When the Olympic Bid studio was splitting up into groups I was immediately drawn to the topic of transportation in Boston. I use public transit almost everyday so I thought that I could understand what needed to be improved.

Along with making Boston a more playful city with the Olympics we also wanted to show that Boston is a walking city and if you can’t walk somewhere it is just a short train ride. Though our system is not that bad there are still some areas that the Train does not reach. The two areas I focused on were Dorchester and several parts of Charlestown, Everett, and east Cambridge. After seeing how much unused infrastructure is left over in some Olympics, I wanted to make sure not to build anything that would be useless once the Olympics were over. I thought that the best way to do this was to reuse a freight line for the Charlestown, Everett, and east Cambridge areas, and build a train line in place of the bus line that now reaches Dorchester.

Another part of public transportation in Boston that could use some improving is the actual train stations themselves. These stations are mostly old and not very nice to look at. I thought that I would use our theme of making Boston more fun by introducing public art into different train stations across the city. I came up with two examples of station designs, one encouraged graffiti artists to come in spray paint the walls, floors, and ceiling with graphic symbols and phrases about Boston and that train stop in particular. The Brookline Hub wrote an article about our proposal in their local news column titled “NuVu Studio Students Have Olympic Dreams…For Boston in 2024”. For my second design they put my idea perfectly into words saying the stop was “decorated like a Parisian cafe, perhaps to reflect openness to a global atmosphere required for the Olympic setting”.