Question for the locals - how big is the fight against making Ringe a bigger Mass-ave connector to Rt 2 traffic? If they straighten out the intersection, it's almost guaranteed to become a much busier road.
Big opposition. Rindge is wall-to-wall public housing, schools, parks, and triple-decker residential and major ped access to/from the various parks and housing between Rindge and Sherman. And the ped traffic is overrepresented by small children. The left-turn prohibition from the parkway and shorting of the 83 bus at Rusell Field parking lot / Alewife far headhouse instead of the busway are overt controls on that. Road's extremely narrow all points west of the Sherman intersection to the Parkway, and traffic-calmed with giant raised crossings on the wider Sherman-Mass Ave. section with on-street parking. Hazardous for a bike because of the minimal lane widths...though most of the locals know to shortcut on a cross street over to Dudley St. or cut through Danehy Park rather than bother with Rindge.
I used to live off the corner of Sherman & Walden for 9 years, so this was my stomping grounds. And I can say this is all a legit sticking point. Traffic volumes are already very heavy on the narrowest section just from loads originating from Sherman, so it simply can't handle much more. And the outsized representation of minors amongst pedestrians is a big concern around the crosswalks. I'm personally
most leery of that one. The Sherman-induced traffic jams at least are purely local traffic represented by drivers who largely know through repetition what the neighborhood makeup is and what to look out for. Introduce a big random sample of suburban cut-thrus to/from the garages with people less familiar and they're not going to be as hip to the fact that there's so many children using those crosswalks with all the extra alertness that entails. Not that Rindge is in any way a jaywalker killzone...as with my drive-by yesterday the resident kids are by-and-large intrinisically well-educated about their surrounds and waiting for the WALK sign when it's busy (actually...all 8 of them I counted waiting at the Parkway crossing yesterday were also dutifully wearing masks despite no adult supervision, so the kids are alright!). But kids are kids...you have to be top-level alert as a driver when the surroundings are swarming with them. And I just don't think that level of alertness is going to be there if it's an all-access thru street.
If the intersection were squared up to a unified light I don't see how there wouldn't continue to be a turn prohibition. Maybe the 83 would be exempted to go thru to/from the busway at long last, but that's it. It'll bring out the voters in-force at all the public housing triggered by the self-interest, and the rest of the owner-occupied and triple-decker neighborhood would follow suit. Rindge corridor is one of the most densely-populated wards in all of Cambridge. Not the highest voter participation because it tilts heavy to public housing, but give the public housing residents a galvanizing issue to vote on and the numbers become overwhelming. I just can't see cut-across being allowed because of what issue intensity it would bring out of the woodwork. And if I were still living there and attending those same meetings...I'd be inclined to side with the neighborhood concerns. Rindge is very much a neighborhood street for neighborhood traffic (which is intense enough); I just don't see enough safety offsets available to make it a cut-through navigable by skew-percentage out-of-towners without a severe degradation to pedestrian safety. It's legit complicated.
This of course wouldn't be a problem if Alewife were actually transit-oriented. But it's not. Open up Rindge to cut-across traffic from Cambridgepark and you know exactly what's going to happen. Where I'm skeptical of this new Jerry's Pit redev is that I have no faith whatsoever that siting on the residential side of the parkway is going to in any way remove the brainslugs from the planners' heads and get them thinking differently that there can't be 1:1 parking space-to-employee ratios on that side or else it's instantaneously D.O.A. with the City. The way Concord Ave. is falling into the same car-centric hole just shows me that they're that incapable of adjusting. So we're probably looking at a process of 37 roundly rejected renders before it gets pounded into somebody's thick skulls that "Oh,
that side of the parkway is 'North Cambridge where people live'...maybe we should stop trying to 'Alewife it'". And probably Sen. Brownsberger eating both of his feet some more trying to mediate a stalemate well above his meager brainpower.
It's not that it can't be done. I mean, WR Grace has been a walk-up friendly local employer for the entirety of the time they've been there, so the right attention to parking-free/few density would work. You've got the little Brickyard complex on Sherman that's representative of mixed-use dev that works well within the density surroundings of the neighborhood. And honestly if they expanded the parkland around Jerry's Pit (whether the pond itself has to be chain-linked off as forever-unsuitable for swimming or not) they'd be speaking directly to the hearts of the kid-friendly residential.
But it's Alewife. And Alewife is planning brainslugs. Alewife is satanically cursed. After living right there for a decade's worth of builds and primally screaming through a couple in-person City meetings and way too many hours of CCTV broadcasts of meetings my brain is simply broken through repetition that the dev pitches will ever be rehabilitated. And that's with Concord Ave.'s predictable fall into parking-oriented redev largely coming since I moved out. Prepare for this slate to be ENORMOUSLY frustrating to watch go through the motions, even though I'd trust almost any aB crayon drawing to do better than what the actual dev money is going to push.
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