I-90 Interchange Improvement Project & West Station | Allston

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Longfellow said:
it’s always struck me that the portion of Brighton Ave that the 66 uses isn’t exactly the cradle of civilization. You can go to Blanchards or TITS, not much really. If you’re trying to make a trip to BU or points East from there it’s faster to walk than wait 20 minutes for a 57 bus connection. If we had an A train of course this would be easier but alas.
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Don't forget Brighton Music Hall, and several Korean restaurants. Perhaps it's just selection bias, but very time I go to a concert there, the area is packed with pedestrians.
 
Longfellow said:
it’s always struck me that the portion of Brighton Ave that the 66 uses isn’t exactly the cradle of civilization. You can go to Blanchards or TITS, not much really. If you’re trying to make a trip to BU or points East from there it’s faster to walk than wait 20 minutes for a 57 bus connection. If we had an A train of course this would be easier but alas.
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This does seem like a rather simplistic way of looking at it. It also services Union Square, which is a bustling restaurant/retail hub with several hundred units of housing within a 2 min walk.
 
Longfellow said:
What I mean is that you are basically forced to use those stops in order to get to service to points east or to the green line. So yes there’s tons of ridership. You’re not alighting with the goal of hanging out in that neighborhood. In a perfect world with a better street layout the bus would use an alignment closer to the Malvern area and jog up Comm Ave to Harvard Ave. The focus on tagging a couple bars and then going on seems specious.

Disclaimer that I could be wrong about it, but either way this is just another way we’ve made it a little ridiculous to get around over there.
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I'm confused by this statement. People wanting the Green Line will stay on the bus until they reach the Harvard/Comm Ave intersection. They definitely will not deboard on Brighton Ave. There are a lot of people who live along that stretch between Union Square and Packard's Corner, and quite a bit of things to do besides grabbing a case at Blanchard's.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
Not many, because so long as Malvern St. (with its virtually unusable intersection at Packards Corner) is the only spanning street to the south on the grid, you pretty much can't mount anything except a super-inconvenient loop-a-thon off Cambridge St. like the 64. BU cockblocking a Babcock connection absolutely cripples the crosstown connectivity. I'm not even sure how that LMA jitney in their plans is going to function at all given the fact that it has to bang a left at Brighton Ave. from that godawful intersection. And if the Cambridge St. loop-a-thon is so inconvenient and schedule-destroying that it's inappropriate for a frequent and load-bearing route like the T66, you're not going to get much in the way of high-frequency linkage from anywhere. The multimodal connections at this station are almost entirely dependent on a dedicated Urban Ring ROW coming through off the Grand Junction. Yes...fine!...do leave a future provision (not an overbuild, but a future provision) for that. But the hope-and-a-prayer GJ Purple Line dinky extra RR platform isn't that provision, either.
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Crappy hack, but can't you just access the bridge from Babcock anyway via Ashford/Gardner for services that link to the east/south east?

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Longfellow said:
it’s always struck me that the portion of Brighton Ave that the 66 uses isn’t exactly the cradle of civilization. You can go to Blanchards or TITS, not much really. If you’re trying to make a trip to BU or points East from there it’s faster to walk than wait 20 minutes for a 57 bus connection. If we had an A train of course this would be easier but alas.
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General 64/66/Allston-Brighton commentary to this + some other posts:

- The 2 block stretch of Harvard Ave from Comm-Brighton Ave is extremely busy (and continues to a degree in both directions), and has probably the single highest density of late night food operations in this city. It's one of the only places in the city where virtually every night of the week, even without any sort of event, you can go by at 11PM and there's still tons of people out and about and it actually looks like a lively city.

- Obviously - there are a number of other such things, bars, Brighton Music Hall, etc in the rest of the path it travels through Union Sq.

- Rerouting the 66 away from basically traveling the spine of the center of civilization for the area, would seem like an absolutely massive mistake.

- A secondary factor is that the mediocre 64/86 frequencies make it pretty normal for people to just walk a longer than typical distance from the Boston Landing area to Union Sq to pick up the 66/57, especially when we're talking nights/weekends. Maybe if you're improving the 64/86 significantly the usage pattern changes, but as of now, pulling the 66 out of Union Sq would serve to make that much harder. If I leave a Roadrunner show at night and want to get back to Cambridge, I probably just walk to Union Sq for a 66 given how thin the 64/86 schedules are.

- I'm not sure I'm that negative on the prospect of the 64's timekeeping for this proposal. While making a left out of Malvern to go east/south is insane, the turns into/from Malvern for something coming from the West aren't too bad from what I've observed. I'm not saying I think it makes much sense to route the 64 there, just that I don't know that it'll kill the route/schedule that bad, especially with the bus lanes now - and if they were better enforced.
 
These are the populations and densities of the census tracts in and around the project area:
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From the 2010 population data so it's probably gone up a bit. The fact that the tract including all of the Allston-Cambridge exit, Beacon Park Yard, and yet unbuilt Harvard developments still has a density of 14k and 6300 people really puts into perspective the importance of reconnecting the grid.
 
Koopzilla24 said:
These are the populations and densities of the census tracts in and around the project area:
View attachment 49625View attachment 49626View attachment 49627View attachment 49628
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From the 2010 population data so it's probably gone up a bit. The fact that the tract including all of the Allston-Cambridge exit, Beacon Park Yard, and yet unbuilt Harvard developments still has a density of 14k and 6300 people really puts into perspective the importance of reconnecting the grid.
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An off-topic question that I've been curious about for a while: What caused these extreme densities? Has the area always been this dense, or was it primarily due to developments in the last 40-60 years where this is one of the few areas with a one-seat ride to downtown Boston at its doorstep?
 
Teban54 said:
An off-topic question that I've been curious about for a while: What caused these extreme densities? Has the area always been this dense, or was it primarily due to developments in the last 40-60 years where this is one of the few areas with a one-seat ride to downtown Boston at its doorstep?
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The Commonwelath/Harvard/Brighton Ave densities go back to the street railway construction from 1898-1903 and are very long standing. Most of the brick and stone masoned buildings are at the newest from the 40s. Here's Packard's Corner in 1948 looking West down Brighton Ave
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It's all still here with very few exceptions. Just out of shot to the right is where Super 88 is now.
Comm Ave at the Chestnut Hill Ave B stop in 1910 is missing a good amount of buildings that would go up over the next 20-30 years but is still very recognizable.
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This 1938 Aerial image with the Boston Braves stadium extant shows just how dense it's always been.
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Teban54 said:
An off-topic question that I've been curious about for a while: What caused these extreme densities? Has the area always been this dense, or was it primarily due to developments in the last 40-60 years where this is one of the few areas with a one-seat ride to downtown Boston at its doorstep?
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This area was almost certainly denser in the 1950s, and that density has mostly be dwindling ever since. (Maybe, hopefully, that tend has reversed the past little while). Boston's population peaked in 1950. If you go comparing aerial photos here, you'll see scattered older buildings replaced by surface parking. In some cases, current one story buildings used to be taller. You can see hints of that where you see the size of an older, taller building still imprinted in the party wall of its neighbor. (I could have sworn that I recently saw a picture of Blanchard's when it was two stories, but now I can't find it. I might be wrong on that one.)

As @Koopzilla24 points out, the density was built up because of the streetcars. The dwindling density is complex, but removing the streetcars is a part of it. Good mass transit is essentially a requirement for any kind of urban density, because it's the only way to move lots of people in a limited amount of space.

And none of this is unique to Allston or Boston. You'd be hard pressed to find urban density like this anywhere in America that developed since 1950. Any kind of density like this is kind of vestigial. Boston survived way better than most US cities, but also almost every neighborhood got hollowed at least a little in the past 60 years.
 
ritchiew said:
This area was almost certainly denser in the 1950s, and that density has mostly be dwindling ever since. (Maybe, hopefully, that tend has reversed the past little while).
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The density isn't that high there but the people per unit is probably pretty high for today's Boston.
 
It was a nice event, mostly focused on eliminating slow zones and decreasing headways on the existing service, not fare policy, system expansion, CR electrification, or things like that.
The Secretary talked about how much she loves buses, so I hope that we will see an improved iteration of the new street grid in Allston that loves buses too.
 
commonwealthbeacon.org

Transportation secretary gives ‘unfiltered’ take on challenges

The secretary said speeding is a problem on Massachusetts roadways because law enforcement officials aren't writing enough citations.
commonwealthbeacon.org commonwealthbeacon.org

Looks like at least some major elements of West Station are going to have to go into redesign. Transpo Sec. Tibbits-Nutt formally came out against the T layover yard that was inverting the station placement, so that'll now need to get deleted and the platforms will have to be spatially moved at minimum.

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Question: What was the layover yard originally designed for? Can its functionalities, if any, be adequately replaced if it's removed from the West Station plan?
 
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Teban54 said:
Question: What was the layover yard originally designed for? Can its functionalities, if any, be adequately replaced if it's removed from the West Station plan?
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It was originally designed to ease the southside space crunch pre- Widett purchase, when they were scraping for any nooks-and-crannies they could get. Now that they have Widett Circle in-tow, that's going to be the much bigger and more centrally-located layover. And the Secretary alluded to as much in the linked article. In practice, Beacon Park layover wouldn't have helped much. It was shrunk from an originally-planned 12 trains of storage to 8 in the latest plans to appease Harvard, and the shuffling of copious deadheads through Back Bay and Lansdowne would've put significant operational stress on the Worcester Line.

What this offers up is a chance to rethink the absolute nonsensical design of the rail level of West. You've got the ass-backwards express vs. local track setup which creates new crossing conflicts, the second island platform for the dubious Grand Junction shuttle concept that's blowing out the projected price tag, and the stark alienation the layover creates from the BU side of the neighborhood. It all needs a major do-over...more compact, more logical track layout, and probably deleting that second island and its up-and-over cost blowouts for a blank spatial provision since the GJ dinky isn't likely to happen anywhere close to when the mainline station opens. Hopefully those changes in turn reverberate to rethinks and tweaks of the street grid and the busway level as we've been talking about these last few pages.
 
I guess it's interesting that the Secretary feels commuter rail tracks are a black hole of sorts but not the highway and the stroads. But at least it seems like she gets it a little more than the engineers do. Excited to see what's next
 
Longfellow said:
I guess it's interesting that the Secretary feels commuter rail tracks are a black hole of sorts but not the highway and the stroads. But at least it seems like she gets it a little more than the engineers do. Excited to see what's next
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According to the article, Fred Salvucci convinced her that the layover tracks were unnecessary. Pretty cool to see that he still has sway like that.
 
BosMaineiac said:
According to the article, Fred Salvucci convinced her that the layover tracks were unnecessary. Pretty cool to see that he still has sway like that.
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Also utterly fucking ridiculous that 84 Year Old Fred Salvucci is the only person that can talk some sense into these people. Is everyone else literally that incompetent or untrustworthy? We're fucked if he's it and he's only got limited time left.
 
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