Traffic Nightmare Averted

July 09, 2019

Proper Transportation Planning, Innovative Thinking, and Execution

Encore is Open!  As everyone most likely has heard the Encore Boston Harbor Resort has opened to great fanfare. Leading up to the opening, however, there was much anxiety as to how traffic would move into, out of, and around the site (or how it would NOT move).  Howard Stein Hudson is very proud to have planned and designed a menu of traffic mitigation solutions to combat this.  This was made possible by the true partnership amongst the local, state, and of course Encore team that allowed us to be bold and maybe even a little bit unconventional in our approach.  If early returns are any indication, results have exceeded expectations as traffic has been more then manageable with patrons taking advantage of bus shuttles, ferries, and even BlueBikes to lessen the impacts on the local and regional roads and ensure public safety is never compromised.

HSH has been on this project from day one in 2012, through the Gaming Commission vote to site the resort in the City of Everett in 2014, through EIR planning and permitting, Sullivan Square design, and ultimately construction, and of course opening.

The benefits did not end there, however; the project also cleaned up a polluted site that sat vacant for years. The project will catapult the City of Everett and the region into the limelight as a hospitality and recreational hotspot. A walk-through shows that Everett is certainly being transformed.

“You and the HSH team deserve a lot of credit for things going so smoothly! There was a lot of anxiety in the weeks leading up to the opening about traffic and the fact that it all has turned out far better than any of us has expected has been a huge relief. I drove by Wellington on Saturday evening and it was packed full of cars and the shuttle buses heading to the resort were being heavily used. Same goes for the community shuttle, Blue Bikes and the many other options that you all helped conceive and structure at the beginning of the process.  A lot of folks who said casino goers would never take transit are thankfully very wrong!” – Jay Monty, City of Everett

We at HSH, bring this same energy to all of our projects, whether they be a $2.6 Billion regional resort destination like the Encore, or your more traditional development project, and everything in between!!  Thanks to everyone who worked so tirelessly with us, listened to us, believed in us, and executed this plan.  This does not happen by accident. It takes all of us working together. We are very proud of our work!

Read more on Encore Boston Harbor.