Yes. But they'll probably just direct everyone to the Ted because that's a whole lot easier to manage.
93/SE-Xway just needs to be widened and proper breakdown lanes added. My friend's husband works for the BTD clearing out cars that break down in the middle of the highway. The stories he tells are crazy. Dozens of cars break down on those roads every day (including Rt 3 during the peak when breakdown lane travel is legal) and that's what causes the traffic. It's not necessarily all due to the HOV bottlenecks/merging and overloaded demand.
They can't do that, because there is no way to go from I-93 southbound to the Ted.
Is there room to do that in the highway's footprint?
Yup. Boston is paying bigtime for the short-sighted decision to claim every last inch of shoulder space for extra travel lanes. Look at how vastly improved 128 is now that the breakdown lane travel is gone and the highway is getting ultra-wide left and right shoulders. Even in Waltham and Lexington where they've been installing the jersey barrier solely to super-size the left shoulders with no capacity increases. Rarely does an accident seriously affect the flow of that road unless it happens on a ramp. The inside-128 Pike only has problems at the poorly-designed ramps and on the few squeezes in Newton and Allston where there are longer-than-usual gaps between full-width shoulders. And 290 in downtown Worcester is half the nightmare it was before its mid-90's retooling that fixed the shoulder pinches on the elevated and cut sections.
Good. It's a city street in a dense neighborhood, not a frickin' divided highway. That thing is already a dangerous speed trap, and the DOT's abominable plan would've only made that worse. If they want to discourage jaywalking put a Brighton Ave. style mid-tall median with plantings on it (since it's on a bridge, basically like a long linear flower pot with grass and shallow-rooted shrubs).
Scrape rust, repaint it. That's like 90% of the project. Why it's taking forever? My guess is they haven't painted it since it was built.
Well, in the case of the Tobin it's environmental regs. You can't just scrape off several tons of rusting old lead paint and let if flake away into the water below. They have to use double the protection that would normally be used for, say, road-over-road bridge to prevent contamination. That's why it took for freaking ever to repaint the Braga Bridge.