One small thing that would help would be waiving the Allston toll for traffic staying in the city...i.e. Pike WB traffic exiting at Allston and EB traffic entering at Allston. At least that lifts the psychological barrier about the Pike being walled off to intra-city travel because of tolls, and the need to avoid the tolls by seeking an inferior toll-free route. I can remember once or twice needing to take the car into work to Ft. Point from North Cambridge to either haul some heavy shit to/from the office, or because I had a before-work doc's appt. and getting from one to the other would've been +1 hr. later arrival because of the extra transfers. Well, when it wasn't time-sensitive like the doc appt. I'd take Storrow in and just allot a whole lot extra time for whatever I encountered en route. When it was time-sensitive, I just got on the Pike. First time I did the Pike it dropped my jaw not only how fast it was from Allston to Southie, but also how painless. Total speed-limit trip, and downright sparse after 93-bound traffic started separating itself to the left in the Pru tunnel while that right lane to Southie was wide open. At 8:30am, all while listening to WBZ blare on about how everything north/south/west coming into the city was locked solid. Pike is such a no-brainer that the only argument against it is avoiding the toll, and I would argue the state's bleeding more money in additional parkway wear-and-tear than it's gaining back from having the toll for local traffic.
Remove it. End the psychological induced demand. That's going to pull off a lot of drivers who take Storrow east to get to Copley, since there is a Pike equivalent there. It'll pull off the drivers who use Storrow to get to 93S or the Callahan...
and be willing to sit in the Leverett Circle backups for light cycles on end to do so. It may even pull a *few* 93N users off Storrow if they then grow more accustomed to using the Pike for Copley/93S/1A, and see that most hours the short extra trip through the Big Dig is not going to be more painful than the bobbing-and-weaving games on Embankment Rd. to get in the proper exit lanes. That still leaves Kenmore/Fenway, Charles Circle, 28, and most 93N destinations using Storrow...but it's tangible relief from a whole lot of excess that doesn't have good reason besides avoiding tolls and toll booth lines to be using that road.
Now, EB Pike isn't going to have any more ramps. I'm surprised the Bowker exit option even survived on the alternatives list, because that got a not-recommended on the last round of studies. Not hard to see why. The footprint between highway, tracks, and side streets is at its most constrained east of Beacon St. Throw in the river and there's really no way to shoehorn in ramps without awkwardly shifting the whole mass of highway--every lane, every jersey barrier--over a few feet and potentially creating unwelcome kinks in the flow. That's fine. But look at commute patterns in the city. Does everyone retrace turn-by-turn their A.M. commute in direct reverse in the P.M.? No. Not with this crazy street grid full of one-way pairs and load imbalances. Plenty of buses don't even take back the exact route from whence they came on the outbound side either. So there's no psychological barrier to doing Storrow EB in the A.M. and Pike WB in the P.M. for would-be Bowker users. If the additional WB ramps were aligned in the correct places and the psychological barrier of the tolls weren't there they would probably be doing this of their own volition even if the Bowker Overpass remained standing forever and ever. Because who would put up with ANY portion of Storrow in the evening if a nearby Pike ramp could get you to Allston for the same price.
OK...now that removes a goodly chunk of the thru traffic on the Bowker, more than enough to call coast clear for all but the most alarmist critics of the teardown that Charlesgate at-grade can handle it. Now you can start looking at Storrow needs vs. capacity asynchronously...because P.M. and WB loads are not going to be the same as A.M. and EB, and the traffic's going to level off at much sharper cliffs with only a couple critical exits on the parkway truly "needed" from lack of viable alternatives. Coincidentally...the only place along Storrow where the road can be expanded without making Olmstead turn over in his grave is EB between the Pike and Kenmore/Bowker. The CSX yard offers up space for a direct connecting ramp from the tolls to EB, bypassing the River St. backups. Trace over the loop track around the engine house and the truck U-turn road behind the Doubletree and you've got the exact footprint of a direct-access ramp. The whole alignment of the parkway
next to the Pike viaduct offers up space for a regulation accel/decel merge and breakdown lane to sort everything out before the RR bridge squeezes it down. And then by virtue of blowing up the Bowker you open up a lot of space for a more natural-curving interchange onto Charlesgate with decent (for parkway) accel/decel lanes. Because, remember, the Bowker can't even support would-be Bowker-level traffic because it's attached to such a shitty interchange.
Normally, I think a streamlining proposal like that would get stiff opposition because...ohno!...a new direct ramp and road widening. Well, no...not quite. Because whatever induced demand potential that may present is NOT going to fill out straight to Leverett Circle or include WB. Because price being equal nobody's going to willingly ride Storrow WB if an equivalent Pike onramp gets them to Allston that much faster. It's no different than the street grid shaping asynchronous A.M. and P.M. routes across the city. As long as nobody lets MassHighway shape the terms of that debate by pushing purely highway terminology around, people who work and commute in the city 'get' that concept down pat. Storrow EB Allston-Kenmore is asynchronously load-bearing...improve it accordingly. Storrow WB is an induced demand trap if Pike access is equivalently convenient and equivalently free-access inside the city...steer as many of those trips as possible onto the Pike instead. Storrow loads orient to Kenmore (one commute more than the other), Charles Circle, and Leverett Circle (some directions more than others) if Pike is equivalently free-access to Copley, Eastie, and 93S. OK...the road's now picking its battles more wisely for its limited overall capacity. And those River St. and Leverett light cycle backups are not nearly what they once were after these travel pattern adjustments take hold. Nor is Charlesgate at-grade the apocalypse when it's got an interchange functionally aligned to split/merge anything more cleanly than the disaster there now.
Nature can take its course here if they strike down that intra-city tolling barrier, pick the right Pike WB ramp locations to add, and above all let go of the notion that a parkway HAS to be an expressway--every segment and direction of it, forever--just because we stuck it in that ill-suited role 50 years ago (again, more a keeping MassHighway from hijacking the messaging than anything else).
