Project

Draft EIS for I-90 through Beacon Yards in Allston (MA)

For the Indirect and Cumulative Impacts chapter of MassDOT’s Draft Environmental Impact Study, EBP worked with FXM Associates to assess the economic impacts of transportation system performance changes resulting from improving the I-90 segment currently carried on a viaduct requiring replacement in the Allston neighborhood of Boston, adjacent to Harvard University's Boston campuses. 

Build alternatives were analyzed considering both current land use patterns and the expected development on the land freed up by the project to capture the pure transportation benefit as well as the forecast performance at build-out through 2045.

EBP collaborated with CTPS modeling staff to develop travel model summaries for all transit, passenger car, and truck modes leveraging trip and skim tables for travel time, distance, transit fares, congestion and more. EBP considered changes in commuting patterns and average commute times to assess spatially discrete benefits estimated by the model under the various land use scenarios. Impacts using the TREDIS software suite were integrated with other economic and equity analysis completed by FXM Associates and CTPS.

This work updated EBP’s analysis supporting the state Environmental Assessment under MEPA in 2017 and leveraged new modeling tools from CTPS and the latest economic data and project information on transportation and land use outcomes.