boston roads

Random musing that doesn't deserve its own thread, but this one looks good enough.

Any thoughts on why the road connecting Oak Square to Beacon Street changes names no less than five times?

It starts as Faneuil in Oak Square. Faneuil splits off to the northeast and the "straight" road becomes Arlington Street. At Market Street, Arlington turns into Sparhawk Street. Sparhawk runs for a mere four blocks to Cambridge Street where it becomes Warren Street. Warren runs to Comm Ave where it becomes Kelton Street. Kelton becomes Winchester Street at the Brighton-Brookline line and terminates at Beacon Street.

Some of the name changes make some sense; like Faneuil to Arlington due to the former continuing elsewhere; and Kelton to Winchester since it crosses city lines. The rest of them make zero sense to me. I'm sure there's some historical reasoning that that Brighton Historical Society or something would know.
 
BussesAin'tTrains said:
Random musing that doesn't deserve its own thread, but this one looks good enough.

Any thoughts on why the road connecting Oak Square to Beacon Street changes names no less than five times?

It starts as Faneuil in Oak Square. Faneuil splits off to the northeast and the "straight" road becomes Arlington Street. At Market Street, Arlington turns into Sparhawk Street. Sparhawk runs for a mere four blocks to Cambridge Street where it becomes Warren Street. Warren runs to Comm Ave where it becomes Kelton Street. Kelton becomes Winchester Street at the Brighton-Brookline line and terminates at Beacon Street.

Some of the name changes make some sense; like Faneuil to Arlington due to the former continuing elsewhere; and Kelton to Winchester since it crosses city lines. The rest of them make zero sense to me. I'm sure there's some historical reasoning that that Brighton Historical Society or something would know.
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Corey Road turns into Brainerd Road (while still descending Corey Hill!) at the same intersection that Winchester turns into Kelton. It makes no sense whatsoever.

I do know most of those roads are named after families in the area. If you zoom in on this map, almost every major street in the area is a house on it. You can also see on that atlas that Faneuil Street is much older than the others. I believe Sparhawk is also relatively young, built later to stitch together Warren and Arlington Streets
 
A little off topic but the interchange at 2, 3, and 16 from Alewife Station to Storrow and Memorial (Fresh Pond) is absolute murder at any given time of night and day.

I know that that was where the planned Northeast Extension was going to be, but is there any plan of restoring some sanity between Alewife and Mt. Auburn Hospital? It needs it. Bad.
 
Agreed - I think they need to put in (bring back?) roundabouts there and also down where it hits memorial/greenough. These strange triangular intersections are the worst.
 
It's horrible. I can't help but think of Arlington's decision to reject the red line extension out to Lexington back in the 80's. Not that such an extension would eliminate the problem, but seemingly that would alleviate some of the traffic coming down 2 and 3.

The timing of the lights is also horrific at the 2/3/16 intersection. It could really stand to be improved.
 
Coyote137 said:
It's horrible. I can't help but think of Arlington's decision to reject the red line extension out to Lexington back in the 80's. Not that such an extension would eliminate the problem, but seemingly that would alleviate some of the traffic coming down 2 and 3.

The timing of the lights is also horrific at the 2/3/16 intersection. It could really stand to be improved.
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Nearly every ex-MDC road has the most horribly timed traffic lights inside 128. It's consistently horrible everywhere. I can't for the life of me figure out why MassHighway hasn't fixed ANY of them since taking over the parkways from DCR. The one at Fresh Pond/Storrow/Greenough rotary that's always red going onto Greenough despite a protected merge has got to be the most infuriatingly pointless one of all.


There's stupid afterthoughts with Alewife rotary that wouldn't cost very much money to fix. Like this stupid set of lights on the 2W onramps: http://goo.gl/maps/Rnsn0. Why does the road pinch here into an unstriped 1-lane into 2-lane merge requiring a whole extra superfluous set of lights??? All they need to do is relax the 16W-to-2W ramp a couple degrees out to the Minuteman bridge to even out the 'pinch' and get rid of the sidewalk. Then lane-drop the 16E-to-2W traffic, and stipe a long controlled merge starting the highway's left lane and right lane from each direction. That signal can outright be taken down, movements to 2 from Mass Ave. can be entirely signal-free, and whatever loss of lane capacity at the merge from the other side gets offset by not having another stupid, totally uncoordinated signal phase to go through. The 16E-to-16E and 2E-to-16E merge somehow manages to do this without gridlock: http://goo.gl/maps/9kDgx. See the lane drop before they freely merge? That's not so hard. What would this cost...$300K?
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
Nearly every ex-MDC road has the most horribly timed traffic lights inside 128. It's consistently horrible everywhere. I can't for the life of me figure out why MassHighway hasn't fixed ANY of them since taking over the parkways from DCR. The one at Fresh Pond/Storrow/Greenough rotary that's always red going onto Greenough despite a protected merge has got to be the most infuriatingly pointless one of all.


There's stupid afterthoughts with Alewife rotary that wouldn't cost very much money to fix. Like this stupid set of lights on the 2W onramps: http://goo.gl/maps/Rnsn0. Why does the road pinch here into an unstriped 1-lane into 2-lane merge requiring a whole extra superfluous set of lights??? All they need to do is relax the 16W-to-2W ramp a couple degrees out to the Minuteman bridge to even out the 'pinch' and get rid of the sidewalk. Then lane-drop the 16E-to-2W traffic, and stipe a long controlled merge starting the highway's left lane and right lane from each direction. That signal can outright be taken down, movements to 2 from Mass Ave. can be entirely signal-free, and whatever loss of lane capacity at the merge from the other side gets offset by not having another stupid, totally uncoordinated signal phase to go through. The 16E-to-16E and 2E-to-16E merge somehow manages to do this without gridlock: http://goo.gl/maps/9kDgx. See the lane drop before they freely merge? That's not so hard. What would this cost...$300K?
Click to expand...

You're hired.
 
I don't know if it's easy to do, but they need to add a lane to the end of highway 2E after passing Alewife exit. When two lanes of cars consistently want to turn left from 2E to 16E they block cars that want to turn to 16W past Alewife. That's the biggest source of backup besides the ill-timing of the lights.
 
Here's a thought: restore the Circles!

I was chatting with someone about Audubon Circle the other day and about how it used to be a circle, and that the city is considering reconstructing it as-is. There's also Cleveland Circle, where some of the tracks are still laid out in the circle configuration.

In most places there's not enough room for a proper roundabout, but maybe these ought to be converted back. But this time, they should stick to a single lane roundabout, get some traffic calming in, and improve pedestrian conditions. There are designs capable of handling the existing conditions, and the goal should be to cap the AADT and even seek to lower it over time.
 
No! Circles take up way too much space. And they're not nearly as ped friendly as a signaled intersection.
 
As I used to cross Cleveland Circle on foot all the time, I do thing something needs to be done there. (At the very least, the pedestrian light cycle should give enough time to cross the whole road, not just enough to get to the traffic island and wait for another cycle, which no one does anyway)

I don't think restoring the circle would solve the issue, though...
 
Crummy multi-lane, signalled Circles are bad for pedestrians, but I believe single lane roundabouts are better than the hyper-controlled 4-way signalled intersections which dominate today.

The space is there, because it was configured that way historically. For most intersections, roundabouts are not an option, but I picked out these in particular because there is enough room.
 
@ Novitate: ^ Wrong on both counts. In both cases Matthew mentions, the circle would be the exact same size as the intersection. And, if it's a single-lane circle, it can be extremely pedestrian friendly. Compare crossing a few stretches of single lane to any typical foot crossing of Cleveland Circle where left-turning traffic doesn't see you or doesn't care to see you, 3-4 lanes merge into 2 just where pedestrians cross, and crosswalks are extremely long and take longer to cross than a light cycle allows. Finally, the circle creates a viable, usable, public space on what previously was just traffic lanes.
 
Yeah, and if I haven't made myself enough of a broken record yet, the "single lane" aspect is really important. The number of conflict points increases exponentially as you add lanes to the roundabout, and it becomes forbidding as soon as n=2.
 
That's nice but do they have any rotaries?
 
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