Closing Summer Street? On World Cup crowd management, Boston locks horns with the T.
The World Cup may bill itself as a unifying event, but this being Boston, it has inevitably triggered tense political clashing between government officials over crowd control plans for a block near South Station barely bigger than a couple of soccer pitches.
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State transportation officials want to shut the section of Summer Street between South Station and Fort Point Channel to vehicle traffic for all seven local World Cup matches as a safety measure for fans taking the train to the games, according to a letter the agency sentto City Hall.
With Boston officials balking at the request, T officials suggested the state will simply take over that stretch of street with or without the city’s buy-in.
With less than a month to the kickoff of the games in Foxborough, the finger-pointing has added further tension to what have become underwhelming preparations and event-planning for the international tournament.
“I really don’t know how we got here. This is a major international event, this should’ve been sorted out a long time ago,” said City Council President Liz Breadon.
Last Friday, Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority general manager Phil Eng sent a letter to Boston officials that serves “as notice that the MBTA intends to acquire the temporary right to occupy this portion of Summer Street.”(The T says it has legal authority to take public property, so long as it is temporary.)
The city says not so fast, painting the letter as an “eminent domain” power move.
“The City opposes this inappropriate use of eminent domain to bypass the permitting process for roadways under local jurisdiction, and we urge the Commonwealth to withdraw the filing while plans are being reviewed,” a spokesperson for Mayor Michelle Wu’s administration said in a statement.
The spokesperson said Boston has ”proposed alternatives to meet the safety and security needs of the World Cup while preserving access to this area for residents, visitors, and local commuters.”
The T, for its part, said through a spokesperson that it continues to work with the city, with talks taking place as recently as Tuesday.
The MBTA expects about 20,000 fans to take trains from Boston to Gillette Stadium for each of the local Cup matches. The T asserts that given the crowds, the “security posture” around South Station should mirror that of Gillette on match days.
ButBoston officials argue the street closure would further snarl traffic in an area already heavily congested during rush hour. They worry that planned detours for the closure don’t accurately account for driver behavior and that the proposal is underpinned by old data.
The city says it has proposed alternatives to shutting Summer Street that include utilizing Dewey Square and the Rose Kennedy Greenway Station as staging areas for passengers.
But the T nixed that counter-offer, saying it needs the space for security screenings, and that the threat a vehicle poses to the crowd is a legitimate concern. Staging crowds across the street from South Station at the Greenway or in Dewey Square could create unsafe bottlenecks at crosswalks and would disrupt Atlantic Avenue traffic anyway, according to the T.
World Cup matches will be held in Foxborough on June 13, 16, 19, 23, 26, and 29, as well as July 9. The T wants to close down the street for up to 10 hours on game days, according to the letter. Previously, the T and the city agreed to close only a portion of Summer Street on June 13 and 19, but Eng declared in the letter that “equal public safety needs exist for the other five matches.”
Only one of the seven matches is slated for a weekend day, with the rest scheduled for kickoff in the afternoon or evening during the work week.
Summer Street is a busy thoroughfare that runs through the Financial District into the Seaport and South Boston. The portion that would be closed on Cup game days is about one-fifth of a mile to just before the intersection with Dorchester Avenue on the west side of the channel.
For City Councilor Miniard Culpepper, the spat represents a larger issue: how the T deals with the city.
“The MBTA is so insensitive to the needs of the city,” he said. “If the city says, ‘You can’t shut down the street,’ the MBTA should come back and say, ‘How should we do it?’ ”
“They’re not listening.”
Breadon, the council president, pointed to an international friendly match between France and Brazil in late March, when so many fans mobbed South Station for the 20-plus-mile train ride to the stadium that some pedestrians were forced to walk in the street. For that friendly, the T set aside 5,760 roundtrip tickets, and only about 2,600 were sold, far fewer than the 20,000 riders expected for each World Cup game.
Given the anticipated crowds, removing cars from that portion of Summer Street would be a prudent move, said Breadon.
“With that amount of people, it seems to make sense that closing Summer Street is the proper way to go,” she said.
At the T’s most recent board of directors meeting on April 30, Erika Mazza, chief enterprise development officer, said the queuing of train riders on just the sidewalk for the Brazil-France friendly did not work out. In short, there was inadequate space, pedestrians who were simply trying to pass through on the sidewalk did not have enough room, and emergency access to the station was compromised, as was accessibility for the disabled.
Moving the queue off the sidewalk and onto a closed-off Summer Street would allow the T to relieve reduce crowding and access issues by giving fans a larger space.
As part of its security preparations, the T is viewing the large crowds in a different light from those who flock to Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins, and Patriots games. For example, there will be far fewer English speaking fans and many of the international fans often celebrate their teams with exuberant and lengthy marches.
Keeping them safe outside and inside South Station, and on each of the 14 trains making the express round trips to the stadium, requires a different approach than the usual Boston sporting events, T officials said.
The dispute over crowd management around South Station is the latest sign of broader dysfunction surrounding Boston’s preparations for the Cup, now just three weeks away.
For months, doubts have swirled in Greater Boston business circles about whether celebrations will have to be scaled back due to a lack of money from private and public sources.
Earlier this year, a protracted dispute between Boston Soccer 26 and the town of Foxborough briefly cast doubt over whether the event would proceed when Foxborough threatened to withhold an entertainment license. (The bitter feuding ended when the town received the assurances it sought.)
But that embarrassment could pale in comparison to what would happen if the region does not get crowd management right for the tournament.
Brian Higgins, a former police chief for Bergen County, N.J., and a lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said good crowd management is crucial to the success of a large event such as the World Cup. Local public safety authorities will want to consider a multitude of measures to safeguard the crowd from vehicles, to ensure safe egress and ingress, all the while keeping the queue moving so that fans don’t grow frustrated and tense.
“We’ve seen example after example of crowded situations that end in tragedy,” he said. “It’s a key to the whole event.”
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