I'm still seeing a lot of "cut a lane" comments that aren't really reckoning with this:
...and just like that, the comments keep zooming right past. Yup, we're in peak frustration alright.
How much clearer can this be.
1. MassDOT says the terms of resolving the 'throat' stalemate must preserve # of thru lanes.
2. Any and all proposals that try to circumvent with lane reductions get rejected sight-unseen and land on the trash heap.
3. Any parties with a vested interest in resolving the stalemate will thus work within these terms of engagement, lest they just be wasting time/energy/bandwidth debating things that explicitly won't ever merit real-world consideration.
Despite such crystal-fucking-clear directive laying out point-blank terms...peak frustration apparently entails. . .
. . .overtly ignoring that these terms are real and either talking right past them or assailing their validity in order to talk right past them.
You guys realize that we didn't make the decision to hold the 'throat' design fix to those terms, right? Those terms were imposed by the agency that has to fund this because it's WAY too late in the game for navel-gazing and delays have forced this to be a shovel-ready fix. Meaning they have no time to refactor traffic modeling for ultra- long-term and unforeseen consequences, as that would add too many more years to the decision.
Look...it sucks that lane-drops weren't debated more rigorously early on in the project. I get that. But we're far past early on. If the 'throat' stalemate isn't fixed this immediately turns into a Hartford Viaduct trash-salvage job where 8 figures has to be immediately programmed for in-situ patches of the existing shitty viaduct to punt out another decade to argue amongst selves on existential matters. And that accomplishes nothing except making one's own idea of a more-perfect waterfront that much more impossible to ever fund. Because that patch money gets lit on fire for NO lasting purpose except punting for more time to circular-argue, and drains the coffers even for implementing some of the
better 'throat' alts. You really will not like the remaining options if stalemate overshoots the time limit for emergency patches. That will not allow time for a more perfect design; it only serves to bankrupt the 'imagination' fund.
This is why the decision is pinned in as "shovel-ready or bust". We can't afford a Hartford-level metastisizing of the stalemate. All of the nice things disappear if that happens, and there will be forever-regrets about the time v. resource squander.
We can either acknowledge that this is the unchangeable bind that constrains the fix options to what they are, or we can let peak frustration facilitate mass denial and squander the time limit for squeezing even the imperfectly nice things out of the fix decision. Pretending we have the terms in front of us to reinvent-from-scratch the lane-drop debate is sticking one's head firmly in the sand at this point.
Talk over it some more to your heart's content if it's THAT impossible to resist the OCD and intensity-of-belief is that hot that the terms the fix is being held to are that no-fair. But do it with eyes wide open on what it actually real-world accomplishes at conversely limiting the options when we run out of time and have a Hartford-like delay quagmire starting to actively suck the resources dry.
