Memorial Drive Greenway Phase III

ccole said:
The irrelevant 2.5 year resurrection of this thread prompted me to look for recent developments on this project. Unfortunately, there is some disappointing news: https://mass.streetsblog.org/2022/01/18/dcr-announces-scaled-back-memorial-drive-road-diet-for-2024/.
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I think the resurrection of this thread probably stemmed from this:
http://archboston.com/community/threads/general-infrastructure.4590/post-420476

It so happened a different poster took it upon themselves to comment on something else once here ; )
 
Is there any plan to fix this part of memorial drive?
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The center median is a huge waste of space. Theres definitely huge potential here to move the road to the left and create a Cambridge esplanade. If they move the lanes on the right over to the left the leftover land would create a lot of waterfront park space. Theres a lot to work with here and it seems like its long overdue. It seems obvious so not sure why its not in the works?
 
stick n move said:
The center median is a huge waste of space. Theres definitely huge potential here to move the road to the left and create a Cambridge esplanade. If they move the lanes on the right over to the left the leftover land would create a lot of waterfront park space. Theres a lot to work with here and it seems like its long overdue. It seems obvious so not sure why its not in the works?
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100% agree. Memorial drive down there needs to go on a diet and be rebuilt. Bring the eastbound lanes together with westbound then turn this into a lovely park from road to water.
 
393b40 said:
100% agree. Memorial drive down there needs to go on a diet and be rebuilt. Bring the eastbound lanes together with westbound then turn this into a lovely park from road to water.
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Anecdotally, it feels like the road is way overbuilt for all times except the peak of peak rush hour. Plus theres so much signaling (i.e. lights) for side streets for the sole reason that you can't have a uncontrolled intersection across 2 lines of highway traffic (even the traffic levels don't warrant a stoplight). Almost all of memorial should be down to 1 general travel lane in direction with more use of small roundabouts, uncontrolled ped crossings, and traffic calming so that traffic can flow at a consistent 25mph rather than wide, straight, highway-width lanes signed for 45mph just so we can hit a red light every 2 blocks.
 
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ccole said:
The irrelevant 2.5 year resurrection of this thread prompted me to look for recent developments on this project. Unfortunately, there is some disappointing news: https://mass.streetsblog.org/2022/01/18/dcr-announces-scaled-back-memorial-drive-road-diet-for-2024/.
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It's dumb cuz that's literally the stretch with the least impact since the park on the river is wide there.

Even dumber, it looks like they want to put some of the reclaimed greenspace on the campus-side of the road. Why is it that Boston designers cant get into their thick heads that you don't make greenspaces appealing by building lots of tiny squares and sharing shitty ten foot wide strips on both sides of a road. Build ONE BIGGER PARK in your mega projects and put all the greenspace on ONE SIDE OF THE ROAD for this sort of project. Yeah, we get your 10-year-old developmental level of brain idea to make Mem Drive oh-so-pretty with more trees on either side. But for fucks sake, there's a wide sidewalk there and nobody needs to use it anyway. Keep the whole road up against Harvard, they have enough goddamned greenspace behind the walls anyway, and put it all on the river side where it belongs.
 
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