But do we want the same number of cars on the pike 10 years from now as we had 10 years ago? I don’t. Induced demand is real and it cuts both ways. If you want less traffic you need to reduce travel lanes. You can’t decongest highways, you can only make them smaller (and still congested, but with lower volume).
Which circles back to the original argument, which is that if you cut lanes on the Pike here, you're likely forever dooming yourself to requiring Storrow to remain largely as-is instead of the various (distant) future ideas people have about downgrading it.
I also think that should anyone with any actual power float this idea today or in any realistically near future, you are going to get a hell of a lot of forceful opposition coming out of the suburbs to the West. They may not control what Boston does with it's local roads, but they certainly are going to have plenty of influence at MassDOT and the Governor's office about this.
If you want less cars soon, congestion pricing (and transit improvements) still makes far more sense to me than trying to brute force it through questionable road ideas.
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Perhaps more to my frustration: This whole focus is still pointless. The "throat" is not, and will not be an attractive piece of parkland where anyone will ever choose to spend time in, under even the craziest proposals people are throwing around.
Here's a wilder one than anyone has proposed. Wave a magic wand, SFR/Storrow disappears
completely. Ignore all the questions about cars/roads in that, lets just focus what we gain from this far more drastic change in the throat: Nothing.
Well, that's not true. You get about ~50ft, for a whopping....~75ft wide patch of land instead of a ~25ft wide one. 75ft is about the width of the parkland at Memorial Drive + Audrey Street. (which only has a single narrower paved path).
Go Street View that and picture it with a beautiful....elevated highway, rail line, and BU's loading docks there instead of the far less unpleasant Mem Dr.
Not very appealing, not a very useful piece of parkland other than as non-motorized connection to other, nicer sections. Does anyone choose to spend time there? No. Is there really much land to even work with once you've used 25+ft of it for the split ped/bike path already planned that will actually be useful? Also no.
In short, no one gains anything worthwhile in terms of parkland from even a
far wilder idea than "dropping a lane from the Pike", so it seems utterly ridiculous to try to say that it's worth delaying/reworking the project to get very marginally more pleasant scenery for a 1000ft stretch of path.