I-90 Interchange Improvement Project & West Station | Allston

cden4 said:
The 4th lane in both directions between Allston and Back Bay really is just an extended on-ramp/off-ramp. Going westbound, the 4th lane is added from the Copley on-ramp and becomes an exit-only lane at the Allston exit. Going eastbound, the 4th lane is added from the Allston on-ramp and becomes exit-only at Copley. So instead of having it continue for that whole length, having 3 lanes in the throat would basically mean that for the middle part, that lane would not be continuous. But already it's very uncommon to have such a long lane that just acts as an auxiliary lane. They'd just be more like regular on-ramps and off-ramps. And in the non-throat sections, you'd have room for real shoulders. You could also create a real acceleration lane westbound at Mass Ave, instead of having it dump you directly into a travel lane.
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I'll disagree with that idea that it's just a long ramp.

It's pretty common at high volume interchanges where an entire lane's worth of people are likely to be getting on/off at all times to not continue all lanes thru, it's just matching lanes to where the volume goes.

And while I'm not a highway designer, it seems to reduce weird speed-up/slow-down effects around interchanges. If you continue all the lanes thru while you've got heavy ramp volume, there's "suddenly" a lot less people on the road between the off-ramp and the matching on-ramp and people speed up/act dumb, only to have a problematic heavy merge into the right lane 1/2 mile ahead and sharp slowdown.

Most of the time those are things like interstate to interstate interchanges.

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Take a look at some of the (old) traffic count schematics and you can see why it makes sense and why losing that lane would probably turn the stretch into a similar mess to the Exit 16/17 area.


As of 2010 in the 8-9AM peak hour going EB, you've got:

6,800 vehicles coming in on 4 lanes from Newton Corner. 1,300 exit at Allston, 5,500 thru (note: this was with the toll plaza in place), 1,400 join.

From Allston to Pru/Copley, you've got 6,900 vehicles on 4 lanes. At Pru/Copley, you've got 2,000 exiting, 4,900 continuing east. Just about 1/4th of the traffic exits at Pru/Copley, so losing 1/4th of the lanes, makes intuitive sense to me.
 
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).
 
fattony said:
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).
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We're talking in circles again about things that have been ruled out in the terms for the fix, as if the talking-around makes it such that those rules never existed. That isn't productive.

Look...how much more simple can this get?
  • The project is not at a conceptual stage of debate. Conceptual started 10 years ago.
  • This decision is to resolve an impasse on locking down the shovel-ready 'throat' design so construction starts can be scheduled.
  • The resolution explicitly is only looking as far back as the final round of presented alts for finding way around the impasse. Blending of features from those alts will be considered if that nets a solve, but it's time-constrained from reopening inquiry to basic existential questions.
  • It's time-limited and constrained like that because this show has to get on the road lest more years of delays in impasse starts wrecking budgets from non-optional temp repairs.
  • The budget gun is the explicit reason why the process isn't going to be cracked wide open again to brand new concepts...because that GUARANTEES enough add'l delays for temp repairs to start eating $$$.
OK...you're an advocate disappointed that it's come to this and wish there were more conceptual reconsideration. Dandy. Now what is your today-move around the ^above^ process constraints? Because simply pretending they don't exist doesn't get you anywhere.
  • Are you satisfied that People's Pike went to the mat to give all due advocacy consideration to lane drops? They had nearly a decade. If there is *any* evidence they got rolled from less-than-stiff-enough spine, what went wrong? And how does the advocacy buck itself up FAST now. Self-answer this with specifics, or you don't have a starting point.
  • If you think an old render was presented satisfactorilly and the state just "ignored" over and over for arbitrary reason...why did it have to wait till now at 11:59th for that to become a crisis? The suggestions on the last 2 pages go as extreme as civil disobedience...so if no one was listened to, why now for pulling out the nukes? Was it not understood that when Final Alts. were presented for consideration without lane drops that's when People's Pike could have drawn the red line in the sand??? Instead of now at the impasse stage after final alts. As before, self-answer...with specifics...that the advocacy held its ground to the satisfaction of lane-drop advocates first. And if there's a gap...better damn well whip People's Pike up for filling it with rigor first before doing battle with MassDOT.
  • Projects don't proceed without following a process. We never get past circular crayon doodles without agreeing to some limiting terms for each successive stage deeper into the game. It's thus understood that project-threatening impasses in overtime have the LEAST leeway for changing process midstream. So given that...how does the advocacy approach changing the process at such a very late and maximally under-stress stage to better terms? Step it out as if you're trying to woo someone shitting bricks over blown schedules that this is in THEIR best interests to consider a last-second relaxing. And describe exactly how much relaxing is realistic for the best interests of someone shitting bricks over more delays creating a temp-patch money raid vicious cycle (Hint: this requires rather painful self-reflection on tolerable compromise vs. ideals).
  • What happens if you do run out of time? You re-vetted the strength of PP's advocacy and made offensive-line corrections. You sounded all alarms about state not negotiating in good enough fate against your bestest no-regrets PP push. You pitched a stakeholder-inclusive process change within best defense of the time crunch. Now chips are down...resolve now or first-wave temp patch funds have to hit the next CIP. Gut-check it for us what happens now? Is it better/worse to stand ground on that 'throat' subset or move on? Get out of the blanket abstract world and say it: "____ would be the worst thing. On a scale of 0-10 it's ____ squander. In the grand scheme of things this matters enough to _____ but doesn't matter enough to ____ in light of [something/somewhere else] ____."

Alright...go. Bottom-line it with a meaty, full-thought answer that upholds an advocacy standard for what YOU want that checks out with how People's Pike is handling it. That holds the state to a least-wiggle room standard for ignoring. That acknowledges the time crunch and works with it...and traces the bounds of what's accomplishable.

Those of you who want lane-drop to be considered...start explaining HOW that goes constructively on the table in WHEN time when the repair gun looms. Making another what/why pitch in isolation isn't moving this discourse forward. Take us from Point A impasse to Point B your-build in three dimensions bound to some sort of delivery process, please. Real-world it for us. Given the stage this project is at that level of specificity is not a big ask. It will specifically be asked of People's Pike if that ends up their stance. So describe how this goes down with them pitching your plan.
 
fattony said:
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).
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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.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
Those of you who want lane-drop to be considered...start explaining HOW that goes constructively on the table in WHEN time when the repair gun looms. Making another what/why pitch in isolation isn't moving this discourse forward. Take us from Point A impasse to Point B your-build in three dimensions bound to some sort of delivery process, please. Real-world it for us. Given the stage this project is at that level of specificity is not a big ask. It will specifically be asked of People's Pike if that ends up their stance. So describe how this goes down with them pitching your plan.
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Why do we need a complete advocacy plan before even bringing up the concept of dropping a lane? Surely the first stage in this process is figuring out the best approach to dropping a lane, and continually shutting down discussion on that topic for no reason continues to baffle me.
 
millerm277 said:
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.
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But that's not what this is about. The parkland is secondary. If there was a solution that eliminated all of the park but fit all of the transportation on the current shoreline, that would be the obvious answer. It doesn't exist. Instead, our options for the rectum (it's narrow, it pushes stuff through by necessity, it looks ugly doing it, and I never want to think about it again) are:

  • Put 12 lanes and 4 tracks and 1 path all at grade. Fill the river. Pollack says this can't pass Federal permitting and EEA and CWRA oppose it on principle.
  • Put something like 9 lanes and 4 tracks and 1 path all at grade. MassDOT hasn't done modeling on whether this would work, but given that SFR and the Pike serve two completely different catchments, it might take new ramps to distribute traffic between the two, which might ruin the "neighborhood grid" of the rest of the project (see davem's old diagram). That's a wholesale redesign that will add years to the discussion and reopen settled issues. We also have no idea if construction staging for this requires temporary filling or bridging in the river, since the final configuration uses all of the available dry land by definition.
  • Put 4 lanes in the air, 8 lanes and 4 tracks and 1 path at grade. This is the "hybrid" concept. It's more expensive both immediately and long-term because it requires a viaduct. Building it requires a temporary bridge in the river, which EEA and CWRA oppose on principle.
  • Put 8 lanes in the air, 4 lanes and 4 tracks and 1 path at grade. This is rebuilding what already exists. It's the most expensive to build and the most expensive to maintain (we'll be right back here in another 60 years), but it has the fewest river impacts.

Those are the options. Not cut lanes or don't cut lanes. Not invest in highways or invest in transit. Urban Rail on the Worcester Line won't happen until this project is done, so I think we'd better resolve this quickly and get to building.
 
ulrichomega said:
Why do we need a complete advocacy plan before even bringing up the concept of dropping a lane? Surely the first stage in this process is figuring out the best approach to dropping a lane, and continually shutting down discussion on that topic for no reason continues to baffle me.
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You don't, but you do in this thread, which is for a real project with budget and time constraints. Fantasy plan all you want in Design a Better Boston. That's the place to play with ideas and hack through proof-of-concept issues.
 
George_Apley said:
You don't, but you do in this thread, which is for a real project with budget and time constraints. Fantasy plan all you want in Design a Better Boston. That's the place to play with ideas and hack through proof-of-concept issues.
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Yes...thank you. Nobody is trying to shut anything off. The point is that since all this discussion is not about what's actually being considered in the solve process...and not what the designated advocacy group People's Pike is actually discussing with the state...for there to be anything real-world to come out of reopening the lane-drop debate the advocacy for the drop has to account for the mechanism that rules it into the process. Sticky Eq's last post if this needs repeating; right now not even PP is taking up that cause. We're proceeding as if flinging lane-droppage out there on aB with increasing hard-headedness is the same as earning a face-to-face conversation with the state, when not even the advocates who ARE meeting face-to-face with the state are talking about lane-droppage. Job #1 is...get the advocates talking about what you want them to talk about, perhaps??? We aren't talking about anything real-world actionable unless we can fit it into the resolution process...within the time/resource constraints of that resolution process because it's at such a very very late stage. That's what George means above on the difference between a current-events thread and a Crazy ____ Pitches thread...the abstraction vs. an in-motion process.

Don't hate the process that's going on while you're sitting on the sidelines...appropriate the process to your own goals. Starting with PP getting sympatico with lane-drop considerations, since right now they are not taking that up. All my last couple posts were trying to do is encourage some thought to the line of action for how you take a concept that's outside the discussion right now and fashion it as something/anything that PP can run into the discussion. Crappy-odds and out-of-time or whatever...just what would constitute a possible mechanism for taking an 11th hour pitch to the negotiating parties and package it in its best possible chances for resonating. Eyes-wide-open to the fact that we're way low on time, of course, but given best possible chances within that. The time/money constraints are real, and PP hasn't yet pivoted to this. So coach the pitch to fitting in the constraints, and coach it as if the folks who have the negotiating seat at the table with the state are going to be representing said pitch to the state. At least you say you took this inquiry somewhere it has its most-snowball's chance.

That's way more productive than this continuing fantasy where we just talk around it as if constraints just don't exist if you believe hard enough, and get progressively more trigger-happy to attack the first person who reminds that the constraints are a thing that's real. You can make a pitch that treats the constraints and is on-topic to the current-events decision. Few seem willing to do that in this thread, for whatever reason.
 
fattony said:
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).
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This is incorrect. A reduction in travel lanes is simply a reduction in roadway capacity.

To reduce traffic volumes, you need to create a reason for an overall reduction - additional public transportation options, increased numbers of people working from home, shifts in peak hour volumes, etc. Taking away a lane might reduce volumes, but only because people will get fed up being stuck in traffic because the roadways will not be able to process the same volumes (vehicles per hour per lane) as they once did. And that's no way to design a roadway.
 
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Equilibria said:
It's irresponsible to advocate grabbing at capacity when you're at a temporary low point in demand brought about by a natural disaster.
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Quite the opposite. It's the best time.

In this country, we find it impossible to make hard decisions in the good times. If the hard decisions aren't made now, they never will be.

Look at Paris as a model for how to turn tragedy into opportunity and transforming how the city gets around.
 
jass said:
Look at Paris as a model for how to turn tragedy into opportunity and transforming how the city gets around.
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5 years of War, Resistance, and foreign occupation to recover from is not a 'feature' citation for best-practices. Jesus...what a way to find something infinitely worse than a deadly pandemic for self-justification.

Not at all relevant in Paris' case, either. The main thrust of RER development came about in excess of 20 years after the end of WWII, mid-60's to mid-70's and continuation beyond. The 1950's in stark contrast were stagnation-city / deferred-maint / service-cutback austerity fever to the metro region's transpo network in response to the cost of their postwar rebuild. It was only in the ensuing out-of-control gridlock it inspired when the metro population exploded from baby boom + mass emigration from ceded French colonial lands that they reversed course and decided to go big. The 'crisis' decision they made was to start actively choking it away. The 'transformation' decision was the "Oh, shit! Look what we've done. We have to recover this fumble or we're doomed." Not an aspirational sequence in the slightest even as means-to-an-end tunnel vision.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
5 years of War, Resistance, and foreign occupation to recover from is not a 'feature' citation for best-practices. Jesus...what a way to find something infinitely worse than a deadly pandemic for self-justification.
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...Im talking about Corona this year dude. Odd your mind went there?

Things such as tons of new cycleways to ensure people can get to work without stuffing into the subway.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1261328863516413953

These were so popular the mayor easily won re-election on a platform of making the changes permanent

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1271118258998034432

Theyre also doing things like installing hand sanitizer at bus stops

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1259790603426160646
 
Guys. Back on topic. Reminder that this thread is about the I-90 Allston Interchange Project.
 
George_Apley said:
Guys. Back on topic. Reminder that this thread is about the I-90 Allston Interchange Project.
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Yes...now I'm even more confused at the difference between citations public health installations stepped up by a pandemic (really...we're not doing any of that this side of the pond???) vs. resolving a design impasse on a project yet to be built. Is it loosely possible to pick a halfway relevant comparison...like, stay within the bounds of the plant kingdom if our apples need critique?
 
I don't care. That tangent is done now.

Go talk about that stuff in a COVID thread, or a general infrastructure thread, or make a new thread.
 
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Equilibria covers the key issue for me above. Getting this done sooner rather than later is important to the Urban Rail vision on the Worcester Line. While I'm broadly sympathetic to the theoretical argument about longer-term reductions in highway capacity, this miserable stretch of land doesn't seem to be the (non-)hill worth dying on. On my wish list, we'd get this project finished ASAP, choosing the DOT-acceptable design that makes the least mess out of the streets and connectivity in the adjacent neighborhood. Then do the Worcester Line upgrades ASAP. Then we can all join in full-throated unison on the plan to downsize Storrow, where a reduction in highway capacity certainly would have a huge quality-of-life benefit for city residents. Dragging out the final approval and execution of this project just threatens to postpone the bigger-picture improvements I'd like to see in my lifetime.
 
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