Which rotary are you referring to here?
The malformed main one at 2. Functionally it's a "destroyed rotary" now, but 30 years ago before the station exit was built there was indeed a real traffic circle there. That worked better than the irredeemable mess currently in-place.
Here is another question. Could they somehow built an elevated ramp, over the train tracks and wetlands, to connect Acorn Park Drive with, say, Mooney Street? Then Smith Place (turn by Burger King) could become the 2nd cut-through, alleviated traffic from both the Blanchard/Brighton slow roll, as well as from getting back onto Alewife Brook Parkway. Obviously then they need better Route 2W access from Acorn Park Drive, but that seems more solvable if you move it away from the wetlands slightly.
Nope...wetlands. Shitloads and shitloads of wetlands. The only reason Acorn Park Dr. exists is because it and a small section of 2 to Lake St. were once the railbed of a Fitchburg Line branch spur to the 19th c. icehouse at Spy Pond. ROW traceable by the north-south stretch of Acorn Park, the WB off/onramps for Lake St. abutting the south shore of the pond, and WB offramp to Pleasant St. where the icehouse was...with a second spur following present-day Spy Pond Pkwy. on the east side of the lake. Spur crossed the brook
right here on a wood trestle (no trace remains), cut across the last few feet of Fitchburg Cutoff ROW on a diamond, then junctioned with the Fitchburg Line only 50 ft. later. After c1900 when refrigeration rendered the icehouses obsolete the spur was cut back to just present-day Acorn Park for an old factory on the Royal Belmont site, before being completely abandoned during the Depression.
Acorn Park-proper is built on remediated brownfields from that old factory. The moat in the middle between Royal Belmont and Vox On Two is remediated 'faux'-wetlands detached from the Alewife Brook hydrology, while the previous + current generations of redev inside of the road loop sits on remediated dirty dirt. It is, in every way/shape/form, its own disconnected island. Spanning anywhere south of the current east-west expanse of Acorn Park Dr. starts touching the ancestral Brook-connected wetlands. Even though a single-track wood RR trestle
used to span that, it's been gone for 80 years and the environmental rehabilitation of the Alewife Brook system is a wholly modern phenomenon. You'll never get an all-new construction permit for anything through there...not even a footbridge for less-circuitous connection to the Cutoff Path.
The fixes for Acorn Park are limited in nature, but straightforward in execution.
- Delete the superfluous 'middle' onramp from Lake St. to 2E.
- Use the reclaimed merge pavement from the deleted ramp to stripe the exit ramp to Lake St. 900 ft. further out.
- Change the Lake exit ramp from a one-way loop to a signalized intersection squared up with Acorn Park. Bank the extended exit stripage from the deleted ramp with a jersey-barriering of that exit lane for some distance back onto the 2E mainline so it's a proper-length exit ramp to this new traffic light.
- Frontage to/from Lake St. is now a 2-way access road. Highway access from 2E now either/or's at the light to Lake or Acorn Park. Note that 2W access from Acorn Park is already not bad by having a turnout onto the Lake frontage...but the reconfig puts a wayfinding highlight on the frontage to make it seem more logical.
- Wraparound of Acorn Park to Alewife Station exit is now made one-way only. Right turns now banned off the high-speed exit because of the better alt accommodations at the revised Lake exit, and right-turns onto the Alewife exit can be traffic island'ed + yield-signed for a modicum better safety than today.
^^Not perfect^^ because the Vox curb cuts are still a giant turd...but a humongous safety improvement overall, and way more logical wayfinding.
I cannot accept that there is no possible way to create another outlet somewhere around Alewife. If this is true, construction across the neighborhood needs to stop immediately and permanently.
Unfortunately there's truth in both these statements. There really, truly isn't any path to cleanroom another outlet. Just geometric fixes begatting wayfinding fixes and a whole shitton of signal optimization to do. And yes, the whole neighborhood has to have a reckoning after going mad in such a very wrong direction with all this parking-centric redev. Concord Ave. is but the latest metastisizing of the cancer with such godawful-slovenly parking ratios being baked into every new project. Full "STOP!" and ban on dev expansion shouldn't be necessary if the planning dunderheads here were capable of adjusting on-the-fly. After all, there is no shortage of ace transit orientation here calling to immediate question why building parking ratios have to be so insanely high in every PNF. That is most definitely an on-the-fly change they can--if willing--fully make to start wrestling these problems back under control.
But in the political-planning axis...Greater Alewife already is a lost cause now repeat doubling-down itself into carpocalypse. They're intent on marching themselves off an unsustainability cliff. I don't have any good answers for why that is happening. It is a willful choice on their part, to our future detriment. But the fix isn't going to come by mass road-building across wetlands. That's simply not going to ever be allowable with how utter max-priority the Alewife Brook hydrological mitigation effort was. The fix is going to be a lot of sweaty bolt-tightening across the road network...each cog of add'l micro-efficiency gains building on every other cog's worth with no self-satisfying killshots available (unless you rate that in-situ bridgeover of the 2/16 rotary from the station exit as a steel-and-concrete winner). It's going to come by putting standards on the parking ratios of all subsequent redev in the area, including reining Concord Ave. back in before all is lost. And it's going to include targeted renovations to the Cambridgepark buildings to rein in their parking ratios...agonizingly gradually...tenants no-doubt dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. No easy "undo" button for parking ratios already askew...just pressure, time, and rigid consistency until turnover starts to make the area incrementally resemble less of a car-trap hellscape. Dirty, absolute zero instant-gratification work playing the long game.
But if you want an Alewife that isn't so egregious an albatross that it must be written completely off and nuked from orbit come 2040, that's literally what it'll take to improve from present condition. No easy answers.
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