The Promises of the Worcester/Framingham Line follows The Research Bureau’s previous work from June 2025, Express for Whom? Ridership, Recovery, and the Importance of the Worcester/Framingham Line. Underscoring the possibilities of this regional rail line that runs between Worcester and Boston dozens of times a day, this report looks at the need and the vision of what that service could look like, explaining ongoing and future work that could unlock its promises.

In Worcester's rapidly changing urban landscape, safeguarding the city's most vulnerable road users (VRU’s) — pedestrians, cyclists, and others outside of vehicles — has emerged as a pivotal concern. This report comes after recent tragedies in Worcester, leading the City Manager to declare a ‘road safety and traffic violence crisis’.

Parking is king. For as long as there have been cars, it has been a subject of conversation in Worcester. This report, Part 2 of a two part Bureau series on parking, covers the history of parking in Worcester, followed by a discussion of minimum parking requirements in the City’s zoning, as well as information about car ownership in Worcester, and an analysis of the ways that parking may impose visible and invisible costs on residents and commuters.

PARKING, is a difficult issue in many cities. Plentiful parking is necessary where the personal automobile is the dominant mode of transportation; and even if other modes predominate, some amount of parking is still necessary.

Walkability has numerous benefits, but how walkable an area is can be hard to quantify—while people have good intuitions about whether their neighborhood lends itself well to casual strolls, or how many destinations are easily reachable on foot, it can be harder to put those thoughts and feelings into a context that could inform public policy.

The Worcester Regional Transit Authority (WRTA), like many bus systems, suffers from low and declining ridership. There is research and evidence from other cities that going fare-free – not merely lowering fares, but eliminating them entirely – is perhaps the most effective ridership-boosting tool available to bus systems.

A transportation center for centuries, Worcester has aggressively developed connections to the outside world. By land, air, and (if only for a few decades via the Blackstone Canal) by sea, Worcester has invested in the infrastructure necessary to move people and goods in and out of the city.

Worcester Regional Airport, airport code ORH, was founded in 1946 as a municipal airport. Over the years it has enjoyed periods of great success, peaking at 354,000 passenger enplanements in 1989, and periods of quiescence with the departure of major national airlines in the late 1990s.

After advocating for many years the sale or lease of Worcester Regional Airport to Massport, The Research Bureau is pleased to endorse the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the City and Massport for the transfer of the facility.

Discusses the progress of the construction of the Route 146 Connector over the past two years, as well as the project's implications for Worcester and the surrounding region.