I-90 Interchange Improvement Project & West Station | Allston

I don't think this has been designed yet beyond choosing the alignment and making a basic massing model to demonstrate how things will be positioned.
 
FK4 said:
Seems like a decent plan overall. We get a wider park. Now we just need to make the state demand connections from Comm Ave across the Pike.
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+1

Although I was kind of hoping for a bikeway viaduct, since I think it would be fun to ride on, and obviously less expensive to maintain.
 
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Charlie_mta said:
Cambridge will never allow filling in the Charles River 10 feet (or probably more). That proposal was killed in the early 1960's when the original Pike design had both the Pike and SFR on the ground, side by side. It wasn't allowed then, and since NIMBYism has gotten all the more virulent since then, it won't happen now. Cambridge NIMBYs are some of the most ferocious.
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Sure there will be lawsuits... but fight those lawsuits with the 100 million dollars taxpayers will save. Charles River is an artificial waterway sculpted from 150 years of being filled in and dammed. For the price of a slice of the river not much longer than my office the state could do this the right way.

I'm a firm no on this project. A billion dollars in taxpayer money down the toilet so Harvard can make a few billion in a real estate deal and we can all get more traffic.
 
tangent said:
We could get a huge park and save nearly a billion dollars if we just take the land from Harvard and make it all a park.
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Ha. Good luck.

It would be nice to think that the plan for Beacon Yards could include one large park, but, as always happens, I'm sure instead we'll get a pathwork series of smaller and useless greenspaces that don't communicate with each other and have no central organizing principle.
 
FK4 said:
Ha. Good luck.

It would be nice to think that the plan for Beacon Yards could include one large park, but, as always happens, I'm sure instead we'll get a pathwork series of smaller and useless greenspaces that don't communicate with each other and have no central organizing principle.
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I was kidding, but it would be a better outcome than this shit plan to build a new elevated roadway along the waterfront... This must have been how it felt when everyone thought it was a great idea to build an elevated central artery along the Boston waterfront.

We are going to be stuck with this complete idiocy for the rest of our lives. Just ground the whole thing... or build some Boring Company tunnels or something. Anything but elevating another multi-lane roadway along the waterfront.

Just to be clear they are moving an elevated roadway... closer to the waterfront
 
Ok thanks I understand now that these are just massing / layout models. Should have been obvious. I still hope this will be well-designed.

Because - as Tangent said what we're doing here is building a wider highway closer to the river. Hard to understand how this is happening in 2019.
 
This isn't in the cards and they're not going to switch plans by just me speculating this idea here, but the trains tracks they are keeping, can it be set up so it can be used a part of a new A-line or Urban Ring?
 
CSTH said:
Because - as Tangent said what we're doing here is building a wider highway closer to the river. Hard to understand how this is happening in 2019.
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No we're not. We are taking 8 elevated lanes and 4 surface level lanes, and re configuring as 8 surface lanes and 4 elevated lanes above the 8 surface lanes. So the current configuration uses 12 lanes worth of land and the new will use 8 lanes worth of land. This is an obvious improvement.
 
HenryAlan said:
No we're not. We are taking 8 elevated lanes and 4 surface level lanes, and re configuring as 8 surface lanes and 4 elevated lanes above the 8 surface lanes. So the current configuration uses 12 lanes worth of land and the new will use 8 lanes worth of land. This is an obvious improvement.
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On the net we gain 20 feet of parkland. The RR ROW (which is currently under the 8 elevated lanes but will be alongside them in the reconfiguration) takes away some of the gain of elevating Soldiers Field Road.

Just about our entire city was built on land reclaimed from the ocean and from tidal flats, but now we as a society have decided that this can NEVER be done again. The Charles itself is a man-made creation. Pushing the Charles riverbank out a few more yards along this stretch and remediating it in other ways seems to make more sense here than building another elevated roadway...
 
HenryAlan said:
No we're not. We are taking 8 elevated lanes and 4 surface level lanes, and re configuring as 8 surface lanes and 4 elevated lanes above the 8 surface lanes. So the current configuration uses 12 lanes worth of land and the new will use 8 lanes worth of land. This is an obvious improvement.
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How is it an improvement to move an elevated road way closer to the river? There will be more shade, more noise, more of a sense of thousands of cars racing over your head as you stroll along the river.

And by not grounding the whole thing you are adding a hundred million to the project and adding tens of millions long term to the maintenance.

All while blocking a better plan because you created some phantom menace in your head about the twelve environmentalists that are going to show up and be pissy at your meetings over ten feet of waterway and/or you are too afraid of BU to take their land.

It would cost very little to go and at least ask regulators to approve the at grade option.

This is a terrible plan which should be DOA.
 
ant8904 said:
This isn't in the cards and they're not going to switch plans by just me speculating this idea here, but the trains tracks they are keeping, can it be set up so it can be used a part of a new A-line or Urban Ring?
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Yes. The Grand Junction is given 2 tracks up to the point it merges with the Worcester Line at West Station, so the ROW for the Urban Ring as far as West is fully provisioned. The remainder of the Harvard Branch deviates off the Worcester alignment and heads north through Harvard's Beacon Park land on alignment TBD while the Worcester Line is given a 4-track berth through the western project limits.


See the "Green Line Reconfiguration" thread for how it would work with a light rail Ring. All Pike designs in the screening allow for the same transit buildout.
 
As was said above, simply remove SFR - everything east of Western/River.

Tie it in to the Pike at the Allston/Cambridge interchange - eastbound to eastbound, westbound to westbound. Arlington or Watertown commuters going to Back Bay who currently use SFR can now use SFR-->Pike and exit at the Pru. Or, downtown, if that's where they're going. The way the on/off ramps on the pike are configured, the reverse commute is equally easy. The only commutes that get adversely affected is Arlington/Watertown to MGH/North Station area.

And by the way, this probably also means you can downgrade the now-truncated Storrow Drive.

*Edited for clarity*
 
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Shepard said:
As was said above, simply remove SFR.

Tie it in to the Pike at the Allston/Cambridge interchange - eastbound to eastbound, westbound to westbound. Arlington or Watertown commuters going to Back Bay who currently use SFR can now use the Pike exit at the Pru. Or, downtown, if that's where they're going. The way the on/off ramps on the pike are configured, the reverse commute is equally easy. The only commutes that get adversely affected is Arlington/Watertown to MGH/North Station area.

And by the way, this probably also means you can downgrade the now-truncated Storrow Drive.
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So to be clear... you're advocating putting all the traffic currently on SFR on... Mass Ave? Since the plan is to put SFR on a viaduct, it's not taking up any more room, so you'd be doing this for the sake of lower maintenance costs and the hope that in 50 years we build a Blue Line extension in the Storrow ROW?

That's assuming that there's width by the Mass Ave bridge - hemmed in by two train lines - for ramps merging SFR and the Pike together, which isn't a given.
 
Sorry, I clarified in an edit above. To expand:

The western end of SFR stays - from the IHOP to Western Ave. Eastbound SFR drivers coming from the west are, at that point, connected straight onto eastbound Pike. My argument is that they can still access the Back Bay and downtown just as easily in that new setup, and the reverse commute would be the same.
 
It doesn't matter how it was created, but the Charles River is navigable waters of the United States. "Fill" of the navigable waters is regulated by Section 404 of the Clean Water Act of 1972.

https://www.epa.gov/cwa-404/clean-water-laws-regulations-executive-orders

It is difficult, but not impossible, to fill in the navigable waters. Overcoming the difficulty is set out here:

https://www.epa.gov/sites/productio...ds_wetlands_mitigation_final_rule_4_10_08.pdf

roughly starting on pdf p. 79. Have fun.
 
stellarfun said:
It doesn't matter how it was created, but the Charles River is navigable waters of the United States. "Fill" of the navigable waters is regulated by Section 404 of the Clean Water Act of 1972.

https://www.epa.gov/cwa-404/clean-water-laws-regulations-executive-orders

It is difficult, but not impossible, to fill in the navigable waters. Overcoming the difficulty is set out here:

https://www.epa.gov/sites/productio...ds_wetlands_mitigation_final_rule_4_10_08.pdf

roughly starting on pdf p. 79. Have fun.
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A Schuylkill Banks-like bike and pedestrian path would not constitue fill, right? It's 2,000 feet long and only cost $18 million five years ago. There already is a bike/pedestrian boardwalk over the river in this stretch that passes under the BU bridge. Couldn't a nicer/brighter/wider version of that be extended the entire length of "the throat" for way less than the cost of elevating SFR?

And besides this, the current regulatory framework by which the cost of turning any water into land is basically infinite is NOT good policy.
 
^I think stacking the roadways does make sense from a space saving point of view anyway.

I’m glad the state has also expanded the scope of the project, which they didn’t have to do.

Since SFR is narrower than the pike, I wonder if it could also leave room for a GLX viaduct ...
 
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