By Pete Stidman
News Editor

A community planning process that will influence development on Columbia Point for years to come held its second meeting on Wednesday, with city planners and consultants filling in an appointed task force on transportation issues, urban design basics, and other facts about the peninsula.

Consultants showed Columbia Point Master Planning Task Force members PowerPoints and spoke about the basics of urban design, streetscapes, and the workings of various transportation modes that reach the area. A representative of Transit Realty also hinted that an air rights project that the MBTA has requested proposals for might not get off the ground until the task force's plans are laid out.

One statistic that caught the attention of members was one provided by the 2000 census. At that time, 50 percent of Columbia Point residents took mass transit to work, and only a third drove. According to other data collected by the consultants, of the people who work on the Point, only 16 percent take transit.

Pedestrians and bicyclists might have the worst time of it, however, according to consultants Crosby, Schlessinger, Smallridge LLC. Photos illustrated entrances to the neighborhood graced with concrete street embankments, bleak horizons and narrow, unprotected sidewalks.

"When I actually went to this site (UMass-Boston), one of the biggest shocks to me was that were was no sidewalk there," said Carole Schlessinger, a consultant.

Task force and audience members also commiserated about the lack of connections from neighborhoods west of I-93 and Carson Beach and the Harborwalk close by.

On the traffic front, predictably, intersections along Columbia Road; at Morrissey Boulevard and Freeport Street; and at Mt. Vernon St. and William J. Day Boulevard were shown to be sluggish at peak hours, as was the Kosciusko traffic circle.

Greg Dicovitsky of Transit Realty Associates, the MBTA's real estate company, hinted that the JFK/UMass air rights project - one that could potentially fund a new station as well - could be delayed by the planning process.

"It's difficult for a developer to tell what that project could be without knowing what mitigations would be," said Dicovitsky.

The next meeting should prove more interesting. It will include Corcoran Jennison Companies, which is planning what amounts to a new neighborhood village on the site of the Bayside Expo Center; and the University of Massachusetts, which has indicated dorms might be part of its new master plan for the Dorchester campus. The location of the next meeting &emdash; March 27, 5 p.m. - is yet to be determined, but is likely to be the Loyola Room at Boston College High School.