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I don't buy that a whole lot more parking would get built without the cap. Policy should be neutral - get rid of the cap, get rid of mandatory parking minimums for development in downtown areas, market-price street parking a la SFPark, price neighborhood parking permits at some level, sell...

Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011 I heard about a lot of this kind of nonsense back when a major TOD development was being debated in a town I used to live in. They were proposing lots of one- and two-bedroom luxury condos. They were going to change the character of the town and make...

The entire point is that, yes, all that TOD is great and should be done, but you also need suburban space and highway connections. The idea is not necessarily that these highways get more people into the city, requiring more parking garages, but that they facilitate additional regional expansion...

Haha, you can chalk that up to rhetorical excess I suppose. The serious point is, if for aesthetic reasons a neighborhood wants to have trees tall enough to take out power lines in close proximity to them, they should have to internalize the costs by burying the power lines. There's lots of...

I think too often people here get into a pro-highway vs anti-highway, partisan type of mentality when thinking about transportation policy. The reality is, the world's complicated than that. As far as Routes 2 and 3, and the Inner Belt, I disagree with Halycon. But look at this group of...

How about some disaster-preparation work that can realistically be done, for disasters that actually might happen? Like trimming a whole lot of trees way back, eliminating a whole lot more entirely, and banning sidewalk trees in areas without buried utilities? I know people like trees, but your...

^this. If you've used Logan via virtually every means possible over the last 15 years you see how much good the improvements have done but also where they're sorely deficient. The modernization project improved vehicle circulation around the airport roadway system a lot. Car access is no...

Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011 Assuming all the facts here are correct and characterized correctly (and I'm not so sure), I don't really see the issue here. In fact what you're describing is exactly what a lawyer should be. A lawyer should be able to argue any aspect of any case...

Our infrastructure should be fine, it's the private buildings that are the issue. Source for the 500-900 year estimate: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2006/05/28/bostons_earthquake_problem/

For 20 years, code has required buildings to be brought up to modern seismic requirements when major alterations are done. As time goes on more and more buildings will require renovations and seismic retrofits will happen. That's really all that can be done. A magnitude 6 earthquake is...

What's going on in Burlington/Woburn is different from the add-a-lane project. Add a lane is from Route 9 in Wellesley to Route 24. The stuff north of there is normal maintenance, resurfacing and reconstruction, safety improvements, signage/lighting improvements, fiber and ITS, that sort of thing.

I was referring to the projects you mentioned, and also the Southwest Corridor and various commuter rail expansions and preservation. A lot of dollars and transportation planning was shifted from highways to transit in the 1970's. And the Southwest Corridor might not have had rail at all...

I think ant is on the right path here. You can't look at this question in a vacuum. A counterfactual in which the Southwest Expressway was built is one in which the Inner Belt and lots of other planned highways would have been built. And it's probably one in which a lot of transit wasn't built...

If that's true then it's wrong and it should be stopped. Police need to have discretion, but you can't rely on discretion in matters where the majority of people break the law and enforcement of the law is profitable for the government. It creates perverse incentives. Police discretion only...

Do the same for speeding fines, and you've got a deal.

I think for better or for worse, the auto-centric design of those cities (including the grid layout) results in the necessity for strict jaywalking laws. It's not the laws that kill the walkability, it's the design. The purpose of traffic law is often misconstrued. For the most part...

Should pedestrians just be able to cross any road, anywhere, any time, with no regard to street traffic?

To start off, the penalties for bike and pedestrian violations needs to be increased. Jaywalking should always be a trivial violation (maybe $40), but the current $1 fine makes it useless to enforce even egregious violations. Bike offenses should be the same fines as vehicular offenses, it...

Chapter 9 is not permitted unless authorized by state law. Federal law trumps state law if it says it trumps state law. In this case federal law does not trump state law because it does not attempt to. Chapter 9 requires a specific authorization from a state's legislature. The authorization must...

Massachusetts law doesn't allow Chapter 9 bankruptcies even for municipalities, never mind statewide authorities.