By Thomas C. Palmer, Jr., Globe Staff
When you have a new frontier, it helps to be able to get there.
That shouldn't be a problem for the Seaport District in South Boston, the hot new area for development. Major pathways for both people and vehicles were planned - and even under construction - before the new buildings began to spring up.
Of course, there are debates - aren't there always, in Massachusetts? - about where the money should go, whether mass transit or highways and streets should dominate, and how both should be configured.
But meanwhile, the half-billion-dollar Transitway between South Station and the World Trade Center is taking shape, as is the highway interchange at D Street, where the Massachusetts Turnpike Extension will be further extended to connect with the Ted Williams Tunnel. They are the funnels to this vast portion of Boston's future, and they will be in use long before most of the buildings and spaces they lead to are even designed.
For once, if only by accident, the planning came first. ``We had a seven-year head start on everybody else,'' says James J. Kerasiotes, who as chairman of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority oversees the $10.8 billion Central Artery/Ted Williams Tunnel project. ``We always anticipated this would attract investment to South Boston.''
When work started in 1992 on the Big Dig, as the Central Artery project is called, decisions had to be made. The Transitway from South Station, an extension of the MBTA system promoted by Representative J. Joseph Moakley and funded by Congress, was combined with the Artery job to save money and time. Big Dig managers, under pressure to cut costs on the budget-busting project, considered eliminating the South Boston interchange of the turnpike. But they rejected that idea, judging that highway access to the Seaport District would be essential to its eventual development.
The Transitway, which is scheduled to roll in 2002 as the Silver Line, will run buses - powered by both electricity and internal-combustion engines - from South Station through a tunnel to an underground stop at the new federal courthouse at Fan Pier, then to a stop at the World Trade Center, and eventually to another stop farther east.
As it happens, the World Trade Center stop is equidistant from that facility and the site of the new convention center: It will be about a 500-foot walk to either one. An enclosed moving sidewalk, like those being installed from central parking at Logan Airport, is considered a likely link from the Silver Line stop to the doors of the convention center.
While these major decisions have been made, however, thousands of issues remain: Where will new streets go, and how wide will they be? How will water transportation connect to other forms of transport? What routes will the Transitway buses follow on surface streets after they emerge from the tunnel? Most pressing, what will be the balance between public transit and private vehicles?
The South Boston Seaport District - 1,000 acres in total - is a huge area that will take lifetimes to evolve. What is being discussed in detail today is the Fort Point Channel area: the 170 acres closest to downtown, bounded roughly by the channel, Summer Street, D Street, and the harbor's edge. And even in that area, there is some time to plan.
``As we watch it, we don't think it's going to grow as fast as people think,'' says Peter Blute, executive director of the Massachusetts Port Authority, which controls large amounts of land on the South Boston waterfront. He and others - including the Boston Redevelopment Authority, the Turnpike Authority, the state highway department, and private landowners like Frank McCourt, James Pappas, and Fidelity Investments - will be creating, reviewing, and remaking the puzzle over the next decade and more. The course of the economy, too, will help determine how quickly development moves forward.
In the short term, there are some concerns about the order of events. The city's master plan for the area is due in November, but a major transportation study won't be complete till sometime next year. Stephanie Pollack, a senior attorney at the Conservation Law Foundation, an environmental group, thinks the process is ``out of sync.''
``Are they willing to hold up on some of the master planning and development stuff, to at least let the transportation study mature?'' she asks. ``If we really have 50 years to build the Seaport, why can't we wait six more months'' for the transportation study?
Like many others, the foundation would like to see mixed-use development - residential, commercial, and industrial - in the Seaport District, and smaller-scale buildings, especially along the water. That would dictate narrower streets, creating an area generally less hospitable to auto traffic and more suited to public transit and pedestrians.
Thomas N. O'Brien, director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, points to an existing building near the Custom House Tower with a ``footprint'' of about 15,000 square feet, a little smaller than the typical Boston building, as something ideal for office space on the new frontier. Smaller buildings, and new or re-formed streets like Pittsburgh Street, West Service Road, and Old Northern Avenue, will strongly dictate driving and walking patterns, shaping the streets and blocks into something on the scale of Back Bay.
O'Brien says the surface street plans should be complete by 2003, right after the Silver Line service begins. Vehicles will have had access to the area from the turnpike since late 2001, and the convention center may be ready as early as 2003, too. ``It works well,'' says O'Brien. ``They match up.''
The decision to use buses on rubber tires, at least initially, as the Silver Line vehicles was based in part on cost: A bus system is cheaper than a rail system. The route could later be converted to rail and the long-term plan is to connect it through Chinatown to Boylston Station. There it would link to the other half of the Silver Line - that is, the new Washington Street transit service replacing the old elevated Orange Line.
``There's going to be a lot of jobs'' in the new Seaport area, says transportation secretary and MBTA board chairman Patrick J. Moynihan. ``And there's going to be a need for people to get to these jobs.''
Some in the pro-transit community, who consider themselves more realistic than others, are happy with the bus solution, at least while development and transportation patterns are being worked out. ``The good news from the Transitway perspective,'' says Pollack, ``is that it got only half planned. It will be capable of running on city streets with a tremendous amount of flexibility.''
The wide new Evelyn Moakley Bridge over the channel on New Northern Avenue is the start of the kind of sensible street coordination that has been denied Boston residents ever since those apocryphal cows laid down street paths several hundred years ago.
Viaduct Street, the elevated roadway to the upper level of the World Trade Center, will be replaced as part of the Big Dig with what is expected to be a lively pedestrian way between Northern Avenue and Summer Street.
In short, a whole new grid of streets - some brand-new, some realigned versions of existing streets, some just repaved and landscaped - will be taking form. Drivers coming from the west on the Massachusetts Turnpike, or from Logan through the Ted Williams Tunnel, will be able to come into the district and find their way to a new neighborhood of hotels, shops, and activities.
Water transportation, though sparse, has at least been born, with a connection from Lovejoy Wharf, near North Station, to the World Trade Center. The South Boston Bypass Road parallel to D Street, a late addition to the Big Dig, is already open and removes thousands of construction vehicles from South Boston neighborhoods. It may someday be extended toward the Conley freight terminal to the east, helping rid the city streets of trucks. An existing Conrail track corridor may be used again as a freight link to Conley, so that the industrial area could be less congested and less dependent on trucks, city officials say.
Finally, a future transit connection to the urban ring, a circumferential route around downtown now only in the early stages of planning and dreams, could link a thriving Seaport area with Dorchester, Roxbury, Brookline, and other points on an encircling path that would lead to Chelsea and Logan Airport.
``Right now, the ring is not a ring,'' says Conservation Law Foundation's Pollack. That is, on paper it is not quite a complete circle. But extending it to the Seaport District from its current theoretical southern end, at JFK/UMass Station on the Red Line, would complete the circle. That's because Logan Airport buses will travel through the Ted Williams Tunnel to South Boston, and on through the Transitway tunnel to South Station.
That enormously ambitious project is a way off. ``I'm not silly,'' says Pollack. ``I know we're talking about the year 2010.''
Kerasiotes isn't so sure even that date is realistic. Having just wrestled with securing funding for the Big Dig from an increasingly tightfisted Congress, he says that ``one of the things we have to do in transportation in the next 30 years is recognize that the `ultimate build' solution isn't always going to be practical or even possible. It's clear the federal government's appetite for large projects is gone.''
Meanwhile, in the midst of the Big Dig's inconvenience, some of its side benefits are often forgotten. One of these is the cleanup of a highway mess in East Boston. Not only will the approach to Logan Airport be improved, both from the Callahan Tunnel and from the Ted Williams Tunnel, but the connection from the turnpike to Route 1A and points north will be new.
The new Route 1A interchange, part of the Big Dig, is scheduled to be finished in 2001, when the Ted Williams Tunnel opens to general traffic. But much of the work in East Boston, including a new bus system connecting to an improved Airport Station on the Blue Line, is already being done, as part of Massport's billion-dollar Logan improvement project.
Thomas C. Palmer Jr., a Globe reporter specializing in transportation, writes the weekly traffic column "Starts & Stops."
