It’s A Thriving Neighborhood, Yet The Seaport Still Struggling with Transit Issues

Boasting a host of new restaurants and an explosion of retail, commercial, residential and hotel development, the Seaport District stands out as Boston’s most exciting new neighborhood in decades; it also stands out for its lack of transit alternatives, here’s a perspective on the issue …

Envisioned since at least the 1970s as a post-industrial center of livelihood and a connection to the harbor for a coastal city more oriented around its rivers, Boston’s Seaport District is fulfilling its mixed-use vision, and more rapidly than anyone could have ever thought. While the neighborhood has many distinguishing features, one of them is, unfortunately, the area’s lack of adequate public transportation, particularly for an urban area developed to its level of density.

An Understandable Problem

The current transportation insufficiency of the Seaport District traces its roots to the 1990s, a time during which the city underwent the Big Dig. As the project was experiencing large cost overruns, efforts were made to save on other projects, including the transit project planned for the Seaport District. A project envisioned to be rail was scaled down to lower-capacity Bus Rapid Transit. Planners could not have envisioned the area would become among the country’s fastest growing business districts, nor could they have foreseen a big share of the working population opting to live in non-car-dependent areas.

Boston’s Seaport District is one of many former central urban industrial areas undergoing redevelopment into mixed-use neighborhoods worldwide. Changes affecting manufacturing and goods distribution have left many of these areas with high vacancy levels in their former uses, and their central location makes them highly attractive as redevelopment opportunities. One caveat in many of these areas, as in Boston, is that these heavy industrial areas typically did not support dense populations as city centers, and do not have the type of more developed transportation infrastructure found, in even the very closely located downtown areas.

Despite all its recent real estate success of attracting top international corporate brands, developing award-winning class A buildings and trading class B assets at record-breaking prices, this modern stretch still needs to figure out its means of transporting. Ironically, the area was recently known for having the majority of parking spaces for workers in and around the financial district. READ THE FULL TRANSIT REPORT (Node by Perry) HERE