At its meeting on Tuesday, the MBTA's Board of Directors quietly authorized the purchase of a 21-acre industrial property at 440 Riverside Avenue in Medford to develop a new bus maintenance garage designed for its planned new fleet of battery-electric buses.
The property was formerly a distribution warehouse for Anheuser-Busch until it closed in 2024.
The purchase is still subject to ongoing negotiations, and specific details, like the proposed purchase price, remain confidential until the deal is finalized.
At its regular monthly board meeting on Tuesday, the board met in executive session for about 20 minutes. When the public meeting began, the board quickly approved a "consent agenda" that included a resolution authorizing the General Manager to purchase the site in accordance with a purchase and sale agreement that was presumably discussed in the executive session.
There was no public board discussion on the consent agenda. StreetsblogMASS was only able to confirm the details of the board's action on Wednesday, when MBTA officials also provided an informational slide deck about the property that had been provided to board members.
A real estate listing for the property describes a 207,000 square-foot cold storage warehouse, plus two smaller outbuildings of 43,000 square feet combined.
The 21-acre property also includes a 2-acre surface parking lot, and an even larger grass lawn along the southern edge of the property along 4th Street and Riverside Avenue.
A conceptual plan that the MBTA provided to board members (pictured below) indicates that the T could replace the larger warehouse with a new bus charging facility for about 54 60-foot "bendy" buses, like the ones it uses for the Silver Line and a handful of other high-ridership routes, plus 99 more traditional 40-foot buses.
A smaller building on the northern edge of the site would house repair bays for maintenance work and some office space.
The main entrance to the site is at the intersection of Riverside Ave. and Commercial Street. A railroad track wraps around the western and northern edge of the property and connects it to the Haverhill Line, a few blocks to the east.
The property is about 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) southeast of the MBTA's existing Fellsway bus garage, a century-old facility that was designed for streetcars.
The existing Fellsway garage is about 17,000 square feet with three garage bays. Most of the 61 buses based there park outdoors in a large surface parking lot that occupies most of the 3.7-acre site.
New garages necessary for planned electric bus fleet
As we've reported previously, the T needs to replace or overhaul all of its aging bus garages, many of which date to the streetcar era of the early 20th century.
The T is currently building two new garages that are designed for a new fleet of electric buses. A small facility in North Cambridge – the former yard for the MBTA's scrapped fleet of zero-emission electric trolleybuses – is slated to be complete later this year, and will have charging infrastructure for 34 electric buses equipped with diesel-fueled heating systems for the winter.
A larger garage in Quincy, designed to replace a 1909 trolley barn, has been under construction since 2023. It will have capacity and charging infrastructure for 120 buses, 34 more than the existing facility. The new Quincy garage is now expected to open in early 2027, MBTA officials told StreetsblogMASS.
MBTA officials have indicated in the past that once Quincy and North Cambridge are complete, its next priorities for garage replacements are the Arborway garage in Boston and the Fellsway garage in Medford.
A 2021 presentation to the MBTA Board of Directors suggested that "a new Fellsway should be sized to accommodate both a larger fleet (about 200 buses) and a mix of 40’ and 60’ buses."
That presentation added that the "ideal location" for a new Fellsway garage would be "near Wellington," closer to new high-frequency bus routes in Everett, Somerville, and Chelsea.
