General Infrastructure

TheRifleman said:
Relocating Logan Airport out towards the west could be a great option and help Boston out of its Gridlock.
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Yeah and cutting off my left leg would be a great way for me to rapidly lose 35 pounds...
 
commuter guy said:
Boston ranked worst city for traffic as per this study:

https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2019/02/12/boston-worst-traffic/

Globe has an article as well that may or may not be behind the paywall for you:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2...report-says/wMNdRAlrEV7svwShY80NaJ/story.html
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I get that that's what the headline says, and what Inrix says, but if you read the article you'll find out that "worst city for traffic" is not at all what the data means. Inrix compared peak hour traffic to off-peak traffic as their metric for congestion. As Adam Vaccaro notes in the Globe, that means that LA, with its all-day congestion, ranks 6th, not 1st, as it used to - the difference in rush hour isn't as large as it is here.

What Inrix has actually done here is measure peaking factors. That doesn't mean traffic in Boston isn't bad (it ranked 7th last year and presumably would have been 6th, 7th, or 8th this year if they hadn't changed methods), but I'm genuinely confounded at why Inrix would have (A) seemingly screwed up their methodology from something relevant to something irrelevant, and (B) made false claims about what their new dataset represents.

That doesn't even get into the issues that Vaccaro alludes to with using 65% of free flow speed as "congested". On a Boston city street, rush hour brings a lot of things that aren't cars - more bikes, more people crossing with or without crosswalks, more buses pulling over to stop, school buses, etc. In sprawling cities where all the major roads are 4-6 lanes wide, these things don't slow you down as much as they do here. Boston is essentially penalized for having local roads that aren't car-centric.

Beyond all of that, as Vaccaro also notes, the use of speed as a metric doesn't necessarily scale up to longer commutes, since Boston is more compact than other cities and people may not be covering as much distance. They might be going slightly slower, but they aren't taking all that much longer to get there.
 
Interesting study and an even handed article which discussed the different traffic measurements. If Boston is the 6th largest CSA in the country, it would stand to reason that it would be in a similar rank on traffic.
 
F-Line, cool it. My initial post was to identify an existing problem with Logan Airport in terms of travel time that many posters on this forum seem to perceive as a positive, specifically lower travel time due to the short distance from Downtown and Logan Airport.

The truth is, the short distance doesn't provide that benefit and, in fact, the location of Logan Airport relative to Boston and the Boston metro area may actually be negatively impacting travel time to Logan. As pointed out in my previous post, because Logan lies directly east of Boston, nearly every traveler from North, South, and West of Boston are required to go through Downtown to reach the airport, contributing to increase traffic at the city's core and increasing travel time. I can guarantee you, had Seattle built Sea-Tac north of Seattle, that travel time would be significantly longer with travelers from Tacoma traveling through Seattle to reach the airport, rather than what they have today, where Sea-Tac is located in between Seattle and Tacoma and thus being able to better distribute traffic more evenly and without travelers having to go through any city core.

Had Logan Airport been established the same way, i.e. built directly west of the City, traffic to the airport would have been more evenly distributed, with none of the suburbs North, South and West of Boston needing to drive through Boston to reach the airport and the only traffic coming from East of the airport would have been from Boston.
 
^ Isn't this obviously a question of 'better for some, worse for others'..with all of us making more-or-less intuitive guesses about the specific mixture & magnitude of winners vs. losers?

And it's also a question that our civic leaders took a long hard and serious look at like 30 years ago, (and decided to keep it where it is and build the TED).

And i also can't imagine how closing and relocating Logan could possibly be cost effective, even with the most generous estimates of the value of the land under Logan.

Its a thought experiment.
 
Worcester upgraded its airport recently and has added more flights. They could probably pick up some of the slack of metro west. No highway access, but all the people who say cities shouldnt have any highways at all can figure out how to make it work there.

Also Norwood is out of the question, but Hanscom actually could be used. Not as a replacement we know Logan isnt going anywhere, but as an alternate for “some” flights. If we forget about moving Logan, Hanscom has the runway length to support mid size jets. It doesnt need to do anything crazy, but in the future I could see it picking up some of the extra capacity. Itd be nice with some 737, a320, a220 flights where you can skip going thru downtown and hop on a smaller jet to some limited destinations. GE had floated around getting a hanger built. I think a small terminal wouldnt be bad in the future. Maybe.
 
Worcester Regional is the most weather-delayed airport in the whole Northeast being perched atop that mountain where inland and ocean air masses collide. Reliable morning flight schedules are a stiff challenge there with the number of days per year it's fogged in, making it a tougher place to eke out a profit compared to similar-size auxiliary airports. It's always going to be relegated to niche player because of that. MassDOT's even moved on from trying to juice up the cargo flights @ Worcester--in spite of Worcester County's region-best bounty of truck terminals--in favor of upgrading New Bedford instead, because the weather variability is so outsized there.
 
Any suggestion of scheduled commercial service at Hanscom will bring out the very powerful NIMBY crowd. The Shuttle America saga will get a reboot.
 
RandomWalk said:
Any suggestion of scheduled commercial service at Hanscom will bring out the very powerful NIMBY crowd. The Shuttle America saga will get a reboot.
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That area is obviously loaded with very wealthy NIMBYs. No transportation infrastructure of any kind will be built in that area for the forseeable future.
 
Anyone know why they didn’t declare either a snow emergency or parking ban last night? Here in Quincy they did, and we got 16 inches, Boston looks like it got 10-15, depending on the neigorhood.
 
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DominusNovus said:
Anyone know why they didn’t declare either a snow emergency or parking ban last night? Here in Quincy they did, and we got 16 inches, Boston looks like it got 10-15, depending on the neigorhood.
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Looks like everyone in general got a lot more snow than anticipated, and it was all overnight. The forecast in Boston was only a couple inches I think.
 
jklo said:
Looks like everyone in general got a lot more snow than anticipated, and it was all overnight. The forecast in Boston was only a couple inches I think.
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Nah the forecast was 8"-12" as of yesterday (https://twitter.com/NWSBoston/status/1102313319816458247) and 8"-9" as of Saturday (https://twitter.com/NWSBoston/status/1101934958246014977) which is exactly what we got I would say, but I think the immediately following warm weather has made it less of an emergency because its half melted already.
 
DominusNovus said:
Anyone know why they didn’t declare either a snow emergency or parking ban last night? Here in Quincy they did, and we got 16 inches, Boston looks like it got 10-15, depending on the neigorhood.
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In Somerville the snow on the roads had already melted so much by 9am that I could bike to work. Not even slush, just wet pavement.
 
HelloBostonHi said:
Nah the forecast was 8"-12" as of yesterday (https://twitter.com/NWSBoston/status/1102313319816458247) and 8"-9" as of Saturday (https://twitter.com/NWSBoston/status/1101934958246014977) which is exactly what we got I would say, but I think the immediately following warm weather has made it less of an emergency because its half melted already.
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Sure as hell wasn’t half melted in the parts of Boston I was working in. All the snowbanks piled up by the plows just got more compact, and of course, because there was no parking ban, there were cars everywhere in it.

Its not like this was a storm of the century or anything, and even though the snow was a third a foot more than expected in much of the area, they should take things seriously.
 
It's odd that they didn't. Usually when they cancel school they declare a parking ban. I believe the two are linked in Somerville. Schools are closed whenever there's a Snow Emergency.
 
BussesAin'tTrains said:
It's odd that they didn't. Usually when they cancel school they declare a parking ban. I believe the two are linked in Somerville. Schools are closed whenever there's a Snow Emergency.
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I noticed coming in this morning that traffic on Berkeley was unusually smooth flowing. Given that there’s no overnight parking there, I can’t help but connect the two facts. I bet there’d be plenty more clear roads in the city if they had instituted a parking ban Sunday night.

What really bugs me, though, is that this is Boston. We seem to keep getting caught flat footed by snowstorms this year, even though its been relatively mild (of course, I keep thinking back to 2014/15. That was a winter in which we had every reason to be paralyzed by the snow). Is it just because most of the storms are followed by relativey warm weather, so cities are cutting corners, betting that nature will do the job for them?
 
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