I disagree with the prevailing sentiment here that an over or underpass is the best solution. Wellington is a chokepoint now, but getting traffic through the intersection faster is just going to offload the congestion elsewhere. The area is served by transit and already has a highway cutting through it, no need to build the parkways into even greater highways than they are now. Instead of an overpass, spend the millions on the Everett Silver Line extension and make one of the branches serve the Wellington T station as per some of the initial plans.
Agreed. It’s a chaotic, suicidal ride right now. I would send my biking brethren elsewhere until we can slow traffic down. Ideally I would set bike lanes away from traffic in dedicated paths. We need to stop treating this like an interstate highway and like a more like a local road.
Sadly, because they know we all loathe ourselves, MassDOT will end up feeding us something monstrously large, lawless and ludicrous, like a Roosevelt Circle, to nudge us toward an early fuel soaked demise.
For the alternatively controversial opinion - as far as I'm concerned, that someone named it a "parkway" 80 years ago or whatever instead of a "highway" has no influence on my assessment of what it is/or "should be".
From 1A to Downtown Medford, it looks a lot like a major highway to me, and many of the other intersections on it are grade separated or otherwise have highway-esque design. Not necessarily the ideal, 2022 design standard compliant highway, but a major highway nonetheless.
In a pedestrian (or cyclist) context, I find an over/underpass vastly more pleasant to pass through than a massive intersection. It may break up a neighborhood in terms of feel, but...so does a massive intersection.
I don't think it's particularly realistic to think a small intersection is in the cards here short of a complete redesign and downgrade of the entire surrounding Rt 16 corridor. I don't see any particular reason to think retaining or worsening this bottleneck is somehow going to make it less of a highway, it'll just make it a more bottlenecked highway, and the heavily car centric adjacent land uses to much of the corridor don't look like they're disappearing soon.
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From my perspective, changing it to an over/underpass would at least remove the large barriers to interacting with Station Landing or the parkland from the neighborhood to the N/NE, and would make it possible to have a reasonably friendly cycling connection from the parkland.
On that same note but probably not for this thread - It seems like Middlesex/Highland Ave and Commercial/River's Edge would both be good candidates for adding bicycle infrastructure with few tradeoffs required, with frequently being an overly wide single lane of traffic on most of their lengths, is there any effort to do either?
