gc
19 May 2003, 11:29 AM
Waterfront TOD
Urban Land Institute - by Alden S. Raine
The South Boston waterfront is regarded as one of America’s boldest experiments in transit-oriented development.
Long envisioned as Boston’s smart growth frontier, the 300-acre waterfront district is expected to keep a generation’s worth of high-end development in the regional core. Mature transit systems like Boston’s Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) spawn transit-oriented development (TOD) projects all the time; but a whole district, planned and built from scratch, is another matter.
The whole South Boston waterfront area did not even exist before the Civil War. It emerged from the mudflats of Boston Harbor through a century of land filling and port development. As late as 1960, few places in America were more alive with the hum of maritime industry, but by 1975, the hum was gone. The evolution of cargo technology from freighters to containers had made intown wharf facilities like Boston’s obsolete while the St. Lawrence Seaway had drained business from northeast ports. Then in 1974, President Richard Nixon closed the South Boston Naval Annex.
The South Boston waterfront needed wholesale reinvention, and its central location was seemingly of no help. Although close to the financial district, the South Boston piers were on the wrong side of the Central Artery and Fort Point Channel. Nearby South Station, once America’s busiest rail terminal, was so desolate by the mid-1970s that only the intervention of Governor Michael Dukakis saved it from the wrecker’s ball. Logan International Airport lay just across the shipping channel, but getting there meant an hour-long drive through downtown traffic and Boston’s dreaded tunnels. For most people, the South Boston waterfront was a forgotten place.
Over the next decade, Boston’s planners and stakeholders slowly but surely assembled a framework for redevelopment. Some 1,000 acres of filled land was divided in two, roughly at Boston’s historic Fish Pier. The eastern half, farther from downtown and closer to deep water, was dedicated to modern-day port activities. The western half—including the 300 acres closest to downtown—was to become a mixed-use extension of the center city. With most of these acres reduced to accommodating cut-rate parking lots and abandoned freight tracks, this was no small undertaking. The Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport), the largest landowner, took the first leap of faith in 1978 when it began preparing its massive Commonwealth Pier for its new role as a private commercial facility, today known as Boston’s World Trade Center.
Twenty years ago, nothing guaranteed the new development district a transit-oriented future; the term did not even exist. But five seminal public policy decisions have combined to make the South Boston waterfront a TOD showcase.
The Big Dig. Without the country’s largest highway project, the opportunity for transit-oriented development in South Boston would not exist at all. For decades, Boston’s business and aviation interests had demanded the creation of a third tunnel from downtown to Logan Airport. But it was not until the mid-1980s that the Dukakis Administration came up with a politically buildable alignment: extending the Massachusetts Turnpike to the airport via the South Boston waterfront. Without moving an inch, 300 acres would be relocated from the middle of nowhere to the middle of everywhere.
A badly designed waterfront interchange could have killed urban development. Instead, an unprecedented planning partnership among the state’s highway, transit, and port authorities and the city of Boston produced something quite different. An intricate system of on- and off-ramps was designed to blend into a new surface street grid, with developable parcels, ample sidewalks, and open space. Truck traffic to and from the port facilities would be diverted from the new city streets by a “haul road” system tied directly to the underground highways. And this complex, three-dimensional roadway system was designed to mesh with the construction and operation of the district’s new transit line.
“The Artery Tunnel is a big highway project, but it’s no less a city-building project and a TOD project. Everything about the South Boston design was guided by those principles,” explains Fred Salvucci, Dukakis’s longtime transportation secretary and the inventor of the Big Dig. The Ted Williams Tunnel, as the new airport tunnel was named, opened in 1995, and the full turnpike extension through South Boston to the airport opened this past February.
The Transitway. Developers began proposing megaprojects on the South Boston waterfront 20 years ago. Although premature, that first generation of plans highlighted the need to integrate high-capacity transit into the future template of roads and parcels. There were two basic choices. Some favored rerouting the MBTA’s Red Line subway, which passes along the western edge of South Boston, through the waterfront—providing heavy-rail capacity, but at one station on one radial corridor. Others argued for multiple-stop, higher-frequency waterfront service with radial connections in the downtown.
The solution that emerged around 1990 was “the Transitway”—a bus tunnel connecting the waterfront to the reborn South Station, where the Red Line, the revived commuter-rail system, Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor service, a new intercity bus terminal, and future air-rights development all converged.
On the waterfront itself, underground stations were located near two pioneering redevelopment projects—the World Trade Center and the new federal courthouse. Both projects were championed by South Boston’s late congressman Joe Moakley, the hometown visionary whose name the courthouse bears; so was the Federal Transit Administration’s $450 million financial contribution to the Transitway. These two stations bring virtually the entire 300-acre urban development district within a quarter-mile walk of indoor, weather-protected, high-amenity bus rapid transit (BRT).
The Transitway will run 60-foot hinged buses, at rush-hour intervals of just 90 seconds. At D Street, near the Fish Pier, the bus tunnel comes to grade, allowing the dual-propulsion vehicles to switch from overhead electric catenary to clean diesel fuel and proceed onto multiple surface routes. One such route, a partnership between the MBTA and Massport, will come to grade just long enough to enter the Ted Williams Tunnel, through which it will access Logan Airport’s four passenger terminals. The South Boston waterfront will be a seven-minute, one-seat ride from South Station in one direction and from Logan Airport in the other.
The Transitway is scheduled to open this December. By 2010, the MBTA plans to extend the bus tunnel from South Station westward into downtown, where it will intersect with the Orange and Green Line subways. At its intown terminus, the tunnel will merge with the Washington Street BRT service, which the MBTA recently opened through the heart of the Roxbury, South End, and Chinatown neighborhoods. A continuous BRT line carrying 60,000 people per day will then connect inner-city Boston, downtown, South Station, the South Boston waterfront, and Logan Airport. The MBTA has named the entire corridor the Silver Line.
“The Transitway was no ordinary engineering job. We had to thread the needle through South Station and the Big Dig,” notes Joe Aiello, a Boston-based senior vice president at DMJM+HARRIS, the planning and engineering firm that designed most of the Transitway and that recently was chosen to design the Silver Line extension through downtown. “We froze the ground to tunnel under Russia Wharf, and we crossed Fort Point Channel in submerged tubes. But the biggest challenge was to design a system whose express purpose, physically and functionally, was to support transit-oriented development.”
The Parking Freeze. The difference between transit-oriented development and transit-adjacent development often involves parking. Among the nation’s transit cities, only Boston and Portland, Oregon, have set districtwide parking limits. Boston had already imposed parking caps within the downtown and at the airport when it addressed South Boston in 1991. Together, the city, Massport, and state clean air regulators froze commercial parking in the 1,000-acre waterfront area at the number of spaces then in existence plus a “bank” of 10 percent. About half of the allowed capacity belongs to the “Pier Zone,” which includes the 300 acres targeted for mixed-use development.
South Boston’s waterfront development is rolling out with parking ratios typical of those found in mature, transit-intensive downtowns. “Thanks to the freeze, major developments were proposed, reviewed, and approved as TOD projects in anticipation of the Transitway, years before it opened,” points out Doug Foy, Governor Mitt Romney’s smart growth director and former president of Boston’s Conservation Law Foundation, an original freeze proponent.
Chapter 91. As Boston rediscovered its waterfront in the late 20th century, no issue consumed more public energy than the effort to modernize the legal framework for shoreline development—Chapter 91 of the Massachusetts general laws and its implementing regulations. Sweeping new regulations published in 1990 invited cities and towns to devise their own “municipal harbor plans,” which, once approved by the state, would allow custom-tailored local provisions to govern issues like height, open space, setback from the water, and first-floor usage. Massport was invited to submit its own standards for mixed-use development of port properties.
In 1995, the city of Boston and its redevelopment authority, under Mayor Tom Menino, undertook the challenge of a comprehensive public realm plan, rezoning plan, and municipal harbor plan for the South Boston waterfront. In 2000, after a long and demanding public process, the state approved the municipal harbor plan as the official “plug-in” to Chapter 91. Massport’s parallel plan for its holdings in the district received state approval in 2001.
What does this hard-fought consensus on waterfront development rules have to do with transit-oriented development? A great deal, it turns out, because the textbook elements of both planning regimens—TOD and public use of the shoreline—are strikingly similar: an amenity-rich pedestrian realm that spills into the first floors of buildings; a 24/7 mix of uses, with housing and office space in balance; an urban street grid with a “wall” of retail and other active uses; and a reliance on transit, with minimal land devoted to surface parking lots. Chapter 91 also requires developers to build water transit facilities. As a result, the South Boston waterfront will have access not only to Transitway stations, but also to ferry stops.
Urban Land Institute - by Alden S. Raine
The South Boston waterfront is regarded as one of America’s boldest experiments in transit-oriented development.
Long envisioned as Boston’s smart growth frontier, the 300-acre waterfront district is expected to keep a generation’s worth of high-end development in the regional core. Mature transit systems like Boston’s Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) spawn transit-oriented development (TOD) projects all the time; but a whole district, planned and built from scratch, is another matter.
The whole South Boston waterfront area did not even exist before the Civil War. It emerged from the mudflats of Boston Harbor through a century of land filling and port development. As late as 1960, few places in America were more alive with the hum of maritime industry, but by 1975, the hum was gone. The evolution of cargo technology from freighters to containers had made intown wharf facilities like Boston’s obsolete while the St. Lawrence Seaway had drained business from northeast ports. Then in 1974, President Richard Nixon closed the South Boston Naval Annex.
The South Boston waterfront needed wholesale reinvention, and its central location was seemingly of no help. Although close to the financial district, the South Boston piers were on the wrong side of the Central Artery and Fort Point Channel. Nearby South Station, once America’s busiest rail terminal, was so desolate by the mid-1970s that only the intervention of Governor Michael Dukakis saved it from the wrecker’s ball. Logan International Airport lay just across the shipping channel, but getting there meant an hour-long drive through downtown traffic and Boston’s dreaded tunnels. For most people, the South Boston waterfront was a forgotten place.
Over the next decade, Boston’s planners and stakeholders slowly but surely assembled a framework for redevelopment. Some 1,000 acres of filled land was divided in two, roughly at Boston’s historic Fish Pier. The eastern half, farther from downtown and closer to deep water, was dedicated to modern-day port activities. The western half—including the 300 acres closest to downtown—was to become a mixed-use extension of the center city. With most of these acres reduced to accommodating cut-rate parking lots and abandoned freight tracks, this was no small undertaking. The Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport), the largest landowner, took the first leap of faith in 1978 when it began preparing its massive Commonwealth Pier for its new role as a private commercial facility, today known as Boston’s World Trade Center.
Twenty years ago, nothing guaranteed the new development district a transit-oriented future; the term did not even exist. But five seminal public policy decisions have combined to make the South Boston waterfront a TOD showcase.
The Big Dig. Without the country’s largest highway project, the opportunity for transit-oriented development in South Boston would not exist at all. For decades, Boston’s business and aviation interests had demanded the creation of a third tunnel from downtown to Logan Airport. But it was not until the mid-1980s that the Dukakis Administration came up with a politically buildable alignment: extending the Massachusetts Turnpike to the airport via the South Boston waterfront. Without moving an inch, 300 acres would be relocated from the middle of nowhere to the middle of everywhere.
A badly designed waterfront interchange could have killed urban development. Instead, an unprecedented planning partnership among the state’s highway, transit, and port authorities and the city of Boston produced something quite different. An intricate system of on- and off-ramps was designed to blend into a new surface street grid, with developable parcels, ample sidewalks, and open space. Truck traffic to and from the port facilities would be diverted from the new city streets by a “haul road” system tied directly to the underground highways. And this complex, three-dimensional roadway system was designed to mesh with the construction and operation of the district’s new transit line.
“The Artery Tunnel is a big highway project, but it’s no less a city-building project and a TOD project. Everything about the South Boston design was guided by those principles,” explains Fred Salvucci, Dukakis’s longtime transportation secretary and the inventor of the Big Dig. The Ted Williams Tunnel, as the new airport tunnel was named, opened in 1995, and the full turnpike extension through South Boston to the airport opened this past February.
The Transitway. Developers began proposing megaprojects on the South Boston waterfront 20 years ago. Although premature, that first generation of plans highlighted the need to integrate high-capacity transit into the future template of roads and parcels. There were two basic choices. Some favored rerouting the MBTA’s Red Line subway, which passes along the western edge of South Boston, through the waterfront—providing heavy-rail capacity, but at one station on one radial corridor. Others argued for multiple-stop, higher-frequency waterfront service with radial connections in the downtown.
The solution that emerged around 1990 was “the Transitway”—a bus tunnel connecting the waterfront to the reborn South Station, where the Red Line, the revived commuter-rail system, Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor service, a new intercity bus terminal, and future air-rights development all converged.
On the waterfront itself, underground stations were located near two pioneering redevelopment projects—the World Trade Center and the new federal courthouse. Both projects were championed by South Boston’s late congressman Joe Moakley, the hometown visionary whose name the courthouse bears; so was the Federal Transit Administration’s $450 million financial contribution to the Transitway. These two stations bring virtually the entire 300-acre urban development district within a quarter-mile walk of indoor, weather-protected, high-amenity bus rapid transit (BRT).
The Transitway will run 60-foot hinged buses, at rush-hour intervals of just 90 seconds. At D Street, near the Fish Pier, the bus tunnel comes to grade, allowing the dual-propulsion vehicles to switch from overhead electric catenary to clean diesel fuel and proceed onto multiple surface routes. One such route, a partnership between the MBTA and Massport, will come to grade just long enough to enter the Ted Williams Tunnel, through which it will access Logan Airport’s four passenger terminals. The South Boston waterfront will be a seven-minute, one-seat ride from South Station in one direction and from Logan Airport in the other.
The Transitway is scheduled to open this December. By 2010, the MBTA plans to extend the bus tunnel from South Station westward into downtown, where it will intersect with the Orange and Green Line subways. At its intown terminus, the tunnel will merge with the Washington Street BRT service, which the MBTA recently opened through the heart of the Roxbury, South End, and Chinatown neighborhoods. A continuous BRT line carrying 60,000 people per day will then connect inner-city Boston, downtown, South Station, the South Boston waterfront, and Logan Airport. The MBTA has named the entire corridor the Silver Line.
“The Transitway was no ordinary engineering job. We had to thread the needle through South Station and the Big Dig,” notes Joe Aiello, a Boston-based senior vice president at DMJM+HARRIS, the planning and engineering firm that designed most of the Transitway and that recently was chosen to design the Silver Line extension through downtown. “We froze the ground to tunnel under Russia Wharf, and we crossed Fort Point Channel in submerged tubes. But the biggest challenge was to design a system whose express purpose, physically and functionally, was to support transit-oriented development.”
The Parking Freeze. The difference between transit-oriented development and transit-adjacent development often involves parking. Among the nation’s transit cities, only Boston and Portland, Oregon, have set districtwide parking limits. Boston had already imposed parking caps within the downtown and at the airport when it addressed South Boston in 1991. Together, the city, Massport, and state clean air regulators froze commercial parking in the 1,000-acre waterfront area at the number of spaces then in existence plus a “bank” of 10 percent. About half of the allowed capacity belongs to the “Pier Zone,” which includes the 300 acres targeted for mixed-use development.
South Boston’s waterfront development is rolling out with parking ratios typical of those found in mature, transit-intensive downtowns. “Thanks to the freeze, major developments were proposed, reviewed, and approved as TOD projects in anticipation of the Transitway, years before it opened,” points out Doug Foy, Governor Mitt Romney’s smart growth director and former president of Boston’s Conservation Law Foundation, an original freeze proponent.
Chapter 91. As Boston rediscovered its waterfront in the late 20th century, no issue consumed more public energy than the effort to modernize the legal framework for shoreline development—Chapter 91 of the Massachusetts general laws and its implementing regulations. Sweeping new regulations published in 1990 invited cities and towns to devise their own “municipal harbor plans,” which, once approved by the state, would allow custom-tailored local provisions to govern issues like height, open space, setback from the water, and first-floor usage. Massport was invited to submit its own standards for mixed-use development of port properties.
In 1995, the city of Boston and its redevelopment authority, under Mayor Tom Menino, undertook the challenge of a comprehensive public realm plan, rezoning plan, and municipal harbor plan for the South Boston waterfront. In 2000, after a long and demanding public process, the state approved the municipal harbor plan as the official “plug-in” to Chapter 91. Massport’s parallel plan for its holdings in the district received state approval in 2001.
What does this hard-fought consensus on waterfront development rules have to do with transit-oriented development? A great deal, it turns out, because the textbook elements of both planning regimens—TOD and public use of the shoreline—are strikingly similar: an amenity-rich pedestrian realm that spills into the first floors of buildings; a 24/7 mix of uses, with housing and office space in balance; an urban street grid with a “wall” of retail and other active uses; and a reliance on transit, with minimal land devoted to surface parking lots. Chapter 91 also requires developers to build water transit facilities. As a result, the South Boston waterfront will have access not only to Transitway stations, but also to ferry stops.