If you need a concrete example to explain why Gov. Maura Healey needs to set out a new transportation vision for the commonwealth, look no further than Burlington.  

Town officials are looking to mixed-use redevelopment as a way to vault nearly 600 acres of aging real estate around the Burlington Mall back into the vanguard of the region’s commercial development scene and keep it filling town coffers for years to come.  

As much as 4.4 million square feet of new development, including nearly 2,000 new homes, could rise if residents OK a still-in-development rezoning package later this year. 

That’s about the size of three and a half Prudential Center towers, 4.3 One Beacon towers – two blocks up the road from Healey’s State House office – or 6.77 McCormack State Office Buildings, where the governor used to work as attorney general. 

If you told a typical Bay Stater that someone wanted to build three Prudential towers next to each other, in the middle of the suburbs and without decent transit, they’d call you crazy. Yet, that’s exactly what’s set to happen. 

Burlington has never been well served by transit, despite good-faith local efforts to set up a shuttle from the mall area to Woburn’s commuter rail stations that have since folded thanks to the pandemic. From the building of the town’s first industrial and office parks and the Burlington Mall in the 1950s and ’60s, the town has been fed exclusively on a diet of highways.

It also sits in bureaucratic limbo, lightly served by the MBTA and the Merrimack Valley Regional Transit Authority but prioritized by neither despite being one of the densest concentrations of jobs in Greater Boston because they lack resources. 

Burlington officials clearly see the need for better transit – the planning documents that underlie the rezoning effort are littered with exhortations to make sure the area becomes pedestrian-friendly and transit-ready – but they are clear-eyed about the reality that no cavalry, whether bus-born or riding a train, is coming to their aid. They must simply hope they can turn the town’s car-ravaged seas of asphalt into a walkable Eden fast enough to convince developers and lenders that buildings can lease up successfully without lots of new parking. 

Here’s where the governor can come in. First, start speaking out in favor of the need to grow transit – maybe take a trip to Minneapolis, Montreal or Toronto to see how successful it can be, even in low-density neighborhoods – and use her bully pulpit to set the agenda. Then, empower the talented transit leaders she’s hired and the rising generation of transit workers who’ve been privately developing visions for a better future to start sketching that future out in public. Lastly, Healey will need to follow through by leading a conversation with residents and businesses about how to fund this vital transformation.  

It’s a no-brainer that transit has to be a bigger part of how we get around if we want to stave off a climate catastrophe and improve our economic competitiveness. But if we don’t move now, the world will move on without us, and not in ways that get us where we need to go.  

Letters to the editor of 350 words or less may be submitted via email at editorial@thewarrengroup.com with the subject line “Letter to the Editor,” or mailed to the offices of The Warren Group. Submission is not a guarantee of publication.  

Healey Must Empower New Transit Vision

by Banker & Tradesman time to read: 2 min
0