Highway's of Yore
- Thread starter Kahta
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Been meaning to post this here even though it doesn't have anything to do with Boston. Kahta, I know you will appreciate this.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/sets/72157622139053795/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/sets/72157622139053795/
whighlander
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Re: What would you do to get the T out of its financial mess?
Mathew -- it sounds as if you've drunk all the revisionist historic Kool-Aid
The single greatest stimulus ever to the US economy was the explosion of road building -- aka the Interstate Highway System -- led by Pres. Eisenhower -- of course it directly stimulated the economy
But -- in fact the major contribution of the Interstates was the ultimate freedom -- the ability to go where you wanted, when you waned -- free from the tyranny imposed by rails and schedules
This model was so successful that it has and is being copied around the world.
You talk of markets and then you in the same breath want a "one size fits all" model of zoning and planning -- well in general people don't want it -- they do what Reagan called "voting with their feet"
This is not to say that the old tradition of using rails don't have virtues -- particularly to meet the demand of moving people and goods in bulk from major concentrations of both to places where there are major concentrations of demand. However rails because of high fixed cost and lack of flexibility combined with their concentrated operating cost are less good at either in / out funnels; and rails are notoriously not good at all at diffuse to diffuse flows -- thus the hierarchy of rail systems -- mostly explained by geometry:
1) Big City core to Big City core
2) smaller city to Big City core
3) suburb to Big City core
4) exurb to Big City core
5) everything else
The above defines the MBTA in that it is relatively easy and would be useful to have a major radial T line carrying folks from near to Lexington to the FID -- hence the original plan for the Red Line to terminate at Rt-128. However, despite the best efforts of advocates and groupies -- it would make no sense to try to carry people from a myriad of small towns north and east as well as north and west of Waltham to a number of distributed locations near to various I-95/Rt-128 Interchanges in Waltham
Finally -- outside of the Big City Cores -- do away with or just naturally lack easy parking and you do away with your customers -- hence the general failures of Big City Department stores to attract suburban customers as suburbs continued to expand in the 70's and 80's and the resultant creation of suburban malls
Mathew -- it sounds as if you've drunk all the revisionist historic Kool-Aid
The single greatest stimulus ever to the US economy was the explosion of road building -- aka the Interstate Highway System -- led by Pres. Eisenhower -- of course it directly stimulated the economy
But -- in fact the major contribution of the Interstates was the ultimate freedom -- the ability to go where you wanted, when you waned -- free from the tyranny imposed by rails and schedules
This model was so successful that it has and is being copied around the world.
You talk of markets and then you in the same breath want a "one size fits all" model of zoning and planning -- well in general people don't want it -- they do what Reagan called "voting with their feet"
This is not to say that the old tradition of using rails don't have virtues -- particularly to meet the demand of moving people and goods in bulk from major concentrations of both to places where there are major concentrations of demand. However rails because of high fixed cost and lack of flexibility combined with their concentrated operating cost are less good at either in / out funnels; and rails are notoriously not good at all at diffuse to diffuse flows -- thus the hierarchy of rail systems -- mostly explained by geometry:
1) Big City core to Big City core
2) smaller city to Big City core
3) suburb to Big City core
4) exurb to Big City core
5) everything else
The above defines the MBTA in that it is relatively easy and would be useful to have a major radial T line carrying folks from near to Lexington to the FID -- hence the original plan for the Red Line to terminate at Rt-128. However, despite the best efforts of advocates and groupies -- it would make no sense to try to carry people from a myriad of small towns north and east as well as north and west of Waltham to a number of distributed locations near to various I-95/Rt-128 Interchanges in Waltham
Finally -- outside of the Big City Cores -- do away with or just naturally lack easy parking and you do away with your customers -- hence the general failures of Big City Department stores to attract suburban customers as suburbs continued to expand in the 70's and 80's and the resultant creation of suburban malls
Re: What would you do to get the T out of its financial mess?
Stimulus is pointless outside the context of a depression, or at least a recession. It leads to the "crowding out" effect. You only want stimulus when there is insufficient demand. The Interstate Highway System was never intended to be a stimulus program. It has other merits, but it definitely represents a [very] large government project.
Very nice, except for one thing. In the United States, we took it too far: we build highways directly into and through the hearts of cities; criss-crossing them. It's one thing to pave cheap, unused land with asphalt. It's a totally another thing to rip up neighborhoods and destroy cities with massive highways. I don't mind intercity interstates, they are useful, though I think they are overly subsidized and should be appropriately priced like any other product. But urban freeways are vile.
Not sure where you get this from. I actually oppose zoning in general. I think it's done more harm than good. The original purpose was to keep dangerous uses out of residential neighborhoods. Fine. But it has mutated into a crazy and elaborate set of rules that takes freedom away from private property owners and forces towns into regimented forms that don't resemble anything that developed naturally prior to zoning.
I don't quite get your point about "voting with their feet." Are you trying to say that people move away from places with zoning? If so, there's nowhere to go. Ever since the famous Euclid case, pretty much every town and city has adopted harmful zoning regulations. It's a bureaucratic dream, which is part of the appeal. Just goes to show that in this country we talk a lot of big talk about free markets, but when it comes to practice, we love our anal-retentive zoning codes. Have you ever looked at one? The level of detail required by regulation is insane.
Places with diffuse-to-diffuse flows are called sprawl, and it requires heavy subsidies to make it work.
Competing with suburban malls by imitating them is definitely a route to failure in the city. Suburban malls are sterile, highly controlled places, with little to no economic diversity. Successful city districts are pretty much the opposite in every respect. They are messy, with lots of clashing styles, different ways of doing business, and extremely high amounts of economic diversity.
As for parking, well, consider this cycle: (1) new suburbs are built with big roads and parking lots; (2) new residents move in and buy a car so they can navigate said roads and parking lots; (3) residents need their car to go places so they demand free parking at every new destination; (4) repeat.
Prior to zoning, suburbs weren't built like this. The idea of "minimum parking requirement" didn't exist to kickstart the cycle. Even in this country, old style suburbs tended to be built quite densely. Boston is surrounded by such neighborhoods, many of them having been annexed into the city long ago.
Stimulus is pointless outside the context of a depression, or at least a recession. It leads to the "crowding out" effect. You only want stimulus when there is insufficient demand. The Interstate Highway System was never intended to be a stimulus program. It has other merits, but it definitely represents a [very] large government project.
Very nice, except for one thing. In the United States, we took it too far: we build highways directly into and through the hearts of cities; criss-crossing them. It's one thing to pave cheap, unused land with asphalt. It's a totally another thing to rip up neighborhoods and destroy cities with massive highways. I don't mind intercity interstates, they are useful, though I think they are overly subsidized and should be appropriately priced like any other product. But urban freeways are vile.
Not sure where you get this from. I actually oppose zoning in general. I think it's done more harm than good. The original purpose was to keep dangerous uses out of residential neighborhoods. Fine. But it has mutated into a crazy and elaborate set of rules that takes freedom away from private property owners and forces towns into regimented forms that don't resemble anything that developed naturally prior to zoning.
I don't quite get your point about "voting with their feet." Are you trying to say that people move away from places with zoning? If so, there's nowhere to go. Ever since the famous Euclid case, pretty much every town and city has adopted harmful zoning regulations. It's a bureaucratic dream, which is part of the appeal. Just goes to show that in this country we talk a lot of big talk about free markets, but when it comes to practice, we love our anal-retentive zoning codes. Have you ever looked at one? The level of detail required by regulation is insane.
Places with diffuse-to-diffuse flows are called sprawl, and it requires heavy subsidies to make it work.
Competing with suburban malls by imitating them is definitely a route to failure in the city. Suburban malls are sterile, highly controlled places, with little to no economic diversity. Successful city districts are pretty much the opposite in every respect. They are messy, with lots of clashing styles, different ways of doing business, and extremely high amounts of economic diversity.
As for parking, well, consider this cycle: (1) new suburbs are built with big roads and parking lots; (2) new residents move in and buy a car so they can navigate said roads and parking lots; (3) residents need their car to go places so they demand free parking at every new destination; (4) repeat.
Prior to zoning, suburbs weren't built like this. The idea of "minimum parking requirement" didn't exist to kickstart the cycle. Even in this country, old style suburbs tended to be built quite densely. Boston is surrounded by such neighborhoods, many of them having been annexed into the city long ago.
whighlander
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Re: What would you do to get the T out of its financial mess?
Mathew -- I'm assuming by your academic approach to things and your junior status that you don't actually have much contact with the real world of cities, suburbs, interstate highways, etc.
-- please correct me if I'm wrong
But you definitely have a one-size fits all model of the world
Only someone sitting on the 3rd rail drinking transit Kool aid would deny the effect of the interstate Highway System on the Post WWII creation of modern America
I'm particularly perplexed by your comments about urban interstates -- perhaps you are mixing the implementation versus the concept. You can't dump the Turnpike onto Boston City streets in Alston - some of the people want to go further -- this has been shown explicitly by the completion of I-90 through Boston proper to Rt-1 in East Boston and ultimately north to NH, ME
As far as suburban zonings bad effects -- I agree completely. This is again proved most effectively by example -- when I first moved to Lexington we lived on a street whose lots had been laid-out in the Trolley / Street railway era (plot plan for subdivision filed in 1896). Almost none of the plots were built-upon until after the GI's returned in the 1950's. The lots were 40 ft frontage and 80 to 100 feet deep -- the houses were small but adequate for a first-time buyer in Lexington.
Today, you could not build those houses even if you wished to build them and sell them for the ballpark $M that houses in Lexington now fetch. The question is why -- were the houses so dense that ....? No -- just some planning theory that decided 1/4 acre was the smallest acceptable. Now I would be the first to insist on large lots if you had septic systems -- but Lexington has had sewers for decades.
On the other hand there is a place for segregation of large commercial, industrial or research complexes and their separation from most residential.
No one that I know of would chose to live in a single family house on Hartwell Ave or Hayden Ave -- the two principle roads for major development in Lexington. However, Spring Street has a dense end toward Hayden and Rt-2 and a residential end near to Mass Ave. -- this seems to coexist fine. even -- Hartwell Ave., has a apartment / condo complex at one end where it connects to Wood St.
By the way : you wrote: " Places with diffuse-to-diffuse flows are called sprawl, and it requires heavy subsidies to make it work. " -- No places with diffuse to diffuse flows are called most of the U.S. outside of a handful of the cores of the largest urban economic areas such as Boston
Out in the suburbs, exurbs and rural areas -- you can not plan your fixed-rail transit systems by trying to anticipate where major development will happen -- nor can you be successful in trying to wait until the development has happened before you start your planning cycle -- that's why the only kind of semi-workable suburban to suburban mass commute is via small buses from some regionally distributed parking lots -- otherwise everyone comes by car.
However --that was then and perhaps now -- but the future might be different:
1) For whatever reason -- there now seems to be a genuine back to cities movement for upper-middle class residents occurring in the more economically dynamic metro ares such as Boston.
2) Many new Knowledge Economy start-ups are putting roots down in the areas near the research universities such as MIT and the Kendall Sq. phenomena.
3) Since the companies seem to be making major commitments, e.g. Biogen returning its H.Q. from the suburbs, Novartis, perhaps Google more senior people may be making commuting decisions and choosing city over suburb.
4) So -- perhaps the need for Suburb to Suburb transit may diminish.
5) the Big question -- Is this a long-term phenomenon (30 years) or is it temporary -- driven by a cohort of young single people today in their 20's and 30's who've been involved in high profile start-ups in with urban life-styles -- what happens when they evolve into young families and want the suburban lifestyle?
Finally - "Voting with your feet" -- means if you don't like being over-planned, over regulated, over governed you are free to move to somewhere that has less planning and less intrusion in your "market place" decisions -- e.g. NH, Texas, Montana, Nevada, etc.
Mathew -- I'm assuming by your academic approach to things and your junior status that you don't actually have much contact with the real world of cities, suburbs, interstate highways, etc.
-- please correct me if I'm wrong
But you definitely have a one-size fits all model of the world
Only someone sitting on the 3rd rail drinking transit Kool aid would deny the effect of the interstate Highway System on the Post WWII creation of modern America
I'm particularly perplexed by your comments about urban interstates -- perhaps you are mixing the implementation versus the concept. You can't dump the Turnpike onto Boston City streets in Alston - some of the people want to go further -- this has been shown explicitly by the completion of I-90 through Boston proper to Rt-1 in East Boston and ultimately north to NH, ME
As far as suburban zonings bad effects -- I agree completely. This is again proved most effectively by example -- when I first moved to Lexington we lived on a street whose lots had been laid-out in the Trolley / Street railway era (plot plan for subdivision filed in 1896). Almost none of the plots were built-upon until after the GI's returned in the 1950's. The lots were 40 ft frontage and 80 to 100 feet deep -- the houses were small but adequate for a first-time buyer in Lexington.
Today, you could not build those houses even if you wished to build them and sell them for the ballpark $M that houses in Lexington now fetch. The question is why -- were the houses so dense that ....? No -- just some planning theory that decided 1/4 acre was the smallest acceptable. Now I would be the first to insist on large lots if you had septic systems -- but Lexington has had sewers for decades.
On the other hand there is a place for segregation of large commercial, industrial or research complexes and their separation from most residential.
No one that I know of would chose to live in a single family house on Hartwell Ave or Hayden Ave -- the two principle roads for major development in Lexington. However, Spring Street has a dense end toward Hayden and Rt-2 and a residential end near to Mass Ave. -- this seems to coexist fine. even -- Hartwell Ave., has a apartment / condo complex at one end where it connects to Wood St.
By the way : you wrote: " Places with diffuse-to-diffuse flows are called sprawl, and it requires heavy subsidies to make it work. " -- No places with diffuse to diffuse flows are called most of the U.S. outside of a handful of the cores of the largest urban economic areas such as Boston
Out in the suburbs, exurbs and rural areas -- you can not plan your fixed-rail transit systems by trying to anticipate where major development will happen -- nor can you be successful in trying to wait until the development has happened before you start your planning cycle -- that's why the only kind of semi-workable suburban to suburban mass commute is via small buses from some regionally distributed parking lots -- otherwise everyone comes by car.
However --that was then and perhaps now -- but the future might be different:
1) For whatever reason -- there now seems to be a genuine back to cities movement for upper-middle class residents occurring in the more economically dynamic metro ares such as Boston.
2) Many new Knowledge Economy start-ups are putting roots down in the areas near the research universities such as MIT and the Kendall Sq. phenomena.
3) Since the companies seem to be making major commitments, e.g. Biogen returning its H.Q. from the suburbs, Novartis, perhaps Google more senior people may be making commuting decisions and choosing city over suburb.
4) So -- perhaps the need for Suburb to Suburb transit may diminish.
5) the Big question -- Is this a long-term phenomenon (30 years) or is it temporary -- driven by a cohort of young single people today in their 20's and 30's who've been involved in high profile start-ups in with urban life-styles -- what happens when they evolve into young families and want the suburban lifestyle?
Finally - "Voting with your feet" -- means if you don't like being over-planned, over regulated, over governed you are free to move to somewhere that has less planning and less intrusion in your "market place" decisions -- e.g. NH, Texas, Montana, Nevada, etc.
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Re: What would you do to get the T out of its financial mess?
How have I denied the effect of the interstate highway system? I've been decrying some of the effects (namely the degrading effect of urban freeways). Of course it had a major effect. It was also a major expense; we should apply a cost/benefit analysis to it, just like anything else. Intercity freeways probably pass that test. Urban freeways don't seem to do so well.
I made an economic point about stimulus being ineffective during non-recessionary times. This isn't a controversial point. Justifying the IHS on the basis of "stimulus" is simply incorrect. You could justify anything using the same reasoning. There's plenty of other reasons for the IHS that don't include stimulus. Had the IHS construction occurred during the Great Depression then it could have been considered a "stimulus" because the right economic conditions held.
And remember this discussion started over how to make public transit profitable. I pointed out that with the government subsidizing urban freeways, it is impossible for transit to be profitable. Regardless of whether urban freeways lead to other problems, this will be true.
I prefer not to take a theoretical approach to these matters where possible. Most of the damage done by city planning has been due to theoretical approaches. You could characterize my thinking as "traditionally-oriented." I like to look at examples of where things have worked in the past, or where it persists to this day, and try to figure out why it has succeeded or failed.
For example, look at the West End neighborhood in Boston. Or rather, what remains of it. Its original form was demolished and amputated from the rest of the city. It was rebuilt in a typically idealist "Garden City" form, but remains relatively cut off and lifeless. On the other hand, the North End, which had similar characteristics, managed to evade the "slum"-clearing bulldozers. It remains one of the most successful city neighborhoods, drawing a tremendous amount of activity, despite being hemmed in by the Central Artery (now Green-scar). This, along with many other examples, strikes me as a condemnation of urban renewal and also a condemnation of the various fads that fall under the category of "landscape urbanism."
I think that if we agree about suburban zoning having bad effects, then we probably largely agree about everything else. I should probably clarify that I'm not terribly interested in "diffuse-to-diffuse" flows. That is "sprawl" and yes, it is the majority of the United States. I'm interested in cities, which by nature occupy only a small portion of the land. If people want to live in "sprawl" that is their right. I only ask that they pay their fair share for supporting it, instead of forcing other people to subsidize their lifestyle.
As for "voting with your feet", none of those places you listed offer less regulation or imposition on private property rights in cities. For example, someone mentioned Houston. Well Houston may nominally not have zoning, but it has something called "restrictive covenants" which serve the same purpose. Different name, same effect.
How have I denied the effect of the interstate highway system? I've been decrying some of the effects (namely the degrading effect of urban freeways). Of course it had a major effect. It was also a major expense; we should apply a cost/benefit analysis to it, just like anything else. Intercity freeways probably pass that test. Urban freeways don't seem to do so well.
I made an economic point about stimulus being ineffective during non-recessionary times. This isn't a controversial point. Justifying the IHS on the basis of "stimulus" is simply incorrect. You could justify anything using the same reasoning. There's plenty of other reasons for the IHS that don't include stimulus. Had the IHS construction occurred during the Great Depression then it could have been considered a "stimulus" because the right economic conditions held.
And remember this discussion started over how to make public transit profitable. I pointed out that with the government subsidizing urban freeways, it is impossible for transit to be profitable. Regardless of whether urban freeways lead to other problems, this will be true.
I prefer not to take a theoretical approach to these matters where possible. Most of the damage done by city planning has been due to theoretical approaches. You could characterize my thinking as "traditionally-oriented." I like to look at examples of where things have worked in the past, or where it persists to this day, and try to figure out why it has succeeded or failed.
For example, look at the West End neighborhood in Boston. Or rather, what remains of it. Its original form was demolished and amputated from the rest of the city. It was rebuilt in a typically idealist "Garden City" form, but remains relatively cut off and lifeless. On the other hand, the North End, which had similar characteristics, managed to evade the "slum"-clearing bulldozers. It remains one of the most successful city neighborhoods, drawing a tremendous amount of activity, despite being hemmed in by the Central Artery (now Green-scar). This, along with many other examples, strikes me as a condemnation of urban renewal and also a condemnation of the various fads that fall under the category of "landscape urbanism."
I think that if we agree about suburban zoning having bad effects, then we probably largely agree about everything else. I should probably clarify that I'm not terribly interested in "diffuse-to-diffuse" flows. That is "sprawl" and yes, it is the majority of the United States. I'm interested in cities, which by nature occupy only a small portion of the land. If people want to live in "sprawl" that is their right. I only ask that they pay their fair share for supporting it, instead of forcing other people to subsidize their lifestyle.
As for "voting with your feet", none of those places you listed offer less regulation or imposition on private property rights in cities. For example, someone mentioned Houston. Well Houston may nominally not have zoning, but it has something called "restrictive covenants" which serve the same purpose. Different name, same effect.
Re: What would you do to get the T out of its financial mess?
I should mention that the so-called "need" for urban freeways only arises because they exist. Let's talk about an urban freeway that doesn't exist: the Southwest Expressway. Do you believe that Boston needed the Southwest Expressway, and that it is struggling terribly without it?
I should mention that the so-called "need" for urban freeways only arises because they exist. Let's talk about an urban freeway that doesn't exist: the Southwest Expressway. Do you believe that Boston needed the Southwest Expressway, and that it is struggling terribly without it?
F-Line to Dudley
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Re: What would you do to get the T out of its financial mess?
Might be a poor analogy. The urban expressway system here and in many other American cities were designed with dependencies galore on other roads in the plan, and little recourse to imbalanced traffic loads if one didn't get built. So, yes...it's a dysfunctional road network because the SW Expressway didn't get built. Take one look at the SE Expressway for proof of that. Or the completed-1/2/3/1A/695 absences distributing things really weirdly across the northern half so some roads are choked, some not intended to be part of the system (Storrow, 16, 28) are choked, and some (Pike downtown) are underutilized.
Problem is, once you invite thru traffic into the urban core you invite all these dependencies...and have to keep building and building and building more urban expressways until the whole city is sliced up by them. Whereas if they did the European system of expressways ringing the city and branching off there for intercity, transition to parkways and higher-speed boulevards leading into the city, and transition there to gridded city streets for the downtown core...that would've worked. Meaning, build all the high-speed asphalt they like to 128 but stop there, make sure the inbound thoroughfares are coherently managed, and let the traffic dissolve into the city shaped along traditional square-to-square traffic patterns instead of being hyper-concentrated and having nowhere to get off except gridlock. Those cities work well.
It's once you start building that it becomes a vicious cycle of building, and one major broken link in the plan starts a chain reaction of unintended consequences. U.S. highway planners never considered the possibility of highway revolts being successful, so traffic got modeled with assumption that these networks would 1) be built total, and thus could not function long-term with unintended gaps...and 2) be able to be scrapped/rebuilt/realigned every 2-4 decades for whatever future conditions they couldn't anticipate. It didn't take more than a dozen years of construction to figure out what foolish assumptions those would be, but because of #2 they couldn't adjust to that reality once the built roads were open.
So I guess if you ask "Would we be better off?"...the answer is hell yes: if few or none of them had been built. But one or a few gashes spared through town don't prevent 93 from being consigned to perpetual hell or headed off the eventual ordeal of the Big Dig. They opened Pandora's Box when they invited expressway traffic in the first place. Any solution to it would've been imperfect. Much denser multimodal transit planning out to 128 to load-balance is probably best they can do for what missing roads leave the network only partially functioning. Results: underwhelming. We need a whole frigging lot more than the Riverside and Braintree branches to fix the imbalance. But it's also hard to un- screw-up what's been screwed up, which is why the price tag for properly fixing the road traffic imbalance with multimodal is so daunting. Somebody should outfit a Boeing LRV with a flux capacitor and 1.21 gigawatt power source and show the 1955 urban planners what the true cost of their drafting table scribbles would be. The last 40 years has been the agonizing dig-out from the lack of fail-safes in their road network as-designed.
For what it's worth, it's not like rail didn't screw it up royally too back when it was new. Read up on trolley interurbans and what immense piles of money were lit on fire speculating in the 1900's-1920's on streetcar networks in the middle of nowhere. There was all-new ROW carved out in places like where the Pike runs in Lee and Blandford that went bankrupt from nonexistent ridership in less time than it took to construct the lines because...well, who knew a slow, rough trip in an open-air buggy on trolley wire would be a poorer mode for traveling 30 miles than it was for traveling crosstown. Just like the RR boom of the 19th century left hundreds of bankruptcies, millions of pounds in abandoned iron, and a route network with really odd coverage gaps in some places and over-redundancies in others that only partially got fixed in later years. One local case in point there: Wilmington/Woburn. They laid the Lowell Line outside of Woburn center in the 1830's, then regretted it and had to build a "loop" line through town. Then the competing RR built the Western Route right next to it on the other side. Nothing crosses the two anywhere in the middle so Burlington has never ever ever had trains, but there were 3 N-S lines in 3 miles. With the Wildcat Branch connection being abandoned, rebuilt, and re-aligned like 3 times because of warring RR's and unsatisfactory fixes to the original planning mistakes.
It's the same with all modes. There's the initial euphoria about it being an ___-killer and catch-all replacing everything that came before it, the overspeculation and construction orgy without regard to consequences or long-term prospects, the bubble burst, the sobering realization that the planning was inadequate and that they're stuck with a flawed imbalance, and the long and tough slog to re-create what was lost or expensively supplement its inadequacies with other less-than-perfect solutions. Transportation goes like this cyclically 1-1/2 times a century. Fuel/energy generation goes like this cyclically. Communications (telecom, media delivery) goes like this cyclically. It's endemic to infrastructure whenever there's some new great leap forward.
Just wait till we make the same mistake again. We'll be due by mid-century. Maybe one or two of us will live long enough to shake our heads at the fixed levitating guideways building boom or some other Jetsons shit tearing up the urban fabric.
Might be a poor analogy. The urban expressway system here and in many other American cities were designed with dependencies galore on other roads in the plan, and little recourse to imbalanced traffic loads if one didn't get built. So, yes...it's a dysfunctional road network because the SW Expressway didn't get built. Take one look at the SE Expressway for proof of that. Or the completed-1/2/3/1A/695 absences distributing things really weirdly across the northern half so some roads are choked, some not intended to be part of the system (Storrow, 16, 28) are choked, and some (Pike downtown) are underutilized.
Problem is, once you invite thru traffic into the urban core you invite all these dependencies...and have to keep building and building and building more urban expressways until the whole city is sliced up by them. Whereas if they did the European system of expressways ringing the city and branching off there for intercity, transition to parkways and higher-speed boulevards leading into the city, and transition there to gridded city streets for the downtown core...that would've worked. Meaning, build all the high-speed asphalt they like to 128 but stop there, make sure the inbound thoroughfares are coherently managed, and let the traffic dissolve into the city shaped along traditional square-to-square traffic patterns instead of being hyper-concentrated and having nowhere to get off except gridlock. Those cities work well.
It's once you start building that it becomes a vicious cycle of building, and one major broken link in the plan starts a chain reaction of unintended consequences. U.S. highway planners never considered the possibility of highway revolts being successful, so traffic got modeled with assumption that these networks would 1) be built total, and thus could not function long-term with unintended gaps...and 2) be able to be scrapped/rebuilt/realigned every 2-4 decades for whatever future conditions they couldn't anticipate. It didn't take more than a dozen years of construction to figure out what foolish assumptions those would be, but because of #2 they couldn't adjust to that reality once the built roads were open.
So I guess if you ask "Would we be better off?"...the answer is hell yes: if few or none of them had been built. But one or a few gashes spared through town don't prevent 93 from being consigned to perpetual hell or headed off the eventual ordeal of the Big Dig. They opened Pandora's Box when they invited expressway traffic in the first place. Any solution to it would've been imperfect. Much denser multimodal transit planning out to 128 to load-balance is probably best they can do for what missing roads leave the network only partially functioning. Results: underwhelming. We need a whole frigging lot more than the Riverside and Braintree branches to fix the imbalance. But it's also hard to un- screw-up what's been screwed up, which is why the price tag for properly fixing the road traffic imbalance with multimodal is so daunting. Somebody should outfit a Boeing LRV with a flux capacitor and 1.21 gigawatt power source and show the 1955 urban planners what the true cost of their drafting table scribbles would be. The last 40 years has been the agonizing dig-out from the lack of fail-safes in their road network as-designed.
For what it's worth, it's not like rail didn't screw it up royally too back when it was new. Read up on trolley interurbans and what immense piles of money were lit on fire speculating in the 1900's-1920's on streetcar networks in the middle of nowhere. There was all-new ROW carved out in places like where the Pike runs in Lee and Blandford that went bankrupt from nonexistent ridership in less time than it took to construct the lines because...well, who knew a slow, rough trip in an open-air buggy on trolley wire would be a poorer mode for traveling 30 miles than it was for traveling crosstown. Just like the RR boom of the 19th century left hundreds of bankruptcies, millions of pounds in abandoned iron, and a route network with really odd coverage gaps in some places and over-redundancies in others that only partially got fixed in later years. One local case in point there: Wilmington/Woburn. They laid the Lowell Line outside of Woburn center in the 1830's, then regretted it and had to build a "loop" line through town. Then the competing RR built the Western Route right next to it on the other side. Nothing crosses the two anywhere in the middle so Burlington has never ever ever had trains, but there were 3 N-S lines in 3 miles. With the Wildcat Branch connection being abandoned, rebuilt, and re-aligned like 3 times because of warring RR's and unsatisfactory fixes to the original planning mistakes.
It's the same with all modes. There's the initial euphoria about it being an ___-killer and catch-all replacing everything that came before it, the overspeculation and construction orgy without regard to consequences or long-term prospects, the bubble burst, the sobering realization that the planning was inadequate and that they're stuck with a flawed imbalance, and the long and tough slog to re-create what was lost or expensively supplement its inadequacies with other less-than-perfect solutions. Transportation goes like this cyclically 1-1/2 times a century. Fuel/energy generation goes like this cyclically. Communications (telecom, media delivery) goes like this cyclically. It's endemic to infrastructure whenever there's some new great leap forward.
Just wait till we make the same mistake again. We'll be due by mid-century. Maybe one or two of us will live long enough to shake our heads at the fixed levitating guideways building boom or some other Jetsons shit tearing up the urban fabric.
Re: What would you do to get the T out of its financial mess?
Gas taxes and related automobile fees pay for roads/highways to a degree that mass transit doesn't even approach-- the most subsidized forms of transit are bus, train, and subway. Why do you think the MBTA is in such a hole? (It's not the big dig debt) It's because fares only cover 25% of the system.
Gas taxes and related automobile fees pay for roads/highways to a degree that mass transit doesn't even approach-- the most subsidized forms of transit are bus, train, and subway. Why do you think the MBTA is in such a hole? (It's not the big dig debt) It's because fares only cover 25% of the system.
HenryAlan
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Even if that were true that gas taxes and user fees covered the cost of road construction, the vast majority of roads would still be heavily subsidized by the "profitable," that is to say highest use roads. There are millions of miles of under utilized road in suburban, exurban, and rural areas. Those roads do not get enough traffic to justify the dost. They are subidized transit.
I think F-line really put it well. Building urban expressways is opening Pandora's box. And you can't build your way out of it, either.
Kahta, roads and highways are heavily subsidized.
5 Myths about the Gas Tax.
States get back more than they put into the highway trust fund. Congress has chipped in an extra $30 billion since 2008 to keep it going.
GAO Report referenced by the above article.
Unprofitable toll roads.
The gas tax hasn't been raised since the early 90s, meaning its buying power has decreased by about a third. Which explains why the highway trust fund is in crisis.
And that doesn't even count local/state roads, which in Massachusetts, may be in even worse financial shape than the MBTA. At least, according to the Transportation Finance Commission report of 2007 (findings) (recommendations). And of course, this is the home of the infamous Big Dig, costing taxpayers to the tune of $22 billion.
Now, due to the high fixed operational cost nature of transit, having subsidized competition does double damage to the bottom line. Every customer tempted away by free highways and under-priced gas means less fare collected by the T, but not less expense incurred running trains and buses.
Kahta, roads and highways are heavily subsidized.
5 Myths about the Gas Tax.
States get back more than they put into the highway trust fund. Congress has chipped in an extra $30 billion since 2008 to keep it going.
GAO Report referenced by the above article.
Unprofitable toll roads.
The gas tax hasn't been raised since the early 90s, meaning its buying power has decreased by about a third. Which explains why the highway trust fund is in crisis.
And that doesn't even count local/state roads, which in Massachusetts, may be in even worse financial shape than the MBTA. At least, according to the Transportation Finance Commission report of 2007 (findings) (recommendations). And of course, this is the home of the infamous Big Dig, costing taxpayers to the tune of $22 billion.
Now, due to the high fixed operational cost nature of transit, having subsidized competition does double damage to the bottom line. Every customer tempted away by free highways and under-priced gas means less fare collected by the T, but not less expense incurred running trains and buses.
whighlander
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Re: What would you do to get the T out of its financial mess?
Mathew -- I'm starting to understand your perspective on things -- especially the " As for "voting with your feet", none of those places you listed offer less regulation or imposition on private property rights in cities." -- my point was that in " NH, Texas, Montana, Nevada " and some other places you can go an hid from the planning and the cities -- you and your cult, you and your disciples, family, etc can go off and do your own thing
In Massachusetts because the history of settlement -- it is much harder to create your own private paradise (I guess a couple of private islands still exist) . This settlement pattern also bothers F-Line from a different perspective.
Consider Lexington the town that I've called home for more than two decades – and the Post WWII effect of Rt-128 – the mother of all local stimuli to the economy.
Lexington began as an extension of Cambridge in 1642 -- providing some people who didn't have a chance to get much of a claim on Cambridge to have some land near by. By 1691, having enough permanent residents it was permitted to incorporate as a separate parish, called Cambridge Farms with its own church and minister -- but still was a subsidiary of Cambridge. By 1713 the people living in Cambridge Farms felt that they needed more autonomy and so they petitioned and the Great and General Court (official name for the Legislature) assented and Lexington as an independent town with its own town meeting was created. Note the origin of the name is unclear -- but may have to do with a failed land development deal.
Lexington prospered as an agricultural and small manufacturing settlement as there was lots of good land, good water and an abundance of water power for mills provided by the now mostly buried Vine Brook a tributary of the Shawsheen River and a couple of smaller brooks. At the time of the Revolution, Lexington consisted of several small farming hamlets and the core of the downtown sitting on a main road into Boston from Concord and beyond. Farmers shipped livestock and produce to Cambridge and Boston as well as some manufactured products and cattle began to be driven through Lexington on what is today the ROW of Concord Avenue and parts of Rt-2, Rt-2A. Paul Revere and William Dawes rode the night of the 18th and the British marched to / fro on the 18/19 along what is today Massachusetts Ave. So you could say that even by 1790 that Lexington was a suburb of Cambridge / Boston though the trip was still arduous under certain conditions -- the best travel was horse drawn sled in the middle of the winter.
In the mid 19th Century -- the Lexington and West Cambridge Railroad was built through the town to the Bedford line and regular service began in 1846. Today this ROW is occupied by the Minuteman Bikeway. With rail and then later street railway access to parts of Lexington -- Mansionization began in the late 19th Century as many quite magnificent estates were built on what had once been intensively farmed areas (such as the estate of Charles Ponzi of the eponymous scheme). By the early 20th Century while the population of the town was still small compared to today (about 30,000 now) quite a few people were commuting from Lexington by the Train and some taking the street railways and a soon a number of private buses were operating. Still as late as 1940 the town would lease the Green to farmers for haying.
*1 “By the 1920s, Kruh pointed out, “Boston was in perpetual gridlock … [and so if] you lived north of the city and wanted to get to Cape Cod, or lived south of the city and wanted to get to New Hampshire, Kruh explained, you had little choice but to fight your way through Boston.”
In 1925 the Commonwealth DPW (Highway Department) began to lay out several numbered routes about including a circumferential route around Boston called it Route 128 about 12 to 15 miles outside of Boston in places such as Lexington along the streets of the town including Rt-128 which passed by the Town Hall and turned at the main intersection in the center on the way to Waltham.
Waltham: High Street, Newton Street, Main Street (U.S. Route 20), Lexington Street
Lexington: Waltham Street, Massachusetts Avenue (Route 2A, now Route 4/Route 225), Woburn Street
Woburn: Lexington Street, Pleasant Street, Montvale Avenue
However, by the 1930s, downtown Lexington and Waltham were getting so overrun with traffic and downtown Boston was still beset by people trying to drive through on the city streets – so William Callahan (aka the Tunnel King) proposed as a six-lane highway 16 miles outside Boston to replace the street-by-street Rt-128. Callahan began in Lynnfield and worked around as money was available until WWII interrupted such projects for nearly a decade. Construction restarted in 1949 and by 1951 a 22 mile section of Route 128 from the Wakefield-Lynnfield border to the Wellesley-Needham border was completed and opened. – 50,000 cars jammed the northern portion on the first day it opened. “Before the southern portion was completed.” Kruh added, “stretches of the northern portion were already being widened from two to three lanes [in each direction].”
Gerald Blakely of the development firm of Cabot, Cabot and Forbes invented the then suburban industrial and now office and r&d park – as essentially college campus type environments complete with opens space, nice buildings and plenty of parking. As there was a lot of now available farm land to be developed this became a very popular model and was widely copied along Rt-128. The first was built in 1948 in Needham near Route 128 followed immediately by Northwest Park in Burlington. – today beginning to be renovated by its long-time owners into “ *an estimated $500 million... project that aims to create a Kendall Square-like campus of high-end housing, retail stores, outdoor cafes, and office space. “
*2 “ The ultimate goal: a complex that will attract a new generation of tech companies and workers demanding more amenities from suburban office developers and landlords, the company said.... “We’re trying to create something that gives office workers a reason to linger around longer after work,’’ said Todd Fremont-Smith, senior vice president of development at Nordblom, a family-run business that has owned Northwest Park for more than 50 years. “We’re trying to build a neighborhood. We’re not trying to build another shopping mall or office campus.’’ “
Also in 1948 Polaroid introduced its first “instant” film cameras later to be built on Rt-128 and Brandeis University founded in Waltham near to Rt-128. Much later – Olin College was chartered and after $400 M was invested by the F.W. Olin Foundation, it became the U.S.A's newest engineering college – first small class graduating in 2006. Olin is located in Needham not far from Rt-128 and adjacent to the older Babson College founded in 1919 as a practical business school.
These kind of developments began to make a name for Rt-128 so that in 1955 *3“Business Week ran an article titled "New England Highway Upsets Old Way of Life" and referred to Route 128 as "the Magic Semicircle". By 1958, it needed to be widened from six to eight lanes, and business growth continued. In 1957, there were 99 companies employing 17,000 workers along 128; in 1965, 574; By 1967, Kruh said, there were 729 commercial enterprises located along the highway employing 66,000 people – in 1973, 1,212 companies including Raytheon, DEC and HP were located along or immediately adjacent to Rt-128.
Built in 1968, Burlington Mall expanded and grew to today's over 150 stores and 1.2 M sq. ft.
In 1971,*Lahey* Clinic announced that it was moving out of Boston: *4"Over 2,000 Burlington voters, the largest number ever to attend a regular or special meeting in the town," overwhelmingly voted in favor of the construction of Lahey Clinic Medical Center in Burlington.
The completion of the rock cut in East Lexington and Arlington Heights allowed the Interstate-class section of Rt-2 to carry many cars into Cambridge – essentially reestablishing the historic link between Cambridge and Lexington. Rt-2 to the west and Rt-3 to the NH border spread the Rt-128 culture and the minicomputer industry into the NW suburbs – creating the “Computer commuter.” Over the last couple of decades despite the demise of DEC and the rise and fall of the Dotcom/ Telecom Bubble – Traffic volumes continued to soar until today 200,000 cars course through Lexington everyday at Rt-2A near to Hanscom AFB.
In addition to the growing industry, the location close to Boston, but yet in the suburbs, provided the ideal location for the returning G.I.s and later others to settle and Lexington became a major bedroom community. Farms and old estates fell to the housing developer and population in Lexington and Burlington grew rapidly during the 50's, 60's and 70's. In Lexington, the population has been roughly constant for the past couple of decades at about 30,000 – currently there are 11,110 households, and 8,432 families of which 37.8% had children under the age of 18 living with them, and 12.3% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.66 and the average family size was 3.10. The median age was 44 years median income for a household in the town was $122,656, and the median income for a family was $142,796. The per capita income for the town was $61,119. About 1.8% of families and 3.4% of the population were below the poverty line, including 3.2% of those under age 18 and 3.4% of those age 65 or over. Property values in the town soared, mansionization returned and the school system established a reputation for national excellence – used by Lexington Realtors to promote property values further and by the town bureaucrats to promote tax increases.
Some additional Rt-128 history that is relevant:
1945 Percy Spencer at Raytheon [Waltham downtown] patents the microwave oven.
>1946 Harvard professor and World War II US Army General Georges Doriot, fresh from his work for the Army Quartermaster Corps, which boosted quality and efficiency of Army supply efforts, returns to Boston and launches American Research & Development (ARD), world’s first public venture capital fund. ARD begins to provide money to Boston-area start-up companies.
>1947 North Shore Shopping Center; designed like a New England village, becomes first shopping center on Route 128 and first on the east coast.
>1949: Raytheon becomes first company to offer commercial transistors [Waltham] dominant maker of transistors in the world through mid-1950s; Claude Shannon at MIT builds the first chess playing computer; “Project Lincoln” – later Lincoln Lab [Lexington and Bedford] – is established by MIT to begin studies that harness radar technology and Whirlwind computer. Effort will lead to SAGE air defense system.
>1951 With funds earned from a computer memory invention, Dr. An Wang, an immigrant from China, starts Wang Laboratories; Bleachery and Dye Works close in Waltham; Raytheon buys plant.
>1952 Successive approximation analog to digital (A/D) converter commercialized by Bernard Gordon at EPSCO. Technology becomes key to many emerging scientific and industrial products and eventually even music on CD-ROM; Inspired in part by the work of General Georges Doriot, US Army establishes Natick Lab to research improvements in clothing, food and equipment.
>1954 High Voltage Engineering moves to Burlington on Route 128. Company, established after World War II with funding from Doriot’s ARD, pioneers use of radiation to treat cancer, develops tools for research in atomic physics; Waltham Watch Company, pioneer of mass produced time pieces in the 19th century, ceases manufacturing operations; Polaroid completes construction of its first plant on Route 128 in Waltham.
>1956 Ohio-based Clevite buys Boston-based Transistor Products and establishes Clevite Transistor in former Waltham Watch factory to manufacture germanium transistors and diodes.
>1956 Transitron founded [Wakefield] – becomes high-flying maker of transistors; Thermo-Electron founded in Belmont [today's Thermo-Fisher in Waltham] by MIT researcher, Dr. George Hatsopoulos, to develop thermionic energy technology – the direct conversion of heat to electricity.
>1957. With $70,000 venture capital investment from ARD, Project Whirlwind and SAGE veteran Ken Olsen starts Digital Equipment Corporation in former Maynard woolen mill; Honeywell's Electronic Data Processing Division (EDP), originally formed in 1955 as a joint venture with Raytheon, introduces its first computer, the Datamatic 1000, based on vacuum tubes.
>1957 Lexington-based Itek founded with help of Rockefeller investment, acquires assets of Boston University Optical Research Laboratory, delves into wide range of futuristic technologies and begins secret development of Corona, the first spy satellites for US government.
>1958, MITRE, a non-profit defense research lab with roots at MIT, is launched near Route 128 in Burlington, Mass., to absorb SAGE personnel from Lincoln Lab and continue this and other defense-related developments.
>1960 General Radio moves to new factory near train station in West Concord. Employees in Cambridge, Belmont, and Waltham can commute by train or car; Clevite moves to new 128 facility near Trapelo Road in Waltham – facility eventully becomes home to Honeywell Electronic Data Processing (EDP) division.
>1963: First specialized graphics terminals developed at MIT Lincoln Laboratories (Sketchpad), beginning the computer-aided design (CAD) era. Sketchpad uses the first light-pen, precursor to the mouse, developed by Ivan Sutherland.
>1967 Thermo-Electron tapped by National Institute of Health to develop power source for artificial heart.
>1968 Digital Equipment Corporation goes public with an initial public offering value of $37 million, earning a 101% annualized return on investment for ARD.
>1969 General Radio introduces first commercial computer-controlled logic circuit analyzer – creating the automatic testing industry; Cambridge-based Bolt, Beranek & Newman [today part of Raytheon] builds thefirst “nodes” of the ARPAnet in California using computers made by Waltham-based Honeywell. Within a year, ARPAnet expands across the country and becomes the eventual basis for the Internet.
>1970 Honeywell merges its computer business with General Electric's to form Honeywell Information Systems.
>1972 Polaroid introduces SX-70 Single Lens Reflex instant color camera. Dr. Edwin Land is on cover of Life magazine. Company continues expansion along Route 128 with film and camera manufacturing in Waltham and Norwood.
>1976 As older industries continue to falter, Massachusetts unemployment rate briefly exceeds 12 percent. Rising taxes and energy costs add to “misery index.”
>1977 Walter Gilbert and Allan Maxam at Harvard University devise method for sequencing DNA using chemicals rather than enzymes, accelerating growth of biotechnologies sector in region.
>1979 VisiCalc, the first computer spreadsheet, is developed and marketed by. Harvard Business School student Dan Bricklin and partner Bob Frankston; EMC founded by Richard J. Egan and Roger Marino in Newton, Massachusetts. Initial products are add-on memory for minicomputers.
>1986 Digital Equipment Corporation founder Ken Olsen named “America’s Most Successful Entrepreneur” by Fortune magazine; With $3 billion in revenue and 30,000 employees, Wang Laboratories ranks 161 on the Fortune 500.
>1988: The first graphics supercomputers are announced by Chelmsford-based Apollo and its competitors – including Sun Microsystems [located for a while on Network Dr. in Burlington eventually acquired by Oracle with locations on Rt-128 in Burlington next to where High Voltage Engineering once existed]; 1988 Digital Equipment Corporation employs 120,000 people, roughly half of them in Massachusetts, achieves market value of $24 billion and ranks 38 on the Fortune 500.
>1992 Two years after the death of its founder, Dr. An Wang, Wang Laboratories seeks Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection; Board of Digital Equipment Corporation forces Ken Olsen to leave the company he founded.
>1998 Digital Equipment Corporation purchased by PC-maker, Compaq for $9.6 billion; EMC software revenue reaches $445 million, making EMC the world’s fastest-growing major software company Total revenue (including hardware) nears $4 billion, more than $1 billion from Europe.
>1999 EMC purchases Data General for $1.1 billion.
Note unless indicated all quotes are from *1 and all > history is from *3
refs:
*1
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...uEmz3iNLeI0YSHveQ&sig2=o5ctUEEdL9Moli-ngXksQQ
*2 http://articles.boston.com/2011-09-...office-buildings-suburban-office-office-space
*3 http://www.route128history.org/id8.html
*4 http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...UGCmJolmELqpucZdw&sig2=soyWZumrO8ELV9XjdNTvww
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Route_128
http://massmoments.org/moment.cfm?mid=246
Mathew -- I'm starting to understand your perspective on things -- especially the " As for "voting with your feet", none of those places you listed offer less regulation or imposition on private property rights in cities." -- my point was that in " NH, Texas, Montana, Nevada " and some other places you can go an hid from the planning and the cities -- you and your cult, you and your disciples, family, etc can go off and do your own thing
In Massachusetts because the history of settlement -- it is much harder to create your own private paradise (I guess a couple of private islands still exist) . This settlement pattern also bothers F-Line from a different perspective.
Consider Lexington the town that I've called home for more than two decades – and the Post WWII effect of Rt-128 – the mother of all local stimuli to the economy.
Lexington began as an extension of Cambridge in 1642 -- providing some people who didn't have a chance to get much of a claim on Cambridge to have some land near by. By 1691, having enough permanent residents it was permitted to incorporate as a separate parish, called Cambridge Farms with its own church and minister -- but still was a subsidiary of Cambridge. By 1713 the people living in Cambridge Farms felt that they needed more autonomy and so they petitioned and the Great and General Court (official name for the Legislature) assented and Lexington as an independent town with its own town meeting was created. Note the origin of the name is unclear -- but may have to do with a failed land development deal.
Lexington prospered as an agricultural and small manufacturing settlement as there was lots of good land, good water and an abundance of water power for mills provided by the now mostly buried Vine Brook a tributary of the Shawsheen River and a couple of smaller brooks. At the time of the Revolution, Lexington consisted of several small farming hamlets and the core of the downtown sitting on a main road into Boston from Concord and beyond. Farmers shipped livestock and produce to Cambridge and Boston as well as some manufactured products and cattle began to be driven through Lexington on what is today the ROW of Concord Avenue and parts of Rt-2, Rt-2A. Paul Revere and William Dawes rode the night of the 18th and the British marched to / fro on the 18/19 along what is today Massachusetts Ave. So you could say that even by 1790 that Lexington was a suburb of Cambridge / Boston though the trip was still arduous under certain conditions -- the best travel was horse drawn sled in the middle of the winter.
In the mid 19th Century -- the Lexington and West Cambridge Railroad was built through the town to the Bedford line and regular service began in 1846. Today this ROW is occupied by the Minuteman Bikeway. With rail and then later street railway access to parts of Lexington -- Mansionization began in the late 19th Century as many quite magnificent estates were built on what had once been intensively farmed areas (such as the estate of Charles Ponzi of the eponymous scheme). By the early 20th Century while the population of the town was still small compared to today (about 30,000 now) quite a few people were commuting from Lexington by the Train and some taking the street railways and a soon a number of private buses were operating. Still as late as 1940 the town would lease the Green to farmers for haying.
*1 “By the 1920s, Kruh pointed out, “Boston was in perpetual gridlock … [and so if] you lived north of the city and wanted to get to Cape Cod, or lived south of the city and wanted to get to New Hampshire, Kruh explained, you had little choice but to fight your way through Boston.”
In 1925 the Commonwealth DPW (Highway Department) began to lay out several numbered routes about including a circumferential route around Boston called it Route 128 about 12 to 15 miles outside of Boston in places such as Lexington along the streets of the town including Rt-128 which passed by the Town Hall and turned at the main intersection in the center on the way to Waltham.
Waltham: High Street, Newton Street, Main Street (U.S. Route 20), Lexington Street
Lexington: Waltham Street, Massachusetts Avenue (Route 2A, now Route 4/Route 225), Woburn Street
Woburn: Lexington Street, Pleasant Street, Montvale Avenue
However, by the 1930s, downtown Lexington and Waltham were getting so overrun with traffic and downtown Boston was still beset by people trying to drive through on the city streets – so William Callahan (aka the Tunnel King) proposed as a six-lane highway 16 miles outside Boston to replace the street-by-street Rt-128. Callahan began in Lynnfield and worked around as money was available until WWII interrupted such projects for nearly a decade. Construction restarted in 1949 and by 1951 a 22 mile section of Route 128 from the Wakefield-Lynnfield border to the Wellesley-Needham border was completed and opened. – 50,000 cars jammed the northern portion on the first day it opened. “Before the southern portion was completed.” Kruh added, “stretches of the northern portion were already being widened from two to three lanes [in each direction].”
Gerald Blakely of the development firm of Cabot, Cabot and Forbes invented the then suburban industrial and now office and r&d park – as essentially college campus type environments complete with opens space, nice buildings and plenty of parking. As there was a lot of now available farm land to be developed this became a very popular model and was widely copied along Rt-128. The first was built in 1948 in Needham near Route 128 followed immediately by Northwest Park in Burlington. – today beginning to be renovated by its long-time owners into “ *an estimated $500 million... project that aims to create a Kendall Square-like campus of high-end housing, retail stores, outdoor cafes, and office space. “
*2 “ The ultimate goal: a complex that will attract a new generation of tech companies and workers demanding more amenities from suburban office developers and landlords, the company said.... “We’re trying to create something that gives office workers a reason to linger around longer after work,’’ said Todd Fremont-Smith, senior vice president of development at Nordblom, a family-run business that has owned Northwest Park for more than 50 years. “We’re trying to build a neighborhood. We’re not trying to build another shopping mall or office campus.’’ “
Also in 1948 Polaroid introduced its first “instant” film cameras later to be built on Rt-128 and Brandeis University founded in Waltham near to Rt-128. Much later – Olin College was chartered and after $400 M was invested by the F.W. Olin Foundation, it became the U.S.A's newest engineering college – first small class graduating in 2006. Olin is located in Needham not far from Rt-128 and adjacent to the older Babson College founded in 1919 as a practical business school.
These kind of developments began to make a name for Rt-128 so that in 1955 *3“Business Week ran an article titled "New England Highway Upsets Old Way of Life" and referred to Route 128 as "the Magic Semicircle". By 1958, it needed to be widened from six to eight lanes, and business growth continued. In 1957, there were 99 companies employing 17,000 workers along 128; in 1965, 574; By 1967, Kruh said, there were 729 commercial enterprises located along the highway employing 66,000 people – in 1973, 1,212 companies including Raytheon, DEC and HP were located along or immediately adjacent to Rt-128.
Built in 1968, Burlington Mall expanded and grew to today's over 150 stores and 1.2 M sq. ft.
In 1971,*Lahey* Clinic announced that it was moving out of Boston: *4"Over 2,000 Burlington voters, the largest number ever to attend a regular or special meeting in the town," overwhelmingly voted in favor of the construction of Lahey Clinic Medical Center in Burlington.
The completion of the rock cut in East Lexington and Arlington Heights allowed the Interstate-class section of Rt-2 to carry many cars into Cambridge – essentially reestablishing the historic link between Cambridge and Lexington. Rt-2 to the west and Rt-3 to the NH border spread the Rt-128 culture and the minicomputer industry into the NW suburbs – creating the “Computer commuter.” Over the last couple of decades despite the demise of DEC and the rise and fall of the Dotcom/ Telecom Bubble – Traffic volumes continued to soar until today 200,000 cars course through Lexington everyday at Rt-2A near to Hanscom AFB.
In addition to the growing industry, the location close to Boston, but yet in the suburbs, provided the ideal location for the returning G.I.s and later others to settle and Lexington became a major bedroom community. Farms and old estates fell to the housing developer and population in Lexington and Burlington grew rapidly during the 50's, 60's and 70's. In Lexington, the population has been roughly constant for the past couple of decades at about 30,000 – currently there are 11,110 households, and 8,432 families of which 37.8% had children under the age of 18 living with them, and 12.3% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.66 and the average family size was 3.10. The median age was 44 years median income for a household in the town was $122,656, and the median income for a family was $142,796. The per capita income for the town was $61,119. About 1.8% of families and 3.4% of the population were below the poverty line, including 3.2% of those under age 18 and 3.4% of those age 65 or over. Property values in the town soared, mansionization returned and the school system established a reputation for national excellence – used by Lexington Realtors to promote property values further and by the town bureaucrats to promote tax increases.
Some additional Rt-128 history that is relevant:
1945 Percy Spencer at Raytheon [Waltham downtown] patents the microwave oven.
>1946 Harvard professor and World War II US Army General Georges Doriot, fresh from his work for the Army Quartermaster Corps, which boosted quality and efficiency of Army supply efforts, returns to Boston and launches American Research & Development (ARD), world’s first public venture capital fund. ARD begins to provide money to Boston-area start-up companies.
>1947 North Shore Shopping Center; designed like a New England village, becomes first shopping center on Route 128 and first on the east coast.
>1949: Raytheon becomes first company to offer commercial transistors [Waltham] dominant maker of transistors in the world through mid-1950s; Claude Shannon at MIT builds the first chess playing computer; “Project Lincoln” – later Lincoln Lab [Lexington and Bedford] – is established by MIT to begin studies that harness radar technology and Whirlwind computer. Effort will lead to SAGE air defense system.
>1951 With funds earned from a computer memory invention, Dr. An Wang, an immigrant from China, starts Wang Laboratories; Bleachery and Dye Works close in Waltham; Raytheon buys plant.
>1952 Successive approximation analog to digital (A/D) converter commercialized by Bernard Gordon at EPSCO. Technology becomes key to many emerging scientific and industrial products and eventually even music on CD-ROM; Inspired in part by the work of General Georges Doriot, US Army establishes Natick Lab to research improvements in clothing, food and equipment.
>1954 High Voltage Engineering moves to Burlington on Route 128. Company, established after World War II with funding from Doriot’s ARD, pioneers use of radiation to treat cancer, develops tools for research in atomic physics; Waltham Watch Company, pioneer of mass produced time pieces in the 19th century, ceases manufacturing operations; Polaroid completes construction of its first plant on Route 128 in Waltham.
>1956 Ohio-based Clevite buys Boston-based Transistor Products and establishes Clevite Transistor in former Waltham Watch factory to manufacture germanium transistors and diodes.
>1956 Transitron founded [Wakefield] – becomes high-flying maker of transistors; Thermo-Electron founded in Belmont [today's Thermo-Fisher in Waltham] by MIT researcher, Dr. George Hatsopoulos, to develop thermionic energy technology – the direct conversion of heat to electricity.
>1957. With $70,000 venture capital investment from ARD, Project Whirlwind and SAGE veteran Ken Olsen starts Digital Equipment Corporation in former Maynard woolen mill; Honeywell's Electronic Data Processing Division (EDP), originally formed in 1955 as a joint venture with Raytheon, introduces its first computer, the Datamatic 1000, based on vacuum tubes.
>1957 Lexington-based Itek founded with help of Rockefeller investment, acquires assets of Boston University Optical Research Laboratory, delves into wide range of futuristic technologies and begins secret development of Corona, the first spy satellites for US government.
>1958, MITRE, a non-profit defense research lab with roots at MIT, is launched near Route 128 in Burlington, Mass., to absorb SAGE personnel from Lincoln Lab and continue this and other defense-related developments.
>1960 General Radio moves to new factory near train station in West Concord. Employees in Cambridge, Belmont, and Waltham can commute by train or car; Clevite moves to new 128 facility near Trapelo Road in Waltham – facility eventully becomes home to Honeywell Electronic Data Processing (EDP) division.
>1963: First specialized graphics terminals developed at MIT Lincoln Laboratories (Sketchpad), beginning the computer-aided design (CAD) era. Sketchpad uses the first light-pen, precursor to the mouse, developed by Ivan Sutherland.
>1967 Thermo-Electron tapped by National Institute of Health to develop power source for artificial heart.
>1968 Digital Equipment Corporation goes public with an initial public offering value of $37 million, earning a 101% annualized return on investment for ARD.
>1969 General Radio introduces first commercial computer-controlled logic circuit analyzer – creating the automatic testing industry; Cambridge-based Bolt, Beranek & Newman [today part of Raytheon] builds thefirst “nodes” of the ARPAnet in California using computers made by Waltham-based Honeywell. Within a year, ARPAnet expands across the country and becomes the eventual basis for the Internet.
>1970 Honeywell merges its computer business with General Electric's to form Honeywell Information Systems.
>1972 Polaroid introduces SX-70 Single Lens Reflex instant color camera. Dr. Edwin Land is on cover of Life magazine. Company continues expansion along Route 128 with film and camera manufacturing in Waltham and Norwood.
>1976 As older industries continue to falter, Massachusetts unemployment rate briefly exceeds 12 percent. Rising taxes and energy costs add to “misery index.”
>1977 Walter Gilbert and Allan Maxam at Harvard University devise method for sequencing DNA using chemicals rather than enzymes, accelerating growth of biotechnologies sector in region.
>1979 VisiCalc, the first computer spreadsheet, is developed and marketed by. Harvard Business School student Dan Bricklin and partner Bob Frankston; EMC founded by Richard J. Egan and Roger Marino in Newton, Massachusetts. Initial products are add-on memory for minicomputers.
>1986 Digital Equipment Corporation founder Ken Olsen named “America’s Most Successful Entrepreneur” by Fortune magazine; With $3 billion in revenue and 30,000 employees, Wang Laboratories ranks 161 on the Fortune 500.
>1988: The first graphics supercomputers are announced by Chelmsford-based Apollo and its competitors – including Sun Microsystems [located for a while on Network Dr. in Burlington eventually acquired by Oracle with locations on Rt-128 in Burlington next to where High Voltage Engineering once existed]; 1988 Digital Equipment Corporation employs 120,000 people, roughly half of them in Massachusetts, achieves market value of $24 billion and ranks 38 on the Fortune 500.
>1992 Two years after the death of its founder, Dr. An Wang, Wang Laboratories seeks Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection; Board of Digital Equipment Corporation forces Ken Olsen to leave the company he founded.
>1998 Digital Equipment Corporation purchased by PC-maker, Compaq for $9.6 billion; EMC software revenue reaches $445 million, making EMC the world’s fastest-growing major software company Total revenue (including hardware) nears $4 billion, more than $1 billion from Europe.
>1999 EMC purchases Data General for $1.1 billion.
Note unless indicated all quotes are from *1 and all > history is from *3
refs:
*1
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...uEmz3iNLeI0YSHveQ&sig2=o5ctUEEdL9Moli-ngXksQQ
*2 http://articles.boston.com/2011-09-...office-buildings-suburban-office-office-space
*3 http://www.route128history.org/id8.html
*4 http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...UGCmJolmELqpucZdw&sig2=soyWZumrO8ELV9XjdNTvww
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Route_128
http://massmoments.org/moment.cfm?mid=246
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tl;dr
Well, unlike van, I do appreciate reading about history and I while I was aware of many of the general points, I have not covered it in this depth. Although it seems like you tailed off at the end (I can imagine, must have been tired).
And I would like to make it clear that I'm not interested in running off into the woods of NH
I rather like being in the city where there's lots of things to do and interesting people. Also, lots of opportunities.
The history of venture capital, research and development in the Boston area is a story about the city of Boston, not Rt-128. Cities provide the chances for people to meet, the resources for them to use, and the support they need to build their ideas.
It is quite common for mostly self-contained, self-sufficient businesses to eventually take themselves outside cities, Boston is not unusual in this respect at all. It is natural, and frees up room inside cities for new and different businesses.
I find it amusing that Callahan proposed highway Rt-128 as a solution to the problem of congestion inside Boston, and as a means for through traffic to skirt the city. When I suggest that through traffic ought to have been directed onto Rt-128 instead of building the Big Dig, I get yelled at. Now I can just say: "It was Callahan's idea!"
The story of Rt-128 you tell seems to me to be a massive confirmation of the 'fundamental law of highway congestion.' Namely, that traffic always follows and fills capacity. Adding a freeway lane just brings more traffic to fill that lane, after a little while, you are back to the same level of congestion you had before. I should also point out the corollary: transit cannot fix congestion. It can help more people travel though, in a given corridor.
Ok, it is pretty late now, time to leave this discussion for another day.
And I would like to make it clear that I'm not interested in running off into the woods of NH
I rather like being in the city where there's lots of things to do and interesting people. Also, lots of opportunities.The history of venture capital, research and development in the Boston area is a story about the city of Boston, not Rt-128. Cities provide the chances for people to meet, the resources for them to use, and the support they need to build their ideas.
It is quite common for mostly self-contained, self-sufficient businesses to eventually take themselves outside cities, Boston is not unusual in this respect at all. It is natural, and frees up room inside cities for new and different businesses.
I find it amusing that Callahan proposed highway Rt-128 as a solution to the problem of congestion inside Boston, and as a means for through traffic to skirt the city. When I suggest that through traffic ought to have been directed onto Rt-128 instead of building the Big Dig, I get yelled at. Now I can just say: "It was Callahan's idea!"
The story of Rt-128 you tell seems to me to be a massive confirmation of the 'fundamental law of highway congestion.' Namely, that traffic always follows and fills capacity. Adding a freeway lane just brings more traffic to fill that lane, after a little while, you are back to the same level of congestion you had before. I should also point out the corollary: transit cannot fix congestion. It can help more people travel though, in a given corridor.
Ok, it is pretty late now, time to leave this discussion for another day.
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I was just being a dick
That was a great history, thanks. I grew up in Arlington so if you have any more history about when they widened Rt 2 I'd love to hear it.
That was a great history, thanks. I grew up in Arlington so if you have any more history about when they widened Rt 2 I'd love to hear it.
whighlander
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I was just being a dick
That was a great history, thanks. I grew up in Arlington so if you have any more history about when they widened Rt 2 I'd love to hear it.
Van -- coming soon -- when I get another burst of energy coupled with the time to put it together
Rt-2 of course is tied up in the proposed extensions of the Red Line past Alewife and of course it was supposed to terminate on the Inner Belt
but all that controversial stuff aside its a fascinating story with a lot of aspects
For instance:
I've always been intrigued by the water seeping out of the cut at several places as well as the base geology which was exposed when the cut was blasted through the bedrock
I've also enjoyed watching the micro climate effects -- what might be snow in Arlington Heights turns into just cold rain by the time you get to Alewife
more later
Ok, then, how about subsidy per user?
90% of commuters get to work by car in the US-- if congress chipped in $30MMM per year from the general fund(180MM users) that's $150/user.
The MBTA by comparison-- 1.3MM users/day $1.4MMM in revenue/year, with $430MM in fares, leaving a gap of 970MM, which amounts to about $750/user (assuming revenue= expenses).
Ok, so not all toll roads are self-funding-- but a significant number of them are. The MassPike between 128 and downtown operates at a significant surplus that is used to pay down Big Dig debt.
The Big Dig (and every govt project) could have costs cut by 1/4 (or more) if it weren't for prevailing wage laws. I'd have preferred to see the Big Dig funded by tolls.
The original intent of the road system was the same for one fare in mass transit-- look at the subsidy per user napkin math, which is probably the best way to look at this issue.
The $30 billion I spoke about earlier is only a small piece of a massive amount of subsidy necessary to maintain roads and highways. If gas tax revenue is devoted entirely to highway maintenance, then what money goes to mitigating gasoline externalities and pollution? And don't forget about non-interstates, either. They are 97.5% of roads.
There was a hugely comprehensive study on this last year, actually, which covers this in way more detail than I have energy for: Do Roads Pay For Themselves?
I also would prefer to see the Big Dig and other roads funded by tolls, at least to a much larger extent. Certainly that would be more fair to I-90 users. Note that the TFC identified a funding gap for the Western Turnpike as well as the Boston extension, though.
MBTA's budget is $1.62 billion. Of that, $405 million is due to debt service, not operations cost. Of the $1.2 billion remaining, about $300 million goes to the Commuter Rail subsidy. $400 million to wages. Notably, the RIDE costs about $84 million, but should really be considered a state aide service that for historical/arbitrary reasons is provided by the T.
The method of counting cost per user is not a bad one for purposes of analysis, but it is far more complicated than what you have presented. Marginal operating cost per rider for the T is negligible and goes down the more people ride it. Increasing the number of vehicles commuting into the city of Boston increases the operating costs of the roads, and accommodating all those cars costs the city tremendously in terms of pollution, space on the road and parking lots. The T has lots of problems, but the city couldn't function without it.
There was a hugely comprehensive study on this last year, actually, which covers this in way more detail than I have energy for: Do Roads Pay For Themselves?
I also would prefer to see the Big Dig and other roads funded by tolls, at least to a much larger extent. Certainly that would be more fair to I-90 users. Note that the TFC identified a funding gap for the Western Turnpike as well as the Boston extension, though.
MBTA's budget is $1.62 billion. Of that, $405 million is due to debt service, not operations cost. Of the $1.2 billion remaining, about $300 million goes to the Commuter Rail subsidy. $400 million to wages. Notably, the RIDE costs about $84 million, but should really be considered a state aide service that for historical/arbitrary reasons is provided by the T.
The method of counting cost per user is not a bad one for purposes of analysis, but it is far more complicated than what you have presented. Marginal operating cost per rider for the T is negligible and goes down the more people ride it. Increasing the number of vehicles commuting into the city of Boston increases the operating costs of the roads, and accommodating all those cars costs the city tremendously in terms of pollution, space on the road and parking lots. The T has lots of problems, but the city couldn't function without it.