Casey Overpass

Is this the DCR of 1946? You've got three lanes on the eastbound Arborway from Washington St. The two right lanes merge together while the left lane splits into a turn only lane and a through lane. WHY. The left lane should be striped as a left-only lane from Washington, while the right two lanes should be through traffic.

This is the same terrible setup as where northbound Cambridge Street meets the Pike offramp by the Doubletree, and it causes myrad backups and a decent amount of fender-benders. I always figured it was some weird holdover, but they are doing it brand new in this design! WTF? Do they want to be able to say "told you so!" or something when this is a nightmare?

I could understand it if the rightmost lane was a turn-only for the frontage road, but it doesn't look like it's configured that way. IMO, that frontage road should just be pushed through that parking lot all the way to Washington to begin with.

At least they did finally drop it down to two+turn lanes. This gives me hope for the McGrath project.
 
MassDOT continues to design lane configurations as they would like people to drive, not how people actually drive. They love to have lanes split and merge back together, whereas people driving typically hate merges if they can be avoided.
 
Yeah, MassDOT loves widening out at intersections and re-merging. They plan to do the same thing on Comm Ave @ BU Bridge.
 
Widening for additional lanes before and up to an intersection makes sense, if those addition lanes are turn only lanes. That way a road that is 2 lanes widens to 3, or 4 coming up to an intersection can have those 1 or 2 additional lanes be designated as turn only lanes.

The problem is that some people driving in Boston and the surrounding towns feel the need to go straight in these turn only lanes despite the lane markings and signs indicating you are not to go straight.
 
mass88, you are much more sensible than the DOT. In fact, the DOT wants to expand the number of through-lanes at the intersection, and then squeeze them back down.

This is probably because they have some kind of internal model that rewards this kind of thinking.
 
During the design phase MassDOT (and their design team) stated that the direction from the MassDOT administration was that there would be no diversion of existing (and perhaps future) traffic volumes from the proposed design. A few local residents also made damn sure that the existing (and future growing) traffic volumes would be accommodated by the design.

Without the through lanes extending into the intersection to the rear, the design team's models showed traffic a bit farther than they (or MassDOT) was comfortable with.

MassDOT wasn't really the one we should have been picking a fight with over traffic growth, the real enemy was, and still is, the Central Transportation Planning Staff (CTPS) of the Boston Region MPO. And that fight should have happened three years ago. Somehow they still believe that traffic is growing by a certain percentage every year.
 
Yes, they need to do the lanes that way to cram as many cars in as possible so the traffic models are even more skewed to hide the utter traffic disaster that will occur when they finally complete this asinine project. It's sad that they ruined the Emerald Necklace with that bridge, but first, that intersection was a nightmare before they did it (as old locals will attest, and why they built the overpass in the first place), and we couldve built a beautiful bridge that didnt hulk so. Unfortunately, lack of funding and vision combined with overly influential, anti-car locals combined to doom a more reasonable solution. So now we will get a slow moving, multi-lane highway at ground level with pipsqueak trees in center medians... a moderate visual improvement from afar, but really not much of a meaningful one at all.
 
A stone masonry arched overpass, such as the Arborway overpass shown below, would have been cool. Such an overpass would only need to be 25' high, not the 50' height of the existing overpass built to climb over the former elevated Orange Line. A new overpass could have included a ped/bikeway/greenway to link the Emerald Necklace, as well as two lanes of traffic each way.

14113433893_1346fd5345_b.jpg
 
Of course it's totally unrealistic (since we're Boston, with a horrendously unimaginative transportation department, even by American standards), but it would just be so great if we could go and get a very elegant architectural gem of a bridge, something slender and artistic, that didn't block out the line of vision the way Casey does. Maybe even some sort of "green bridge".

Although I like the stone bridge there, that area has always been a dead zone and there definitely is merit in the argument that an overpass generally will kill an area by hulking over and dividing it in two. There may be more to the story than the Riverway overpass to why that area is dead, but its definitely a major factor. I always think how funny it is that no one is going around Mission Hill or Brookline yelling about "reuniting" Brookline and Mission Hill by tearing down THAT overpass... But as for that overpass, I wish it could be lightened up a little, maybe just with something like what they did with the new parking spots under I-93.
 
Well I'll chime in and say that I do not like the Riverway overpass. I sometimes wait for the 66 there and it is dark and clammy. The stonework is pretty but it is depressing to be underneath. And the sudden expansion of Huntington Ave into a highway sucks generally.
 
Charlie, Just imagine what a multi-span granite faced 1/4 mile long bridge would do to separate the southern portions of the Forest Hills neighborhood and businesses from the rest of the neighborhood to the north. It would be devastating to the restaurants on Washington St/Hyde Park Ave across from the T station.
 
Charlie_mta said:
A stone masonry arched overpass, such as the Arborway overpass shown below, would have been cool. Such an overpass would only need to be 25' high, not the 50' height of the existing overpass built to climb over the former elevated Orange Line. A new overpass could have included a ped/bikeway/greenway to link the Emerald Necklace, as well as two lanes of traffic each way.

14113433893_1346fd5345_b.jpg
Click to expand...

This is a bad example - I bike through that area daily, and it's one of the worst spots on my commute - plus that overpass totally cuts off mission hill from Brookline.
 
A stone arch overpass would form not just increase the mental barrier but create a visual barrier that resembles a stone wall. While it might be nicer looking the best way to deal with this is to just not have an overpass and attempt to knit the neighborhoods together.
 
Matthew said:
mass88, you are much more sensible than the DOT. In fact, the DOT wants to expand the number of through-lanes at the intersection, and then squeeze them back down.

This is probably because they have some kind of internal model that rewards this kind of thinking.
Click to expand...

Increasing the number of lanes at an intersection is potentially useful because doing so reduces the queue length and reduces the length of time it takes the queue to clear-at least in the traffic models.
 
Scalziand said:
Increasing the number of lanes at an intersection is potentially useful because doing so reduces the queue length and reduces the length of time it takes the queue to clear-at least in the traffic models.
Click to expand...

Well yes, Sims always let each other merge one after the other, increasing throughput. Here in reality-land, Massholes would force you to drive into a traffic pole before they let you in.
 
Thanks, davem ;)

Scalziand said:
Increasing the number of lanes at an intersection is potentially useful because doing so reduces the queue length and reduces the length of time it takes the queue to clear-at least in the traffic models.
Click to expand...

Also, using some geometric intuition, at the limits, you can posit that the only increase in capacity comes from the fact that the extra lane might have some empty space between the intersection and the merge. That's room for at most, another dozen cars, most likely.

The reason for this is simple: if the intersection is truly processing at maximum capacity, then the need for a merge will cause the through lanes to back up and prevent additional cars from crossing the intersection. The addition of lanes can only accommodate significantly more traffic if the intersection tends to clear anyway, in which case, it's not necessary and just represents overengineering.

MassDOT highway engineers are still very much highway-centric. That they would value a dozen cars over the 24-hour needs of pedestrians is a sign that we still have a long way to go.
 
FK4 said:
...It's sad that they ruined the Emerald Necklace with that bridge, but first, that intersection was a nightmare before they did it (as old locals will attest, and why they built the overpass in the first place)...
Click to expand...

I'm a month late on this, but in my opinion the notion that the car traffic (alone) caused the overpass to be built - or that we're doomed to have it again without a new overpass - needs to be tempered with an awareness of what caused that traffic in the first place, along with an awareness of what the footprint of the overpass has saddled the area with today.

The Casey Overpass was built to span a ground-level trolleyway and two elevated rail lines: the old elevated Orange Line and the heavy rail of the Boston & Providence/New Haven line that crossed the Arborway via a massive stone viaduct until the mid-80s. None of those street level impediments exist any more. The Orange line and heavy rail are now sunk in the Southwest Corridor trench and the trolleys haven't run past the Huntington VA for decades. The community (and region) are stuck with the ramps and abutments of this 60 year-old skyway plunked right on top of what *should* be the eastbound Arborway, and as a result north, south and street-level east-west traffic must navigate convoluted zig-zag paths and several lights to get anywhere.

Here's a visual history I put together that shows what things looked like:
http://arborwaymatters.blogspot.com/2013/09/under-overpass.html

Clay
 
Just saw this in the Boston Globe E-edition:

New bid dates for the Casey Arborway:
Filed sub-bids due August 26 – previously July 22.
General bids due Sept 7 – previously due August 5.

This doesn’t seem surprising, most Saturdays MassDOT has a legal notice for a project or two that has a bid extension. Contractors and subs may be saying that they need more time or the State may be trying to make sure more bidders are bidding so that they actually have more than one responsible bidder to choose from.
 
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