Bucolic a few miles from gritty
Site of the Russell Garrison, a 17th Century fortified area in Dartmouth, Mass.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
It was heartening to learn that MBTA train service connecting Fall River and New Bedford with Boston, which started just last year, has become quite popular. The line averages nearly 10,000 passengers a day, most of it on weekdays. That’s a lot of cars no longer on the still often clogged roads between the Massachusetts South Coast and “The Hub,’’ and it helps reduce air pollution. The folks taking that line almost universally say the trip is far less stressful than driving and gives them time for work and/or to snooze.
The service will be an economic boon for Fall River and New Bedford by drawing more skilled workers to live there, some of them in the many converted old mill buildings built in those cities’ industrial heyday, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The line will let the region become more absorbed into the Greater Boston wealth machine even as it remains less expensive than the area up north.
But some newcomers will want to live in the pricey towns nearby, especially close to Buzzards Bay, on what my friend Will Morgan calls “The Quaker Coast’’ because of the many people of that denomination who started settling there in early colonial days. Considering the density of the region’s population, there’s a surprising amount of beautiful countryside there, including vegetable farms, a few dairy farms, and some vineyards in the area’s mild microclimate. More and more people want to live there as summer folks (think The Hamptons) and as year-rounders, many of them five-day-week commuters to Boston and elsewhere.
We’ve often noted how the area looks like parts of England, with gritty cities cheek by jowl with bucolic scenes.
But will rail service sharply intensify the area’s residential-development pressures and substantially erode its beauty?