November 21, 2019
MBTA Presentation
Winchester Chamber of Commerce Comments and Concerns
Good evening, my name is Christopher Mulhern. I am a member of the Board of Directors of the Winchester Chamber of Commerce, chairman of the Chamber Downtown committee, and a member of the design working group which has been working with the MBTA on the station design for more than ten years.
The Chamber of Commerce is seriously concerned about the impact of this project on the downtown, both during and after construction. This plan could have major negative impacts on the downtown business community. It directly threatens the viability of the downtown retailers and will have consequences for the non-retail businesses and for the community at large, our customer base.
The largest and most important concern is parking. The proposed loss of 123 spaces during the construction period represents a loss of 18 percent of the available lot and on street parking in the center. Nearly half the Waterfield lot and all of the Laraway road spaces will be lost during construction. A total of 25 spaces will be lost permanently under the current design, including 10 on Shore Road, 12 in the Waterfield Lot, and 3 in the Aberjona Lot.
Our biggest concern is parking for customers. We think that given the all the competing interests looking for places to park, our customers will be shut out and will take their business elsewhere. Local brick and mortar retail is threatened every day by competing big box stores with big parking lots as well as by on line retail. Losing this much customer parking will make a tenuous situation much worse, threatening the very livelihood of some of our retailers.We also worry about town center employees, they currently use a portion of the spaces which will be lost. We are less worried about commuters, they have more options than retail customers and local workers.
We suggest several moves which can help address this difficult situation:
1. Relocate commuter parking away from the center. This would free up the remaining available portions of the Waterfield and Aberjona lots for shoppers and town center employees. One way to achieve this would be to allow additional street parking near the Wedgemere station.
2. Work with DCR to make the Sandy Beach/Shannon Beach lots available for commuters. With spaces on both sides of the Mystic Valley Parkway, this area can accommodate many of the town center commuters with a short walk to the Wedgemere station. Summertime vacations will reduce weekday ridership, reducing the overlap with daily and weekend beach users.
3. Restrict town center employee parking to the south end of the Aberjona lot, freeing up more of the north end of Aberjona and the remaining spaces in the Waterfield lot for shoppers. These areas could be pay and display. This change will offset the loss of the Laraway Road pay and display parking.
4. Force the MBTA project workforce personnel to park remotely. This approach was used successfully on the high school project; workers parked at the transfer station and were bussed to the jobsite. This method will prevent construction workers, who arrive early, from dominating the few available downtown spaces. Parking could be made available at the transfer station or at Boorgard beach.
5. Institute a jitney bus shuttle around Winchester to pick up and drop off shoppers. A program like this works in Lexington. It would reduce the demand on downtown parking by providing an alternative way to access downtown businesses.
6. Make scooters and bikes more viable options for users of all ages
A secondary concern is the Chamber Building. Based on the previous schemes, we fully expected to be displaced by this project. We know that we will probably be displaced when the Waterfield Lot is redeveloped. We are happy not to have to relocate in the next two years. That said, the Chamber and the other tenants will need safe access to building during regular business hours for the duration of the construction. The final design of the station should include access from the new platform to the building to replicate the current condition.
Schedule is also a concern. Two options for the duration of the project have been offered. The Chamber favors the shortest possible construction schedule. Even the so called “28 month short schedule” will have a major negative effect on the town center, but longer will be worse.
On the design side, our biggest concern is the relationship between the proposed work and the Quill Rotary. The proposed platform overlaps half of the rotary roadway. Two new piers will add to the visual clutter in the circle. The covered, sloping pedestrian bridge crosses the other half on the town center side, with the long return ramp eating up 10 parking spaces along Shore Road.
This configuration has been on the drawings for the last several iterations of the design, but the MBTA has not yet produced an eye level view looking north from the Brown and Stanton block to show us what this will look like. The reason is that it will not look well. The platform extensions and their railings will make the south bridge look much thicker that it does now. The sloping, angled truss bridge will fight with the basic geometry of the existing rail bridge. The solid base of the ramp, and its canopies, will narrow the appearance of Shore Road, making this area even less appealing.
The Chamber would like to see the entire platform shifted south to stop short of the Quill Rotary. We would much prefer a return ramp similar to the Laraway Road ramp replacing the proposed stair behind the shops on Thompson Street at the north end of the outbound platform. A version of this option was presented by the T as a value engineering proposal in March of 2017. It had a life cycle cost savings of about $1.4 million dollars. If implemented, these changes will greatly reduce the visual impact of the project and save ten parking spaces on Shore Road.
To summarize, the loss of parking, both during and after construction is an issue of grave concern to the Chamber. The near term fate of the Chamber building and the construction schedule are also important considerations. Re-design at the Quill Rotary could be both a cost savings to the project and a huge visual improvement.
Thank you for your attention.
Christopher H. Mulhern
For Winchester Chamber of Commerce – Downtown Committee
