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.