It took more than a quarter-century, but Arlington has come around to wanting the MBTA red line to come through town.
The neighbor to Cambridge, which blocked a red line expansion in the 1970s, has filed a home rule petition to ask the Legislature to take back part of a 1980 law and allow for the possibility of an expansion. The news was reported Friday by the State House News Service, who identified its basis as a vote at Town Meeting held May 18.
Among the filers is state representative Dave Rogers, whose 24th Middlesex District includes parts of North Cambridge as well as Arlington and all of Belmont.
The timing is meaningful in that the MBTA is in the midst of planning its work for the next decade, said Cambridge vice mayor Burhan Azeem, who made red line expansion part of his campaign to represent the 2nd Middlesex District in the state Senate. Another sponsor of the petition with Rogers, state representative Sean Garballey, said he’s hopeful of passage before the end of the year; he has a $50,000 earmark secured to study an extension.
“This is so exciting. If you wanted to make an impact on that process, this is exactly when you would want to act,” Azeem said in a call Friday, referring to the state planning process. “It takes moments like this to show how different the politics are now.”
Concord has also expressed interest in an MBTA expansion, Azeem said.
Planning in the 1940s proposed that the red line reach as far as Lexington, but activism by a group called Arlington Red Line Action Movement rallied opposition as St. Agnes Church finished building its Catholic High School and Boston wrestled with racist school desegregation issues. Now the State House News Service reports Town Meeting member Paul Schlichtman saying the town will “choke in traffic if we don’t get better transit in town … the plans have been drawn, once upon a time, and we’re trying to get them to dust them off and move it forward.”
With an Arlington expansion blocked, the decision was made to end the red line at Alewife, a station that went online in 1985 with a giant parking garage that made it a park-and-ride commuter hub. With the garage decaying, the MBTA has explored working with a developer to rebuild the station and the surrounding 30-plus acres.
