Ideally we'd return this section to what it was before the highway overpass was built -- which was just 'Medford Street'.
Bingo. How many opportunities are there left in the urban core to add a new square where there wasn't one before. That eyesore is chewing up the space of basically a taffy-stretched Union between the Medford St. intersection and the Somerville Ave. intersection. Plus side streets like Cross St., Linwood, Poplar, Greenville, Prospect Hill Ave. (with its proximity to Prospect Hill Park and the lookout point) that are severed off the grid by dumping onto one-ways. It's an immense footprint of barren land underneath there, plus underdeveloped asphalt properties on the corners (shuttered gas station at McGrath/Medford, the Washington St. ramp maze, the Autozone, the used car lots on facing sides of Somerville Ave./Medford, the McGrath-facing industrial property on the corner of Poplar). Immense amount of prime real estate in moderate state of decay locked onto sides of one-way ramps into expressway off-ramp type car-centric usage. Just in terms of developable urban storefront property that's almost a new Union right there.
It is damn hard to pass up those kinds of redevelopment opportunities. Simply giving Somerville its street grid back does a ton of good alone, but the chance to re-knit it with square-oriented urban development? Huge. And maybe more importantly, out of the grasp of the BRA so it could
actually be square-oriented street-facing commercial instead of Meninotowers buffeted by useless greenspace, like Northpoint up the street.
28/McGrath/O'Brien
was I-93 before there was an I-93. That's what it was built for: the highway route into Boston. It's been superseded in that capacity for 40 years now and subsists only as a redundant induced demand trap. There's no strategic reason for it still existing...or still existing
in tandem with 38/99/Rutherford Ave, which was the other half of "proto-93". There is no reason why a cleaned up 93/28/38 interchange can't siphon all the thru surface traffic that absolutely has to be there away from it and redirected to the frontage roads, slightly more capable and accessible Rutherford Ave., and (eventually) the under-93 Rutherford Ave. truck/frontage road when that street is returned to its neighborhood. The volume of trucks using McGrath is absurd, and far outstrips anything that actually has to maneuver around East Somerville and Union to make local deliveries. And it makes Leverett Circle that much worse when the 6 highway lanes have to compress into 4 in front of the Science Museum. I think the redundancies are definitely there to absorb all this traffic elsewhere without a blip. Moreso than even the Casey Overpass. Shrink McGrath to 4 parkway lanes + crossable grass median from Broadway to Medford St. "Square" it to Somerville Ave. Then 4 lanes and a much wider sidewalk over the bridge and on O'Brien until Lechmere Sq. and the Cambridge St. convergence.
Nothing to fear. This one's going to become Boston's Exhibit A for taming the induced demand boogeyman. I literally think within 2 years of completion people will be asking themselves "Where did it all go? 93 and Rutherford don't seem any worse...but the traffic doesn't go here anymore? Why?" And a light bulb starts to flicker on.
