[CANCELED] Summer St. Gondola

[DBM]

As an aside, I don't have the same personal animus towards Salvucci you have, but I'm sure you have your reasons.

I'm very sorry you mistook my facetiousness (is that the right word?), I have nothing but admiration for Fred--after he, was one of the chief drivers of the Big Dig, when others were dithering inexcusably. Also, I heard that his parents' house was seized to construct I-90 through Brighton (can't remember the source for that), which supposedly gave him a healthy appreciation and sensitivity to the community affairs side of big infrastructure planning, as well as the sociological catastrophes that are highways [Big Dig aside].

I was more just trying to spoof the cultural concept of "senior statesmen" in the first place, and how excessive deference to the idea is inherently problematic. I suspect people may defer to him now more than they perhaps should, just because he's still in the game at 80 and they know he was involved in the epic saga of the Big Dig (and if he served under Dukakis then he presumably must take credit for the Red Line extension as well).

Also, I was merely trying to highlight the very clever, cinematic way that Carter caught Fred out in that lie--I forgot the exact assertion Fred made, I think it has to do with the width of Washington St. in the South End? And Carter, as I recall, immediately follows-up on Fred's claim with a scene vividly demonstrating its falsehood. Carter is a gifted filmmaker, and some of that gift comes at Fred's expense in the documentary, if I'm remembering correctly--I haven't watched the film in many years.

 

[roy_mustang76]

The question remains, though, in a non-downtown area, can an entirely separate train line 4/10's or 6/10's of a mile away get funding in this day and age? I wish the answer was yes, but I have my real world doubts on it.

Perhaps a solution is:

1) to spend the money on better east-west bike/pedestrian access to the Orange Line stations from Washington Street
and
2) banishing on street parking on Washington to make the Silver Line far faster/more efficient. Parking can be relegated to side streets.

Better east-west pedestrian access sounds better, but you can't magically make 4/10ths or 6/10ths of a mile into 1/4 of a mile, and you can't magically level topography (well, I guess you can but at that point you might as well just put the trains where the people already are). The sidewalks on Malcolm X are already reasonably wide thanks to the schools, and the other intermediate routes between the SW Corridor and Washington have the Fort Hill neighborhood in the way (which, as the name suggests, is a substantial hill). People walk those every day because they don't really have much of a choice, but the choice to put the train away from the people is absolutely something that depresses transit ridership along the corridor because it sucks. Doing things like adding bike infrastructure to Malcolm X, and making Columbus Ave less of a deathtrap for pedestrians are great things to implement on the margin (because the OL isn't coming out of that trench any time soon), but they'll never come close to fixing the original sin, which was taking two bonafide corridors (Centre St/South St in JP, and Washington St in Roxbury), stripping them of their LRT and HRT services, and replacing them with an HRT service that is, for lack of a better term, "behind" both corridors.

HRT isn't coming back to Washington St, and there's basically no chance of LRT running the whole length either. But LRT running to the biggest unserved node in the city? That can dodge the downtown traffic snarl that will forever bedevil SL-Washington? Now we're getting somewhere, and the existing bus routes into Nubian work a lot better paired with some kind of rapid transit spine. But now I'm really just repeating F-Line and he's a hell of a lot better at this than I am.

 

[George_Apley]

Locking this down since the "project" is cancelled and this has just become a transit coffee hour... and we can do that in any number of other threads.