There are a lot of shady things about Allston, the Boston neighborhood that borders West Campus: the dilapidated storefronts, the old houses with dirty basements and the faint smell of marijuana that follows you wherever you go. But perhaps the shadiest is a secretive deal made by Boston University President Robert Brown about the building of a railway station deep in the heart of Allston.
One of former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick’s last acts as governor was a plan to build a railway station in Allston’s Beacon Park Yard, a piece of property owned by neighboring Harvard University. Ever since 2006, a Harvard-Allston Task Force has existed to help Harvard formulate plans for an Allston extension.
However, Patrick’s plan never came to fruition during his time in office due to inadequate funding.
The Commonwealth and Harvard each pledged to pay $8.3 million to fund two-thirds of the project, leaving the final third unfunded before Charlie Baker took office in January. New information has surfaced, however, that reveals the tentative third donor as Boston University.
Brown, in a letter to the former governor obtained by the Boston Globe, apparently wanted to fund the final $8.3 million to build West Station.
“Boston University is prepared to help fund the construction of West Station, in partnership with the Commonwealth and Harvard University,” Brown wrote in the letter, saying that he is “pleased to be a partner in this important transit project for the Allston area.”
The donation was never finalized, however, because it came with a price even greater than a cool $8.3 million of our tuition money. Brown was unprepared to sign the agreement unless the Commonwealth and Harvard could promise that cars and buses would not be allowed to use BU’s West Campus as a way to get to West Station.
BU spokesman Colin Riley told the Globe that new conversations have not yet taken place, but BU is “looking forward to restarting them with the Baker administration.”
The commuter rail station, to be called West Station, would improve transportation and more easily connect Allston to Cambridge, Harvard’s home base. West Station would be part of a bigger plan to revitalize Allston and improve commuter access into Boston, along with a $260 million project to straighten out the Massachusetts Turnpike near the Allston tolls.
It does make sense that Brown would help to fund West Station: Allston could basically be considered West West Campus, and the “Allston Crawl” is an important part of the BU first-year experience. The station would allow easier access into Allston and perhaps even make it a safer place to walk around at night. Additionally, many BU students live in Allston during their sophomore, junior or senior years thanks to the prime location and low housing prices. A house in Allston will usually cost you less than a stay in 1019 Commonwealth Ave. and, of course, Student Village I and II.
The station would allow current and future BU students easier access to other parts of campus from Allston, which can seem light years away from central campus where most classes are located. Especially in the long, harsh winters, a typical walk from an Allston abode to the College of Arts and Sciences will cost you about 30 minutes of your time.
Investing a few million into something that will make daily life easier for most BU students doesn’t seem like a huge burden. Allston is, whether we like it or not, a part of BU, so it makes sense that we are showing interest in its infrastructure and well-being.
What’s confusing, though, is Brown’s insistence that cars and buses won’t be able to use West Campus as a route to West Station. How can you entirely avoid driving through a part of campus that takes up a huge part of Commonwealth Avenue? For someone driving to the station from many parts of Boston or Brookline, he or she would have to go totally out of their way to avoid West Campus. It doesn’t seem feasible, or enforceable, for that matter.
However, if that ever gets figured out, it is nice that Brown is trying to ensure that there’s no negative impact on BU’s campus as far as traffic and congestion is concerned. Harvard doesn’t have to deal with the traffic that this station is going to cause, but we do.
BU helping to fund West Station seems like it would bring benefits to students — and yet, we cannot escape the bad taste in our mouths from being caught totally unaware. We are, after all, paying for a rail station that won’t even be built until most of us graduate (the project is slated to start in 2017 and won’t be finished until 2020). $8.3 million isn’t much when you divide it among 30,000 students, but still, a common theme recurs: there must be far more transparency with regards to the spending of our tuition checks.
