Why didn’t the Green Line Extension go further?

I received a message from a fellow member of the Community Preservation Committee about whether I would support an extension of the Green Line to Route 16/Mystic Valley Parkway. This was the first time I even learned that there had ever been plans to extend the Green Line further than it had been.

To bring people into the loop: the Green Line is a subway line that passes through Boston. In 1991, as part of the mitigation for the Big Dig, the state agreed to extend it to Tufts. This project really only took off in the mid 2000's. It concluded recently when the Green Line extended to Medford, North of Boston, all the way to Tufts University, on the border between Medford and Somerville. Before that, only bus lines connected this part of Medford to the metropolitan area. However, this message from my colleague was the first time I'd learned that there had been plans to put the extension even further into Medford — stopping not at Tufts, but at Route 16.

With the extension, this is what the Green Line looks like today: 

The extension is visualized in bold. As can be seen from the diagram above, it ends at Tufts, near the border between Somerville and Medford

At an endorsement barbecue for the Greater Boston Labor Council, I ran into a person who said his old roommate used to be the Globe reporter assigned to an area of Greater Boston that included Medford, Malden, and Everett. "Does Medford still have the most dysfunctional city council in Greater Boston?" he asked me.

Where does this impression come from? I think the history of the Green Line Extension — GLX for short — and why it failed to extend further to Route 16 — the "Phase 2" part of the plan — is a great anecdote for illustrating the nature of soft power in politics and how not exercising it can lead to a community being left behind.

The day after the barbecue, I had coffee with Ken Krause, an advocate who, with many other Greater Boston residents, was responsible for pushing the Green Line extension as far as it did go. The history was best described in an email Krause sent to me, along with a packet of materials related to it, which I would only be paraphrasing if I went into the details:

"Recapping briefly the history, in 2006 MassDOT/MBTA originally selected the Route 16 location for the terminus station (its Preferred Full-Build Alternative).

However, since this station went farther than what was required as part of the state’s Big Dig mitigation commitment to extend the Green Line to “Medford Hillside,” and because MassDOT could not identify funding in order to complete the full extension by what was then a legal deadline of 2014, MassDOT in 2009 broke off the Route 16 station into a Phase 2 of the GLX, and started putting aside money for it through the Boston Region Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO), the body that decides on which projects federal transportation dollars budgeted for the region are spent.

Then, in 2015, when a lack of funds threatened the completion of GLX Phase 1 (the extension to College Avenue and the Union Square branch), MassDOT succeeded in getting the Phase 2 money ($158 million) reallocated to GLX Phase 1. As a condition of that move, the MPO – wanting to help ensure this would not be the GLX Phase 2 death knell -- insisted that GLX Phase 2 planning must continue in the form of a new Environmental Impact Study. Then-secretary of transportation Stephanie Pollack agreed to that (including writing a letter to that effect to Medford, which is also in the packet), MassDOT has yet to see through that commitment.

Now, with Pollack long gone to Washington [she left in 2021 to become Deputy Administrator of the Federal Highway Administration], the MBTA mired with so many other problems, and decreased support for GLX Phase 2 from Boston MPO members, in particular the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, formerly a leading champion, it’s been an uphill battle to get any movement on getting the EIS back on track, despite continued efforts by State Rep. Christine Barber and Sen. Patricia Jehlen in particular. 

There’s still a chance the project could some life back in it, especially if private developers succeed in expanding the commercial cluster at Route 16 (two projects are in the works there) and would commit some money toward a GLX station there, but it’s honestly a long shot at this stage."

Our conversation over breakfast mainly just expanded on the details of this narrative. We talked about other things, like the logistics of the placement of the station on Boston Avenue, the environmental impact study of Phase 2, and residents' complaints about the proposal, which I had heard echoed when I canvassed around the area.

What I was particularly interested in was how city councilors could be solid advocates for these sorts of projects despite limited direct influence over the MBTA. I'd been thinking about this generally for other state-level and federal projects — particularly the flight noise issue that I'd been hearing in my door knocking. Krause explained that Medford City Councilors had, by and large, been passive in this project.

"Were other city councils any different?" I asked.

"Oh, yes," he replied. "The Somerville Councilors were all over the place."

The project nearly died several times, but Somerville Councilors showed up to meetings, wrote letters, and made their voices heard. That was it. They wrote and they showed up. In contrast, City Councilors over in Medford attended their own meetings on Tuesday nights, loudly complained that they weren't informed of developments, and didn't really do much else. The attitude of passive "you approach me" governing and active "I approach you" governing is a fundamental difference between getting resources and getting nothing.

As Krause explained in the email and repeated to me over breakfast, the extension is likely dead in the short term, given the MBTA's other public problems and dysfunction they've been dealing with. Even so, the commitment to Medford, from previous administrations, is there:

Letter from then-Secretary of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation Stephanie Pollack to then-Mayor Stephanie Burke on the MBTA’s committment to extending the Green Line further to Route 16. Pollack did initiate an environmental impact study for Phase 2 of the GLX, but little other progress had since been made.