Route 16 Green Line Station Meeting March 30

Meeting to focus on air quality, traffic, parking and more

The second in a series of meetings about extending the Green Line to Mystic Valley Parkway will take place on Wednesday, March 30 from 6:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. at 51 Winthrop St. in Medford.

The meeting is part of a visioning process, funded by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT), examining the effects of a potential Mystic Valley Parkway station on the planned Green Line Extension to Somerville and Medford.

The meeting will be hosted by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC), which is the regional planning agency for Metropolitan Boston. MAPC is leading the community visioning process which seeks to examine how a potential future station at Mystic Valley Parkway could foster transit-oriented development in the area and minimize negative impacts for surrounding communities.

The first public outreach meeting, held on February 16 in Medford, introduced the visioning process to the public, described the scope and timeline for the process, and included an hour-long small group dialogue to capture the key concerns and opportunities of those who attended. This second meeting, building upon the key issues heard in the first meeting, will focus on providing information and answering questions on the topics of traffic and parking, air quality, land acquisition, and managing neighborhood change. This is the second of five planned public meetings as part of the yearlong visioning process.

Additional public meetings will be scheduled throughout this year, with the goal of gathering community input on the benefits and impacts of extending the Green Line to Mystic Valley Parkway. MAPC and MassDOT have included the Massachusetts Office of Public Collaboration, based at UMass Boston, in this community visioning effort to help facilitate a strong public engagement process.

For more information about the visioning process, please visit www.mapc.org and www.mass.gov/greenlineextension.

– Information from MAPC

Photo by Alexander Svirsky, MassRoads.com