By 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.)

McGrath Highway’s McCarthy Overpass is falling apart, and the Commonwealth’s transportation authorities are again treating Somerville like a second-class stepchild.

The Overpass begins near Somerville Avenue and crosses over Washington Street, stretching nearly to Highland Avenue. Replacing it with an urban boulevard would make the area safer for drivers and pedestrians and create a more hospitable environment for businesses and people. The resulting development would increase access to Union Square and Inner Belt, generate much-needed city tax revenues and significantly expand our job base.

Twentieth Century highway construction threw up elevated roadways like McGrath Highway. They tore apart urban neighborhoods while not interacting with them. They reduced neighbors’ quality of life, blighted their property, damaged their economies, and burdened taxpayers with enormous maintenance costs.

They are now deteriorating. But in places like Milwaukee, Portland, San Francisco, Chattanooga, and elsewhere, governments are finding that replacing them with boulevards and avenues is their most cost-effective and sustainable option.

The area beneath the McCarthy Overpass is an example of the problems that elevated roadways create, and of the opportunities associated with transforming them. Its confusing configuration, limited visibility, and interweaving traffic make it dangerous for drivers, while pedestrians and bicyclists take their lives in their hands. It depresses property values, discourages business location, and isolates neighbors.

The city has identified development of the Brickbottom/Inner Belt area as essential to resolving its fiscal woes. But neither Brickbottom nor Inner Belt is easily accessible, and half of Inner Belt is landlocked by two rail lines. The only access passes through a low and narrow tunnel, creating a choke point. The area’s development requires connecting it to McGrath Highway and the rest of Somerville, which cannot really be done with the overpass in place.

For these reasons, the Comprehensive Plan (thesomervillenews.com/archives/24230) commits the City of Somerville to “Advocate for the conversion of McGrath Highway into a surface-level, tree-lined urban boulevard, crossable by pedestrians at every intersection, with accommodations provided for bicyclists.” Regarding traffic capacity, the Plan states that McGrath now “functions with no better efficiency than an urban boulevard.”

Meanwhile, the McCarthy Overpass is falling apart. Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) engineers assess it as “structurally deficient,” meaning, unsafe.

There is plenty of money in the Accelerated Bridge Program (ABP) fund to transform it into a boulevard. When the Commonwealth kept skimming cash from other transportation budgets to pay for the Big Dig in the early 1990s, the U.S. Department of Transportation said that it would cut off all funding if the state did not begin repairing its crumbling bridges. Ultimately, the Patrick administration and the Legislature created a $3 billion dollar ABP fund.

The Boston Metropolitan Planning Organization plans for and authorizes major transportation projects throughout Eastern Massachusetts. In recent years, it has budgeted between $23 million and $30 million to “repair or redesign” the McCarthy Overpass. The work was scheduled to go out to bid in August 2013 and begin in 2014.

Planners in the Massachusetts Departments of Public Health and Transportation saw this project as an opportunity to conduct a Health Impact Analysis (HIA) to determine benefits achievable by de-elevating the Overpass. HIAs are a process heavily advocated by the Centers for Disease Control. They support designing communities in ways that promote public health. Both MassDOT and the Department of Public Health have received national praise for using an HIA to redesign and rebuild McGrath.

HIAs require extensive public participation. ABP regulations mandate public participation as well.

Related to the Health Impact Analysis, MassDOT planners are conducting a study on bringing McGrath Highway back to ground level, with ample community participation in the project design. The study is scheduled to be released this summer.

So planners and community advocates were shocked to learn that in mid-March, the MassDOT Board voted to authorize $10.9 million to repair, rather than replace, the overpass. The vote came without public awareness, much less public participation.

This is quite different from how MassDOT has managed similar projects. When it found that the Sullivan Square Overpass was structurally deficient, it closed the overpass and made plans to rebuild it. The City of Boston said that doing so would be unacceptable.

Boston officials insisted on combining redesigns of Sullivan Square and Rutherford Avenue, using a robust public participation process. They wanted a significant portion of the road width to be allocated to green space and pedestrian and bicycle uses. They got what they wanted.

The same was true with the Casey overpass in Jamaica Plain. After broad public participation, MassDOT agreed to replace it with a boulevard. And the simple rebuilding of the bridge in front of the Museum of Science and Industry involved a remarkable amount of public participation.

It is unclear as to why MassDOT is bypassing both public participation and its own planning process. The best guess is that senior managers feel under pressure to show that they are spending ABP funds and fixing bridges.

The situation is a reminder of the large burden that Somerville bears to support regional transportation, in comparison to the small benefit that it receives. Six rail lines cut our neighborhoods apart, but we have only one T station. Vigorous advocacy, first by the Mystic View Task Force, then by the Somerville Transportation Equity Partnership, and then with the leadership of Mayor Curtatone won commitments to extend the Green Line and build a new Orange Line station.

We now need similar advocacy regarding McGrath Highway. MassDOT’s Highway Division has scheduled a public meeting at the Argenziano School for May 31st at 6:00. It seems clear from the agenda that, instead of soliciting public input on transforming McGrath Highway, they intend to explain how they will repair the overpass.

It’s time for community advocates and the mayor to step up, as they have done so effectively in the past.