Architectural Oddities: The Canton Junction MBTA Viaduct

Do you ever look at a piece of architecture and think, What the hell were they thinking?

---

Yesterday's adventures brought me to the Canton Junction MBTA station. Most of the parking for this station is literally on the wrong side of the tracks.

Planning my trip he day before, I'd been looking at Google Earth and trying to figure out just how one was meant to get from the lot to the platform, and then I figured, well, there has to be a tunnel or something. I'm sure I'll see it when I get there.

Boy, I sure did.

What we're looking at here is a giant "E"-shaped steel frame structure.

It's purpose is to allow people to walk from the parking lot to the central platform, or to the opposite platform, on a bridge that extends over a total of four train tracks, two in each direction.

Along the connecting line of the "E" are three sets of stairways, each two stories high, with four landings.

This is itself would be enough to allow 99.8% of the passengers to safely pass above the tracks. But because of wheelchair access requirements (and I am not saying these are a bad thing) they had to extend the massive arms of the "E" a couple hundred feet out, allowing someone in a wheelchair the opportunity for a vigorous workout followed by a go-kart speed descent.

All I can think of is a childrens' Boxwood Derby competition. Wheee!

In a more civilized country, we would probably have a set of elevators for the passengers who couldn't walk. This may be a suburban station, but the commuter crowds were huge. So it's not like this is an under-utilized spot. And ironically, this structure in the big, open air, funnels the departing commuters through passages that are more cramped than the inner-city underground subway thoroughfares.

Because the commuter rail is in the hands of a private company, who gets all the benefits of a competition free infrastructure-based market without any free-market competition, cost cutting measures are just too much to resist. Incidentally, recent attempts to make improvements have revealed several code violations.

Even with all the ramps and rails on this pedestrian structure, it still leaves one glaring safety issue.

Look at the picture above, where the people are walking. A passenger in a wheelchair barely has enough room to pass between that trash can and the yellow safety stripe along the tracks. As I was making my way back to the car last night, one of Amtrack's Acela trains blew through the station. When I first heard the distant rumbling, I wondered why everyone turned around and covered their ears. Three seconds later it was like a steel dragon was roaring down my throat, and four seconds later it was gone. I'm not sure how fast it was travelling but those trains get up to 150 MPH in this corridor. And the only thing between the pedestrians and those trains is a bumpy yellow strip.

A 61 year old man was killed in this location in 2008.

You might wonder why the stairs and ramps aren't oriented the other way, so pedestrians have to exit on the outside, away from the tracks. I sure did. But there's chains and jersey barriers on that side, so anyone who wants to take the safe way out of the bridge has to jump over. Plenty were.

I'm not saying I could design a better pedestrian walkway to serve a triple platform station - but architects are pretty innovative when they have to be. This thing looks like it was designed by a committee who got drunk before they even started.