CRWA in the News

Lost on the parkways

by Mike Ryan

Boston Globe, Monday, August 20, 2007

GREATER BOSTON'S parkways hold a special place in the state's history, and they are quite different from its highways. So it would be a mistake to have them in the care of the Massachusetts Highway Department. Yet that is the course being laid out by Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Ian Bowles and Transportation Secretary Bernard Cohen as they chart the future of the metropolitan parkway system.

These top officials -- and transportation industry insiders -- say that it would be more efficient to transfer parkway responsibilities from the Department of Conservation and Recreation. As Bowles puts it, "Our intention is to let DCR be a parks agency, and let MassHighway be a highway agency, or a roadway agency."

Judging from a review of their recent press statements, it appears that the goal of these policy makers is to sever the parkways from the parks, with no concept of the environmental and operational effects of what they are doing.

When over a century ago Charles Eliot and Sylvester Baxter planned the nation's first metropolitan park system for the Commonwealth, they intended for landscaped pleasure roads -- parkways -- to be central to the park experience. Today, in a much more dense and urbanized setting, the parkways continue to provide citizens with easy access to parks and to serve as protective, noncommercial barriers bordering green parkland.

Park managers' focus on parks includes care and control of these incomparable parkways, which are often inseparable from parkland. Sadly, this key point is lost on those officials who look at a parkway and see only a road, or worse, a highway.

Governor Deval Patrick's proposal for shifting the parkways' "curb-to-curb" maintenance -- including pavement, curbs, and drainage -- to MassHighway fails to recognize that most parkways are an integral part of parkland.

Moreover, in their zeal to shift care of these roads, administration officials fail to understand that the state's highway department is not ready, willing or able to maintain the 500 lane-miles of parkways. To foist this task on MassHighway would diminish parkways and endanger the integrity of the Massachusetts park system.

In March, the Massachusetts Transportation Finance Commission issued a withering report, calling the financial management of our highways unsustainable. Citing the lack of trained personnel and a $2.2 billion highway infrastructure maintenance backlog, the report said "MassHighway is cannibalizing its capital budget to support its operating needs." Under these circumstances the highway department simply can't sustain the added burden of parkways.

But the problem goes deeper than funding. A lawsuit filed July 2006 by the Conservation Law Foundation and the Charles River Watershed Association against MassHighway charges that the department is failing to carry out federally mandated storm water management on its roads and highways and refuses to address the shortcomings.

Kate Bowditch of the watershed association says, "Compared to other states' programs, MassHighway is far behind in approach, information management, technology, commitment, storm water pilot projects, and public participation." By comparison, Bowditch commends DCR's commitment to getting its storm water management program on track.

MassHighway's laxness and nonresponsiveness regarding storm water management -- a primary component of curb-to-curb road maintenance -- leads to increased flooding and pollution of watersheds and rivers.

If curb-to-curb parkway transfers are carried out, DCR's experienced parkway maintenance staff would be reduced to becoming project advocates rather than active participants in decision-making. In addition, projects currently integrated with parkway plans, such as playground improvements, would be excluded from MassHighway funding.

Moreover, it is hardly clear that MassHighway has much knowledge of a newly completed set of guidelines for maintaining historic parkways.

"The expertise is in DCR to maintain the parkways, and that expertise isn't in MassHighway," said Joe Dorant, president of the Massachusetts Organization of State Engineers and Scientists. "When you design a parkway it's focused on parks, where MassHighway is focused on transportation -- getting one place to the next."

We risk degradation of our parkway system if we implement the administration's ill-conceived parkway transfer plan. The remedy is to provide adequate parkways funding for DCR, which has the expertise and enthusiasm for treating these public resources as the jewels they are.

Mike Ryan is executive director of the Friends of the Middlesex Fells Reservation.