I think removing SFR from the throat could have a bigger cost impact than you're suggesting. Part of the cost at the throat is the complicated staging required to keep all 12 lanes (Pike + SFR) open during construction. I don't know the current state of those plans, but they've generally required lots of temporary structures, some putting the road or highway partially over the river. That's expensive. If we eliminate SFR, then the staging could be simplified a lot. I couldn't guess how much cheaper this would be, but it's more than just the cost of the half mile of asphalt.
Are we actually planning to keep every lane open on both roads during all/nearly all phases of construction? I'd agree that seems excessive and very expensive, but it also doesn't seem particularly consistent with what we've been doing with roadwork in the region of late. If this is both the plan and a major cost driver, it certainly seems like an easier thing to get regional acceptance for than permanent reductions are.
The public has been pretty tolerant of the "shut it down more drastically for longer blocks of time at cost of greater disruption if it gets the work done significantly faster + cheaper" with regards to both transit + road closures of late - at least when the government manages to deliver on their end of that.
Seeing those highway numbers increase year over year kinda does prove the point of them being a self fulfilling curse, and shows you why MassDOT is skittish about lane reductions -- of course we need to support 150k cars on the pike, nevermind that it was 5k fewer last year, and 5k fewer the year before, and then before that fewer...
The
MAPC region is probably the closest proxy we have to a "you are very much in the Boston urban region employment market" - possibly a bit too restrictive (Lowell, Lawrence, Brockton, etc are outside it - as well as satellite metros that some people do commute from like Worcester or Providence). That shows a ~270,000 person population gain in the 2010-20 decade. It also shows an increase of ~290,000 jobs in the region - so not
only have we added lots of people and jobs they need to get to, we've added more jobs than we've added population (and of course, a decent chunk of people do not work for age/other reasons), and even more people can be expected to be commuting from out of the MAPC region entirely to fill them.
Boston + Cambridge alone have added approximately 145,000 of those jobs, and about 100,000 of the population.
I'd expect to see increases to usage over the decade on basically every mode of transportation - there are more people, there are more jobs, there should be more trips everywhere, on everything.
Instead, for the decade we basically failed at transit. Ridership in 2019 was
well below 2010. A few modest expansions/improvements counteracted by lots of backsliding elsewhere. That the road usage is
only up that much is almost surprising.
I do not think the solution to Boston's transportation challenges lies in building a pile of new road expansions and trying to outdo Houston. However, I also take a pretty skeptical view of the premise that a place that has been objectively failing at delivering other means of effective or attractive transportation to our growing population, is a place that can just rip out/drastically downsize significant pieces of highly utilized infrastructure with some vague handwave that they'll just go find some other way to get there.
Let's say the 94k users in peak covid are people who for whatever reason will perish if they don't have access to the road and work from there.
At peak covid nearly all the offices and most things to do were closed. That the road was kind of empty then is not particularly useful to any sort of planning just as it isn't useful to say we should have shut down most of the T, it's unnecessary since most people weren't using it in 2020. For somewhat obvious reasons, the peak covid state of affairs would be an apocalypse for the city long-term.
