meltdown, many of those projected office and lab complexes – and the new jobs they promise – could prove illusory.
The numbers, if nothing else, are daunting. Route 128 is looking at an increase of 150,000 car and truck trips a day over the next decade or two, boosting the daily count to 350,000 from 200,000 today.
In this age of rapid fire decision making, companies can move away as fast as they move in.
Just take Biogen IDEC, which is now exploring a move back into Cambridge only months after opening a grand new headquarters off Route 128 in Weston.
As the traffic woes mount on 128, developers may be forced to scrap projects and companies may start to rethink whether they can do business along the corridor.
While a lucky few may be able to locate to already packed Cambridge or migrate out to Interstate 495, others may consider bailing out of Massachusetts altogether.
Worse still, as the traffic situation goes from bad to terminal, 128 may very well lose its luster as a beacon to companies and entrepreneurs from around the globe.
Band-Aids & Politics
So what’s to be done?
One option that is not on the table, for obvious reasons, is a major, multibillion-dollar highway restructuring, ala the Big Dig.
For one, the Big Dig, with its ever escalating budget and endless scandals, earned itself the nickname of the Big Pig in the rest of the country, making Congressional support dubious for another major highway project in the Bay State.
More crucially, much of Route 128’s central corridor from Burlington to Waltham is hemmed in by sprawling office parks and lab complexes, making it hard – if not impossible – to significantly expand the highway’s footprint.
That means that Route 128’s future hinges upon outside the box solutions that will focus on getting more commuters onto shuttle buses and out of their cars.
One possibility raised by highway planning groups like the MAPC involves converting a lane to accommodate the many shuttle buses that now ply the highway. Paid for by office park developers and companies, the buses make a circuit between Alewife and Route 128’s office parks. But the buses are far from as efficient as they could be, forced to battle through gridlock along with other commuters.
Another group, the 128 Central Corridor Coalition, is getting ready to study the possibility of creating a regional public transportation hub in Waltham or Weston, which would combine a commuter rail stop with a shuttle bus depot.
But that could take years, even decades, to come to fruition.
Most likely, Route 128 will have to be saved from choking to death on its own traffic with some combination of short-term band aids and long-term solutions.
Whether there is a political will on Beacon Hill to deal with a complex problem like that, one where all the solutions are likely to raise controversy, is another question.
Frankly, I’m skeptical on that count.
The only certainty is that doing nothing about Route 128’s impending traffic meltdown is nothing less than a recipe for a regional economic disaster.
