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City Council President Dan Cahill says that Lynn is way overdue to benefit from the Blue Line rapid transit extension.
City Council President and soon-to-be state Rep. Dan Cahill didn’t need to say the words, “Hey, what about us?” during a Wednesday state transportation spending discussion. He made his point much more forcefully by telling a state transportation planner that Lynn is way overdue to benefit from the Blue Line rapid transit extension.
Cahill joined state Rep. Brendan Crighton and state Sen. Thomas M. McGee in pointing out the obvious during the North Shore Community College hearing: “I feel very bad for the folks in Somerville who won’t get a third subway line. We want just one.”
Cahill’s sarcasm is well founded. State transportation officials seem to be wearing blinders when it comes to improving transit service to Lynn and the North Shore. They talk about South Coast Rail and Green Line extension as if everything north of Boston did not exist.
McGee, Crighton, Cahill and Lynn Business Partnership representatives made it clear why the Blue Line matters.
The extension in one form or another has been discussed for 70 years and the reports and news stories written about it could fill a freight train with useless paper. Wonderland Station in Revere is the end of the line for Blue Line trains. Allowing the cars to roll down commuter rail tracks to Lynn would forge, McGee said, an ironclad bond with Boston spelling economic opportunity for Lynn.
“That project is imperative,” he said, summing up a point that Cahill expanded on when he pointed out how he drives to Revere to take a train to Boston when he could easily join other commuters in riding a train from Lynn to Boston.
Commuter rail, as the mega winter of 2015 proved, is great for casual “Geez, I think I’ll take the train to town today” commuters. But someone who has to get to work on time, every day, is ill served by it.
Now could not be a better time to prioritize the Blue Line and find the money to translate the plan McGee touted into an extension.
Gov. Charlie Baker and his top economic lieutenant Jay Ash came to Lynn last November with U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton and vowed to help spur Lynn’s economic resurgence from the drawing board into reality.
The three men can appreciate the importance of hitching the Blue Line extension to a full-court economic push on Lynn’s behalf. Baker commutes from his Swampscott home through Lynn daily to work. Ash in his previous job presided over urban Chelsea’s economic renaissance and Moulton has worked on high-speed rail projects.
The trio have sat in a room with McGee and listened to the veteran senator warn about the economic and safety implications of continually underfunding transportation in Massachusetts. McGee said $20 billion, not the $14.4 billion outlined by state planners, needs to be spent over by 2020 with the Blue Line ranked as a priority.
In describing his work commute, Cahill offered the most convincing reason on Wednesday why the Blue Line makes sense from an economic, environmental and life quality point of view: “I would love to not have to drive to Revere,” he said.
