I have to agree. A few thoughts,
1) a lot of the traffic going through there are people skipping the inbound toll on the tobin, so traffic will likely remain what it is, more commuters will just opt to pay the toll instead of sitting in casino traffic. Induced demand will change to demand demand.
2) fixing sullivan square to mitigate the demolition of the overpass and closure of the outbound underpass (why is this closed again, they don't want to haul away that tree?) will also alleviate a lot lf traffic that exists for no reason.
3) the benefits of activating the riverfront and getting rid of a brownfield are far greater than the potential traffic, which since it will be off peak won't be that bad anyway.
4) we are talking about traffic in a wasteland of industry and pollution. I can't think of a better place for gridlock then amidst tank farms, an electric plant, and a big box power center. If in revere/eastie it would be in the middle of houses.
5) Alford St is a shortcut for the majority of users, not a vital link. The traffic already has other options before mitigation, which would likely be substantial.
6) upgrading of rt 16 to limited access + frontage roads would do wonders for traffic, and not have many negative effects considering the area. A transit reservation down the center would complete it.
Agree. Just about the only truly worthy construction of new interstate-grade mainline highway miles (i.e. not just fixing interchanges) the state would want to consider inside the 495 belt is grade-separating 1A in Eastie and Revere to a new interchange with 16 at roughly Railroad St./Route 145 and doing some reshuffling of 16 between there and Route 1 with frontage roads and whatnot. And retiring most of the spaghetti asphalt at the rotary to clean that beastly thing up. These areas have suffered too long with heavy truck traffic clogging their streets, and too much North Shore traffic goes through the gut of downtown because of the crappy road quality here, leaving that golden Pike/Ted link woefully underutilized. Give the highway and thru truck traffic a real means of bypassing the city streets, and give the city streets back to the neighborhoods. This benefits regardless of where the casino gets plunked.
Not too hard, expensive, or permanently disruptive. It is the dreaded increase in road capacity, but it's one that vastly helps the residents by making streets real streets.
1A
1) Compact 1A at Curtis St. where the full expressway-grade highway ends. Do a better interchange at Curtis/Chelsea St. where the truck traffic turnouts are high-volume. Use the freed-up compacted space to reconnect Pope St. with Chaucer on the south end and Addison on the north end to make that purely neighborhood street grid.
2) Connect Addison to Chelsea St. by the bridge, overpassing 1A. Gives this neighborhood easy integration with the Chelsea side and the nearest UR/Silver Line stop to de-isolate it significantly.
3) Frontage the string of businesses on 1A NB to eliminate the curb cuts, integrate better into that access road off Boardman. Tie in to Addison to complete the street grid here. Probably some protesting from the 1A curb cut businesses like the Planet Fitness and Courtyard Marriott, but it's for everyone's own good.
4) Overpass Boardman to connect to driveways on that pocket of SB curb cuts. Loop Boardman around the other side on another overpass to (realigned) Tomassello Way. Cut Walderar Ave. from 1A and tie into Tomassello for sake of the street grid. Stagger an interchange on this Boardman Loop block. Tie in the Global Petroleum driveways on both sides of the highway and the car rental lot on the SB side to Tomassello/Boardman Loop + interchange to eliminate the jughandle intersection. The tiny rent-a-car company on the corner of Waldemar/1A NB probably has to get uprooted, as does the Hess station unless they dig in for a sweetheart deal for their own exclusive rest stop turnout.
5) New high-speed T-interchange with 16 cutting across the solar farm just south of Railroad St. and across the creek. Integrate it into a combo exit to a 145 ramp/frontage for movements to/from 145 from all directions. And to keep the small string of NB businesses near the 145 exit in business. Hampton Inn probably has to get all blowed up for this.
6a) De-commission 16 from this interchange north to the rotary (more on that later).
6b) Overpass/underpass Hichborn St. across 1A to reconnect the residential grid. Eliminate the last curb cuts here with driveways to 145 (sorry, diner...you're gonna lose your business). Send 1A solo into the cleaned-up rotary with the 16 leg demolished. Maybe cut Everett St. from the rotary too so it becomes a sane 4-way instead of the ungodly 6-way octopus it is now.
16
1a) Interchange with 1A as above, funneling all 145-bound traffic as well.
1b) De-commission 16 as a state highway between this interchange, 145, and the rotary since all thru traffic now peels off onto the high-speed interchange. Make the interchange to 145 leg a standard unnumbered city street; terminate the street at the 145 intersection; and terminate the numbered highway at the new 1A/145 interchange. Outright demolish the portion from 145 to the rotary (no buildings or curb cuts on this portion, so nothing of value lost), and make it into a city park.
2) On the de-commissioned city street, direct-connect Vinal and Railroad St. at a signaled intersection. Bridge Railroad St. over 1A to the frontage road on the 1A NB exit to 145 so those businesses get their traffic, and complete the street grid to the other side with a single "Vinal St. Ext." that de-isolates the trailer park.
3) Shift 16 a little closer to the water west of the interchange with appropriate retaining wall. Maybe not much they can do here, so I'm assuming 16 still has to be parkway-speed between 1 and 1A. That little shack thing overhanging the water must go to buy space for the road. Try to shiv a city-street frontage between Vinal, Mill, and Wilson tying into the existing frontage near 107.
4) Slightly upgrade the 107 ramps for better safety and to preserve the frontages on both sides.
5) Shift 16 much closer to the water between 107 and 1 to continue that WB-side frontage into a real city street between Olive and Borden.
6) Re-do the 1 exit into a full self-contained interchange that de-gunks all the crazy ramps just west between Washington Ave. and Webster Ave. Do some sort of better-designed EB turnout into Parkway Plaza. Now the canyon here is an ever so slightly less painful gash dividing the town.
7) Grade separation now complete. Let the rest of 16 to Wellington Circle stay as-is with nothing but safety and signal improvements. Consolidate some curb cuts into shared driveways, see if there are any superfluous residential streets to cut. Re-time the signals. Improve the crosswalks. It's not very improvable, so do the best you can with what you have and the grade separation to the east will vastly cut down how
long a clusterfuck the road is and make it viable for getting to an Everett casino.
8) Fix the 99 rotary so the turning radius is less dangerous. It's accident central today, it was the site of that horrific tanker explosion a few years ago, and this is where Boston-bound traffic and any Everett casino traffic is going to turn out so it must get safer and more resilient to accidents.
9) Fix Wellington Circle best they can. Downgrading McGrath and Fellsway between Wellington and Assembly/93 from 6+ to 4 lanes helps as lot with the induced demand traffic. Circle itself could use better light timing, but probably isn't improvable on the 16 side. Cutting the 28-fed induced demand will do the most good here.
10) Make the 93 interchange a full interchange. 16W-to-93N ramp on the quasi-highway portion. 93N-to-16E offramp for simple right turn onto 16 instead of slamming 28/Assembly. 16W-to-93S onramp (tie into the existing signal cycle where the 16E frontage meets the 16E mainline). Delete the Mystic Ave. ramps entirely. Mystic Ave. now returns to rightful place as a Somerville city street, the McGrath/93 interchange gets a significant traffic reduction aiding the shrinking of McGrath, and the pain threshold on 16 into Everett from 93 gets significantly reduced.
Ped/Transit
1) Complete the Mystic path system with linkage of all the small disconnects from Alewife to the Bike to the Sea.
2) De-terrify 16 near Wellington with wider sidewalks at the replacement Mystic and Orange Line bridges. Lane-drop Fellsway and footbridge the Mystic paths over Fellsway to Station Landing so the various disconnected Mystic paths, Assembly, Station Landing, Gateway Ctr., and the casino are linked in non-scary fashion. Wellington is the nerve center of all those interconnections.
3) Don't fuck up this Silver Line rollout. That busway better work right, better be compatible with future light rail conversion, and better have learned from the egregious mistakes Connecticut made trying to throw a busway along an active, busy commuter RR.
4) Urban Ring planning goes back on the front-burner. And it better be a Green Line branch off Lechmere and the Innerbelt leads, not busway. Busway is OK for the Silver Line-Chelsea because that's the easiest system tie-in available. Green Line is the easiest tie-in for completing the circuit, so somebody has to realize that trying to busway it all around is going to be some poorly-functioning Rube Goldberg machine.
Now you've got a viable bypass around-the-horn from the Mass Pike and all 3 tunnels through Eastie and Chelsea to 1, a pain-reduced cleanup of the bad portion of 16 to just the 1-to-Wellington stretch, and significant cleanup of the 93-to-Wellington stretch that aids all the parkway de-commissionings and induced demand reductions in Somerville and Boston. This circuit is doable now without any single points of failure.
Now you've got the urban trail system completely linked everywhere-to-everywhere. The Somerville Community Path other efforts do their part. But breaching the parkway brick walls around Wellington is the critical piece for interconnections outside of Boston. Everything from Lynn to Alewife-via-Mystic to all the developments along the Mystic--Assembly, Station Landing, Gateway, casinos--converge here. And there's little to no grade separation to be had, so those parkway crossings have to be made friendlier and those sidewalks on the river crossings much much wider and better-protected. Do that and the path system has interconnections to all the destinations and all the transit anywhere in the urban core. This is mega.
Enough has been said about the Urban Ring. Git 'ur dun, and keep it simple stupid.
Highway, and thru industrial traffic on the asphalt thru industrial traffic belongs on. Fewer failure and congestion points. A transit circuit. A bipedal transit circuit. Giving the long-suffering and long traffic-divided neighborhoods back to the neighborhoods. It's a megaproject with megaproject implications...but not a megaproject price so long as they're diligent about doing all these interdependent little fixes systematically and multi-modally. And so long as they stay on-point while doing it (esp. the asphalt part and MassDOT's institutional temptation to always favor raw capacity over community).