I-90 Interchange Improvement Project & West Station | Allston

The current plan was 8 lanes.
IMG_2259.jpeg


FK4 said:
There are intelligent arguments to be made about whether or not we need the highway of a certain width here. But it just drives me up the wall here these stupid people when they say stuff about “highway expansion next to a commuter rail stop”. That one little statement reveals so much ignorance and simplistic reasoning. If you were talking about a massive reconstruction of the Worcester line to be high speed rail, sure. Or some other major transit investment. But to suggest that even the best case scenario for West Station, out in the hinterlands of western Boston, comes close in any way, shape or form to the vast and diverse uses of the highway, that is exactly the type of stupidity that makes car oriented people scoff and smell conspiracy.

If you want to actually invest in the future undergirded by a philosophy that represents a real change from auto culture toward public transportation, fine. Then do that. But we hear so many versions of this argument. Some random rail or bus station does not achieve the same thing as an interstate highway. Wanna fix the transit system? Please, do it! But so often we get these obnoxious and condescending arguments for reducing pavement while very little is done to make the alternative (transit) any better in any truly meaningful way.
Click to expand...

What she is saying is that there are other options for the area which would be cheaper and have many less lanes. Like this
IMG_2260.jpeg


Or this
IMG_2261.jpeg


Her argument is that the people/state that are arguing that we absolutely cannot drop the pike down to 6 lanes, and have to go with the full build 8 lane option, with the full price that entails because it would cause a traffic nightmare… are wrong. She says this because we've already dropped it down to 6 lanes for years now with the fenway air rights project and the parcel 12 air rights project and its been fine. Shes saying that going back up to 8 lanes would “essentially” be a highway expansion, because weve had 6 lanes now for years.

Its been 6 lanes already for years, its currently 6 lanes now, and it would continue to be 6 lanes throughout the duration of the construction of the throat project. So in total we would be getting by just fine with 6 lanes here for over a decade only to bring it back up to 8 lanes upon the completion of all of the different projects in the area. So thats what she means by it would essentially end up being a highway expansion. The difference between 6 or 8 lanes in such a confined space has huge ramifications not only for cost, but also the amount of room left over for green space and pedestrian/bike lanes, so the less lanes you can get by with the more room you have for other things.



“Can we survive with a 6-lane Turnpike? Sure we can, because we’re doing it right now,” observes Emily Norton, a Newton resident and executive director of the Charles River Watershed Association.

Norton points out that nearby segments of the Turnpike have already been narrowed to a 6-lane configuration for several years for the construction of air-rights developments in the Fenway neighborhood.

“If MassDOT wants to build 8 lanes here, then what we’re actually talking about is a highway expansion project. Because it’s been 6 lanes for over 5 years now. It would be 6 lanes through the decade-plus of construction (of the Allston Multimodal Project)," says Norton. "Can you tell me anywhere else in the state where you’re planning a highway expansion next to a new commuter rail stop?”
 
Last edited:
Charlie_mta said:
No it isn't. You're showing the throat area, which will have 8 lanes. But, within the limits of the new interchange in the.West station area, I-90 will have only 6 lanes.
Click to expand...
Those idealized throat renders from the CRWA are also physically impossible. They send Soldiers Field Road down the Pike mainline on the wrong side of BU. How is that supposed to work? That organization shoots their credibility in the foot running for months on end with that error and for dramatically expanding the project area and cost by extending the roadway work past BU.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
Those idealized throat renders from the CRWA are also physically impossible. They send Soldiers Field Road down the Pike mainline on the wrong side of BU. How is that supposed to work? That organization shoots their credibility in the foot running for months on end with that error and for dramatically expanding the project area and cost by extending the roadway work past BU.
Click to expand...
There is open land between the Grand Junction and BU Bridge approach that the alignment shown could conceivable use to rejoin the current east bound alignment just before the BU Bridge underpass. You basically hug the eastern side of the Grand Junction as is bends over toward its bridge. That would not plow into the BU campus. It would be a fairly nasty S curve.
 
JeffDowntown said:
It would be a fairly nasty S curve.
Click to expand...
Exactly: create an outright driving deathtrap for the sake of a marginally more acreage-idealized parkland setup. The curve would be more than nasty...it would be a southeast-to-north northeast-to-due east hairpin that's either outright design-illegal or would have to have to build in enough severe traffic-calming features to brute-force enforce taking a >40 MPH-design parkway down to sub-25 MPH for a stretch. There's no universe where it would be societally responsible to induce that kind of crash risk, yet the CRWA has persisted with advocacy for exactly that for half a year now. It's credibility-destroying.

And even if the state did consider doing that it makes the whole project that's already choking on its bigness that much harder to mount because it significantly increases the cost by significantly increasing the project area. We're well on a trajectory where nothing at all is going to get built because the state can't get its head out of its ass on major unfinished design decisions, and the leading VE advocacy is trying to...make it all significantly harder to pull off? Why push this clusterfuck so hard instead of just straight-up making the argument to delete lanes around the existing alignment?

This project is absolutely cursed with stupid actors all-around.
 
I never quite understood why this stretch needed 4 lanes for the Pike in each direction.
It's 3 lanes past the Pru. And 3 lanes before Newton Corner.
Is there a compelling reason why it needed to be 4 rather than 3 in the redesign?
 
Max Power said:
I never quite understood why this stretch needed 4 lanes for the Pike in each direction.
It's 3 lanes past the Pru. And 3 lanes before Newton Corner.
Is there a compelling reason why it needed to be 4 rather than 3 in the redesign?
Click to expand...
The highway engineers (I am one, or used to be) would call this 4th lane an "auxiliary lane", which adds an extra lane beginning at an on-ramp, and ending at the next off-ramp. This supposedly eliminates abrupt merging and also increases capacity.
 
I think utilizing the arguement that long temporary measures will make this a highway expansion is a very silly argument. No matter how long those temporary measures have been in place. Technically the road is designed as four lanes between Newton Corner and Pru so the roadway is a 4-lane road. (please breathe and keep reading lol)

That being said though, the 3-lane configuration that Max Power points to east of the Pru and at Newton Corner (and points west) is a much more tangible argument. I also understand where Charlie is coming from with the "auxiliary lane" language, but to me that only is justifiable where we have alot of merging going on, which is not the case here. The first exit east of this project would be the Prudential Tunnel exit which is around 2-miles east and then the first exit going west is the Newton Corner exit at around 2 1/2 miles west. Using those exits as justification for including auxiliary lanes is just ridiculous. At most, I would think those "auxiliary lanes" should be 1/2 miles long (which could queue about ±120 cars in stopped traffic).
 
CBCArch61 said:
That being said though, the 3-lane configuration that Max Power points to east of the Pru and at Newton Corner (and points west) is a much more tangible argument. I also understand where Charlie is coming from with the "auxiliary lane" language, but to me that only is justifiable where we have alot of merging going on, which is not the case here. The first exit east of this project would be the Prudential Tunnel exit which is around 2-miles east and then the first exit going west is the Newton Corner exit at around 2 1/2 miles west. Using those exits as justification for including auxiliary lanes is just ridiculous. At most, I would think those "auxiliary lanes" should be 1/2 miles long (which could queue about ±120 cars in stopped traffic).
Click to expand...
IMO, The biggest problem is that MassDOT has portrayed the 8-lane Pike as absolutely non-negotiable, and as far as I'm aware, has not shown any projections for what would happen if the auxiliary lanes are shortened/removed. This makes it impossible to have a good-faith discussion about tradeoffs, which is likely the point. If it was clear how much capacity is lost with lane reductions, then it would be much more straightforward to discuss supplying similar capacity with the Commuter Rail and other transit improvements. I can't pretend to know how much the total savings would be with these modifications, but ballparking it in the $300-500 million range would provide enough for high-level stations on the entire line (excluding the Newton cost blow-outs), triple-tracking, and a substantial amount towards grade separation around Framingham station or the electrification needed for BEMUs. Would this "make up" for lost capacity? Possibly, but it's hard to say. At the end of the day, we just need transparency from MassDOT so there can be any amount of trust in what they're doing.
 
Are there strings attached to trust fund or other grant money that prohibits lane removals as part of the construction?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top