Boston Infrastructure: A Summary

[BostonUrbEx]

No, it is comparable to the McGrath.


(Sorry, just wishing we'd have an earthquake and that only the McGrath would fall down)

 

[HenryAlan]

The T began expanding in the 1970's before the CLF existed or the Big Dig had gotten much beyond the Cerebral Cortex of Salvucci

Agreed, but what has happened since then was almost entirely focused on either highway or commuter rail. These are arguably important pieces of the overall transportation system, but they shouldn't happen at the expense of urban transit. Minimal transit expansion has happened since Alewife opened. The Southwest corridor OL doesn't count in my view, because it was replacement, rather than new service. The Big Dig completely killed the earlier focus on rapid transit.

Only the DTX to Forest Hills Orange Line had anything to do with highway cancellations -- the rest of the T expansion was plotted during the 1960's or even before the creation of the T -- its just that in Boston everythig done by the gov't takes some time to go from the concept to the serious concept and then the implementation to the final product (typically about 20 to 25 years)

Yes, and 25 years after the OL re-opening, we have not seen a single expansion of the core rapid transit system. Yes, a lot has happened regarding track work, station re-builds, ADA compliance, etc., but the system that existed on the map in 1987 is identical to the system we have today, 25 years later. Given the timeline you've suggested, which I don't dispute, what happened to the rest of the ideas from the '60s and '70s?

 

[HenryAlan]

Sure you could have. Wrecking ball. Done.

Ok, I will presume that you are going to complain next about "but what about all the through traffic" and I'll just skip a step and point you at the Embarcadero Freeway which was damaged by an earthquake, and the result has been absolutely wonderful and at a fraction of the cost of the Big Dig.

In fairness, the Embarcadero was a freeway to nowhere. If it had been completed, it might not have come down so easily.

 

[Matthew]

That didn't actually answer my complaint at all, because the Embarcadero Freeway is nothing like the Central Artery.

Demolishing the Central Artery means the rest of Interstate 93 has to go somewhere else, and for a guy who is so "anti highway impact" I'm sure you can see the problem with having a major highway end abruptly in the vicinity of Mass. Ave on the south side and North Station on the North. If all those cars are bad enough on an interstate corridor, how bad do you think they'll be when they're dumped onto your surface streets?

The Embarcadero Freeway carried 70,000 vehicles a day, approximately half of what the Big Dig Central Artery/Tunnel carried in 2005. It's not the same, but it's still pretty significant.

Highways are not rivers. The flow doesn't have to push through because of gravity. We're not taming the mighty Mississippi here. What would have happened if the CA/T was not built is that through-traffic would have largely rerouted to Rt 128 and went around the city. The people using I-93 would have been folks going TO Boston and contributing to OUR economic development instead of just passing through and leaving fumes behind. There's no need to travel 70mph bypassing the heart of Boston when you're about to finish your commute and pull into a parking spot.

 

[cden4]

People make choices based on their options. If I-93 failed to connect to itself through downtown Boston, fewer people would use it as a through route unless downtown was their destination. More people would use I-95/128.

Re: Storrow, MassDOT is looking to add some additional on/off-ramps to I-90 in Back Bay to add connectivity and allow for westbound exit and eastbound entrance where you currently can't do so. This should alleviate traffic on Storrow and the Bowker Overpass and allow them both to be downsized into local streets instead of major regional routes.

 

[KentXie]

I guess nobody here remembers that the Zakim Bridge was built.

 

[mass88]

I guess nobody here remembers that the Zakim Bridge was built.

Good point.

Crippling debt aside, the Big Dig has been a great benefit to the city of Boston as a whole. Getting rid of the old elevated artery has gone a very long way to improving the downtown area. Yes a lot of the parcels are not being used to their potential, but having that open space in the heart of the city is amazing.

 

[Matthew]

Crippling debt aside, the Big Dig has been a great benefit to the city of Boston as a whole. Getting rid of the old elevated artery has gone a very long way to improving the downtown area. Yes a lot of the parcels are not being used to their potential, but having that open space in the heart of the city is amazing.

We were just talking about how we could have reaped those benefits without the crippling debt.

BTW, this cheerleading summary of the economic benefits from the Big Dig estimates that it is worth about $168 million a year.

Sounds excellent. The project will pay for itself, in only 130 years!

 

[whighlander]

People make choices based on their options. If I-93 failed to connect to itself through downtown Boston, fewer people would use it as a through route unless downtown was their destination. More people would use I-95/128.

Re: Storrow, MassDOT is looking to add some additional on/off-ramps to I-90 in Back Bay to add connectivity and allow for westbound exit and eastbound entrance where you currently can't do so. This should alleviate traffic on Storrow and the Bowker Overpass and allow them both to be downsized into local streets instead of major regional routes.

People Please -- you can't redistribute the 200,000 vehicles per day (that was the traffic count on the Central Artery at the South Station Tunnel) after removing the elevated central Artery without a major negative impact on the economics of Boston and Cambridge

In the absence of the Inner Belt there was a good reason to call the Fitzgerld Expressway the Central Artery -- it was Boston's Aorta -- if you remember an awful lot of trucks and even buses flowed through as well as cars

For example -- without the Central Artery -- How was someone to get from the wholesale meat district in South Boston to the restaurants in the North End or from the Chelsea fruit and vegetable market to restaurants in the Back Bay -- the answer would be even more trucks stuck in traffic in the financial district. How would Legal Seafood get day boat fish from the pier to Cambridge

Yes, certainly the Ted Williams Tunnel was the most valuable overall improvement made to transportation in Boston in decades. But after that -- the direct and indirect benefits of the BIg Dig -- and despite some sleazy cost cutting and sloppy construction work -- will be collected at the rate of B$ per year for many decades:

1) the reduction in traffic jams acheived by simplification of the ramps when the Big Dig burried the Central Artery
2) opening up the passage of both people and cars across Boston from downtown to the waterfront and the North End
3) Vastly improved access to / from Logan
4) the more obscure rationalization of the spaghetti bowl of utility lines
5) the parks and greeness in the midst of the highway coridor

This combination will do for the waterfront area what the Turnpike extension did for the development of the Back Bay -- many many B$ of investment

 

[Matthew]

whigh, no need to guess. Read the link I posted above, it's a study commissioned for the Big Dig, to measure the impact of the Big Dig.

And I thought people were busy whining that the Central Artery was, in fact, a huge traffic jam for most of the day? E.g. trucks stuck in traffic in the middle of the financial district.

What a surprise, you direct through-traffic into the middle of an old city where space is limited, and you combine that with local traffic, and you get a mess.

The right answer was to send through-traffic around the city, and work on easing local travel between or to destinations within the city. And an urban freeway does not accomplish that goal!

 

[HenryAlan]

I guess nobody here remembers that the Zakim Bridge was built.

The Zakim is spectacular, but fundamentally, it is a bridge crossing a river, where we previously had a bridge crossing a river. I'm not sure it's forgotten as much as it doesn't change anything.

 

[mass88]

whigh, no need to guess. Read the link I posted above, it's a study commissioned for the Big Dig, to measure the impact of the Big Dig.

And I thought people were busy whining that the Central Artery was, in fact, a huge traffic jam for most of the day? E.g. trucks stuck in traffic in the middle of the financial district.

What a surprise, you direct through-traffic into the middle of an old city where space is limited, and you combine that with local traffic, and you get a mess.

The right answer was to send through-traffic around the city, and work on easing local travel between or to destinations within the city. And an urban freeway does not accomplish that goal!

How would you adequately route traffic around the city?

 

[whighlander]

whigh, no need to guess. Read the link I posted above, it's a study commissioned for the Big Dig, to measure the impact of the Big Dig.

And I thought people were busy whining that the Central Artery was, in fact, a huge traffic jam for most of the day? E.g. trucks stuck in traffic in the middle of the financial district.

What a surprise, you direct through-traffic into the middle of an old city where space is limited, and you combine that with local traffic, and you get a mess.

The right answer was to send through-traffic around the city, and work on easing local travel between or to destinations within the city. And an urban freeway does not accomplish that goal!

Mathew -- You seem to have some strange idea that Rt-128 has infinite capacity to absorb the "through traffic" which you want to route around the city

the problem with your model is that a lot of the "through traffic " is generated within the City Limits of Boston

You can't send a truck from South Boston down to Rt-128 to then have to come around on an already congested highway and then in on another radial such as the Turnpike or I-93 -- that's insanity -- all of those businesses would have immediately relocated to somewhere outside of Rt-128

No -- the right answer from the standpoint of rerouting the traffic only -- was to build the Inner Belt and the other radials to connect to it

Since the Inner Belt never happened -- the Central Artery took on a major part of that role of inconnecting and routing traffic from: the NE (Tobin), Logan (original tunnels), NW (Storrow Dr), W (I-90), SW (SE Expressway), S (SE Expressway), SE (SE Expressway), etc.

The completion of the Ted William Tunnel reduced the need for some of that traffic routing to happen only on the Central Artery -- e.g. you didn't need to go to downtown Boston to get from Lexington to Logan

Howerver the undergrounded Central Artery still has to deal with a lot of the above routing

If money was no object Rt-2 should be connected via an underground Interstate class connector (Lowell connector) with only one exit (when crossing the Charles) to i-90 in Alston Brighton

 

[Matthew]

Rt-128 is for through traffic coming from outside. Internally, the traffic could have been routed onto smaller, at-grade streets with grid-like connectivity, if not a grid. This would be much more useful for local deliveries and city-destined traffic than an urban freeway.

Manhattan successfully resisted two straddling highways. They have not suffered for it, quite the opposite. The experience of the Cross-Bronx Expressway proved that urban freeways do no good for the local neighborhoods and in fact, completely destroy them.

The CA/T is much better than the elevated Central Artery but it was not worth the cost. What we got? A six-lane highway running at-grade through downtown Boston, with a larger highway tunnel beneath, as well as the Ted Williams, for $22 billion. The 2006 report commissioned by the proponents of the Big Dig found that the economic benefit of the project is $168 million/year. At that rate, it will pay for itself in 130 years.

 

[Equilibria]

Rt-128 is for through traffic coming from outside. Internally, the traffic could have been routed onto smaller, at-grade streets with grid-like connectivity, if not a grid. This would be much more useful for local deliveries and city-destined traffic than an urban freeway.

Have you ever been outside the Boston City Limits? It's frankly outrageous to suggest that Route 128, the highway corridor largely responsible for keeping Boston in the game industrially and commercially for the past 50 years, is simply a bypass around Downtown. In fact, that isn't even how the road originated - Route 128 was conceived as an upgrade of a pre-existing sequence of local roads purpose-designed for intra-suburban traffic. I-495 might be a pure bypass, but even that is changing.

You also failed to address Wigh's point: Boston, like all major cities should, generates truck traffic. Even if you assume that the whole industrial sector of the city moves away, that still leaves all the deliveries that need to be made to hotels, restaurants, stores, etc. These deliveries aren't from the neighborhood, they're coming from the surburbs and from other cities. They need to access the city somehow.

To absorb all the through traffic from I-93, Route 128 would have to expand to at least 6 or 7 lanes in each direction. That simply is not realistic. There are real cities there that go back just as far as Boston does and real people that live along that highway. Asking a half-million residents of these areas to suffer so that 200,000 Downtown Bostonians can have a nice avenue is crazy.

New York, Paris, and London indeed have rejected Downtown highways. They also have reputations worldwide as notoriously awful cities to get to, around, or through if you aren't commuting or toristing by subway.

 

[Commuting Boston Student]

Rt-128 is for through traffic coming from outside. Internally, the traffic could have been routed onto smaller, at-grade streets with grid-like connectivity, if not a grid. This would be much more useful for local deliveries and city-destined traffic than an urban freeway.

Manhattan successfully resisted two straddling highways. They have not suffered for it, quite the opposite. The experience of the Cross-Bronx Expressway proved that urban freeways do no good for the local neighborhoods and in fact, completely destroy them.

The CA/T is much better than the elevated Central Artery but it was not worth the cost. What we got? A six-lane highway running at-grade through downtown Boston, with a larger highway tunnel beneath, as well as the Ted Williams, for $22 billion. The 2006 report commissioned by the proponents of the Big Dig found that the economic benefit of the project is $168 million/year. At that rate, it will pay for itself in 130 years.

Atlantic Avenue should never have happened. Fortunately, it can still be destroyed and hopefully will in the future.

Re: Grid-like connectivity or an actual grid, it sounds nice, but I don't think you're going to ever get that easily on the streets of Downtown or the North End short of doing something incredibly drastic.

Not to say that incredibly drastic is automatically bad. Making the entirety of DTX (as I define it here) an excluded way for local deliveries, transit and pedestrian use ONLY is drastic, but also potentially hugely beneficial for that area if handled properly.

 

[whighlander]

Atlantic Avenue should never have happened. Fortunately, it can still be destroyed and hopefully will in the future.

Re: Grid-like connectivity or an actual grid, it sounds nice, but I don't think you're going to ever get that easily on the streets of Downtown or the North End short of doing something incredibly drastic.

Not to say that incredibly drastic is automatically bad. Making the entirety of DTX (as I define it here) an excluded way for local deliveries, transit and pedestrian use ONLY is drastic, but also potentially hugely beneficial for that area if handled properly.

Commute -- you and Mathew need to take a refresher course in Boston's history of settlement, land making, transportation etc

I have a map showing Atlantic Avenue with water to its inboard side -- 1885

the process was called wharfing out and filling in -- all of downtown Boston closer to the Harbor than Congress St. is built on filled land created by the wharfing out -- building out into the harbor and the filling in the shallows until the wharfs stuck out enough to allow the ships to tie-up and load/unload to/from the warehouses built atop the wharfs

For example consider State (formerly Kind St) and its extension out into the harbor as Long Wharf

Dock Square (Sam Adams statue) Congress and State -- was so named because it was once where the Town Dock was located.

At the time of the Boston Masacre -- Long Wharf extended out into Boston Harbor to about where 75 State Street is today with the then customs house located about on the present State-Congress corner

75 years Later the 2nd newer Customs House (original Doric Temple with Roman Dome) was built so ships could tie-up to pay their customs duties almost on the greenway. By then Long wharf had been extended out to where it ends today.

Filling continued until about the early 1900's when the shore line arrived where it is today

 

[Commuting Boston Student]

Commute -- you and Mathew need to take a refresher course in Boston's history of settlement, land making, transportation etc

I have a map showing Atlantic Avenue with water to its inboard side -- 1885

the process was called wharfing out and filling in -- all of downtown Boston closer to the Harbor than Congress St. is built on filled land created by the wharfing out -- building out into the harbor and the filling in the shallows until the wharfs stuck out enough to allow the ships to tie-up and load/unload to/from the warehouses built atop the wharfs

For example consider State (formerly Kind St) and its extension out into the harbor as Long Wharf

Dock Square (Sam Adams statue) Congress and State -- was so named because it was once where the Town Dock was located.

At the time of the Boston Masacre -- Long Wharf extended out into Boston Harbor to about where 75 State Street is today with the then customs house located about on the present State-Congress corner

75 years Later the 2nd newer Customs House (original Doric Temple with Roman Dome) was built so ships could tie-up to pay their customs duties almost on the greenway. By then Long wharf had been extended out to where it ends today.

Filling continued until about the early 1900's when the shore line arrived where it is today

That doesn't mean it needs to exist as a 6-lane highway, which was my point. With the CA/T handling most through traffic, Atlantic Avenue presently serves:
a) extreme local traffic
b) trucks and other vehicles over capacity for CA/T
c) vehicles arriving into wharfs/Aquarium/North End
d) people terrified of driving through the CA/T

It can handle all of these groups just fine as a four-lane road. As a six-lane, it's still a huge obstacle to cross over, creating an artificial barrier - just like the Central Artery did - and what was one of the main reasons for getting rid of it.

 

[Equilibria]

It can handle all of these groups just fine as a four-lane road. As a six-lane, it's still a huge obstacle to cross over, creating an artificial barrier - just like the Central Artery did - and what was one of the main reasons for getting rid of it.

Really, though, I wouldn't call it a 6-lane road. It's 2 1-way 3-lane roads separated by a too-wide expanse of open space necessitated by the depth of the tunnel and the presence of its ramps. Does that mean it shouldn't be 2 2-lane 1-way roads? No, but its impact on the city is not really as you describe it. It doesn't look like Route 9 in Framingham.

 

[Commuting Boston Student]

Really, though, I wouldn't call it a 6-lane road. It's 2 1-way 3-lane roads separated by a too-wide expanse of open space necessitated by the depth of the tunnel and the presence of its ramps. Does that mean it shouldn't be 2 2-lane 1-way roads? No, but its impact on the city is not really as you describe it. It doesn't look like Route 9 in Framingham.

It might not be as bad as I describe it, but it certainly isn't a pleasant thing to cross. At least, it wasn't any of the times I tried crossing it, but I'm willing to admit I'm speaking partially on my own bias.

Anyway, I edited in some additional traffic manipulation to that DTX map, to reflect knocking that road down a lane on each side (among other things).