Grafe, Jerome (DEP) 

From: Matthew Danish [matthew.r.danish@gmail.com] 

Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2012 3:52 PM 

To: Grafe, Jerome (DEP) 

Subject: Written Testimony regarding Red Line/Blue Line Connector 

Hello, 

I am submitting this e-mail as written testimony for the public meeting on the Red Line/Blue 

Line Connector project, as described 

here: http://www.mass.gov/dep/public/hearings/transitl2.htm 

The reason I am writing this letter , and the reason that the public has been asked to 

comment, is that the DOT is trying to break the law. 

Dust as importantly, they are breaking a promise to ^e-people of Massachusetts and the 

residents of the Boston region."That is why tfiey scheduled this public comment period with 

such littl e notice and the meetings at inconvenient times. 

The massive boondoggle highway project known as the Big Dig was supposed to be balanced out 

by key transit improvements that would help alleviate the negative effects caused by such 

enormous highways. 

The whole agreement is being thrown off-balance by DOT'S shirking of it s commitments. I t 

seems clear that the DOT never intended to fulfil l these commitments and entered into them 

dishonestly, knowing that they could procrastinate indefinitely. 

The Blue/Red Connector is an improvement to the core rapid transit system. Every day, many 

people crowd the Green and Orange lines to ride for one stop because the Blue/Red connection 

does not exist. This wil l only get worse over time as the Blue line is currently 

underutilized, but that won't be the case forever. I t also causes delays to the already 

struggling Green and Orange lines, which means i t affects most of the rapid transit system. 

I f we do not build the Blue/Red connector soon, i t wil l only become more congested, more 

necessary, and more expensive to fi x in the future as more development takes place around 

Cambridge Street. This connection has been planned since the days of the Boston Elevated 

Railway Co, and is a gap in the system which has become more and more pressing over time 

since then. 

Do we want to look back in 20 years and regret that we did not do anything because we were 

unwilling to study a short, 1500 foot tunnel now? 

What is the reason that the DOT is refusing to study this necessary project? We know that the 

$750 million price tag is vastly inflated overf. the actual cost. The DOT's documents state 

that a 40% contingency has been added, which is far in excess of typical contingency amounts. 

In addition, they overestimated the amount of inflation . As the CLF has pointed out, i f you 

take older project estimates and update them to present-day dollars, i t only comes out to 

approximately $300 million in cost. Is the DOT ashamed of the misrepresentation of costs, and 

that they were irresponsible for not pursuing this project sooner? 

Instead, they pursued extremely expensive and dubious commuter rai l extensions. Greenbush 

cost $534 million and only attracts 3,000 riders, most of them former ferryboat users. A 

miserable return on investment. South Coast Rail has already spent over a $100 million in 

studies and wil l ultimately cost $2 billio n to serve 5-8,000 riders in optimistic scenarios. 

The DOT is happy to pursue parking lot construction (e.g. Wonderland) but becomes extremely 

stingy when i t comes time for improvements that help the core of the rapid transit system. 

How is i t that parking lo t construction is permitted as "air quality mitigation" when parking 

lots only attract more cars onto the roads, cause more air pollution, more traffi c congestion 

l 
and more sprawl? I t is shameful that parking lo t construction is allowed to proceed under the 

rubric of transit funding and as "air quality improvement" when i t is neither. That money 

could have been used to at least study the Blue/Red connector project, which actually has the 

ability to draw riders who would otherwise be using their automobiles. 

I also find i t strange that the DOT has been happy to pursue, even force through, projects 

that serve affluent communities in the suburbs 

-- even when towns like Hingham didn't want i t -- but continues to neglect communities in the 

core like East Boston. The money to study South Coast Rail -- which is and wil l probably 

always be an infeasible transit extension that should be dropped immediately -- could have 

been used to study the<Blue/Red connector, which is a much more realistic and useful project. 

Why is the DOT and the MBTA so obsessed with forcing commuter rai l extensions, even on 

communities that don't want it , while leaving core communities in the cold? Why has the T 

continued to focus on inefficient, ineffective, sprawl-promoting commuter rai l when the rapid 

transit system is in disrepair and not even finished? Why can the DOT find $500 million for 

barely used commuter rai l extensions but cannot find $10 million for a study that could 

potentially benefit every single rider of the rapid transit system? How can we believe 

anything from the DOT and it s associated agencies when they toss away commitments like this? 

These are al l questions that I would like to see answered before throwing away the decades of 

work that have gone into the Blue/Red connector. From a macroeconomic standpoint, this is a 

time when infrastructure projects should be moving into high gear in preparation for 

construction, as there is much unused slack in the economy. We should not be talking about 

ending projects, we should be talking about how to get themeshovel-ready. 

I would also like to hear how the DOT plans to implement interim offsets to make up for the 

time between the missed Dec 31, 2011 deadline and whenever the compliant Blue/Red connector 

fina l design plan is released. 

Writing as a resident of Boston, 

Matthew Danish 

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