What's a head house?

And why does it matter? William C. Shelton (The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville News belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville News, its staff or publishers.) Few Somerville residents realize Assembly Square's scale. The distance between its North and South ends is the same as that between North and South Stations. But while the downtown area has 12 T stops, Assembly Square will have only one, so it should serve the site as well as possible. MBTA officials expect to begin construction next fall. At a recent community meeting regarding the station's design, nearly every Somerville resident who spoke asked T officials to add a second head house. A head house is not the little structure that one found behind homes before the arrival of indoor plumbing. It is a T-station entrance and exit. And building the Assembly Square station with only one head house, as is now planned, can have a significantly negative impact on East Somerville and Ten Hills residents, on Somerville drivers, and on breathers. The reasons begin with the 333,000+ autos that daily travel on the five roads surrounding Assembly Square. Most Somerville drivers are acquainted with the congestion that daily plagues Route 28 in particular for long periods. Assembly Square's planned developments will greatly increase traffic, but not by nearly as much as the 100,000 auto trips that were forecast by the developers' traffic engineers before the settlement agreement negotiated between the Mystic View Task, Federal Realty Investment Trust, and IKEA. Working together, the parties found creative ways to halve the number of required trips. By comparison 50,000 trips per day was the increase in I-93 capacity created by the $15-billion Big Dig. An essential element in this plan was finding every means possible to encourage Orange Line use. The developers pledged $15 million to build the station, and Congressman Capuano obtained a $25 million Department of Transportation commitment. At the outset of settlement discussions, IKEA negotiators promised that at Assembly Square they would create a whole new model for IKEAs in urban areas. Ultimately, they proposed, and the Planning Board approved, the same old blue box. Including its parking structure, it will be six times the size of the Home Depot. IKEA officials conservatively forecast that their Somerville store will generate 6,180 new car trips on weekdays and 10,510 on Saturdays. Readers will be familiar with the legendary traffic backups created by the Stoughton IKEA. The distance between Route 24 and the Stoughton IKEA is 2 miles on a four-lane road, while that between Somerville's I-93 Lombardi-Street exit and the IKEA site will 1050 feet on a two-lane road. And IKEA projects that half its vehicle trips will come from the North on I-93. Many of IKEA's Boston-area customers will be students and others beginning new households, and many of those could come on the Orange Line. That's where the second head house comes in. To reach IKEA from the proposed single head house, customers would have to walk a circuitous quarter mile, climb or escalate up and down the equivalent of six stories, and then return with their purchases. This will seriously discourage those who would otherwise come by train. An additional head house at the station's Southern end would allow for a level walkway between the top of the T escalator and the IKEA, substantially increasing train users and reducing car trips. The single-head-house station's price tag has now grown by almost $10 million. The Boston Metropolitan Planning Organization has agreed to cover this increase by using some of its regional highway funds. So where would the money for a second head house come from? The obvious answer for a good chunk of it is IKEA. The company is benefiting greatly from $65 million in road improvements in front of its site, financed with state and federal transportation funds. IKEA has made large contributions to local governments elsewhere to mitigate its traffic impacts. It gave $10 million for a bike-friendly highway project in College Park, Maryland, for example. It's hard to imagine that the world's largest furniture company's managers could claim that they can't afford it, although IKEA's erstwhile CEO said that worldwide sales had declined for the first time in the company's history. He thinks that consumers' spending is shifting toward electronics products. Local activist Wig Zamore has an idea for IKEA. It could recruit a high-volume computer/electronics store to share its property. That store would have more frequent visitors, from a smaller trade area. IKEA would have less-frequent visitors, but from a larger trade area. Together, they would boost each other's sales. And with a portion of this increase, plus rent from the electronics store, IKEA could help pay for a second head house. The Assembly Square T station could better serve Somerville with two more important improvements. Draw 7 park is a hidden jewel on the Mystic River. An exit from the T station directly into the park would make it less hidden and more accessible. Finally, as now designed the station will be visible from only a tiny portion of the site. It would be best to increase visibility for both head houses by putting them at the ends of Foley Street and IKEA Way. With these changes, the T station would be a much better asset for Somerville and for visitors to Assembly Square.

Comments

[Tricky]

Bill - do you know whether a second headhouse would have to be accessible? Perhaps for now it would be nothing more could than a stairway and exit with Charlie Card access (see Central and Kendall Square stops on the Red Line), maybe you build it in a way to construct a more proper headhouse sometime in the future.