BU revs up riverside vision
By Andreae Downs
Globe Correspondent / April 20, 2008
Thomas Vitolo said that when he lived near Commonwealth Avenue and Mountfort Street, he often heard brakes screeching, followed by "thump, thump, thump" at around 2 a.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.
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The thumping part was a pedestrian being hit, he told Brookline selectmen last week.
Partly because of such "conflicts," as traffic engineers call them, and because Boston University's campus extends on both sides of this interchange, the university wants to see the area redesigned for pedestrian and bicycle safety, said Michael Donovan, the school's vice president for real estate management.
"This is an issue of campus safety for us," Donovan said during the Brookline selectmen's weekly meeting. "We think now is a good time to plan, as the state is looking at making [transportation] improvements. We don't profess to have all the answers, and invite the community to test our data and assumptions."
In the first of what will undoubtedly be many community meetings, BU presented its 24 months of traffic studies and ideas for improving the interchange, a forbidding stretch of overpasses, dangerous crosswalks, merging traffic, and crumbling concrete.
The most dramatic part of BU's vision includes building wide platforms over the Massachusetts Turnpike and Storrow Drive. Renderings show the platforms containing 8 acres of open space and unspecified buildings. The idea is to enhance pedestrian and bike access to the Charles River, said Ken Greenberg, the master planning consultant to BU. "This could create a true gateway to the river and its trails," as well as to Brookline.
Mountfort would become an arterial between the BU Bridge and the Longwood area at Park Drive, with fewer access points and less infusion of traffic into residential areas. A separate bridge for buses and bikes would take that traffic out of the mix, too.
Another feature, Greenberg explained, would be a transit hub accessed from a pedestrian deck at Commonwealth.
The hub would include links to the "C" Green Line, commuter rail, bike trails, and the much-debated Urban Ring - a bus or light-rail connection of the neighborhoods surrounding Boston's downtown, set to roll out around 2020.
According to BU's data, about 10,000 cars use Mountfort daily, 13,000 use Brookline streets to get to the interchange, 16,000 pedestrians cross at Commonwealth daily, and the number of accidents in the interchange are "among the highest in the city."
Those numbers will rise, Greenberg said, if planned developments get built, including at least 10 million square feet at Harvard's North Allston campus.
"If proposed state infrastructure improvements are handled correctly," he said, "it could make a significant improvement here."
Stressing that the renderings he presented were merely ideas to be discussed, Greenberg said, "we hope that out of this we can begin a relationship to define common goals and identify opportunities."
