The transportation hub at T.F. Green Airport will take about three years to build.

01:00 AM EDT on Tuesday, July 18, 2006

BY DANIEL BARBARISI
Journal Staff Writer

WARWICK -- Pretend for a second you're a Boston resident, and you're sitting at your computer planning a vacation or a business trip. You fight traffic every day going to work, and the idea of having to drive through the clogged tunnels to the crowded Logan Airport takes all the thrill out of your trip.

Instead, you look on an Internet travel site, find a good price for a flight out of T.F. Green, check the time for the regular train service from Boston's South Station directly to the station at the airport in Warwick, and consider your trip planning done, without ever involving a car.

It's a prospect that has Rhode Island airport officials salivating, and by 2009, it should be a reality.

Yesterday, federal, state and local officials broke ground on a $222.5-million intermodal train station and rental car parking garage connected to T.F. Green Airport. The station will connect Warwick to Boston via the Metropolitan Boston Transit Authority's trains, which will run eight times a day Monday through Friday starting in late 2009.

"This project is a sign that Rhode Island is becoming a force in the New England economy. Cities across America should take notice of how the state is addressing transportation in this integrated and innovative approach," said Maria Cino, acting U.S. Secretary of Transportation, who was on hand for the groundbreaking.

"It really will impact this region. It is long overdue," Cino said.

It has taken a long time for the project to get to this point -- so long that silver-haired Warwick Mayor Scott Avedisian said that when plans first seriously started, in 1997, he was a city councilman with no gray hair.

"I don't think [we] ever thought it would take so long, with so many twists and turns -- more twists and turns than the railroad tracks should have," Governor Carcieri said, adding that it's been worth the wait.

"I think this is pivotal. I think this is one of the milestones that we'll look back on as a state."

The massive 1.5 million-square-foot garage will sit between Post Road and Jefferson Boulevard on mostly vacant land that is now being used as a graveyard for trucks that sold frozen lemonade. The station and garage will straddle the train tracks, connected to the airport by a quarter-mile skywalk over Post Road.

The structure itself will rise six stories, with parking for 2,200 rental cars and 1,000 commuters.

It will also boast a concourse housing counter space and offices for the rental car companies and for a bus hub and the MBTA train station.

Officials had long hoped that Amtrak would serve the station as well, but the national railroad has made demands for additional track and special equipment that would add $50 million to $60 million to the cost. James Capaldi, director of the state Department of Transportation, said that the infrastructure will be built and Amtrak will come at some point, though it could be several years after the station opens.

Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee was generally recognized as the one who has pushed hardest to make this project happen, first as mayor of Warwick and then in the Senate. Chafee's father, the late Sen. John Chafee, secured the first financing for the station in 1997. In the last two years, the younger Chafee has managed to find $60 million more for the project, essential as the cost rose from the initial $168-million estimate to the $222.5-million figure.

"For me, today marks a dream come true. In 1994, as mayor, I began to have big dreams of a tremendous intermodal facility. . . . My father secured $25 million in the 1998 transportation bill and in last year's highway bill I was able to secure another $20 million for the Warwick train station. In addition, I sponsored an amendment that allows Rhode Island to reallocate unspent bridge appropriations, freeing up as much as $40 million for the project," Chafee said.

The groundbreaking yesterday was ceremonial. No project manager has been chosen yet, and significant construction work may not begin until next summer, said Brian Schattle, chief financial officer of the Rhode Island Airport Corporation. So far, all that has been done is site clearing, and it is likely that basic site work and design revisions will take up the remainder of the year. Engineering and architecture plans are still being finalized for the skywalk and for a station for rental car fueling and washing.

The state also still needs to negotiate the cost for the MBTA to use Amtrak tracks from Providence to Wickford.

More than 100 people packed into a tent on the airport grounds to celebrate the event, including former governors Bruce Sundlun and Lincoln Almond, Rep. James Langevin, airport officials, and Cino and Chafee. Chafee's predecessor as Warwick mayor, Charles Donovan, was also there, insisting that he had first bandied about the idea of an intermodal station in 1992 -- and providing newspaper articles proving that he had considered the intermodal concept first.

Regardless of who dreamed it up, now that the station is officially under way, current Avedisian said that it will allow his city to draw even more hotels and development to a place that recently became able to boast that it has the most hotel rooms in the state, for the moment even more than the capital city.

"Ten years ago, you would never have thought that the city of Warwick would be competing like that," he said.

dbarbari@projo.com / (401) 277-8062