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- May 25, 2006
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Widening roads is a bad idea, it will just turn this into a four-lane speedway (that ends abruptly), and will destroy a good chunk of the park as well as the semi-decent bike lanes that exist now.
A good chunk of the park? It's a sliver of the park that no one uses yet. Also they are replacing "semi-decent bike lanes that exist now" with bike lanes on BOTH sides of the road. That is an improvement.
The shitty parts of the South Boston Waterfront are the wide roads! We've been decrying that for ages on this forum. Why make another mistake? Isn't it bad enough there already?
You are really blowing this out of proportion. Seaport Blvd, Congress St, and Northern Ave are all much wider than this and are designed as suburban arterial highways. They obviously need a road diet. A St though is small and will be the ONLY thoroughfare through the neighborhood. Expanding it to 4 lanes with bike lanes on each side won't destroy the character of the street. They aren't turning it into some highway. Road diets work when there are other roads with which to distribute traffic. There is no other road parallel to A St so adding a lane is needed.
You act like any road widening is going to destroy Fort Point but it's not like they are ramming a highway through. Look at the plan and you will see that the traffic will be dispersed by the new east-west boulevard at the north end so the argument about it going from 4 to 2 lanes is meaningless.
Do you really think this is going to be some Dutch bikers utopia? People drive to work and in an area with limited transit they drive more. So add a bus, sure, but with two lanes on the "Main St" of Fort Point that is going to cause congestion with all the new traffic still.