Casey Overpass

omaja said:
How could it not be? The overpass is a massive visual barrier when traveling north/south and takes up way too much land that could otherwise be developed to unite Forest Hills with the rest of JP. Eliminate the overpass, allow for TOD around the station and - voila - a much, much more pedestrian-friendly environment to bridge the areas that have long been separated by that ugly monstrosity.
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You don't know JP. Once we have grass where people walk their dogs; they want it to stay a park because it's "green."

Also, I'm pretty sure this boulevard is going to have 3-4 lanes in both directions (not totally sure). How is this going to be awesome for pedestrians? I agree, it's better than an overpass but by how much? If you can name me some awesome boulevards (with four lanes in each direction) with heavy auto traffic around the US or Europe that are pedestrian friendly then please enlighten me.
 
armpitsOFmight said:
You don't know JP. Once we have grass where people walk their dogs; they want it to stay a park because it's "green."

Also, I'm pretty sure this boulevard is going to have 3-4 lanes in both directions (not totally sure). How is this going to be awesome for pedestrians? I agree, it's better than an overpass but by how much? If you can name me some awesome boulevards (with four lanes in each direction) with heavy auto traffic around the US or Europe that are pedestrian friendly then please enlighten me.
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3 lanes both directions, with a median.

IMO - it's way over designed - at peak there is only something like 2000 to 3000 cars per hour both ways on the existing overpass - this new section road is built to handle something like 6k cars an hour IN EACH DIRECTION. Of course it absorbs some of the turning traffic, but I think they could have easily removed one lane in either direction without really affecting things too much.

I'm not a traffic engineer, so I don't really know their reasoning for designing something that can handle 4 times as much traffic as currently exists.
 
rinserepeat said:
I'm not a traffic engineer, so I don't really know their reasoning for designing something that can handle 4 times as much traffic as currently exists.
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Expressway mentality: why build 4 lanes when you can build 6?!?! Just sprinkle some greenspace around it...it totally works on the Route 2 median!


Also, MassDOT seems to regard the very concept of "induced demand" like they're climate change deniers despite the overwhelming evidence of it on the ex-MDC parkways.
 
Yep. MassDOT is designing this for a 2035 traffic estimate to work with the 15 minute peak within the peak traffic hour. They say that they can't right-size it as they proposed in June of 2012 because all the proposed transit oriented development by 2019 (the new opening design year) will cause the traffic to head towards the 2035 volume much faster than they originally expected. They seem to forget that the Orange Line, Commuter Rail, Bus service, and the Pierre Lallament Bike Path can all help to absorb this increased population.

I've been told that the MassDOT design team has been told to design this with "no traffic diversion". Maybe that's code for no transit/bike diversion.

The bridge design that was proposed had a narrower median strip (not much bigger than the bridge supports) than even the proposed at-grade design does. That's what pretty much clinched it for me; that and a butt ugly standard precast bridge.

The final design package was scheduled to be submitted for internal MassDOT review at the end of this month - so it's likely already done.
 
It's so infuriating, on the one hand they're saying "we want to reduce auto trips and triple the number of walking, bicycling, and transit trips" and then on the other hand they design assuming that auto trips will keep going up and there's nothing they can do about it. It's like saying I'm going to lose 20 pounds this year and then buy extra large pants since I'm surely going to get fatter.
 
The auto traffic is sure to go up in the future, so why not plan for it? I am not saying there needs to be a 10 lane road, but taking steps to think about current and future numbers makes sense.
 
Why would it go up? If you avoid adding extra capacity for more traffic, you won't get more traffic.
 
Ron Newman said:
Why would it go up? If you avoid adding extra capacity for more traffic, you won't get more traffic.
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And also...show us the evidence it's going up? It's been trending down on all the other ex-MDC roads ever since the Big Dig opened. Why is this one an exception?

And note...that didn't stop the DOT from concern-trolling Rutherford Ave., McGrath, the Bowker...every rebuild-or-teardown project where the community-preferred alternative wasn't a capacity enhancer. Even on the roads where the traffic reductions have been most pronounced, like McGrath. They are so utterly transparent about always needing to maintain or enhance capacity to keep the asphalt funding spigot for new builds flowing in the post-Dig era. And MassHighway makes no bones about being in competition with it's MassDOT brethren the T and Massport for that funding pie. Call it what it is: concern trolling for bureaucratic turf. They lose leverage the more evolution of the metro parkways trends back closer to...more park than highway.


They're not wrong in every case, but they throw so much bullflop around in community meetings on every project about future traffic counts always increasing...always increasing faster than you ever thought. They don't show their work often enough on where that carpocalypse is coming from, why this particular parkway route will bear the brunt of expressway diversions instead of the expressway, why this is a real-demand and not induced demand route, and why the transit mode share that is growing in real time everywhere is always absent or totally flat in their models. This is habitual enough truthiness from them that it's not convincing very many people any longer, and if they want to separate the critical capacity projects from the surplus-to-requirement they have to start substantiating their scaremongering with much harder evidence before they get their money to build faster, uglier, still neighborhood-dividing expressway overpasses on neighborhood roads.
 
They're completely full of shit. They always use notions like "1% per year increase" a.k.a. exponential growth when modeling traffic on roadways.

Hello? Exponential growth would quickly outstrip the capacity of any fixed resource, like a roadway with fixed width. It's incredibly irresponsible to model traffic growth using exponential models: doing so is basically equivalent to begging the question. The exponential model will always demand more and more capacity, because it grows faster than anything else.
 
It's more than that, although that contributes slightly. VMT across the nation can increase exponentially if you assume that population grows exponentially. That works because there are many cities, and people develop new neighborhoods too, if needed. So it's quite remarkable to see such a drastic decline in VMT, bringing us back down to 1995 levels IIRC.

But locally, the street network is fixed in size. There is a limit to the number of vehicles per hour that can be squeezed down a road. And you have to contend with the connecting streets, which can be bottlenecks too. So applying "exponential growth" -- which may work as a model for nationwide VMT (although it turns out not to be true) -- is completely nonsensical at a local level where you're dealing with unchangeable limits on capacity.
 
is this being transferred back to the city or is it still state jurisdiction? If it becomes city property, I think it would easier to unite people to remove unneeded lanes.

This is what I wish the "bridging forest hills" folks would switch to fighting for - but they appear to be of the same antiquated mentality of the DOT. Maybe we'll have to wait another generation before people finally start getting smart about traffic design.
 
The Casey Arborway will be owned by DCR when complete, the traffic signals will be operated by the City of Boston.

There are other groups (WalkBoston, LivableStreets, Arbrway Coalition, Boston Cyclists Union and others) fighting for fewer lanes, but MassDOT has refused to budge.
 
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MassDOT at one point came up with a plan to underpin 6 lanes but only lay out 4 initially; then come back later and add the 2 extra if "necessary."

But for some reason they've now ditched that.
 
Matthew said:
MassDOT at one point came up with a plan to underpin 6 lanes but only lay out 4 initially; then come back later and add the 2 extra if "necessary."

But for some reason they've now ditched that.
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That seems like a smart idea. Build in the ability to easily widen the road if necessary.
 
Yes, smarter than 6, anyway. Obviously, some kind of antibody mechanism must have kicked in and worked to eradicate the smartness.

Maybe the best we can hope for now is to make a deal with the parking devil and push for the outer lane to be on-street parking.
 
These are from more than a year ago. I need to get back here and grab more "artsy" pics of this overpass before it's gone.

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