I will die on the hill that Longwood Ave between Louis Pasteur and Brookline should be transit/bike/delivery only. This would not change vehicular access to any of the parking garages or hospitals but it would greatly speed up transit making it a better alternative. Combined with bus lanes on Brookline and ALP and the new BNRD more direct routes to Longwood it’d be a very swift in and out on transit.
That's a fair point, though I wasn't expecting many residents in Boston to use it as a Green Line feeder anyway. I do think there's a significant crowd using the 1 between Cambridge and Back Bay, especially if their origin is not very close to a Red Line stop and/or their destination is closer to Hynes than Copley; but yeah, they're more plausibility using it for a destination in the Back Bay area instead of transferring to the Green Line. If anything, whenever I wait for the northbound 1 at Beacon St, there's almost always more passengers boarding there and heading north across the river than passengers alighting there (often zero).
Yeah, I think that's the more common use case for the southern half of 1: as a feeder to BMC and nearby workplaces. It appears that such crowds typically feed into GL/OL much more than Nubian, the latter of which is mildly surprising.
MIT students can apply for a Harvard library card, which grants access to all buses that require Harvard IDs (M-2 and Harvard's own shuttles). MIT students who cross-register for courses at Harvard can also get a (permanent?) Harvard ID. Also, I believe that even though the M-2 is intended to be for LMA, Harvard students do use it for intermediate travels like to MIT and Central Square.
In such a world, would it be possible to extend the transit-only segment even further east to Huntington Ave? One notable thing about the BNRD is that it removes all buses on Ave Louis Pasteur: the LMA buses either use Francis St (T12, T22, T28, T66), or use Longwood Ave and Huntington Ave and then to Ruggles (T47, 65, 85).
What about splitting bus traffic between Francis St and Longwood Ave? While it would add some time to buses coming from Nubian needing to turn onto and then off of Huntington, it would allow both streets to maintain one mixed traffic lane as well as allowing for street parking on Francis St for the residential buildings located on the western side. Here are some quick Streetmix visuals for each one:
The level of bus traffic is incredibly high on Longwood and Francis when you factor in the Yankee shuttles, individual hospital shuttles, and MASCO bus routes into the MBTA equation so I think transit priority on both should be the way to go. My concern with Francis St though is that one side of it beyond Vining is all residential, and I’m pretty sure a bunch of them are assisted living. They have plaques on the doors or porches but I can’t remember exactly what they say. Either way I’ve seen many people with various assisted mobility devices going in and out of those houses to vehicles parked out front so resident parking and front door vehicular access should probably remain in a reconfiguration.
With those considerations in mind a full transit (And other essential traffic) conversion of Longwood Ave between Brookline and Huntington probably makes the most sense. I'd suspect adding a bus lane on Francis St still makes sense though, even with Longwood Ave being fully set aside for buses/shuttles/delivery vehicles.
This is a small spreadsheet I made from the Better Bus Profile data:
A lot to respond to here, but let's simplify:
Opening connections in areas that LACK them is different than just building a highway that opens up new territory to car only development. We’re talking about local adjustments.
More effectively increasing capacity (with 40 foot buses) by incewasing is what you're trying to say.
32 had used articulated buses in 2007 but they stopped that according to an operator because of issues with getting the buses through the streets.
There's a keyword repeated and that's traffic. Cars are geometrically incompatible with dense land use. Not to say that there's no place for private automobiles as they're a very useful transportation tool. That said, of this 66-served region that we're discussing, the only part that potentially has a genuine automobile access and capacity problem is Harvard-Allston crossing the Charles. Without that Eliot Bridge interchange taking up that entire area, it would be a good idea to have a bridge extending from Hawthorn so that not all traffic coming or going northeast from Allston is funneled across the existing Anderson Memorial. It still boils down in the end to too many cars all trying to go to finite-sized destinations and not enough alternative transportation modes to suit the travel corridor demand. The population and job market aren't stagnated, the travel demand will only continue to increase. A Malvern extension would only offer about a half mile of "relief" which just puts the same cars right back to Comm, Brighton, Cambridge Ave, etc. The working design alternatives also have I-90 exiting onto Malvern.
That's frankly not how scapegoating works. The vehicular congestion in the LMA is not coming from people driving from Allston/Brighton/Cambridge, there are not enough car users from these places with LMA jobs to cause that congestion, and they have decent transportation alternatives. Boston is an actual city where real people live, so it's as you say major center nodes pepper a region of dense old residential neighborhoods. This is the best way to build environments where as many people as possible can live close to work and amenities. Originally it was to be able to walk easily but then we invented an amazing thing called mass transportation that allowed more people to live in these same kinds of places but with greater regional access to more opportunities. Unfortunately, we built cars into the way we live, as infrastructure prioritized for cars is dangerous to people and makes getting around our dense human environment more difficult. Roads are good when they prioritize moving people not cars. Highways have their place to move people and goods between urban centers but not within them.
Europe barely has any urban highways, and the places that do *cough* UK cities *cough* absolutely suck. Other places that realized they suck tore them down. What European cities do well is indeed their division of arterials, collectors, and local streets in terms of vehicular traffic management and in part safety. Europe also got flattened during a couple of wars right in time for the rise of the automobile making it easier to restart street layouts for the car. I'm not sure where you're getting no sidewalks and terrible for pedestrians from though. Yeah, Europe has roads that are bad offenders of car priority to the detriment of pedestrians but they are very limited, and like you say they'll have a robust transit system to facilitate the safe movement of people in this dangerous car-dominated world. Also, the UK, France, Italy, and Germany are known for being incredibly car-dependent outside of a select number of cities. Every city has room to grow and be better for people, some are farther along in that than others and that's where examples of success can be pulled from.
You're just flat wrong about Europe. Im not talking about Berlin or Rotterdam (which got flattened), and London definitely doesn't suck. Doesnt mean there's zero traffic. What it means is there is not a totally brainless denial of the fact that people (oh gee whiz) use cars, and there is a much more logical land use and urban planning in any cities, destroyed in there wars or not.
Sorry dude this is just absolute and complete bullshit. In Boston, pedestrians disregard any and all rules. So do bikes and so do cars. People walk, drive, and bike how and wherever they want. They walk in the bike lanes and they walk across roads, they speed up in cars when someone is trying to get across a crosswalk, they'll zoom a car or pedestrian on bike, and it has nothin whatsoever to do with safety. This is a cultural/local problem. Perhaps you're not from here? Even in NY people dont do this anywhere close to the way they do here. And in any European city, people behave and follow the rules. Cars stop at yellow lights, people walk during the walk signal, and scowl at Americans who break these rules. Ditto for Americans strolling along like assholes in bicycle lanes. Because in Europe people are orderly and are used to accommodating density and that we dont live in a free for all. That is an American problem. And back to my original point, the diff between USA and Europe gets right to that point, which is that in the US, everyone greedily wants their little fiefdom and ideology. The pro-transit people want to obliterate roads, and the car people want forests paved over. There is BALANCE in Europe. Not to ignore their many problems but the functionality of the transportation networks in Western European cities is not only about good design. People also follow the rules in ways Americans simply won't and in ways we will never, ever see in this city especially.
This is most definitely not true. At least in the Netherlands, People cycle through red lights, cycle while on their phone, (Middle-school aged kids especially) walk in the bike lanes, mopeds will absolutely scream down the bike paths, people will cross the street wherever they want (Although there's nothing illegal about it) and there are still people that are probably too old to be driving causing accidents. That's not to say nothing is different, you'll very rarely see cars double parked or parked in the bike lanes, even when there's no physical barrier, and I would generally say cars are better behaved in general, likely due in part to the process of getting a driver's license being much more expensive and time consuming.
This is a false dichotomy, and going to more than one place in Europe will immediately show you this. I would say in the Netherlands nobody really cares one way or the other. I think a majority of people wait at crosswalks, but nobody well tell you off if you don't, nor is it illegal. German culture on the other hand is generally much more "follow the rules" and so blowing through crosswalks is more frowned upon (And technically illegal, although enforced about as much as everywhere else) and you will sometimes find grumpy old people that will tell you off for it. (Although it's still pretty common in urban areas.) Any Bostonian or New Yorker would feel right at home in Milan though.
Europeans are more than capable of being greedy. It's not a communist utopia.
I’ve spent time in Leiden, Utrecht, Amsterdam and Rotterdam and the behavior of pedestrians and bikers is night and day to anything you see here. So no, I’m not talking one trip or “one city” but thanks.
The chaos of the USA is the great appeal and the great drawback of this country. When I say there's no ambiguity on that, it's because there just isn't. Europe is tired, old, limited, claustrophobic, but also orderly and the settled and takes care of its [well, at least, natural born] people. The US is wild and free, but wasteful and chaotic. Are these stereotypes? Only to a point. It is ridiculous to argue that the behavior of Boston or American drivers, bikers, or walkers is not worse, overall, than the behavior of their counterparts in Amsterdam, London or Paris. We are a frontier society that got catapulted through the industrial revolution, and it shows in all the good and bad ways. It's ok, Europe exported its barbarism to the colonies and "othered" its problems in different ways. They aren't innocent or perfect by any means.
Welcome to reality. Humans aren't robots that perfectly follow rules and react to external stimuli in the same predictable way every time. The thing is, not following rules or acting unpredictably has far more serious consequences in only one of these; being behind the wheel of an automobile. A car is heavy machinery and there is a local/cultural problem that we let just about anyone and everyone drive with next to zero training here. That's a big difference with the rest of the world.
It is very true that individualism and the idea of freedom promote a culture here where everyone feels they should be free to inconvenience others, and that is a problem, but there's a huge difference between inconveniencing people and endangering the lives of others.
London is unique in the UK for its public transit and low car ownership. The rest of the UK's cities seriously lag behind. Rotterdam is known for being the car-centric city of the Netherlands but it still doesn't have a limited access highway to the city center and neither does Berlin.
