Getting your Trinity Audio player ready…

At the traffic intersection of Cambridge Street and Lincoln Street, the light turns green for a left turn — that almost no vehicle takes — to Beacon Park Yard, where freight trains used to run between Boston and Worcester. Vehicles once hauled goods daily from Beacon Park Yard out onto Cambridge Street. The railyard has been closed for over a decade now.

The future of the railyard is a question of the Allston Multimodal Transit Project (AMTP), the lead agency of which is the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT). 

On March 24, MassDOT is expected to announce its selection of a consultant team for a cost analysis and engineering review of the project at a meeting open to the public, which often brings together people living in Allston as well as representatives from the City of Boston, Harvard University, and other construction and engineering groups. Updates from MassDOT concerning the Cambridge Street preservation project and from the City of Boston Planning Department concerning its design recommendations for Beacon Park Yard are also expected.

Cambridge Street preservation project construction sequence acquired by Allstonia

Allstonia acquired a copy of the construction sequence of the Cambridge Street preservation project, accurate as of February 18. The project is overseen by engineers at Highway District 6 Office, which is a state office that assists with road engineering, maintenance, and construction in the Greater Boston area.

According to the sequence, work on Cambridge Street’s two sidewalks and bike lanes is expected to be completed this October. As of March 15, work is being done on Cambridge Street’s westbound sidewalk and bike lane, which have been closed since January. A makeshift westbound bike lane and the street’s eastbound sidewalk and bike lane remains open.

“The goal is to get people back on a safe sidewalk as soon as possible,” said Luisa Paiewonsky, chief of megaprojects at MassDOT.

After the sidewalks’ completion, the preservation project will proceed from the sidewalks to the inner roads. In particular, work on the two outer roads running both eastbound and westbound is expected to run from October 2026 to May 2027. Following the work on the outer roads, work on the inner two roads and the traffic island between them is expected from May 2027 to October 2027. During those stages, the lanes undergoing preservation will be closed, meaning that vehicle traffic in each direction will be restricted to one lane — instead of two — on Cambridge Street. 

What to expect at the March 24 meeting: Cost analysis consultant team selection reveal

MassDOT is expected to announce its selection of a consulting team to provide a cost analysis and engineering review of the AMTP, following the rescinding of 327 million dollars in federal Neighborhood Access and Equity Grant funds by the Trump administration in July 2025.

“It was known even within the Task Force that even before we lost the grant, there was a shortfall of funding in the project,” said Paiewonsky.

A cost analysis, she added, would be “very important to move the Allston project forward, having lost hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds, and believing, as we do, that the funding gap will be even larger due to the impacts of construction inflation and steel tariffs and scope growth over the years.”

Crucially, the cost analysis could provide MassDOT and its partners with recommendations how the AMTP should unfold. Certain components of the megaproject’s funding structure can only be activated under specific conditions or dates.

“We want to also make sure that the funds that we have can be spent on particular components of the project,” she said. “Some of them are more immediate. Some of them are focused on specific infrastructure. For example, Harvard has pledged 90 million dollars to the construction of the West Station, the Commuter Rail station [which would be located at Beacon Park Yard].” 

“So we’re going to go through those as part of this financial analysis and say, if we were to have a phase one, which of these funds could be used now and for what purpose?”

“I think it’s really helpful to have a fresh set of eyes on which things are actually providing the most benefits and and what’s the cost benefit analysis for some of these individual elements?” said Jessica Robertson, a homeowner in Lower Allston and a member of the Allston Task Force since its inception about 14 years ago. 

At the same time, Robertson hopes that the needs of the neighborhood will also be taken into consideration by the selected consultant.

“We definitely hope that we will have a different result than what we saw on the Green Line Extension, in which case the project was over budget, and a new consultant was brought in to cut costs, and they ended up dramatically scaling back the bike and pedestrian elements of the project, which in the overall scale of the project, budget was just pennies, but yet it had a real impact on the quality of those facilities.”

According to a summary of an AMTP Task Force meeting from this past January published by a hired consultant from the firm Howard Stein Hudson, Robertson asked if “there could be more opportunity for two-way conversation between the Task Force and the consultant to make sure the right questions are being asked and that really important things aren’t left out,” to which Paiewonsky responded that “MassDOT will be managing the independent consultant and does not share the view that it would be better for the consultant to interact directly with the Task Force.”

Following MassDOT’s review of the insights of the cost analysis, an engineering review to evaluate the project’s design and recommend how to sequence or phase components will proceed. ■