Closing Newbury Street to cars

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tysmith95

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The city plans to close down Newbury Street to cars for one day this summer as a pilot. Personally I would love if they shut down parts of the street to all but deliveries and emergency vehicles. The Strøget street in Copenhagen is a great excample about how well car free shopping streets can function. I guess closing the street to cars for one day is a good start.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/20...er/TrOg3r9rBDHYG4sAfJmNGL/story.html#comments
 
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tysmith95 said:
The city plans to close down Newbury Street to cars for one day this summer as a pilot. Personally I would love if they shut down parts of the street to all but deliveries and emergency vehicles. The Strøget street in Copenhagen is a great excample about how well car free shopping streets can function. I guess closing the street to cars for one day is a good start. Here is a comparison of Newbury Street and the Strøget street.



http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/20...er/TrOg3r9rBDHYG4sAfJmNGL/story.html#comments
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DUDE
resize pics before posting, come on
 
Finally...I can window-browse at things I could never afford with two months' salary while dodging the most shallow tourists humanity ever vomited up and not almost get hit by an exchange student in a Benz tarted up with neighborhood-quaking bass rig that blows straight through the Gloucester St. stop sign while I'm on the crosswalk!

Where do I sign up?!?
 
I thought the converting of vibrant open streets into closed-off pedestrian enclaves died with the 1970's.

Oh well....
 
FK4 said:
DUDE
resize pics before posting, come on
Click to expand...

Sorry, I just took it from Wikipedia images and I didn't know how to resize the images on this site.

And just reiterating what I tried to say before the city is only planning to close the street to cars for one day to see how it plays out. I personally love the idea of a pedestrian avenue.
 
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tysmith95 said:
And just saying the city is only planning to close the street to cars for one day to see how it plays out
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Fearless prediction: some rich asshole in a Benz runs the Gloucester St. stop sign anyway after swerving around the barricade so he can get a curbside parking spot 5 paces from his lunch date on the Scoozi patio. Hank and Barb, tourists from Dubuque in town celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary, are killing time between the Duck Tour and boarding their Royal Caribbean cruise ship at Black Falcon. They narrowly escape injury diving out of the crosswalk. Barb mutters in disbelief after she hits the deck: "Such savages here in Boston."


I don't think this is going to fly nearly as well as the Downtown Crossing ped zone, which is generally obeyed by a civilized society. Too many automobile users of Newbury are drawn to it solely because they want to be seen in their cars and have entitlement issues convincing them they're above the proletariat's "traffic laws". Either that or whatever the barricades successfully block in renegade Land Rovers the Vespa scooters will pass right through like scoring on a Bruins backup goalie.
 
I'm 100% for this, 365 days a year.



110% if you can give me a surface light rail supplement to the existing greenline tunnel (because more capacity=more better) running down the middle of it.
 
Charlie_mta said:
I thought the converting of vibrant open streets into closed-off pedestrian enclaves died with the 1970's.

Oh well....
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I don't get the hate. I'm all for this. The problem with the pedestrian enclaves you speak of, that were so popular mid-century, is that they were bubbles which one needed to drive between. The plan was to completely destroy the cohesion of the city to give people the ability to drive to a city-themed mall. This takes an existing, dense, walk-able neighborhood, with good transit, and makes it safer, more attractive, and more walk-able, without sacrificing anything other than short-distance automobile access that can easily be duplicated in adjacent, parallel streets and alleys.
 
When I used to live in the neighborhood, I remember them closing the street to traffic once a year for some street festival (Arts Newbury perhaps). It was AWESOME and should be replicated as the standard for the street.

By the way, anyone who knows the area, knows only stupid or lazy people drive on Newbury (lazy as in must park 2 steps from my destination). You can't get there from here using Newbury, due to the double parking, pedestrian spill over into the street and cars cruising for street spaces. If you want to get somewhere you use Beacon, Comm Ave or Boylston.
 
Stuff like this works well in hundreds of places all over the world. So of course it's impossible in Boston. For reasons.
 
I would love to see a study of who parks on Newberry street. Similar studies conclude it is NOT shoppers/visitors but rather owners and employees (who work the system on a daily basis and have time to game it via moving and meter-feeding and res-permit swapping/shaving/renting)

A great study in San Fran showed also that store owners grossly overestimated how much of their business arrived by car.

And observe that most modern, successful Malls make you park remotely and then stroll car free

Most Newberry $ probably arrive on foot and more would be attracted (and be better accommodated) if Newberry were pedestrianized, particularly where the "front lawns" remain and the sidewalk is narrower
 
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underground said:
Stuff like this works well in hundreds of places all over the world. So of course it's impossible in Boston. For reasons.
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It works in Boston too. The Mayor committed to doing this during a Twitter chat, and Downtown Crossing is already car-free.
 
Partial closures on summer weekends I think will work fine. I don't think a permanent closure would be beneficial or possible.

You've got private parking garages on both ends, plus a surface lot that are all going to (obviously) have a problem with no longer being able to be accessed.

Closing the Hynes end causes issues for access to the Pike ramp and is going to push more people towards Storrow (usually the opposite of what people here want to see) or just going to gridlock Mass Ave even harder with Comm Ave -> Left on Mass Ave -> Right into the Pike

But more importantly, I don't think pedestrian streets work well unless you have a real critical mass of pedestrians nearly all the time. Times Square, for example.

DTX has never worked in my view and is creepily empty much of the time. It would be better with cars most of the time, it'd at least feel less dead. Newbury absolutely looks like a great candidate for being a pedestrian shopping street on a summer weekend, but on some rainy Monday? It's pretty desolate.
 
Keep in mind that faneuil hall also represents an example of pedestrianized streets. Not that newbury would or could be consolidated into a mall under single management. But - it works, in all weather.

Zooming out a bit - again, there ate literally hundreds of example of this kind of thing from around the world. It would increase the value of the real estate property, and not only because you get a lot more 'revenue-driving' effective sq ft if you can put tables and clothing racks on a much-expanded sidewalk.

If anyone who reads this board is not familiar with any of the hundreds of examples - i'm sure many of us would be happy to blow your minds if you'd like.

The only barrier is convincing existing stakeholders to give up parking spaces - and that's - qrotesquely - almost certainly enough to prevent this from ever happening.
 
millerm277 said:
Partial closures on summer weekends I think will work fine. I don't think a permanent closure would be beneficial or possible.

You've got private parking garages on both ends, plus a surface lot that are all going to (obviously) have a problem with no longer being able to be accessed.

Closing the Hynes end causes issues for access to the Pike ramp and is going to push more people towards Storrow (usually the opposite of what people here want to see) or just going to gridlock Mass Ave even harder with Comm Ave -> Left on Mass Ave -> Right into the Pike.
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You seem to be exaggerating the plan only so you can point out the flaws in an exaggerated plan. Nobody's saying that every square inch currently labeled "Newbury" has to be blocked.

At DTX very little is fully blocked. "Closed" ends up meaning "no parking" and "no through traffic" and "rare vehicle drives with full deference to pedestrians"

Here is a reasonable set of rules which are, at least, not strawmen designed to fail and might achieve most of what's being looked for

1) Not applied to cross-streets and applied on Newbury only *between*
  • Exeter-Fairfield
  • Fairfield-Gloucester
  • Gloucester-Hereford,
but doing so also lightens traffic on Arlington-Exeter and Hereford-Mass Ave. The lot at Dartmouth@Newbury would have full access and so would the garage between Hereford and Mass Ave. (Danker & Donohue)

2) Eliminate all parking and standing/idlin, just like an airport curb.

3) Narrow asphalt from 4 lanes to 3 and give a half lane to each side's sidewalk

4) Narrow asphalt from 3 lanes to 2 and give a half lane to a bike lane on each side

5) Use texture / mountable curb for fire/emergency/construction access.

6) Retain 1 travel lane for Taxi/HOV/delivery only. Ensure that every vehicle always has a driver who can move it on a moment's notice or is a real UPS/Fedex/delivery-type delivery, or somebody loading a rug into their car. Enforce with cameras

7) Retain 1 curb lane for ACTIVE loading/unloading only and a small taxi stand, just like the curbs at Logan.
 
The challenge here is the cross streets more than Newbury itself. Jeff's exactly right; nobody local to Boston would ever drive on Newbury-proper in their right mind. The only car users are people who got confused on their turn and quickly learned to regret it, or the entitlement set who MUST have a parking spot at the front door. And who cares about those folks.

But I don't know how you make a sometime- street plaza work without chaos breaking out at the crosswalks. Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, Exeter, and Hereford are load-bearing cross streets. Fairfield and Gloucester aren't, but the stop signs are an all-around disaster on all 4 corners. The shoppers skew disproportionately to out-of-towners and new students who don't know the jungle rules of Boston traffic...or are so entitled they don't care.

How do you corral all that crossing traffic effectively when, unlike DTX, the heavy cross traffic is not only still there but load-bearing and more important during a Newbury closure to keep fluid all the way between Beacon and Boylston? Are they going to do special-design raised crosswalks with high-profile, kitchen-sink ped signaling? Are they going to spend real money to make the grid and flow mesh correctly? It's not going to work just slapping barricades down, calling it a day, and letting the jungle govern itself at those same crosswalks. That would be like 8 blocks worth of the BU kids playing chicken at the University Rd. crossing. Even Mass Ave. suffers on the Boylston-Newbury block from completely anything-goes pedestrian crossing behavior.

^Not a big hurdle to fix. Not at all. If this were Cambridge we'd probably have exactly all those ped crossing bells-and-whistles paid for, and it would work great. But this is not only Boston not Cambridge, but Back Bay in Boston not any-other-neighborhood in Boston. That "neighborhood character" blah blah blah straightjacket that BTD is so loathe to touch. I can't picture one brain cell's worth of traffic engineering thought process being flexed on their part before the barricades go up and the jungle is left to govern itself at the crosswalks.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
How do you corral all that crossing traffic effectively when, unlike DTX, the heavy cross traffic is not only still there but load-bearing and more important during a Newbury closure to keep fluid all the way between Beacon and Boylston?
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Times Square in Manhattan is this way and pedestrian/tourists get it. They've been given 5 blocks of Broadway (from 42nd to 47th) but not 7th Ave and not the cross streets, and Broadway didn't stop being an arterial elsewhere. (Boylston is our 7th Ave and Dart/Ex/Fair/Glou/Her are our cross streets).

The reality is that the pedestrians generally win (particularly when 7th Ave is "with them" but even when it isn't. It simply sucks to be a cross street driver, but for everyone else it is a much better space. We'd end up with a similar new normal.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
nobody local to Boston would ever drive on Newbury-proper in their right mind.
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Really? I take part of Newbury often to get to the Pike westbound entrance at the end of Newbury. Otherwise, if you are over by say Kings or Bukowski on Dalton, you have to backtrack to Dartmouth to enter the Pike westbound.
 
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