Oh I see how it is. Only people who drive cars count. Can't say that's a new attitude, sadly. :/
Highways are basically part of the continuous advancement of economic progress outlined in
this paper. There's no way around that fact. They are a productivity enabled and make operating a supply chain exponentially more efficient compared to trains only. The same principles that apply to operating a supply chain apply to personal life.
Here are a few examples of common activities for driving vs the T--
Going to the grocery store-- instead of driving to Market Basket in Chelsea, my options are about 50-100% more expensive and restrict me to buying only what I can carry.
Bringing my dog to the vet-- quick, let me walk to the D-Line, take the T and risk looking like
strollercat, but the
100 lb dog edition. Easily a 50 minute trip each way because of walking/waiting and the vet I bring him to is near Brookline village.
Visiting my parents-- they live near Lowell. Let me take the Green line to north station, then take the train to Lowell, then have one of them drive 30 minutes each way to get me. oh, my town used to have a passenger line, but then highway interests/economic progress killed it in 1934.
Seeing friends that don't live in Boston-- Once again, like going home, traveling to see them takes at least twice as long as driving.
The list keeps going on and on...
I needed to get a lead paint testing kit the other night and the hardware store near me closed at 630. Instead of taking a bus and a 45+ minute ride, I drove my car 15 minutes over to Watertown to home depot.
Need to get a package from the Post Office? easily an hour errand to Coolidge Corner and walking (in subzero temperatures) would probably take about the same amount of time. Driving took a total of 20 minutes.
Dropping my dog off at daycare before I have to travel for work? Something that takes a total of 30 minutes becomes well over an hour.
Need to appeal a parking ticket/do something at town hall? Again, taking the T takes over an hour round trip in what can be accomplished in 15 minutes in a car.
I know your commute sucks, we discussed it. Part of it is the crummy state of transit after years of decay, part of it is the terrible planning of the Silver Line, and part of it is the billions of dollars we spent to make I-90 an easy route from Brighton to the South Boston waterfront. Transportation and land use are inextricably intertwined.
Yes, as we've already discussed-- driving (even not on the pike) is still significantly faster than taking the T. It's not a consequence of the disrepair of the system, it's simply a consequence of the operational constraints that are part of public transit. As I demonstrated above, the same inefficiencies happen with transporting via rail which is why once value has been added to raw materials, they almost always travel by truck.
Reminds me of that apocryphal quote from Henry Ford. You can have any color of car so long as its black. Americans always buy black cars because, when given an option, that's what they want. Look out the window, everyone owns a black car! Clearly that is what the American people want.
We've spent hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars on making it possible for you to get in your car and go anywhere for cost of gas alone. It's an amazing achievement. At the same time, we allowed the public transit system to decay and deteriorate to the point where it is just staying one step ahead of total collapse.
Whose choice was that? A bunch of old guys (few, if any, women) who are dead or nearly so, whose vision looked something
like this.
Cute huh? Found that while doing some unrelated research.
Popular science always has a futirist view of technology. the same things were said about cars for 40 years-- when I was in high school I bought a collection of every issue from 1946 to ~1998 and read a lot of them. The same things were said about telecommuting from about 1970. Its one thing to theorize about technology (as that article is clearly doing) and another to realize what the practical application is. The same things have been said about solar/wind power since about 1970 "Its just 5 years away from being cost competitive with fossil fuels".... the hybrid car concept has also dated back to that era, as have electric cars, yet the practical, real world, applications are still incredibly limited. It also sounds like self driving cars are described in that article... and here we are 80 years later and once again, now they are possible but the real world limitations may prevent them from ever being fully developed.
And for the record, it would not take much to make highways operationally safe at 100 mph. My car can achieve that easily and feels "about right" at 90 mph, but I try to keep it at a speed that feels safe based on traffic conditions and road conditions. The issue is that other people don't have cars that can drive that fast and that highways (in Massachusetts at least) aren't in good enough condition or designed for that type of speed. In much of the country that would be entirely possible because of the flat terrain. I'm not an expert on civil engineering or road design by any means, but I talked about it at length with my grandfather before he passed away and its entirely possible, but because stopping distance gets exponentially longer with higher speeds, there's a practical limit to road design and construction that gets applied
Yes.. Brookline and Newton.. two towns with some of the best transit access in the Boston region outside of the city itself.
Brookline and Newton are where they are partially because of history, but also because of Boston schools. My place is worth about 30% more than virtually identical condos that are 80 feet away because it is in Brookline.
You're right, people will pay a premium to live next to transit. Even the Green Line. Funny how that works, even it's decrepit state, the MBTA keeps adding ridership and people keeping paying more and more to live near it, vacancy rates going down and down. Imagine if it didn't suck.
Increased ridership (and more parking problems) can be explained by--
Gentrification/increased population density-- now that 4 bedroom home has 4 yuppies/college students there instead of a couple with a few kids.
Bad economy-- starbucks/retail/per diem/temp work doesn't pay enough for car ownership
High cost of car ownership-- 10 years ago it was possible to buy a used car for $500 that had a year of life left. Now, the same car costs $4,000 and at the same time, wages for low skill jobs are basically unchanged while the cost of living has increased substantially. The average doesn't tell the whole story because the bottom of the market has come up a lot faster than the
market as a whole. The number of cars on the road (TTL US) has declined slightly since 2008 while the average age
has continued to rise.
Also, doesn't the increased ridership harm your (and others) argument that the central artery made driving in Boston too easy and the city is on the verge of being overrun by cars?
I don't mind if people are willing to pay the costs. But I, and others, don't want to pay the high price of having a city gutted by parking lots, chopped up by grade separated highways, a city that is decimated by pollution and the extreme amounts of infrastructure required to make car commuting feasible for everyone. If I wanted to live like that, there's the 99% of the cities in the United States where I could go live like that. I prefer Boston. Heck, compact walkable places don't take up much space. So there's plenty of room in the Boston region for both kinds of living, and other diversity as well.
Again, you're acting as though the plans for the inner belt and intermediate belt have been revived or as though the Boston.com comments are now the official transportation policy of Massachusetts. Parking lots (at grade) are basically disappearing in Boston because the land is so valuable (Fenway is the last area of large parking lots that I can think of. The parking lots of South Boston will all be gone in 20 years time. The biggest obstacle is political fighting/profit maximization around taxes, the same goes for making the pike go completely underground. When it's time to replace the I-93 viaduct between the zakim bridge and medford, you can damn well bet that below-grade will be seriously considered even if it means that tolling (with FHA approval) is used to pay for it. Once there is a serious discussion about fixing storrow drive, you can almost guarantee that tolling will be on the table.
Making a city manageable for the non-transit users is a good goal because most people look at transportation as a means to an end while balancing needs (perceived and actual), financial cost, convenience, and time. Transit has some some significant shortfalls, but that doesn't mean that it should be ignored, but at the same time, making driving more difficult (eliminating storrow drive, I-93 turned into a boulevard, deleting lanes on I-495, etc.) isn't the answer.
I assure you that Brookline will resist any and all attempts to build a grade separated highway through the middle of town. We know how those work out.
You're either willfully ignoring what I said or you're just not reading it-- I suggested building small overpasses/underpasses to speed throughput at a few locations that are chronically congested today not unlike Comm Ave at Mass ave, huntington at mass ave, or the proposed 2 lane (one in each direction) forest hills overpass. The same thing applies to bowker.
There's a bunch of great quotes in The Power Broker about this sort of thing. I was working on a more comprehensive article, actually, but here's a taste. Every time Robert Moses would build a parkway, it would invariably fill up with cars. The good traffic conditions would last maybe a few weeks after the opening of the new road. Of course, his response was "we need to build another one!" When the West Side Improvement was opened it took 20 minutes to traverse the isle of Manhattan lengthwise. A little while later it regularly took nearly 50 minutes, almost the same as travelling local streets. The Southern State Parkway was a big improvement over the hodgepodge of local farm roads used previously. It was also completely jammed with traffic so that it would take hours to get to Jones Beach. The Gowanus Expressway ran through Sunset Park using the elevated structure of the old elevated train (which was replaced by a subway). Except that the Gowanus was larger in width, blocked out the sun completely, and below it was a massive highway at-grade as well. It killed 3rd Ave in Sunset Park, a formerly thriving neighborhood built around the el. There's so much more (great book) and I haven't even arrived at the Bronx chapters yet. This all happened by the 1930s, btw, so the concept of induced demand was already well exemplified by the time Anthony Downs wrote in the early 60s.
The funny part is that even with the new parkway or expressway, the local streets would still be just as jammed up (or maybe just slightly less). You can't induce demand only onto one route and take it away from the other. Well at least, not by doing what he did.
NYC and Boston have such differing population densities and car use/transit patterns that I'm not sure that they can effectively be compared even in that era. The character of NYC was a working waterfront at that point. Not to mention, the west side highway had pretty much every deficincy that the old central artery did-- today the central artery is still a 6 lane highway, but has a substantially improved design.
Of course there was huge lines to get to the beach-- this was an era before widespread AC and then, add in car ownership and a weekend, everyone wants to go! Not really a big surprise, especially since it wasn't easy to leave metro NYC at the time.
Yes, that's why we have property rights and got abuse of eminent domain under control. Well, presumably. There's a big difference between a corn field and a city though. A corn field you can negotiate with the owner and work out a mutually beneficial deal. Nobody gets "Moses'ed" these days. A city is a whole other can of worms. There's so many people, so many relationships, and so many side effects that it is a monumental task to accommodate them all reasonably. And it's not right to just roll over them. We're past that, as a society. That's why we don't build urban freeways anymore here. Even disregarding the monetary costs, the human costs are overwhelmingly bigger than the benefits. That goes for the Route 9 elevated bypass too.
Again, I'm not proposing the inner belt/southwest expressway (Yeah, I may have said some stupid things, but I agree that it was probably a bad idea).
You're also reading between the lines and acting as though I'm talking about turning Route 9 into an I-93 style double deck viaduct. Nothing could be further than the truth. It's just a question of fixing dysfunctional sections of that road road which date back to the 1920s and weren't improved in the past because of either the turnpike authority or excessive hand wringing by brookline residents.
The old pavement is getting removed regardless of what we say or do. It's decrepit and beyond repair. Either it gets replaced, or the safety inspector comes along one day and shuts it down, like they did briefly on the Casey. The question is what is it getting replaced with.
The system we have now evolved into place, it did not arrive one day by magic. Storrow Drive was built before the Mass Pike extension. The Bowker overpass covered what was once "the crown jewel" of the emerald necklace. The world changes, people change, ideas change, and there's no reason that infrastructure shouldn't change with the times either. Especially when the issue is being forced by deterioration. Land use and transportation are inextricably intertwined, and both will change together over time too.
Once again, as I have explained a million times on here, the mass pike extension and storrow drive serve entirely different parts of boston and have entirely different, but critical, purposes.
The rehab of storrow (whatever the rehab is), is without a doubt one of the best ROI road projects inside of 128 because of the critical role it plays in keeping traffic out of residential neighborhoods and connecting Allston/Brighton/Brookline to downtown without dumping the traffic on local streets.
At one point the state of the art was bypasses. Bypasses for everything. Now we know that doesn't work. So we change.
Bypasses/beltways worked to open up more land that was less expensive to suburban development and improved transportation oriented industries productivity and cost structure. The problem comes when they aren't expanded to accommodate economic growth.
