The initial vision of the Bay Colony Rail Trail was for a continuous bicycle/pedestrian path along a (mostly) unused railroad right-of-way from National Lumber in Newton, through Needham and Dover and on to Medfield.
As plans began to be floated, the town of Needham made it quite clear that they did not support using the right-of-way for that purpose at the Newton facing end of Needham. Newton decided to go ahead and use the right-of-way for recreational purposes and turned it into the Upper Falls Greenway. Needham was none to pleased, since they envisioned using that Newton corridor for light rail transit rather than recreation. Local Newton advocates were very hopeful that the Upper Falls Greenway would eventually be extended into Needham but to this day the trail ends at a chain link fence at the town border at the Charles River.
Ironically, Needham was enthusiastic about using that right-of-way at the opposite end of town for recreation. They built 1.7 miles of trail there that ends abruptly at the Dover border.
A few years later, the state’s Add-a-Lane project came along to widen Rt 95. As part of that project a number of bridges over Rt 95 had to be rebuilt and extended to span the now-wider highway. Unfortunately though the railroad bridge for this right-of-way was not rebuilt – in effect severing the right-of-way.
The towns of Needham and Newton have jointly funded a study to look into two alternative plans for connecting the towns and using this corridor. There is a meeting in Needham tomorrow, April 18 at 6 PM in Needham to present the results of the study. That will be followed by a meeting in Newton two weeks later on Wed April 26 at 7 PM.
If you care about the Upper Falls Greenway and its future uses please attend one or both of these meetings, either in person or via Zoom, to let both town’s know your thoughts. Here’s additional info from the mayor’s newsletter …
Help Plan a Future Path Connecting Newton and Needham The City of Newton is partnering with the Town of Needham to study the future use of the former railroad corridor that historically connected the two communities. A possible shared-use path would extend the Upper Falls Greenway across the Charles River, across I-95/128, and along the former railroad right of way to Webster Street in Needham Heights along the former Charles River railroad corridor. This long-term project is in the very preliminary stages. |
The State has funded a feasibility study which includes a technical analysis, survey, and two community meetings to explore the project. Newton’s transportation planners are working with their counterparts in Needham and both groups are reaching out to residents. One particular focus is whether this would be a path for cyclists, pedestrians and similar uses only, or whether electric shuttle buses should also be included. What do you think? Follow this link for more information, including on how to register for the virtual community meetings on Tuesday, April 18 at 6:00 p.m. and Wednesday, April 26 at 7:00 p.m. You can also take an online survey, open through April, to give us feedback. |
|
Especially when you consider that Needham’s other neighbor refused to cooperate and extend the trail across the same river, just further upstream. Didn’t want to let in the riff-raff? Word was Dover residents were afraid people hiking or riding bikes would spook their horses.
When it came to the add a lane project, the reason MassDOT gave for severing the railroad without replacing the bridge was that the two municipalities had to agree on what type of bridge to build. Would it carry people walking and riding bicycles, or would it include vehicles? That question continues today with the renewed push to get state and perhaps even federal funding.
At first, the study proposed to extend the Greenway as a bicycle pedestrian path consistent with the Bay Colony vision. Needham modified the legislation to study adding an electric shuttle bus into the mix. Some might recall a similar, failed proposal to the MAPC for the Needham/Newton Rail Right-of-Way Transit Concept about 10 years ago. A handful of shuttles each day would run on the greenway to Needham’s office parks. The MAPC report included an illustration with a shuttle bus mowing down walkers and cyclists (see page 52 of the download). I thought that idea was put to rest, but here we are again.
The corridor is, by law, reserved for future use to provide public transit. Until real public transit is an option, let’s hope everyone can agree on the building a linear park to connect our communities. And let’s hope Newton doesn’t get Bullied into Needham’s plan.
Seniors who aren’t sure-footed can definitely walk the Greenway. (That’s why I don’t walk the Martin Poetry Path to see my own poems!) Add electric vehicles and you erase that possibility! First of all, it is very difficult to hear an electric vehicle driving up behind you, unless it uses a skeuomorph (that’s a great word…do look it up) to alert you and possibly give you a heart attack. Keep those pesky motorized vehicles away.
Why the people of Needham do not want to complete the path is beyond my comprehension. Almost as strange as them willing to tolerate the commuter rail horns.
Some hope exists now that the hard-core resistance of a few on the other side of the river to the extension of the Greenway over the bridge into Needham may finally be dissipating. For those of us who have been trying to see this project done, that would be a blessing akin to the arrival of the messiah! Realistically, there’s no chance that the route would be approved for any other purpose than walking and cycling.
Some homeowners near a proposed project such as this one have an irrational fear about “the type of people” it might draw. I saw this first hand when I lived in the Washington D.C. area and I’ve sensed some of it here even when the proposal is simply geared to encouraging more people to use an existing walking trail, bikeway or a combination of the two modes. Opposition generally dissipates quickly once something is actually established, but getting past these initial fears can be a challenge. During the initial campaign to establish the Upper Falls Greenway, I helped Jerry Reilly with knocking on a lot of doors in homes adjacent to the proposed greenway to discuss the project and assuage whatever fears homeowners and residents might have. Jerry has a wonderful knack for engaging people and I think some concerted outreach along these lines is needed here. It’s imperative that legitimate concerns be addressed. The project may be more than half way to success if residents along the proposed route buy off on it. It’s dead if they don’t.
And most of the outreach should come from Needham homeowners or residents. Neighbors talking to neighbors.
Pretty good meeting tonight. Thankfully, there seems to be strong support in Needham for a pedestrian-bicycle path. For a shared-use transit concept, not so much.
Opposition to the latter comes from neighbors worried about having a bus in their backyard, as well as from pedestrian-cyclist advocates who are either worried that the buses would be a menace to cyclists or that a project dimensioned to handle buses would never get funded.
As someone who’s stupid enough to bike across the Highland Ave./128 interchange on a regular basis, I’m surprised that any cyclists would feel threatened by the buses – there used to be
some cool autonomous 6-seater ones in Providence called Little Rhody
and if they were to run those say, 2 or 3 times an hour at 15 or 20 mph with pedestrian avoidance technology, I can’t see how they would pose any kind of risk. But the worry that opponents could use the transit component as a red herring to delay funding, as they have for the last 10 years, is a real one.
There was also some concern as to the restricted scope of this feasibility study, which at $200k looks at only 4,000 feet in Needham and doesn’t do much to evaluate the overall context of the project and the connectivity that it could potentially provide. Nor does it consider funding.
But Needham officials cautioned that it should be viewed as a very preliminary analysis. We should take whatever we can get at this point, I suppose – the right-of-way really shouldn’t be allowed to rust away for another decade.
I’m a bit mystified about what problem they would be solving with electric buses on the Greenway. If as you say they were to run 15-20 MPH buses down the Greenway how would that be any faster than running a bus down Needham St a 1/4 mile away.
In the meantime, as one commenter noted, you would be adding motor vehicles to the only safe bicycle crossing over Rt 95
Not only that, it looks like they would only be going one way, and currently they would be dropping passengers off behind National Lumber. They keep talking about a direct shuttle to the Newton Highlands T, but how in the world is that going to happen?
I wonder if this was pushed into the project to appease some abutters or other sources of resistance in Needham.
Jerry, I guess the presumption is that Needham Street will be choked with traffic so it’s one of the few cases in this neck of the woods where you could position a bus as truly being a more comfortable and efficient alternative.
Or maybe the bus could exclusively serve the Needham side as an extension of the Commuter Rail from Needham Heights to Needham Crossing (TripAdvisor territory). Although before heading down that path, logically during the Better Bus Project the 59 bus should have been reconfigured from its milk run on Hillside/Webster/Central/Elliott/Chestnut/Oak and routed down Highland Ave.
Unfortunately a lot of projects undertaken by Needham town government are shoot-first-ask-questions-later and this study seems to be an example of that. There’s no holistic approach and the study has no intention of investigating linkage to Newton Highlands, or even the connection on the other end between the Needham Heights train station and Webster Street. The consultant wasn’t familiar with the existing Needham rail trail between Needham Junction and Dover either. Apparently the study just serves to answer the (apparently $200,000) question, “Will these 4,000 feet in Needham accommodate a rail trail of some kind.”
But again, I’m very grateful that things are moving forward; this should have been coordinated with the Upper Falls Greenway 10 years ago but it wasn’t because of an obstinate Board of Selectmen. Now Needham has finally elected a Select Board with decent, forward-thinking people who have prioritized getting something done. Hopefully they can line up funding before there are any serious discussions about our $400 million worth of pending school reconstruction, since that will send the town to the proverbial poorhouse and we can kiss any discretionary projects like this goodbye for a long time.
@Michael: Agreed, this study was at best sloppy. They kept cluelessly talking about a shuttle to the Newton Highlands T station, as if the Newton side of the path already goes there.
I hope Newton is not on board with this ridiculous shuttle bus thing. It basically means no trees on the “Greenway”. How in the world did this even become a possibility?
@Newtoner – For years now Newton and Needham have had different ideas about using that corridor. Needham has always wanted it as a transportation corridor and they were not happy when Newton used it for recreation instead.
A few years back, during the Rt 95 Add-a-Lane project, the state severed the right-of-way by taking down the railroad bridge that crossed the highway. Ultimately both Needham and Newton have an interest in having the state rebuild a bridge there and restoring the right-of-way.
Recently the possibility of funding for a preliminary engineering study arose, to study the technical issues and costs for rebuilding that bridge (as well as the Charles River crossing). The only way Newton and Needham could agree on this study is if it included two distinct options – pedestrian-bicycle or pedestrian-bicycle-bus (at Needham’s insistence).
So that’s how we got here. Like you though I certainly hope that ultimately there is no effort to turn the Upper Falls Greenway into a street for buses.
There will be a meeting in Newton on April 26 (next Wednesday) about this and they are solicting the public’s feedback on how they would like to see the corridor used. Here’s that on-line survey
@Newtoner – From last night’s meeting in Needham all the feedback I heard from abutters was clearly against the bus option and in support of the pedestrian-bike option.
It has always been the Needham Selectmen that have been pushing for the idea of buses on that corridor. At different times different groups of Needham residents have advocated for pedestrian-bike usage on that portion of the right-of-way but so far they have not got any where …. though the town did build a trail at the opposite end of town on this same right-of-way.
I can see why Needham wants to provide transit access to the Green Line, and the corridor is the best way to do that. But hybrid work is here to stay, and combined with the continued unreliability of the T, I’m not sure if future demand will justify the added expenses of the new service.
I attended the Needham meeting on April 18 by Zoom. There are some subtle, and not so subtle, items that I would like to point out: Audience members asked: “Why just 4,000 feet for the study?” The Needham Moderator finally fessed up that, while this was a bird’s eye view of the “pinch point” that would indicate the possibility of any connection between Needham and Newton, clearly there was a rational motivation to extend the corridor further in the future. (Foot in the door!) I asked whether this would be one-way or two-way electric vehicles, since the picture of the 26 foot wide crossing showed only one bus. Answer: likely two-way traffic! One bus was depicted as taking up 10 feet. Two would take up 20 feet, leaving 3 feet on either side for pedestrians and bikes. I don’t know how two people could walk safely side-by-side along such a narrow path. I believe I also asked about trees. Most of the trees would have to be removed on either side to accommodate a 26 foot path (the electric vehicle one). It also came out in the discussion that DOT has rules that the bridges and, I believe, the whole length of the study path to Oak Street would have to be ASPHALT, not the current stone dust that lines it now. As you know, asphalt is non-permeable and should be avoided if at all possible. Bottom line? Leave the path as it is. Apply the $200,000 to NPS needs so we don’t have to fire as many teachers or lose as many programs. Needham’s insistence on adding electric vehicles is so blatantly-self-serving that Newton should NOT agree to proceed unless they desire the same safe pedestrian-bike facility that we have and love in Newton. Be sure to go to tonight’s Newton-side Zoom meeting and ask your questions about this ill-conceived project.
Here’s the Zoom link for tonight’s meeting – https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86744973932
and here’s the link to an on-line survey to let Needham and Newton know what your preferences are for the future of this corridor. The survey is open for responses until Sun April 30.
TIL something depressing that I presume many people are well aware of but I’d never really thought about: rail-trails are often polluted up the ying-yang with heavy herbicides, the chemicals that were in the ties, and the tons of carcinogenic junk that the railroads dumped willy-nilly along the right-of-way for decades.
Specifically, I was talking to someone involved in planting a fruit and vegetable garden along the Somerville Community Path not long ago – they tested the soil around a strawberry patch and it was determined to be a chemical soup of lead, arsenic, pentachlorophenol, and other unmentionables.
To me, a strawberry patch along a bike path is close to perfection, so my heart sank when I heard this.
I’m sure that you can generate similarly toxic results from testing the soil in the berms of most major thoroughfares and maybe even some playgrounds (e.g. the one that Needham built 60 years ago over its old burn dump across from the current dump), but I just hope that future caretakers of the Greenway and our region’s other beautiful rail trails are able to ensure that nobody ever tries planting say, a raised herb garden or something.
Sounds like something worth following up: how depressing! I bike along the greenway all the time, and I have passed along the Minute Man Trail many times…ay yay yay!