Trains of Thought

OUR OPINION

As promised on the campaign trail, Gov. Deval Patrick plans to deliver a timetable for a New Bedford/Fall River commuter rail line within the first 90 days of his administration. Patrick’s top transportation aide, Bernard Cohen, recently toured proposed train sites between Stoughton and the line’s New Bedford/Fall River destinations as he prepares an outline to be unveiled by early April.

Cohen wisely called his visit “a listen-and-learn tour,” and pledged to seek a balance between the potential for economic growth with the project’s price tag, now estimated at $800 million. The rail extension would start at the existing Stoughton rail station and go through Easton, Raynham and Taunton, then split into two lines in Berkley with final destinations in Fall River and New Bedford.

Cohen would be wise, too, to take a look at the lessons learned from the soon-to-be-completed Greenbush rail restoration.

Cohen knows that challenges lie ahead: he led a $4.6 billion restoration program of transportation facilities and infrastructure in New York City after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as director of the Federal Transit Administration’s Lower Manhattan Recovery Office. And he said of the proposed rail extension that “projects like this are not easy projects to do.”

In a sure sign of things to come, Cohen and other state officials were greeted along their tour route by Easton and Raynham town officials and protesters who carried signs voicing opposition to the project – mainly because of its potential effect on the ecosystems of the Hockomock and Pine swamps.

Environmental concerns were a major force behind opposition to the restoration of Greenbush, the third and final branch of the restore Old Colony line. It took years for the MBTA to acquire the requisite permits addressing environmental concerns and setting restrictions along the 17.7-mile line, and the T sometimes failed to hold contractors accountable for observing them. Opponents spent nearly two decades arguing that the project would damage the environment, cause blight along the right of way, place the public’s safety at risk, cost too much, and that cheaper alternatives such as increased commuter boat service were never properly explored.

In the case of the New Bedford/Fall River line, it remains to be seen whether plans for an elevated trestle over swamplands will satisfy project skeptics.

There will be other objections, including noise, disruption, and the general not-in-my-backyard reaction. Had that been anticipated in the Greenbush project, and had state and T officials been more adept at community relations, years of the animosity and delays might have been avoided.

The Patrick administration needs to approach the new project with a spirit of compromise and common purpose, and not demonstrate the uncooperative and indignant tone that state bureaucrats took with citizens voicing their concerns over Greenbush.

(c) 2007 Patriot Ledger, The; Quincy, Mass.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.