I'd rather just have people learn not to run out of gas on the highway.
95% of the breakdowns that hose 93 at rush have nothing to do with people running out of gas. It's mechanical breakdowns, blown tires, and fender benders in usually slow-speed stop-and-go. Bang...instant +1 hour to the commute and an awkward maneuver where miles of cars have to swerve out of the way of the emergency vehicles because they can only reach the scene by splitting traffic with there being no breakdown lane. It's an infinitesimally small minority who end up on the losing end of gaming their gas gauges. C'mon, that just doesn't happen here with the extreme density of off-ramps in this region. Is anyone ever more than 2 miles from a gas station?
This is why the MUTCD road design standards have a breakdown lane requirement in the first place for all limited access highways and major arterials. They only grant exemptions for things like new-construction tunnels that have naturally constrained construction dimensions, legacy bridges, or parkways (and the parkway loophole has been abused enough that they're clamping down on that). SE Expressway did its add-a-lane almost 30 years ago maxing out its footprint before whichever MUTCD revision outlawed that. That's why there's never any talk of doing an add-a-lane on anything else by cannibalizing a breakdown lane (3, 128, etc.). It can only be done by widening for a breakdown lane accordingly (and the feds have since closed the loophole in the MUTCD that allowed insanely dangerous conditions like rush hour breakdown lane travel).
Lack of breakdown lane is the #1 most deficient part of the SE Expressway design. They did the turnouts on the wide spots during the 1980's reconstruction, and we can see the results any given morning...they don't freaking work. The turnouts gamble on breakdown frequency being lower and more predictable than it actually is, and volumes being low enough that traffic is actually moving fast enough for a vehicle in crisis to be able to switch lanes and pull over instead of crapping out in one of the center lanes. Stop-and-go fender benders overwhelm the rest of the inadequate turnout density. For whatever reason they thought by making these wide like a truck rest area it would somehow compensate for them being so short and infrequent. The DOT seemed to like those at some point in the 70's and 80's, but you'll notice that in places like the 128 widening they're actually tearing out those rest area-sized individual turnouts in favor of enforcing uniformity on the overall shoulder dimensions. It works a ton better.
What they need to do is mimic the Pike in the Newton, Allston, and Fenway spots where that constrained roadway was widened 3+ decades ago to 7-8 lanes. On every stretch where they could get a minimum 750+ feet of contiguous breakdown lane they widened the road and put in a regulation-size shoulder. It skips around old bridge abutments and retaining walls that lack the width, but otherwise they've filled in all the space that'll support it and no vehicle is ever more than 1000 or so feet away from a turnout. And if some abutment gets rebuilt, it gets rebuilt at regulation-width to extend it. MassHighway is proposing extending the Pike breakdown lane through some gaps that have seen enough structural renewal over the years to support grabbing a few more feet here and there.
As bad as the Allston tolls are, an accident never hoses them as long or as many miles out as even the tiniest disruptions gridlock 93, and that's borne out by a comparison of peakmost Pike loads vs. offpeak weekend 93 loads where an accident
still will lock it solid the whole length of the Expressway.
A road's only as good as its most deficient design feature. It's pretty obvious how to relate that in layman's terms to the zipper lane on the Expressway, but turnout space is the other huge one. And I would argue the bigger of the two because regular flow is less of a problem day-to-day on the road than its ability to absorb one single disruption in flow on any one lane anywhere along its length without totally gridlocking...regardless of time of day. When this is playing out exactly the same as a miles-long backup even during hours where the road is running well below capacity, that's a screaming sign of the road's entire design being upended by a single point of failure.
