I-695, Soutwst X-Way, Mystic Valley Prkway, S. End Bypass

With all the opposition to highways and how they will destroy homes, displace the elderly, and tear up neighborhoods, have highways been built that have actually done such a thing? Okay, I know people say the Central Artery did tear up neighborhoods, but that has since been rectified and in a beautiful way. But I’ve never heard someone complain about how the Mass Pike or 128 tore up the neighborhood or some poor persons home and they had no where to go. Is it more a fear of change rather than a clear vision of the desired outcome?
Click to expand...

290 through Worcester did a lot of damage. It took out a swath of functioning neighborhoods and cut off the mostly residential hills from the downtown core of the city which was one of the main reasons Worcester's downtown tanked.
 
Welcome to AB ChingChing!

As Matthew pointed out, highways into cities like Boston were built to connect suburban bedroom communities to a commercial core. That model, while not a colossal failure (obviously the US rose as an economic superpower while converting old cities and building new ones to that model), has proven not to be the best way to organize a city. Greater Boston has a moratorium on highway building because new highways can't solve the failures of the old highways. Here in Boston (perhaps not everywhere, but clearly here) adding more capacity to highways will just make traffic and congestion worse. The final destination of all those cars on the highways is still the narrow, winding streets of Boston, Cambridge, etc. If anything, we need to find a way to reduce demand for cars (not people, just their cars!) to enter the city. Building new highways induces demand.

The thinking of the 60's that built all the highways we have was flawed. Policy has adjusted as the adverse effects of overuse of automobiles becomes more and clear. I think you'll see tweaks and improvements to aid the efficiency of the roads we have, but I don't think we'll ever see an official policy to increase car access to urban centers.
 
cozzyd said:
Traffic's not a huge quality of life issue unless the cars are moving too fast. If it's gridlocked, you can walk across the street at any time :)
Click to expand...

If they're gridlocked their still spewing emissions into the air, even more so than if they are rolling. We don't want boston to look like LA do we?

As mentioned above, building new highways does no real good for the city. 128, needs to be and rightfully is the cutoff. What we do so desperately need is increased and improved public transportation, so that people inside 128 can reduce their dependency on cars, and people outside can drive to the general 128 are and park and ride from there. Cities can be massively efficient ways of living, and a very green way of living if the public transportation is built to accomodate it.
 
meddlepal said:
290 through Worcester did a lot of damage. It took out a swath of functioning neighborhoods and cut off the mostly residential hills from the downtown core of the city which was one of the main reasons Worcester's downtown tanked.
Click to expand...

The original Southeast Expressway construction, south of the Dewey Tunnel, and the Mass Pike Corridor chewed up about half of residential Chinatown. Half of Hudson Street, All of Albany Street, Curve Street, Ohio Street, Corning Street, Kirkland Street, Porter Street, Wheeler Street and Broadway in the South Cove were all raised. (The Mass Pike did not fit in the old rail alignment in the area near South Station, too many rail lines.)
 
Welcome to the board ChingChing. As other have mentioned, building urban highways has HUGE destructive, detrimental effects to urban neighborhoods, and only creates more demand and more gridlock. It seems like you have some very naive perspectives about what the Inner Belt and South West Expressway would have meant for the metro-area.
 
bobthebuilder said:
Cities can be massively efficient ways of living, and a very green way of living if the public transportation is built to accomodate it.
Click to expand...

And this, in a nutshell, is what's wrong with Boston. We rightly stopped construction of highways, but did not do enough expansion of transit. It kills me to think of what a Big Dig level investment in transit could have done. Ah well, off to crazy transit pitches, I suppose.
 
BussesAin'tTrains said:
It seems like you have some very naive perspectives about what the Inner Belt and South West Expressway would have meant for the metro-area.
Click to expand...

To be fair to our new poster, I was also was naive about many urban planning and transportation issues before I took an interest and started reading this forum and many other great sources on those topics. This place is a treasure trove of information on the past, present, and future of the Boston area.
 
HenryAlan said:
And this, in a nutshell, is what's wrong with Boston. We rightly stopped construction of highways, but did not do enough expansion of transit. It kills me to think of what a Big Dig level investment in transit could have done. Ah well, off to crazy transit pitches, I suppose.
Click to expand...

I'm glad for the Big Dig and it's decent (if far from perfect) restoration of downtown neighborhoods, but wish that it wasn't exclusively the transit aspects that got shelved, delayed, and/or cut entirely. Red-Blue connection, North-South connection, GLX... they were all there originally. If not for the "car is king" mentality of the time those essential elements wouldn't have been considered expendable. I think if it was all happening today that the political will would exist to make sure they survived. I don't know what the ultimate cost saving was, but I'm sure it is many times less than these projects are going to cost now that they've been delayed. You can only do open heart surgery on a major city once or twice a century.
 
bobthebuilder said:
If they're gridlocked their still spewing emissions into the air, even more so than if they are rolling. We don't want boston to look like LA do we?
Click to expand...

To get them to roll, you would need way more capacity, which means more cars.
 
fattony said:
I'm glad for the Big Dig and it's decent (if far from perfect) restoration of downtown neighborhoods, but wish that it wasn't exclusively the transit aspects that got shelved, delayed, and/or cut entirely. Red-Blue connection, North-South connection, GLX... they were all there originally. If not for the "car is king" mentality of the time those essential elements wouldn't have been considered expendable. I think if it was all happening today that the political will would exist to make sure they survived. I don't know what the ultimate cost saving was, but I'm sure it is many times less than these projects are going to cost now that they've been delayed. You can only do open heart surgery on a major city once or twice a century.
Click to expand...

The breathing room for a multi-modal solution (functioning roads, functioning transit, and functioning bike/ped connectivity) can come as MassDOT starts letting go of the notion that every time the asphalt gets cut for an improvement there must be an increase in capacity. Old habits die hard, especially when it's the laziest way to justify more pork spending. But it's undeniable that things are changing. Neighborhood preservation is paramount now. The costs of maintaining old infrastructure long past its expiration date is forcing decisions on what's essential and what's surplus-to-requirement. And there is real momentum to start retiring unnecessary, city-scarring capacity: Casey Overpass, McGrath Highway, Rutherford Ave., Bowker Overpass, the Route 79 shitshow in Fall River. With more of that to come as the ex-MDC roads continue to get reined in...trimming the fat on Fellsway, Greenough Blvd., Birmingham Pkwy., the Fresh Pond/Soldiers Field octopus. And the debate on Storrow's ultimate future probably dominating conversation for the next 20 years.

Sooner or later if they want their pork they've got to adapt and go with that momentum, not fight against it. Casey Overpass was the real bellweather there. Every scare tactic about carpocalypses being unleashed on Forest Hills if they didn't make a bigger, better overpass in its place made no impression. It isn't gaining traction on McGrath or Rutherford either. The Bowker teardown proponents started debunking it as their offensive move...not even waiting for the state to start giving the usual song-and-dance and then reacting. Traffic studies that plug in a default 5% increase per X years as if it were some mathematical constant are getting questioned for justification on where and why those volumes are programmed...where before increases were just a given and a starting point.

This is new. And it's not taking unprecedented mass revolts like the 1960's to beat back the DOT's default thinking. So I think we're seeing the beginning of an evolution. They'll resist...they'll resist as long as it's expedient. But diminishing returns aren't going to keep it expedient much longer. If they want their money to build, the planners are going to have to adapt to a post- capacity increase mentality.


And even for asphalt-only construction, it matters to take a pass on capacity-increasers when it can address highway bottlenecks that are failure points under any load or capacity. Like straightening out all those mangled half-interchanges that were never finished. Fixing minor interchanges and weaving problems. And realizing that full-size shoulders are sometimes just as important to keeping the traffic flowing resiliently as the actual travel lanes, and that claiming every ounce of space for extra operating lanes sometimes does more harm than good. Drive modernized, breakdown travel-banned 128 vs. the artificially zipper-narrowed SE Expressway when there's an accident: it's a temporary blip vs. an entire commute flushed down the drain twice a week or more. How much do you want to wager that simply removing the zipper for full left-and-right shoulders could help the Expressway un-FUBAR itself more than widening it the rest of Dorchester to extend the HOV lane?
 
^ plugging in 0% as the default increase was a major theme of the comments in the most recent Bowker meeting.
 
meddlepal said:
290 through Worcester did a lot of damage. It took out a swath of functioning neighborhoods and cut off the mostly residential hills from the downtown core of the city which was one of the main reasons Worcester's downtown tanked.
Click to expand...

Worcester's still lucky that the western bypass wasn't realized; that would have cut off downtown on the western side and left it completely isolated.

Like the SW corridor in Boston, New Haven also saw a big strip of neighborhoods flattened for a highway tat was never built, RT 34 in this case.
 
chingching48 said:
There’s also now the rest of Route 2 which is left under-utilized and you can fly through at speeds greater than the speed limit during the peak of rush hour while parallel highways that have been completed (the Mass Pike) are at a standstill.
Click to expand...

Route 2 between Alewife and Rte. 128 (I-95) should be narrowed to 2 general lanes each direction, plus a single reversible bus-only lane. The space created by the narrowing would be converted to a linear park with a trail linking Concord to Alewife.

Narrowing the Route 2 Expressway is the solution, not widening the roads it dumps into from Alewife into Boston.
 
Charlie_mta said:
Route 2 between Alewife and Rte. 128 (I-95) should be narrowed to 2 general lanes each direction, plus a single reversible bus-only lane. The space created by the narrowing would be converted to a linear park with a trail linking Concord to Alewife.

Narrowing the Route 2 Expressway is the solution, not widening the roads it dumps into from Alewife into Boston.
Click to expand...

A trail? How? It's got two frontage roads running the whole length criscrossed intermittently by high-speed ramps and the highway is in a big-ass rock cut through most of Belmont. That would be the world's most dangerously uninviting trail. Unless you put it in the road median...where it would just be the world's most street-inaccessible uninviting trail.

Also...there IS a trail to Concord: Minuteman to Bedford Depot, hang a left onto the Reformatory Branch Trail. 4 miles to Monument Sq. in downtown Concord. Dirt and gravel surface at the moment, but Bedford has a paving job in final design pending funding for construction and Concord is looking to initiate the same on the portion in its borders.


I'll agree that 2 needs to be lane-dropped from 8 to 6 lanes in Arlington and Belmont since that capacity's wasted by Route 3 never being built to connect. But that's it. There's no need for HOV or bus-only lanes. The highway's free and clear of congestion everywhere except EB into Alewife and the buses already keep a brisk pace on the frontage roads. It is literally just Alewife rotary ruining it for everyone car or bus. Which is why MassDOT focusing on interchange de-FUBAR'ing is a way better value than MassDOT focusing on capacity enhancement.
 
chingching48 said:
For example, I have what technically should be a reverse commute, from my apartment in Charlestown to my office in Waltham. However, the most direct route, Route 2, abruptly ends at Alewife, so to get onto (or off of depending on the way) of Route 2, I have to sit in traffic for an hour plus meandering through local roads because the extension of Route 2 through Cambridge was canceled. What results is poor safety and adverse traffic conditions for those who are affected by all this local traffic that wouldn’t be there had the highway had been finished.
Click to expand...

Which I consider a quite reasonable trade-off in exchange for not destroying my neighborhood. Porter Square would not be a nice place at all if Route 2 sliced through it on the Fitchburg RR right of way. Neither would Union Square. The damage to the urban environment would radiate out all the way to Davis and Inman and beyond.

But I’ve never heard someone complain about how the Mass Pike or 128 tore up the neighborhood or some poor persons home and they had no where to go.
Click to expand...

If you find old enough residents of Newton, I bet they'll have plenty to say about what the Pike did to their city. Surely Newton Corner, Newtonville, and West Newton would all be better places without the Pike having amputated parts of their commercial districts and severed them from the residential areas to their south.
 
Last edited:
chingching48 said:
For example, I have what technically should be a reverse commute, from my apartment in Charlestown to my office in Waltham. However, the most direct route, Route 2, abruptly ends at Alewife, so to get onto (or off of depending on the way) of Route 2, I have to sit in traffic for an hour plus meandering through local roads because the extension of Route 2 through Cambridge was canceled. What results is poor safety and adverse traffic conditions for those who are affected by all this local traffic that wouldn’t be there had the highway had been finished.
Click to expand...

I think at a certain point you might consider that the problem isn't that you don't have an easy commute to Waltham from Charlestown, it's that you're probably better off living somewhere closer to Waltham.

And come to think of it, taking I-93 from Charlestown to the Pike to 128 is just as direct to Waltham as a hypothetical Inner Belt to 2 to 128 would be.
 
Really, you would probably be better served by a shuttle from a commuter rail station on the Fitchburg line, although the office parks there probably don't provide one.
 
There are bus shuttles all over the Waltham office-park area from Alewife station. See http://128bc.org. One of their shuttles also intercepts the Fitchburg line at Waltham Center.
 
Ron Newman said:
Which I consider a quite reasonable trade-off in exchange for not destroying my neighborhood. Porter Square would not be a nice place at all if Route 2 sliced through it on the Fitchburg RR right of way. Neither would Union Square. The damage to the urban environment would radiate out all the way to Davis and Inman and beyond.
Click to expand...

Yeah-- the pike absolutely devastated kenmore square, the back bay, and much of allston brighton making it completely undesirable for every generation of yuppies that have moved to the city since the 1960s.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top