I-90 Interchange Improvement Project & West Station | Allston

F-Line to Dudley said:
I don't think there's going to be any clarity on this particular issue until the ongoing maint facility siting study that just kicked off releases some prelim findings. It's entirely possible the Pike project managers are out-of-sync with the thrust of that ongoing Readville-leaning maint study, since there's been no published updates on prior siting studies in many years. The Pike team may simply be placeholding with old BP site info until the new study is complete. After all, they sure as hell ain't done troubleshooting West's layout or that incomprehensible street grid. Movement towards resolution on the 'throat' stalemate just means something might actually be able to get done before we're dead. I still have less-than-zero confidence that the land will be development-ready before it happens given the incoherence of the grid and continued crickets from Harvard about land usage. And West has not seen its last...much less second- or third-from-last...major design reboot and associated public comment primal screaming if it's still clinging to that pointlessly self-alienating inverted layout vs. the yard.
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Given that we heard about this for the first time today, I doubt that the project managers for the Allston project had thought about it. Kind of came across as someone from the T giving it some real thought for the first time, saying "holy sh"! and running down the hall to yell at them.

Also, good luck getting any resolution on anything soon. People's Pike is basically burning Pollack in effigy this evening. We've reached the point of true deadlock: activists are demanding lane reductions. Pollack is pointing out that you'd have to sextuple ridership on the Worcester Line to have it carry the same throughput as SFR.
 
George_Apley said:
Is there some reason why most of SFR can't go underneath the outbound side of the new viaduct?
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Here's what I recommend: put the eastbound SFR lanes under the Pike (2nd rendering):
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I see no reason why it could't be done. The ends where SFR enters and leaves would just require some offset posts and lengthened cross-beams.
 
Charlie_mta said:
The ends where SFR enters and leaves would just require some offset posts and lengthened cross-beams.
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As Van and Equilibria alluded to, I think that's a lot harder/more expensive than it seems for a 4 lane highway viaduct.

What's the possibility of putting SFR WB over EB? Added maintenance costs for a new viaduct, but I think it simplifies the complexities of reorienting and properly curving SFR EB from under WB to a 4-lane surface highway.

Overall, thinking through all the alternatives, no matter what they do, this is a lot of spending for riverfront pedestrian space. Not saying if its worth it or not, just a high price tag..
 
Merge SFR into a ground-level Pike at the western end of the throat, eliminate Storrow from there to Mass Ave along with Charlesgate, downgrade Storrow to a signalized boulevard from Mass Ave to Longfellow, invest the hundreds of millions of dollars saved into RUR. Boom. Somebody make me Transportation Secretary.
 
Equilibria said:
Pollack is pointing out that you'd have to sextuple ridership on the Worcester Line to have it carry the same throughput as SFR.
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Says the official who has expended more energy in 2020 trolling RUR and East-West/NNEIRI than doing any other aspect of her job. Heaven forbid we actually implement projects that do end up sextupling the B&A's ridership in our lifetimes and deprive ourselves the fun of arguing about lane capacity on a substandard horror-parkway for another lifetime-and-a-half.


It's fitting in a way that all umpteen sides of this cursed project have proceeded to just setting a meet in the middle of the BP moonscape and proceeding to eat themselves in self-cannibalism till the last one standing bleeds out from a missing arm. Just in time for the next human sacrifice to repeat itself on Widett anti-planning. Our intrepid institutions are totally killin' it with blank-canvas imagineering right now. Killing it straight into the ground.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
Says the official who has expended more energy in 2020 trolling RUR and East-West/NNEIRI than doing any other aspect of her job. Heaven forbid we actually implement projects that do end up sextupling the B&A's ridership in our lifetimes and deprive ourselves the fun of arguing about lane capacity on a substandard horror-parkway for another lifetime-and-a-half.
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You aren't wrong about her trolling, but the throughput (which they may be embellishing, I haven't double-checked them) is striking nonetheless. I'd love to do projects that scale up Worcester Line ridership that much, but that doesn't do anything about the next decade or two. Secretary Pollack's schtick is focusing on person throughput, and measured that way, SFR is way more important than the Worcester Line will be for decades.

lexicon506 said:
Merge SFR into a ground-level Pike at the western end of the throat, eliminate Storrow from there to Mass Ave along with Charlesgate, downgrade Storrow to a signalized boulevard from Mass Ave to Longfellow, invest the hundreds of millions of dollars saved into RUR. Boom. Somebody make me Transportation Secretary.
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This argument has been done to death, but I'll just summarize. Everything you just said doesn't save money, it costs money. Building ramps to Mass Ave costs money (if it were physically possible, which it isn't). Tearing out SFR costs money. Building the high-speed ramps to merge SFR into the Pike probably offsets whatever you save in this project by not reconstructing SFR (not to mention it makes a dent in the available space for neighborhood building in Lower Allston). You're proposing hundreds of millions in new capital investment to do all of that, on top of the tens of billions RUR will cost.

EDIT: Here are the slides...

 
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Also, good luck getting any resolution on anything soon. People's Pike is basically burning Pollack in effigy this evening. We've reached the point of true deadlock: activists are demanding lane reductions. Pollack is pointing out that you'd have to sextuple ridership on the Worcester Line to have it carry the same throughput as SFR.
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It seems disingenuous of Pollack to compare SFR to the Worcester Line because they aren't really serving overlapping commuters/communities. This is all spitballing analysis, so I may be way off-base, but the western end of SFR is carrying a lot of commuters/drivers from Brighton and Watertown, not neighborhoods that can easily utilize the Worcester Line. The further east you go, the more SFR is filling with drivers from Allston, Cambridge, Belmont, Arlington, and Route 2 commuters. SFR fills a completely different commuter niche from the Worcester Line. It actually overlaps more with the Fitchburg Line's catchment than the Worcester Line's.

I guess she's just using a rhetorical device to show that "car is still king" and therefore we have to accommodate our plans around that, but from an argumentative standpoint it's fairly a useless datapoint (if it's even true).
 
George_Apley said:
It seems disingenuous of Pollack to compare SFR to the Worcester Line because they aren't really serving overlapping commuters/communities. This is all spitballing analysis, so I may be way off-base, but the western end of SFR is carrying a lot of commuters/drivers from Brighton and Watertown, not neighborhoods that can easily utilize the Worcester Line. The further east you go, the more SFR is filling with drivers from Allston, Cambridge, Belmont, Arlington, and Route 2 commuters. SFR fills a completely different commuter niche from the Worcester Line. It actually overlaps more with the Fitchburg Line's catchment than the Worcester Line's.

I guess she's just using a rhetorical device to show that "car is still king" and therefore we have to accommodate our plans around that, but from an argumentative standpoint it's fairly a useless datapoint (if it's even true).
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You're not wrong about the catchments. I also don't think the point is "car is still king", it's more "we don't want to eliminate lanes on a road that has 50% of the volume of the Turnpike on that short stretch".
 
True. Really what this whole planning mess has shown is that the state has no cohesive vision for improving/remaking the transportation network in metroBoston. MassDOT is content to address projects as they come up with no consideration for the big picture of why transportation conditions are what they are and how we could mitigate them.

For example, the state *should* have been looking at ways to make SFR less critical to the Boston transportation network a decade ago. SFR is a consequence of bad transportation connections northwest of Boston. The massive transit hole between the Lowell Line and the Fitchburg Line. The attempt of FPP/SFR to serve as both an arterial for suburban commuters and important city streets in Cambridge. Those aren't easy solves, but that those questions seem completely off the state's radar is not good.
 
George_Apley said:
True. Really what this whole planning mess has shown is that the state has no cohesive vision for improving/remaking the transportation network in metroBoston. MassDOT is content to address projects as they come up with no consideration for the big picture of why transportation conditions are what they are and how we could mitigate them.

For example, the state *should* have been looking at ways to make SFR less critical to the Boston transportation network a decade ago. SFR is a consequence of bad transportation connections northwest of Boston. The massive transit hole between the Lowell Line and the Fitchburg Line. The attempt of FPP/SFR to serve as both an arterial for suburban commuters and important city streets in Cambridge. Those aren't easy solves, but that those questions seem completely off the state's radar is not good.
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One could also make an argument that SFR is a consequence of not building the Route 2/3 connector to I-93 that would have obliterated the whole Somerville Avenue corridor and both Porter and Union Squares. As you've been saying, the path is clear: people go from Route 2 to Fresh Pond Parkway to SFR. A true regional solution for this problem would do two things:

- Extend the Red Line up Route 2, providing more convenient park-and-ride capacity toward (and ideally at) Route 128.
- Build something like DaveM's original proposal for Lower Allston that obviates the need for SFR by directing the FPP traffic due southeast from Cambridge through the Harvard atheltic fields to merge into the Turnpike. That reduces SFR to serving as a distribution road from the Turnpike to Mass Ave, Fenway, and Kenmore, a function that might require fewer lanes.

I completely agree that regional planning needs to get some chutzpah. That said, if you try to do it quickly without collaborating and finding consensus with the community you get Urban Renewal and the postwar highway boom. You're committing to spending a lot of time on this, forever, and someone will always be left unhappy.

You could say the same thing about this project. If MassDOT had just decided to replace the viaduct as an anonymous bridge project, it would probably be done now. They chose to make it multimodal. They chose to reduce the footprint of the interchange. They chose an urban interchange design. All of those choices were motivated by the desire to do right by the community and see the big picture, and all it's done is make the project more expensive, more impactful during construction, and less popular.
 
Yep, you're right on all counts. I'm just frustrated at how urban entropy makes that kind of work so disruptive and expensive. The cost of doing things wrong a half-century ago really weighs on present possibilities.
 
Equilibria said:
This argument has been done to death, but I'll just summarize. Everything you just said doesn't save money, it costs money. Building ramps to Mass Ave costs money (if it were physically possible, which it isn't). Tearing out SFR costs money. Building the high-speed ramps to merge SFR into the Pike probably offsets whatever you save in this project by not reconstructing SFR (not to mention it makes a dent in the available space for neighborhood building in Lower Allston). You're proposing hundreds of millions in new capital investment to do all of that, on top of the tens of billions RUR will cost.
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Of course this idea would cost money, and a lot of it. But I'd be willing to bet the upfront costs would be at most equal to and likely lower than rebuilding the current SFR+Pike highway infrastructure. And the real savings kick in once you factor in maintenance, which is the whole reason this project is even being discussed.

My main point is why is MassDOT spending countless hours studying and debating which overbuilt highway plan is best but has never once stopped to consider an alternative that gets rid of the roadways strangling this city? Are they scared of something? Which is more radical: sextupling ridership on the Worcester line and eliminating/downgrading Storrow east of the throat OR pouring billions of dollars and 10 years of disruption to jam 12 lanes of highway into 240 ft. of space?
 
lexicon506 said:
My main point is why is MassDOT spending countless hours studying and debating which overbuilt highway plan is best but has never once stopped to consider an alternative that gets rid of the roadways strangling this city? Are they scared of something? Which is more radical: sextupling ridership on the Worcester line and eliminating/downgrading Storrow east of the throat OR pouring billions of dollars and 10 years of disruption to jam 12 lanes of highway into 240 ft. of space?
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Well, this project will cost around $1B upfront, and RUR (the way you sextuple ridership) will cost something like $30-$50B upfront, so...

I support RUR, but dollar-for-dollar roads always beat the crap out of transit per person throughput. Way simpler infrastructure and the users pay the operating costs.
 
lexicon506 said:
Merge SFR into a ground-level Pike at the western end of the throat, eliminate Storrow from there to Mass Ave along with Charlesgate, downgrade Storrow to a signalized boulevard from Mass Ave to Longfellow, invest the hundreds of millions of dollars saved into RUR. Boom. Somebody make me Transportation Secretary.
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Or if you don't want to go that far, eliminate SFR between the BU bridge and Cambridge/River St.

Tuck SFR away from the Charles to the W somewhere in between Western Ave and the Doubletree, either just N or just S of Genzyme. Then merge the shifted SFR with a ground-level Pike in whole street grid redesign at Beacon Park. Storrow can then merge into the ground-level Pike just W of the BU bridge, requiring just one flyover to connect the Pike E to Storrow E. Storrow W can merge with the Pike W at grade.
 
At the end of the day, the Mass Pike viaduct replacement is probably the only politically feasible option. At the throat area, any grounding of the Pike and/or or elevating of SFR is radioactive with NIMBYs and environmentalists. Just slap up a replacement viaduct, but cantilevered slightly over SFR to increase the pathway zone along the river. That's all that can be done.
 
Too bad there isn’t the political fortitude to implement a partial lane drop in the throat.
 
I'm probably missing something here, but I don't get the great deal of handwringing over the "throat" from a non-motorized perspective beyond connectivity between the city + the riverfront path and ped/bike path widening/separation, and it looks like they're managing both.

We're talking about a ~1/4 mile stretch of land that would have been a largely forgettable piece of "park" even in the best alternatives that have been seriously considered, and few would ever choose to sit on a bench there or spend time there like they do in the wider sections.
 
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