This is great news. They had one of the two WB traffic lanes closed all fall for the power washing and it had zero traffic impact, so this a no brainer.
Beyond the quality of the view though, the challenge with making the wider sidewalk on the north side is access.
To get to the north sidewalk from the beacon hill side, you have to cross two storrow on ramps, a parking lot entrance/exit, and a storrow offramp - in the context of a very funky traffic light pattern. And on the kendall side, you either have to dash across the Mem Drive viaducts (which is dicey because drivers treat those like cousins of storrow drive) or make the long, dull walk 1/2 mile walk from 3rd street. So that will be a pretty lonely sidewalk.
On the south side of the bridge, however, you have direct connections from the the esplanade (via the pedestrian bridge) and the cambridge embankment (via a button-controlled mem drive cross walk), and from the area around the NERD building.
So until they either put cross walks on storrow or build a ped overpass north of the bridge (and fix the area around the kendall canal) this will be untapped potential
