Recent content by Commuting Boston Student

What tool did you use for this?

Our long regional nightmare is finally over. Today's been a pretty good day, overall.

There are plenty of other ways to have fun and build civic pride that aren't centered around a corporatized and overcapitalized money grab wearing the tired window dressings of sport. And it isn't $5B in private funds. You don't get to have this both ways - if this is really $5B exclusively in...

To get the things you otherwise wouldn't have had for decades (Blue and Orange Line extensions), centuries (North-South), or potentially ever (Mass Avenue subway). Irrational exuberance is all well and good, if - and only if - it results in something of appreciable value that we couldn't have...

Get used to it, because LA is the only place in this entire country qualified to host a 'sensible' Olympics. The venues are all there already, they've done it twice before, the infrastructure is getting built out quite nicely. If, indeed, we're not going to put on the total urban overhaul style...

Not even. This is a functionally worthless routing - New Yorkers heading to Boston already have the Northeast Corridor service into South Station, everyone north of Haverhill heading to Boston already has the Downeaster into North Station, the track connection between Worcester and Ayer is...

It's worse than all merely being "theoretical," there's a very real chance that anything put into motion before a 2016 referendum would be shut down / spiked by the pro-Olympics contingent as retribution for the city not going along with its betters and doing as it was told. This is, of course...

Re: Fairmont Line Upgrade Slowly reducing parking accomplishes nothing (or, more technically, it turns legal parking spaces into illegal parking spaces that could maybe one day become small fractions of a bus lane.) While a bus lane is absolutely valuable and worth implementing here, it won't...

Re: Boston to Cape rail No, that's only for spur interstate routes (three digit numbering.) 93 can be redesignated to start and end wherever we like, provided the entire road is up to interstate standards. The way the numbering scheme for spur routes works is that a spur interstate is...

Re: Boston to Cape rail Of course the only solution is to build more bridge! I mean, it's not like the real problem could possibly be the imbalance between traffic on the two bridges owing to the lack of a freeway connection between their feeder roads on either side of the bridge. And it's...

Currently under construction. The new target date is 2020, a realistic expectation would be 2021, and I'm willing to bet that I will be able to board a train to Union Square in Somerville in 2023. "Business as usual" doesn't mean that nothing ever gets done, it means that things get delayed...

OK, but the Olympics boosters aren't arguing that things won't get done on schedule otherwise. I understand that, and agree, and I think that's a problem we ought to be addressing in a fashion other than this. What the Olympics boosters are arguing is that without Boston 2024 - rather than...

And you know what? Frankly, these people ARE in a no-win situation. It is an indisputable fact that a whole host of infrastructure improvements were being planned before when the Olympics bid was barely more than a twinkle in John Fish's eye. The question that I've been asking and the...

Doesn't the calculus on the billion-dollar busway as a cure for 84-related woes fly straight out the window when it turns out that a third of the busway is in the way of viaduct replacement, meaning that section of road is blown up instead of carrying buses when 84mageddon happens?

As I understand it, the path of least resistance from an engineering standpoint is to send the Blue Line over one of the Storrow Drive carriageways, which is also probably the only trade-off that will get that godforsaken traffic sewer reconfigured into something more pleasant and appropriate...