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To be fair all of NYC's first plazas were cut rate too. They were designed to be temporary so they could be adjusted based on how well they worked. It's a smart plan.
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To be fair all of NYC's first plazas were cut rate too. They were designed to be temporary so they could be adjusted based on how well they worked. It's a smart plan.
Replacing deficient materials from the last project.
Looks like removing the toll booths in Eastie has indeed created more problems than it solved.
https://www.universalhub.com/2018/neighborhood-gridlock-sumner-tunnel-changes-leave
Jouhou
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Are we talking about the headhouse? We discussed those at length before, it was a nod to the old headhouse that was intended to be climbed and sat upon.
Beton Brut
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Until a year ago, I commuted through the Sumner every day. I count myself as truly fortunate for not having to do that anymore.
MassDOT has done a butcher's job on this critical piece of infrastructure. They were called to account at a public meeting last October at East Boston High School and were righteously excoriated for this shit-circus. Since than, little has been achieved beyond the persistently infuriating conditions for East Bostonians, North Shore commuters, and visitors to Logan.
Councilor Edwards has told me at a recent public meeting that MassDOT has refused to meet with the public and be held to account for this "solution."
BB - I've just slowly been waking up to the fact that Twitter can actually be used, to a certain extent, to get local things done. Savvy users in my 'hood will hammer-tweet and tag local town halls and neighborhood groups who then retweet it, and also tag local reps.... and at least some of the time it does seem to get things done.
Harder with the state agencies, though. They seem to feel no need to ever be held to account, and are quite comfortable being the opaque bureaucracies they are.
The main goal of this project was to tighten up the entry to the tunnel and restore the street network of nearby streets. For years residents wanted this area to feel more like a neighborhood and not a highway dumping you into a sea of pavement and a free for all entrance to the tunnel. These changes accomplished that goal.
Why are so many people cutting through the neighborhood? That ought to be what they try to fix first.
Beton Brut
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I respectfully disagree. The MassDOT project prioritizes vehicles traveling south on Rt 1A (from Logan Airport or the North Shore) over vehicles on local streets.
There isn't one root cause of the cut through traffic; part of it is "oral history," and part of it is navigation systems that offer active traffic forecasting and route alternatives. Good luck fixing that...
What a lot of people fail to understand is that the toll-plaza generated a positive side-effect -- traffic-calming. With the plaza, there was an "equalizing" scrum. It was tight and congested, but drivers made eye-contact at slow speeds, and figured it out.
Try merging from a traffic signal into a stream of vehicles moving at close-to highway speeds. Add a general sense of confusion and disorientation into the mix. Consider human factors, haste, stress, inconsideration, carelessness. MassDOT's design not only fails to take this spectrum of challenges into consideration -- it exacerbates them.
^ Exactly. I pulled a couple years of commuting through there too. It used to work because 1A drivers and merging drivers were on more or less equal footing.
That's going to have to be restored, somehow. I think the best option might be taking 1A traffic down to a single lane, and giving the local mergers a lane of their own. That'll still be tricky because people fight hard while entering the tunnel to get into the appropriate lane for their exit (e.g. left for 93, right for storrow) but itd be a start.
And to make that possible, you probably have to eliminate the 'offramp' entirely, so you have a merge rather than a weave where the logan ramp and the 1A come together, and so you don't also have a weave (now with that stop light) once it hits ground level.
Oh and to control the cut-through traffic you could perhaps add a toll gantry further north on 1A to track plates and charge a steep premium to anyone who exited and reentered etc.
But for the time being this is properly fucked.
That's going to have to be restored, somehow. I think the best option might be taking 1A traffic down to a single lane, and giving the local mergers a lane of their own. That'll still be tricky because people fight hard while entering the tunnel to get into the appropriate lane for their exit (e.g. left for 93, right for storrow) but itd be a start.
And to make that possible, you probably have to eliminate the 'offramp' entirely, so you have a merge rather than a weave where the logan ramp and the 1A come together, and so you don't also have a weave (now with that stop light) once it hits ground level.
Oh and to control the cut-through traffic you could perhaps add a toll gantry further north on 1A to track plates and charge a steep premium to anyone who exited and reentered etc.
But for the time being this is properly fucked.
Beton Brut
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I attended the public "feedback session" a year ago. I was disappointed that it was so easy to make the Commonwealth's traffic engineers appear witless and unprepared.
I asked if they were videotaping traffic and studying driver behavior. They asked why they would do that. I explained that the most accident-prone driver isn't drunk or high or texting -- instead they're simply confused; observing "the confused" as they interact with a piece of infrastructure may lead to design improvements. They indicated that they only studied vehicle counts to inform their design.
Pro Tip: If you're designing something for human use, human psychology will provide key data points.
It's clear that MassDOT is only prepared to answer questions that nobody asked...
I asked if they were videotaping traffic and studying driver behavior. They asked why they would do that. I explained that the most accident-prone driver isn't drunk or high or texting -- instead they're simply confused; observing "the confused" as they interact with a piece of infrastructure may lead to design improvements. They indicated that they only studied vehicle counts to inform their design.
Pro Tip: If you're designing something for human use, human psychology will provide key data points.
It's clear that MassDOT is only prepared to answer questions that nobody asked...
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Exactly. Why would they prioritize an on-ramp over the highway which is just continuing its route into downtown?
When the highway flow is prioritized, there is no reason to filter through East Boston side streets to get to the tunnel.
Beton Brut
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Not prioritize. Load-balance toward equilibrium. Removing the toll plaza (with its traffic-calming side effect) has generated a predictable outcome -- capacity-induced demand. The downstream effect is a backup of residents who also need to commute through the tunnel, blended with late-comers from the North Shore who navigate their way out of the 1A traffic jam.
Your statement has no connection with reality. None at all.
If this is a solution, many of us would like the problem back.
Are you saying there is no induced demand onto side streets from giving more priority to the East Boston on-ramp?
Beton Brut
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No. Read what I wrote again.
And there is no "on-ramp" -- it's a traffic signal that allows "local" traffic to enter the tunnel.
And there is no "on-ramp" -- it's a traffic signal that allows "local" traffic to enter the tunnel.
I'm going to guess that is likely the case today, yes.
Keep in mind that the nearest upstream offramp, at Bennington St., is also a special kind of clustercluck - so anyone trying to skip the que has to pay a meaningful time tax before they even get close to the tunnel.
And that's probably also true for 'local' folks today who'd be tempted to avoid the local traffic at the tunnel entrance by getting onto 1A upstream - they too have to burn some extra time trying to get onto 1A @ bennington. (That's true also if they want to take the Ted instead, fwiw).
So on the margin, yeah, i'll guess there's not a direct trade-off between 1A traffic staying on 1A vs. taking a detour through the local streets. Keep in mind that there is theoretically a point at which that would be true, obviously, but the Bennington St. bottleneck is a big enough wedge that scales can tip pretty far back towards the local trip origins before you start seeing a meaningful detour effect.
Which is all another way of saying that I think that any further changes to the advantage of the local traffic is more or less a direct re-balance at the expense of long-distance traffic.
Which is ok, because the no-toll re-design (inadvertantly) tipped things dramatically to the advantage of the long-distance traffic.