On Monday, state officials revealed that the MBTA will receive a $472 million federal grant for the replacement of the century-old Draw 1 railroad bridge over the Charles River – a critical piece of infrastructure that dozens of trains cross every day on their way to and from North Station.
The existing Draw 1 bridge carries all of the MBTA's north side regional rail traffic – the Haverhill line, Newburyport/Rockport line, Lowell line, and Fitchburg line – plus 5 daily round-trips for the Amtrak Downeaster. Those trains carry over 11 million passengers a year, according to MBTA estimates.
Under the most recent MBTA capital plan, the North Station Renovation and Draw 1 Bridge Replacement Project is expected to cost $1.2 billion in total, and had already had $385 million in funding committed – enough to complete the design and permitting phases.
The project also includes plans for a new control tower, upgraded train signals, and the addition of two new tracks inside North Station that will expand the station's capacity.
Even with the additional federal funding announced on Monday, $343 million of the project's $1.2 billion cost still remains unfunded.
An MBTA spokesperson confirmed that the federal funds committed on Monday will give the T enough money T to replace the drawbridge, but other elements of the project – the signal upgrades, the replacement control tower, and new station tracks at North Station – still need additional funding.
The federal grant will come from the new National Infrastructure Project Assistance program, a discretionary program created under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021. The program is sometimes referred to as the "Mega" grant program, because it was set up to finance "large, complex projects that are difficult to fund by other means," according to the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT).
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law authorized $5 billion in total funding for the Mega grant program over a 5-year period.
In a Notice of Funding Availability published in March, USDOT revealed that $1.7 billion of that authorized spending remained for the entire country. The MBTA award for the Draw One project represents a little over a quarter of that remaining funding.
In a press release issued Monday morning, officials noted that this is the largest federal grant award the MBTA has ever won.
Project won't include long-planned pedestrian connection
MBTA officials say that the new bridge likely won't include a new pedestrian crossing to connect North Bank Park in Cambridge to Nashua Street Park in Boston – an idea that dates to the 1995 "New Charles River Basin Master Plan."
In a June 6 meeting of the Boston Region Metropolitan Planning Organization, which allocates federal funding for transportation projects in eastern Massachusetts, Josh Ostroff, the MBTA's Director of Capital Strategy, explained that any pedestrian connection across the Charles River would need to be separate from the new drawbridge.
"In the course of advancing the design for this, it's become clear that through the NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) review process, we would need a separate Coast Guard bridge permit for a pedestrian bridge structure," said Ostroff. "The drawbridges and the pedestrian structures would be physically separated, and supported by their own discrete foundation systems... The entity to build this would need to do this separately from the engineering and construction of the drawbridge."
T spokesperson Joe Pesaturo told StreetsblogMASS on Monday that although a walkway won't be part of the replacement bridge, "the MBTA remains committed to collaborating with DCR and other stakeholders to explore alternative plans or strategies for improving pedestrian connectivity" across the river.
MBTA on a winning streak for federal grants
The MBTA had twice previously applied for funding for the Draw 1 project, without success, in 2022 and 2023.
In its press release announcing this year's grant award, Governor Healey's office boasted that the T "has successfully secured an award from every (federal) grant program it has applied for since the beginning of the year, signaling a growth in confidence in its ability to efficiently deliver productive results."
Some of those other recent grant awards include:
- $67.6 million for accessibility upgrades on the Green Line's outer branches
- $40 million for an under-construction garage for new electric buses in Quincy
- $22 million to build a center-running busway between Everett and Sullivan Square
After decades of underinvestment by state lawmakers, the T has a $25 billion backlog of projects – including the Draw 1 bridge replacement – that it needs to complete to attain what it calls a "state of good repair."
