Channel Center | Fort Point

Matthew said:
Widening roads is a bad idea, it will just turn this into a four-lane speedway (that ends abruptly), and will destroy a good chunk of the park as well as the semi-decent bike lanes that exist now.
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A good chunk of the park? It's a sliver of the park that no one uses yet. Also they are replacing "semi-decent bike lanes that exist now" with bike lanes on BOTH sides of the road. That is an improvement.

The shitty parts of the South Boston Waterfront are the wide roads! We've been decrying that for ages on this forum. Why make another mistake? Isn't it bad enough there already?
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You are really blowing this out of proportion. Seaport Blvd, Congress St, and Northern Ave are all much wider than this and are designed as suburban arterial highways. They obviously need a road diet. A St though is small and will be the ONLY thoroughfare through the neighborhood. Expanding it to 4 lanes with bike lanes on each side won't destroy the character of the street. They aren't turning it into some highway. Road diets work when there are other roads with which to distribute traffic. There is no other road parallel to A St so adding a lane is needed.

You act like any road widening is going to destroy Fort Point but it's not like they are ramming a highway through. Look at the plan and you will see that the traffic will be dispersed by the new east-west boulevard at the north end so the argument about it going from 4 to 2 lanes is meaningless.

Do you really think this is going to be some Dutch bikers utopia? People drive to work and in an area with limited transit they drive more. So add a bus, sure, but with two lanes on the "Main St" of Fort Point that is going to cause congestion with all the new traffic still.
 
Drop into Streetview, Van. There are already bike lanes on both sides. The point is, this WILL influence the character of A Street as it develops. Very few streets in Boston need four lanes - only the absolute most trafficked two-way arterials like Beacon in Brookline, Comm Ave, Mass Ave, and Huntington really require four lanes. I wouldn't even include the Greenway in that roster, considering it has 6 to 8 lanes underneath it. Anyway, that rant aside, if more capacity is needed on A Street - which is highly debatable - the best possible fix here is opening Dorchester Ave past the postal facility. A Street is primarily a detour for that travesty, anyway. I agree with Matthew that this is worth protesting.
 
vanshnookenraggen said:
A good chunk of the park? It's a sliver of the park that no one uses yet. Also they are replacing "semi-decent bike lanes that exist now" with bike lanes on BOTH sides of the road. That is an improvement.
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The plans are to replace buffered bike lanes with smaller, below standard, 4-foot bike lanes. And instead put that space towards four 11-foot lanes. Maybe you can see why I find this upsetting?

You act like any road widening is going to destroy Fort Point but it's not like they are ramming a highway through. Look at the plan and you will see that the traffic will be dispersed by the new east-west boulevard at the north end so the argument about it going from 4 to 2 lanes is meaningless.
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In concurrence with Shepard: the time to fight street-widening is before it happens, and before it's fully built out.

Afterwards, when we realized it's a mistake to put four lanes of roadway space in an urban area, it's too late. It will always be a car-dominated space.
 
Just spoke with my source. This is just to preserve the right of way for future use. The BRA cross section is out of date and the construction is unfunded.
 
How wide do two lanes need to be for one bus to pass another? or a bus to pass a truck making a delivery? Is 10' sufficient for this?
 
sm89 said:
Just spoke with my source. This is just to preserve the right of way for future use. The BRA cross section is out of date and the construction is unfunded.
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Thanks.

TallIsGood said:
How wide do two lanes need to be for one bus to pass another? or a bus to pass a truck making a delivery? Is 10' sufficient for this?
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Yes. I suppose that drivers of larger vehicles would always like more space, but the point of the 10'-wide lane is that in a city the safety of people on foot should come first.
 
Matthew said:
Yes. I suppose that drivers of larger vehicles would always like more space, but the point of the 10'-wide lane is that in a city the safety of people on foot should come first.
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Sorry, I wasn't asking about preferences, but actual clearance. What width is required to have proper clearance and have trucks and busses pass safely. If the lanes arent wide enough arent they just going to cross into either the bike lanes or cross the yellow line? If 10' is sufficient, fine. If one bus is stopped and another bus or truck needs to cross the yellow line to safely pass then that is a problem.
 
Matthew said:
The plans are to replace buffered bike lanes with smaller, below standard, 4-foot bike lanes. And instead put that space towards four 11-foot lanes. Maybe you can see why I find this upsetting?
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Unless you plan on making major deliveries and otherwise spurring commerce on your bicycle, maybe you can see why the city doesn't care?
 
Jesus you are so condesending. Europe manages to do deliveries without massive lanes so maybe think about what you are saying before you act like an ass.
 
I tend to support reasonable road improvements in addition to my strong support of mass transit & alt transit, but I can't see a single benefit or need for widening A St. The way it's arranged now appears to be fine. There's even a buffer for the bike lanes.
 
TallIsGood said:
Sorry, I wasn't asking about preferences, but actual clearance. What width is required to have proper clearance and have trucks and busses pass safely. If the lanes arent wide enough arent they just going to cross into either the bike lanes or cross the yellow line? If 10' is sufficient, fine. If one bus is stopped and another bus or truck needs to cross the yellow line to safely pass then that is a problem.
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Boston uses 10' wide lanes in many places today. DOT default preference goes to wider lanes because they enable higher speeds, and remember, that used to be (sometimes still is) a goal. But for vehicles, trucks, buses, etc going legal speeds in cities, 10' is plenty.

Jeff Speck wrote a nice article a few months ago, about why 10' wide lanes are important. He's concerned even more about cities that require 12' wide lanes, which are highway-spec, but 11' is only a little better.
 
coleslaw said:
Jesus you are so condescending. Europe manages to do deliveries without massive lanes so maybe think about what you are saying before you act like an ass.
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In general, Europe has smaller trucks and much better mass transit so their equilibrium for transit modalities isn't the same as it is here in the US. A lot of car owners (like me) who like biking and mass transit and often use those modes, want to see enhanced mass transit and more bile lanes, but we must accept that the transition to a new equilibrium will take time and that cars will be part of the transit mix, just as they are in Europe and Japan for example. For a successful transit ecosystem, no single mode can always take precedence. We are seeing the car come down from the throne it has been on for decades, but it is still an enormously important and versatile form of transportation and will continue to be.
 
maybe think about what you are saying before you act like an ass.
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Pot meet kettle? Please keep it civil. There is no reason for personal attacks on here.
 
meddlepal said:
Pot meet kettle? Please keep it civil. There is no reason for personal attacks on here.
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I hardly see your comment as civil. You laughed off a totally reasonable position as ridiculous in a completely condescending way that implies that only you have any logic on your side. it was dismissive of both the arguement and any facts that disagree with you.

Also I know cars aren't going away in the short term but I don't think we should continue to further shape our urban environments in its favor.
 
coleslaw said:
I hardly see your comment as civil. You laughed off a totally reasonable position as ridiculous in a completely condescending way that implies that only you have any logic on your side. it was dismissive of both the arguement and any facts that disagree with you.

Also I know cars aren't going away in the short term but I don't think we should continue to further shape our urban environments in its favor.
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You need to crawl out from underneath that academic rock of yours and get with it. Yes, I'd much rather live in a city like Amsterdam or London but your viewpoint is probably shared by about the same number of people who support polygamy in this country.
 
davem said:
Right. Widen A street even though it drops back down to two lanes at either end. Don't explore connecting B street to "west service road" next to the convention center, and extending Wormwood, Binford, and Iron streets. Because if history has shown us one thing, its that widening arterials always works better than permeability of routes...

*facepalm*
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i agree with dave. we do a terrible job of creating grids in boston.. sure, the streets downtown are colonial and chaotic, but many peripheral areas like this suffer from a lack of connectivity due to either poor planning during the original development (like competing real estate developments of adjacent neighborhoods) or because of old industrial rights of way like now obsolete rail sidings, enormous but now defunct factory building footprints and the like. When opportunities to connect streets arise, neighbors always fight them and it is another form of NIMBYism that we never talk about on here, aside from the issue with BU/Beacon Yards. Creating better road connections is a good way to improve flow and keep the street widths small. If all the other ways that connect southie and Dot to the seaport werent so stupidly designed in the first place (with my personal favorite, the sudden one way directional change), we probably wouldnt be having this discussion in the first place.
 
Matthew said:
Boston uses 10' wide lanes in many places today. DOT default preference goes to wider lanes because they enable higher speeds, and remember, that used to be (sometimes still is) a goal. But for vehicles, trucks, buses, etc going legal speeds in cities, 10' is plenty.

Jeff Speck wrote a nice article a few months ago, about why 10' wide lanes are important. He's concerned even more about cities that require 12' wide lanes, which are highway-spec, but 11' is only a little better.
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Mathew -- have you forgotten about February already? :)

Boston streets need some extra space not needed in Las Vegas or Amsterdam for that matter to handle a bunch of snow falling and being left around for a while
 
kmp1284 said:
You need to crawl out from underneath that academic rock of yours and get with it. Yes, I'd much rather live in a city like Amsterdam or London but your viewpoint is probably shared by about the same number of people who support polygamy in this country.
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This is not an academic rock it is reality. I frankly don't care how much of the general citizenry is in agreement (although it is far more than you would imply that it is). Climate change is disastrous and we need to take extreme measures to alleviate the effects (every scientist who studies the issue, is competent, and is not funded by the fossil fuel industry agrees so the general populations opinion has a lot less validity than that). To continue to shape our world for a method of transportation that is contributing to its destruction is extremely foolhardy.
 
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