Recent content by omaja

I don't see how auxiliary lanes in a cloverleaf interchange will meaningfully impact the bottleneck... you cannot eliminate or mitigate the very heavy weaving volumes simply by adding a lane. Sure, the fourth lane on I-95 should help the through traffic. But any time people see red brake lights...

Interested to see what this new design is on 4/17. The image seems to imply that eastbound traffic would be diverted to North Beacon/Leo M Birmingham versus existing SFR? But oddly, they've kept SFR as a four lane road? Or would SFR still exist as-is while they expect traffic to queue in a...

Made some further refinements to my map and wanted to share the central portion (still working through the suburbs and making the map legend). Light rail is now a slimmer line and any street-running portions are distinguished by a black or white stripe along the line. Added small line...

Riverside - I liked the idea of swapping the Mass Ave and Dartmouth Street lines, so did that in the latest of my working map. :) Also went a little crazy with reworking more of the "Green Line" system in Cambridge and Somerville to bring back more of the lost streetcar network in those cities...

Thanks, Riverside! :) I've never really liked the Urban Ring as proposed because it feels too tightly constrained (especially if it were ever to be rail)... breaking it up into more lines that provide more unique combinations of direct and one-connection routings makes more sense in my mind...

Lost my original file for my "in another universe" map from years and years ago, so decided to create a new version. Here's how it started (2012-ish is when I would have worked on it): And how it's going: Taking an approach that's more like a combination of NYC (different services noted by...

For some reason I had just assumed that the bridge replacements/expansions done to Route 3 over High Street and Webster Street in Norwell/Hanover were in anticipation of an impending widening. Seems a bit odd that they would have only widened the bridges to include a left shoulder... instead of...

Love all of this. Dropping "commuter rail" might just be the smartest and cheapest change to actually get people (suburbanites) to take note that trains aren't just about schlepping to/from downtown, and eventually we'll see increased funding for rail across the state.

Quite the Baker-aggrandizing piece of literature. One might think the commuter rail is the engine driving the majority of commerce in the region and that Baker has thought up a revolutionary way to fix it. The improvements and innovation the piece talks about come at a price. That price is still...

The modeling has already been done. Safety studies have already been done. This isn't something that MA would be reinventing; we're talking about the most common interchange setup on the busiest freeway in North America: Highway 401 through Toronto area - not to mention countless other uses...

I've read SPUIs are just as safe as a traditional diamond interchange but are built to handle significantly more volume. Perhaps this is what you've read? Higher volumes would yield more accidents in total, but the accident rate for each would be the same. This is absolutely correct. SPUIs...

Banco Santander's global head office is located in the suburbs of Madrid, not in the city of Santander. There initially would have been decent traffic, but the bank has not been doing too well for a number of years and as a result its contribution to BOS-MAD traffic is nowhere near what you...

No, they two serve different purposes. In essence, a SPUI is a better all-around interchange whereas the DD is better for instances where traffic is more unidirectional at any given time (say morning versus evening rush). SPUIs centralize all movements in one very high-capacity intersection with...

Completely agreed. That is one of the major complaints I have with Boston is that it seems that parking always comes before mobility for both personal autos and buses. Where are the rush-hour parking restrictions, turning lanes and general lane enforcement rules that are so prevalent basically...

"The new Upper Busway Canopy for the expanded upper Busway at Forest Hills Station on the Orange Line will facilitate year round Bus Operations." Given that the original canopy did a mediocre job shielding people from the elements, I'm not sure how "year round" operations will be any better...