On the 50th anniversary of its founding, MASCO today unveiled its new brand identity—the Longwood Collective—under which it is releasing its first White Paper, which details the successes of mode shift in the Longwood Medical and Academic Area (LMA) over the last 30 years, alongside a landmark Transportation Framework that provides guiding principles and tools for evaluating project proposals that impact mobility within and surrounding the 213-acre LMA. The new transportation study and planning tool reflect the unique transportation challenges inherent to a medical and academic campus, including the critical need to ensure emergency vehicle and patient access. Together they will be used to inform and guide the Longwood Collective’s perspective on projects impacting mobility within and outside of the LMA for the benefit of the area’s workers, patients, students, and visitors.

“Our mission as an organization is to drive collaborative solutions enabling Longwood to be an innovative hub of healthcare, research, and education,” said the Longwood Collective’s CEO, David Sweeney. “The Longwood Collective name itself exemplifies how by working together with our area institutions on matters that transcend organizational boundaries, we collectively are greater than the sum of our parts. Under our new banner, we are aiming to heighten our reputation as a problem-solver and thought leader by offering new and useful data as seen in our White Paper, coupled together with fresh approaches and solutions for our most pressing challenges, as evident in our Transportation Framework.”

The Longwood Collective is the chief planner and principal steward of the LMA, serving the area’s world-renowned medical, academic, scientific, and cultural institutions, and providing critical transportation, operating, planning, and placemaking services to the area’s benefit.

“The new Longwood Collective brand is a more intuitive reflection of the leadership and stewardship that is provided to the Longwood area and in service to member institutions,” said MASCO Board of Directors Chair Dick Argys, Executive Vice President, and Chief Administrative Officer at Boston Children's Hospital. “This new name, paired together with the compelling data and analysis offered in the White Paper and Framework, show a dedicated commitment to making Longwood the most desirable place to work, learn, and heal.”

The White Paper, “A Case Study in Robust Transportation Demand Management (TDM) Confronting Access Limitations at the Nation’s Pre-Eminent Medical, Academic and Cultural Campus,” documents the tremendous success achieved over the past 30 years in driving “mode shift”—people choosing to use public transit or walk or bike instead of driving—in the LMA, citing that the percentage of people driving to work in the LMA declined from 47% in 2002 to 30% more recently, all while the district added approximately 15,000 jobs and grew by almost seven million square feet. This is significant, as the LMA is an internationally recognized hub of healthcare, research, and innovation that employs one out of every 10 people who work in the City of Boston, supports 155,000 jobs statewide, and drives $30 billion in annual business revenue. Forty-eight percent of employees who come to the LMA do so via public transportation, while 10 percent walk, four percent ride a bike and four percent carpool, among the highest percentages of Boston residents commuting by those modes.

Showcasing never-before-seen data, the White Paper also provides clear evidence that mode shift is reaching its natural limits given current transit infrastructure, and that further increasing transit ridership, walking, and biking by people traveling to, from, and through Longwood will require investments in new, high-capacity transportation infrastructure. Since 1990, the paper shows, transit demand has grown twice as fast as has increased transit-service availability through the expansions of bus, Green Line, and commuter rail service.

To reliably measure project impact on mobility within and outside of the LMA, the Longwood Collective’s new Transportation Framework is both a vision statement with guiding principles and goals and a dynamic toolkit for evaluating how well transportation proposals meet Longwood’s unique needs and priorities. The Framework offers evaluation metrics that uphold the five goals identified, including:

1. Manage congestion
2. Improve transit
3. Improve multimodal safety and infrastructure
4. Manage scarce curb space in the LMA
5. Plan for emerging mobility services and technologies.

In the Framework, the Longwood Collective lays out guiding principles for transportation in the LMA: that it is safe, convenient, and affordable for everyone who wants to work, learn, heal, and visit in the district; offers services and amenities that are as world-class and innovative as Longwood’s healthcare, research, and educational institutions; is clean, sustainable, and resilient; and prioritizes vulnerable populations and users.

“The Framework provides a transparent, data-driven tool for evaluating how projects within and beyond the Longwood Collective’s borders address the needs of our patients, employees, students, and visitors,’’ said Tom Yardley, the Longwood Collective’s Vice President of Area Planning and Development. “It does this by assessing how a project impacts 12 top-priority metrics such as impact on emergency service routes, impact on single-seat transit rides for Longwood employees, and impact on walking and biking infrastructure.’’

Both the White Paper and the Framework also reflect that planning and managing transportation In Longwood entails unique challenges compared to the rest of Greater Boston. Principally, the critical need to ensure emergency vehicle and patient access, as 90 percent of patients served at hospitals must travel by private vehicle for medical and safety reasons. In addition, congestion and demand for extremely constrained curb space and street surface within Longwood require active management to reduce conflicts among various types of vehicles, pedestrians, and bicyclists. With its many world-leading hospitals, Longwood also needs 24/7 transit services for the thousands of workers.

“We are thrilled for the combination of the Transportation Framework and White Paper to provide useful information tools to enhance mobility in the LMA,’’ Sweeney said. “With millions of square feet of development underway or in the pipeline and an ongoing redesign of the MBTA bus network, the Longwood Collective and our members are looking forward to the tremendous opportunity to shape the future of Longwood.’’