Next big highway project?

[Matthew]

I'm well aware of it. I'm a huge transit advocate and am all for reducing auto traffic via investments to public transport, but I also understand the need to optimize all forms of transit so they are efficient, more environmentally-friendly and most-importantly, safe, and that includes roadways. The alternative is to continue with this extremist anti-car agenda and get absolutely nothing done. Balance is key. Budgets are not unlimited and there's no "sandbox mode" in the real world. Boston already exhibits extremely low car ownership rates in the country.

I by absolutely no means advocate for building new highways, but am in favor of optimizing the ones we have so they reduce air pollution caused by excessive traffic as well as making them safe to use. Others on this board continually advocate for letting highways deteriorate instead of fixing them which is purely reckless endangerment and it drives me crazy. I cannot for the life of me understand how some people on here are willing to risk the lives of people just to make a point about alternative transit. The same goes for highways that do not meet standards. We should bring them to standard and then be done. No super highways or anything, just highways that meet standards and are safe to use.

I am all for increasing safety on the highways that we have. I'm not sure who you reference.

I just don't believe that "increasing safety" implies that we must build tunnels that cost $10-20 billion. It's quite easy to fix safety for significantly cheaper, but the highway officials wanted every ounce of speed they could squeeze out of it.

If safety were paramount then all the highways without shoulders would be restriped, yesterday, with shoulders. Even if that meant dropping travel lanes. Safety! And capacity is not served by pushing speed limits up to 65 mph.

In practice, the need for speed trumps both safety and capacity in the minds of highway officials. So we end up with highways without shoulders and a push for ever-higher speeds. Safety is just one aspect that often gets traded away. It's not the decision I would make, but I don't make the decisions.

I would agree and also add that there will always be a large group of people who wish to drive

The fact that "people will drive" is not a reason to subsidize it. If they want to drive, so be it, as long as they pay the cost and don't make me pay it, I'm happy. The Big Dig made all of us pay, and doesn't even have tolls for the most part.

As much as I hate to say it, it made sense to address the big, hulking automobile eyesore first, and then clean up the transit mess afterwards. The problem is that people see the T as broken, but for some reason not fixable. You see this in the globe comments all the time, "how can they add X more apartments when the trains are dying and rusting". I feel like there is a public perception issue that transit has to be bad, and that you can't do something big-dig visionary to fix it. You can, and we need to. That's the next step.

I just don't see it happening. Look how much kicking and screaming the T did over the GLX. And that's only a small piece of the puzzle. The T has so many internal problems that need resolving, on top of its crazy funding problems, and then add all the auto-centric policy of the last few decades that is only starting to be unwound. If things were done right then the T would be the best way to get around the city, using walking for access and egress. Maybe not always the fastest way (hey, cars and even bikes can be tough to beat), nor the best way to carry heavy stuff, but overall the best deal for a typical trip when all factors are considered. I hope that wouldn't cost $200 billion (I wouldn't support that) but even a reasonable price tag is probably out of reach politically at this point (and I have no idea how hard it would be to do the political reform that makes the T a non-dysfunctional agency).

I dunno. I'm running out of steam at this point.

 

[davem]

I just don't see it happening. Look how much kicking and screaming the T did over the GLX. And that's only a small piece of the puzzle. The T has so many internal problems that need resolving, on top of its crazy funding problems, and then add all the auto-centric policy of the last few decades that is only starting to be unwound. If things were done right then the T would be the best way to get around the city, using walking for access and egress. Maybe not always the fastest way (hey, cars and even bikes can be tough to beat), nor the best way to carry heavy stuff, but overall the best deal for a typical trip when all factors are considered. I hope that wouldn't cost $200 billion (I wouldn't support that) but even a reasonable price tag is probably out of reach politically at this point (and I have no idea how hard it would be to do the political reform that makes the T a non-dysfunctional agency).

I dunno. I'm running out of steam at this point.

The original subway system was built by the Boston Transit Commission and it's Cambridge equivalent to solve congestion issues, then turned over to BERy to operate. Perhaps that's what needs to happen to force the T's hand. If the T doesn't want to, for instance, build red-blue or an F-Line to Dudley, I don't see much stopping the Boston DOT from doing it themselves and then giving the infrastructure to the T. It would stop all the wrangling at the state level to get anything moving as well. (Hell, in the case of the F-Line, they city could just run their own trolleys with a trackage agreement. That's what the green line was designed for in the first place, after all.)

The divergence to transit is getting off topic though, and any further conversation along these lines should really go in one of the transit threads. Getting back on topic:


I-93 Boston to Braintree I agree with Arlington that fixing 93 south should be the next priority after the current interchange reconstructions are finished. It's a multi-modal mess. It's also perhaps a larger challenge than the big dig from a design standpoint, due to that ROW being SO narrow. Question for Southie/Dorchester folks, how vital is Morrissey Boulevard? Could it be cut down from six lanes to two or four, with the remaining space used for CR tracks? Every satellite view I've seen of it it looks empty, but I will say I've never once driven it. That would solve the majority of the space constraints on 93 through.

I-93 Boston to Medford After that, I'd like to see something done about 93 from the Mystic to the Zakim. This is 20, 30 years down the line, but if current development continues by that time it may be as much of a barrier to East Cambridge and Somerville as the old artery was to Boston. The viaduct will probably need replacement around then too. Ideally it would go underground, but that may be prohibitively expensive. An open cut that could be decked with selective parkland decking might be however. Thoughts?

RT-1 Charlestown to Revere/PeabodyWe've discussed this in various threads on here. I love the look of the Tobin, but it's approaches are detrimental to Chelsea and Charlestown. I'd say the options for this would be:
1) Reroute it alongside the railroad through the Everett tank farms, merging with 93 where the charlestown bus garage is.
2) Extend the I-90 designation up route 1A, then left at route 16 to merge with route 1 in revere. Ideally the I-90 designation would then be extended all the way to Peabody at 95, mostly to get federal funding, but also to alleviate some of the out of state drivers that stick only to interstates from using the CA/T.

Route 16 I'm only familiar with the portion through Everett, so that's what I will comment on. I believe that route 16 should be reconstructed as a limited access 4-lane highway from the merge at RT-1 to RT-28, with frontage roads. It's in enough of a no-mans land that an upgrade here would have few negative impacts. Positive impacts would be less congestion and pollution waiting at the zillion lights, and easier access for pedestrians, who instead of having to cross 7 lanes of traffic would only cross 2-3, since the through-lanes would use underpasses.

Route 9 Boston to Chestnut Hill This needs to be downgraded. Especially through brookline, the thing reminds me of New Jersey. The median needs to be eliminated, lanes narrowed, parallel parking, curb bump-outs and bike lanes added, and frequent traffic lights. Basically make it more like Comm Ave.

Memorial Drive It needs to be completely rethought. It either needs an upgrade (especially from Harvard to the BU Bridge) or a downgrade. But the current mixed situation with people making left turns to get to whole foods, etc is terrible. I think what the future of Mem Drive will be depends heavily on...

Storrow Drive Nuff said. What to do with it probably deserves it's own thread.

 

[mass88]

People pay gas tax when they fill up. Where does that money go? People pay excise tax on their cars, where does that money go? People have to pay registration costs for their cars, where does that go?

 

[Equilibria]

It made life better for people rich enough to own a car, maintain it, and a place to park it in the city. Or people who live in the suburbs and own a car. It has not made life better for many people in the city. As I said, it has cemented in place an automobile-centric view of mobility in Boston.

It made life better for people who do not or cannot commute by transit. As the city becomes more urban and the young professionals move back, the poor get pushed out of transit accessible areas, and become dependent on cars. Don't make this a wealth thing.

That last statement doesn't actually say anything positive or negative about cars. Just that the Big Dig comes from a mindset where the car is king. Obviously you all know how I feel about that.

I do, and I won't ever win this argument. The thing is, you may not like it, but the car IS king. That's the reality of this country. Either you can spend money to make it work, or you can not spend the money and it doesn't work. Those are your choices.

There are 4.5 million people in the Boston Area. Probably about 800k are served by rapid transit. If there were a dense web of lines inside 128, that rises to about 1.25 million. If you make it impossible for the other 2/3 of the metro to access the Downtown, their jobs and development move out to them, not the other way around.

You were right in one sense before. The people with the cars control the money. If you shut them out, the money goes too.

I want to live in a city where walking is safe and pleasant, where smog does not choke the skies, where destinations are not separated by acres of parking, and where development is not held hostage to the insatiable space needs of motor vehicles. I know that all this is fundamentally at odds with the promotion of the automobile as the near-universal answer to mobility, as a visit to just about any 20th century-developed American city will confirm.

Yes, and the Big Dig helped address all of these issues but the parking without impeding - and actually improving - the ability of traffic to flow. I'd call that a success. You're arguing that by making it flow better we're inducing additional auto traffic, but I don't think that's valid. Not only, as Dave pointed out, is most of the demand pre-existing in this case, but it's been 10 years now. If the road were going to get clogged again, wouldn't it have? Wouldn't we have seen the massive suburban tract housing you predict once people can drive Downtown?

The development we're seeing is urbanist, multi-use, and transit oriented. New inner neighborhoods are going up on seas of parking. Your dark future should be the present. It isn't.

I don't think that it is possible to actually gain enough benefit from the O'Neill tunnel to make up for its cost.

Let's just look at one impact: the revitalization of Logan Airport. Before the Big Dig it was assumed that Boston would have a new airport at some point. Studies performed as the Big Dig was being considered identified a few sites, principally Devens and South Weymouth.

If the Big Dig doesn't happen, or even if some truncated TWT-only version happens, Logan probably doesn't survive. Massachusetts spends the same amount of money on the airport. Airports are really big. If you want to put one at Devens, then either Shirley or Ayer is simply gone (that's also just geometry). Same thing with Weymouth or Abington at the other site. That's not to mention the costs and impacts of upgrading Route 2 or Route 3 and building access roads and train lines to get people there.

Then, once the thing is built, development patterns change. Downtown Boston benefits tremendously from Logan's proximity. All of the multi-national corporations that in Chicago or DC headquarter themselves in Rosemont or Tyson's or Reston go to Downtown here, or more recently to the SBW. Even if Downtown was able to compete, it would be competing. Boston doesn't have any true edge cities right now. It would then.

I get that that's really broad and overwrought-sounding, but the Big Dig is that kind of a project. It's a city-definer. It's a little different in Seattle, where the Alaskan Way has I-5 backing it up. A better analog for that in Boston is probably Storrow Drive.

I guess, in an ideal world, the cost of driving would match the negative external cost that driving imposes on others in the city. Perhaps in such a world, the capacity represented by the O'Neill tunnel does not metastasize into an induced-demand trap, and the political pressure shifts from we-need-parking-parking-parking to seeing improvements in walking, biking and transit. Although I don't hold out much hope for that ever happening, I do think that people in Boston are much more open to city-friendly modes than their elected officials give them credit for.

But the thing is, you're getting your TOD, your bike lanes, your transit improvements... what more do you want? Less new parking? That's a good idea. The "induced demand trap," though, just isn't there from anything I've seen.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

If I had to do a shortlist of cleanup chores to tie the 128-and-in highways in a bow. . .

• The designed projects, officially planned or under active comment: Canton split, Braintree split + frontage roads, Allston Pike do-over (whatever final form it takes), Pike WB downtown exits (pick 'em selection), McGrath teardown, Rutherford slimdown.

• SE Expressway rebuild w/regulation shoulders (but NOT...*slap*...a capacity...*slap*...increase, MassDOT...*slap*).

• Non-128 interchange improvements: (1) 93/16 in Medford as de-clusterfuckifier for today's staggered 28/38/16 exit mess. (2) AlewifeAlewifeAlewife!!! (3) Modernize the substandard Route 1 exits in Chelsea, Revere, and Malden. (4) Newton Corner and West Newton.

• Other Pike misc.: (1) New WB exit/entrance @ Birmingham Pkwy./Nonantum Rd. to divert Watertown traffic away from Newton Corner and West Cambridge traffic away from Allston onto the empty/wide western river roads. (2) More continuous breakdown lane space in Newton. For the most part that's claimable if the commuter rail stations get rebuild as center-island platforms and can give back the extra platform vs. highway buffer back to the road. Other places can get infilled with cycled bridge renewal.

• Sensible Storrow dieting in a post-Bowker, more Pike-ful world: (1) Compact the Kenmore interchange to Mass Ave. into just one 4-lane, jersey-barriered straight carriageway like it is west of Kenmore, with the compacted highway turning the Mass Ave. left exit into a proper right-hand exit. (2) WB onramp from Mass Ave. to yank Pike-bound Cambridge traffic off Memorial Dr. and onto traffic-lightened Storrow WB. (3) Lane-drop Kenmore-Copley from 6 to 4 lanes + merging space. WB slimdown can get traded in for a wide shoulder doubling as more Hatch Shell special event parallel parking. (4) Compact the MGH mess to eliminate the S-curve and left-handed ramps, do simpler Charles Circle interchange. (5) Full EB breakdown lane, Pike to BU Bridge. Because the stupidest fucking truck drivers on the planet will never learn, and the only way to fix this is making that direction more breakdown-resilient. (6) Direct Pike-to-EB onramp (if allowable in the Allston redesign) to lighten load on Cambridge St. lights. Storrow EB will still be an AM load-bearer to Kenmore because of lack of Pike EB exits before Copley; it's Kenmore-Copley both directions, Kenmore-Pike WB, and afternoons in general where the volumes decline.

• Other parkway dieting: (1) Lane-drop Greenough Blvd. 4 to 2, direct-connect the 2 halves at one intersection in lieu of the zigzag up Arsenal. (2) Lane-drop SFR from 6 to 4 with good accel/decel lanes at the Harvard, Western, and Arsenal ramps. (3) Compact Fresh Pond interchange. (4) Delete Birmingham Pkwy. in entirety in lieu of SFR and cleaner Brighton traffic patterns, with new Pike WB offramp fitting into its old slot at the N. Beacon light. (5) Lane-drop Morrissey Blvd. + Old Colony Ave. 6 to 4 w/left-turn lanes. If the SE Expressway is made functional, this induced demand starts disappearing just like it did post-CA/T on McGrath and Rutherford.

• Grade separations: (1) 1A in Eastie and Revere. Give the neighborhoods back to the neighborhoods by reconnecting the street grid with frontages, get the trucks off the streets, put the high-speed traffic on a regulation limited-access expressway instead of an expressway-in-turnpike's-clothing. New T-interchange with 16 at Railroad St., improved 145 interchange, old 16 leg of the 16/1A/60 merge into the rotary demolished w/rotary cleaned up. (2) Parkway-grade improvements to 16 between 1A and 1, since this is a major truck route. More grade separation finessing: put the WB curb cuts east of the 107 exit behind one-way jersey barrier where space tight, shift road a few feet for a city-street frontage west of 107, revert last few blocks at the northbound turn to Route 145 to a quiet city street ending at 145 now that all high-speed traffic and all rotary traffic funnels into the new 1A interchange. (3) Few more blocks of Route 1 expressway grade separation to 99 interchange to tidy up everything south of the Malden/Saugus line.

Weston interchange makeover is a nice-to-have, but I think that decision can be stayed for awhile longer with high-speed tolling + the above cleanup and load-shifting at the Newton exits. Any delays on 128 there get a lot less costly when the Lexington-Burlington snarls go away upon the Burlington interchange rebuild. Ditto 24/128 with Braintree and Canton on either side of it getting fixed. Those two are minor imperfections when the chain reactions from the next adjacent big clogs go away.



And that's it. Other than the huge amount of infrastructure renewal on the SE Expressway most of these are single-point corrections at interchanges, fixing lingering 1950's design deficiencies without capacity increases, resiliency fixes, and taking out the trash on some of the MDC's worst crimes against humanity. But the overall system 'works' once you solve for the SE Expressway vulnerabilities and do the dirty work on the Big Four 128 interchanges, so these are just dotting I's and crossing T's. Only the 1A grade separation differs from the non-Expressway projects in stretching more than 1 linear mile of mainline road or requiring invasive surgery amidst dense commercial/residential. But in that case the locals would likely support it because of the traffic it gets off their streets, plus they're used to Massport endlessly making their lives miserable with Logan construction.



Transit's a whole other mess, but the CA/T put us on the cusp of the finish line at making that incomplete half-grid of asphalt highways frozen in 1970 start doing their job and balancing the load around. We really are down to just those single-point interchange renewals and a toxic cleanup (but not expansion) job on the Expressway from having it all sorted at long last.

 

[paperless paul]

I-93 Boston to Braintree I agree with Arlington that fixing 93 south should be the next priority after the current interchange reconstructions are finished. It's a multi-modal mess. It's also perhaps a larger challenge than the big dig from a design standpoint, due to that ROW being SO narrow.

Boston MPO's 2012 study to improve I-93 Southeast Expressway. It more or less does what F-line suggests. It fixes the capacity constraints at Savin Hill by tunneling the Red and Old Colony lines (now double-tracked) below the Expressway and uses the remaining right of way to add a single reversible preferential lane the length of the current zipper all the way to CA/T HOV lanes (sorry F-line).

It also sees improving the southhampton on-ramp to two lanes and the follow-on improvement from having a double-tracked Old Colony.

 

[davem]

I just updated by last post with this and F-Line partially answered, but:

Question for Southie/Dorchester folks, how vital is Morrissey Boulevard? Could it be cut down from six lanes to two or four, with the remaining space used for CR tracks? Every satellite view I've seen of it it looks empty, but I will say I've never once driven it. That would solve the majority of the space constraints on 93 without tunneling anything.

Other parkway dieting: (1) Lane-drop Greenough Blvd. 4 to 2, direct-connect the 2 halves at one intersection in lieu of the zigzag up Arsenal.

This this 1000 times this. I don't know what the hell they were thinking when they built it in the first place, but this NEEDS to happen. I'd say instead of rerouting the 2-lane section behind the arsenal along the park by the river (the easier option), they should reroute Greenough from Grove Street along the base of the cliff there through that brownfield cleanup they just did, meeting the Arsenal section. This way you net more parkland without a road cutting through it. And yeah, there is no reason for it to be four lanes past the Eliot Bridge.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

I just updated by last post with this and F-Line partially answered, but:

Question for Southie/Dorchester folks, how vital is Morrissey Boulevard? Could it be cut down from six lanes to two or four, with the remaining space used for CR tracks? Every satellite view I've seen of it it looks empty, but I will say I've never once driven it. That would solve the majority of the space constraints on 93 without tunneling anything.

Morrissey doesn't have any impact on commuter rail. It's 2 Braintree x 2 Old Colony everywhere between Dorchester's Park St. and the approach to Wollaston station. And that would extend further north upon completion of the Savin Hill Little Dig and slapping +1 track berths on top of the Park and Freeport St. bridges. Nowhere near Morrissey, so that road is a project in isolation more related to fallout from the Expressway's dysfunction and fixes therein.

You've even got room to overhang an infill Red Line station at the rotary or at the old Old Colony station location on the north shore of the Neponset with no ROW impacts at either site.


That Old Colony Ave. underpass that slips beneath the Columbia rotary may have to go if JFK CR station gets doubled up, because everything is artificially crammed in tight there. But that whole eight-armed octopus of a sorta-interchange + rotary is an MDC warcrime shouting "Kill me, please!" to anyone in earshot. It's Exhibit A of why Morrissey needs an enema...or exorcism. I don't think anyone will miss it if the setup is simplified.

 

[mass88]

If I had to do a shortlist of cleanup chores to tie the 128-and-in highways in a bow. . .

Weston interchange makeover is a nice-to-have, but I think that decision can be stayed for awhile longer with high-speed tolling + the above cleanup and load-shifting at the Newton exits. Any delays on 128 there get a lot less costly when the Lexington-Burlington snarls go away upon the Burlington interchange rebuild. Ditto 24/128 with Braintree and Canton on either side of it getting fixed. Those two are minor imperfections when the chain reactions from the next adjacent big clogs go away.



And that's it. Other than the huge amount of infrastructure renewal on the SE Expressway most of these are single-point corrections at interchanges, fixing lingering 1950's design deficiencies without capacity increases, resiliency fixes, and taking out the trash on some of the MDC's worst crimes against humanity. But the overall system 'works' once you solve for the SE Expressway vulnerabilities and do the dirty work on the Big Four 128 interchanges, so these are just dotting I's and crossing T's. Only the 1A grade separation differs from the non-Expressway projects in stretching more than 1 linear mile of mainline road or requiring invasive surgery amidst dense commercial/residential. But in that case the locals would likely support it because of the traffic it gets off their streets, plus they're used to Massport endlessly making their lives miserable with Logan construction.



Transit's a whole other mess, but the CA/T put us on the cusp of the finish line at making that incomplete half-grid of asphalt highways frozen in 1970 start doing their job and balancing the load around. We really are down to just those single-point interchange renewals and a toxic cleanup (but not expansion) job on the Expressway from having it all sorted at long last.

What they should do at the 24/93 interchange in Randolph is make 24 SB 4 full travel lanes (along with a full breakdown lane) as those coming from 93 NB and 93 SB merge at the start of 24. It gets backed up all the time during the evening commute and cause things to move slow at times from 138 through the interchange.

Another issue they have is that those merging from 24 onto 93 SB either ignore the lane markings and rush to merge onto 93, or they slow down once they're on 93 because they need to get all the way over in time to hit the next two exits. They either need to put a barrier up thereby forcing people to wait before they merge, or they should have had the on ramp go under 93 and come up on the right side so people wouldn't have to cut across 4 lanes of highway to get to their exit.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

What they should do at the 24/93 interchange in Randolph is make 24 SB 4 full travel lanes (along with a full breakdown lane) as those coming from 93 NB and 93 SB merge at the start of 24. It gets backed up all the time during the evening commute and cause things to move slow at times from 138 through the interchange.

Another issue they have is that those merging from 24 onto 93 SB either ignore the lane markings and rush to merge onto 93, or they slow down once they're on 93 because they need to get all the way over in time to hit the next two exits. They either need to put a barrier up thereby forcing people to wait before they merge, or they should have had the on ramp go under 93 and come up on the right side so people wouldn't have to cut across 4 lanes of highway to get to their exit.

One immediate thing they can do is abolish the Ponkapoag Trail exit. Which is just a lazy shortcut to 138. MassHighway talked about jersey-barriering the northbound merge from 24, because traffic counts turned up too many people kamikaze-swerving to Ponkapoag only to get to 138 all the same via the backroads detour. They opted not to...ironically because it would shorten the 1.5 miles of lane-switching room between 24 and 138. And so the situation persists where the cheaters keep doing that weave in 2000 ft. to beat the 1.5 mile weave to 138. One hand doesn't know what the other is doing.


It's not ideal, but honestly if they whack that useless exit and fix Braintree + Canton it buys enough time to punt the 24 construction a good deal back of the pack. Address when they've got their shit together about applying for fed funding to rebrand 24 as a real I-x95 interstate. It's not a good interchange, but you can't plausibly put it in the same breath as Braintree, Canton, Reading, Burlington, and several other severe non- Metro Boston necessities like 290/495, 291/Pike, 24/140, 95/295, 91/5/57.

 

[Equilibria]

One immediate thing they can do is abolish the Ponkapoag Trail exit. Which is just a lazy shortcut to 138.

Why is that even there? No one lives there, and the two exits on either side (138 and 28) cover pretty much everywhere you can get from there...

Is Ponkapoag a relic like Recreation Road from when 128 was primarily a weekend parkway and had exits for every golf course and swimming hole?

 

[TheRifleman]

What we need to do next is dump $200 billion into mass transit. .

I agree 100% with this. The problem with our state leaders is the MBTA financial condition with their Pensions. It comes down to trust. MBTA is just another political shithole of secret hirings for the politicians so they get votes.

There seems to be NO Transit Vision in this state.

And I can honestly say I despise all the people that worked at the BRA that issued tax breaks and incentives to these private developers and corporations to only enrich themselves and their political agenda then call it job creation.

The MBTA continues to mirror what they used to be in the 80's in a city that is trying to evolve into a 1st class city.

You want to make a better society (A Better Transit for the state would do wonders on people's attitude) Clean, Efficient, Fast.

 

[Shepard]

The original subway system was built by the Boston Transit Commission and it's Cambridge equivalent to solve congestion issues, then turned over to BERy to operate. Perhaps that's what needs to happen to force the T's hand. If the T doesn't want to, for instance, build red-blue or an F-Line to Dudley, I don't see much stopping the Boston DOT from doing it themselves and then giving the infrastructure to the T. It would stop all the wrangling at the state level to get anything moving as well.

Great idea. Does Boston have some sort of lever to fund these capital expenses that MassDOT doesn't?

Route 9 Boston to Chestnut Hill This needs to be downgraded. Especially through brookline, the thing reminds me of New Jersey. The median needs to be eliminated, lanes narrowed, parallel parking, curb bump-outs and bike lanes added, and frequent traffic lights. Basically make it more like Comm Ave.

Brookline Village to Cypress Street (Brookline Hills) definitely. The fact that storefronts orient right onto Route 9 along this stretch, combined with the existence of two T stops, makes this an absolute must. There will also be development sites along this stretch too like the Red Cab, and already there have been some large condo developments at Cypress Street. You'd also really make the most of the Reservoir which, to my mind, is an underutilized asset.

The long stretch beyond this, past Fisher Hill, Chestnut Hill Ave and down to Chestnut Hill can stay fast in my mind. There's nothing really there and won't ever be.

The Chestnut Hill stretch - from about Hammond to Langley - is trickier in my mind. Existing developments (Chestnut Hill Mall, Atrium) aren't inviting at all towards the street. Newer developments like Chestnut Hill Square and The Street are equally bad in this regard (The Street being slightly less so). Here, Route 9 acts like a New Jersey arterial and I don't feel like that's going to change much. I think the best that can be hoped for is better pedestrian and bicycle access through the shopping centers, not necessarily on Route 9 itself.

 

[Matthew]

It made life better for people who do not or cannot commute by transit. As the city becomes more urban and the young professionals move back, the poor get pushed out of transit accessible areas, and become dependent on cars. Don't make this a wealth thing.

Oh I agree that's terrible. But that doesn't mean that subsidizing cars is helping the poor. It's not helping. Instead, it's just making it more difficult for people to live without the car that they cannot afford to keep. What we really need to do is fix the problem of people who depend on transit getting pushed away from it. And that's zoning/land use/housing reform.

I do, and I won't ever win this argument. The thing is, you may not like it, but the car IS king. That's the reality of this country. Either you can spend money to make it work, or you can not spend the money and it doesn't work. Those are your choices.

I live in Boston, which is not the same thing as the rest of the country. I like that. It is not possible to make "car is king" work in Boston AND have the nice urban atmosphere that I find attractive about living here. No amount of money can do that. We've been trying to put that square peg in a round hole for over half a century, and all it's done is make people miserable and destroyed part of the city.

The Big Dig was, I hope, the very last major project to try and squeeze more cars into the city.

There are 4.5 million people in the Boston Area. Probably about 800k are served by rapid transit. If there were a dense web of lines inside 128, that rises to about 1.25 million. If you make it impossible for the other 2/3 of the metro to access the Downtown, their jobs and development move out to them, not the other way around.

Who said anything about making it impossible? I want to make it eminently possible! Car travel is not the solution. It don't even work as things stand. There is not enough space in the city for that many people to drive. Cars just don't work when space limitations are your constraining factor, as they are in any decent city.

That's why I don't get why you keep harping on how cars are the greatest thing ever. Sure ... if you have the space, the wide open roads, the parking lots, the fuel, and the money to handle them. But we don't have that, and never will without destroying Boston completely (as urban renewal nearly did). So it's quite irrelevant whether cars are super convenient because they don't work in a city like Boston. Not in large numbers.

The funny thing is that car travel will always look really attractive -- in the abstract -- in a compact city like Boston. And as long as car travel is rare, it will be the most effective way to get around. But the moment that everyone decides to use a car, then all of a sudden it sucks for everyone. And if you try to design a city where everyone CAN use a car, it starts to look like Houston or LA, and you lose what made car travel attractive in the first place: the relatively short distances are replaced by much longer distances that take you just as long (or more) to cover, but now you absolutely require motor vehicle assistance to do it.

I think this effect probably has a name, it sounds like an equilibrium.

If the road were going to get clogged again, wouldn't it have? Wouldn't we have seen the massive suburban tract housing you predict once people can drive Downtown?

It did, and we have. The Big Dig mostly just pushed the bottlenecks outwards. And subdivision development hasn't stopped. Maybe the state zoning reform will address that.

The development we're seeing is urbanist, multi-use, and transit oriented. New inner neighborhoods are going up on seas of parking. Your dark future should be the present. It isn't.

But the thing is, you're getting your TOD, your bike lanes, your transit improvements... what more do you want? Less new parking? That's a good idea. The "induced demand trap," though, just isn't there from anything I've seen.

Where? What? Only dribbles, and hard fought at that. We only get bike lanes where they had those ridiculous 14' outer lanes that could be reallocated without cutting car capacity. Some paint. And nice words. Nice rhetoric. After 3 years of discussion they finally moved a few bus stops around. Then reverted a bunch of them. Still can't do the obvious things like signal priority for Green Line, Silver Line or buses. Bus lanes only go in places where they're not needed. I took this picture over two years ago and the sign is still there:

City just rebuilt the curbs on a major street near me without fixing the numerous outstanding issues with pedestrian safety. They're planning to WIDEN the car lanes on Comm Ave in a supposed "road diet" that will narrow the sidewalk.

Hey, maybe this following year will be the year that they finally start doing all the things they've been saying, instead of empty promises. I dunno. I hope so.

 

[Equilibria]

I live in Boston, which is not the same thing as the rest of the country. I like that. It is not possible to make "car is king" work in Boston AND have the nice urban atmosphere that I find attractive about living here.

But clearly it is, because the Big Dig exists and you're happy here. What makes you unhappy, as you mention later in the post, is that the city and state don't build enough bike lanes. That has nothing to do with the presence of the CA/T.

You're identifying "car is king" with Dallas-style tract housing and 10-lane expressways. These things do not exist in Boston, and no one is trying to "make them work."

The Big Dig was, I hope, the very last major project to try and squeeze more cars into the city.

It didn't! It wasn't! It was designed so that the number of cars they already had could flow. It was designed to remove those cars from sight, reduce the number of access points they had to city streets, and to allow commerce, development and investment to occur Downtown. You're treating the Big Dig like it was a new Interstate through the middle of a cornfield, and that's just incorrect.

Who said anything about making it impossible? I want to make it eminently possible! Car travel is not the solution. It don't even work as things stand. There is not enough space in the city for that many people to drive. Cars just don't work when space limitations are your constraining factor, as they are in any decent city.

Ok. You believe that. I have no earthly idea why you believe that if you make living with a car in Boston impossible, people will decide to move to the city. What will happen is that business will move out. We know this because in the 1950s and 1960s, the last time Boston was inaccessible to cars, that's exactly what happened. Don't confuse the fact that unmarried, newly-graduated twentysomethings increasingly want to live in the city with any chance of them sticking around once they've got 3 kids and care about schools, crime and yards.

That's why I don't get why you keep harping on how cars are the greatest thing ever. Sure ... if you have the space, the wide open roads, the parking lots, the fuel, and the money to handle them. But we don't have that, and never will without destroying Boston completely (as urban renewal nearly did). So it's quite irrelevant whether cars are super convenient because they don't work in a city like Boston. Not in large numbers.

...and if you make it impossible to use them there, people will go somewhere where they can. That's my argument. When I say cars are better, I'm not overlooking anything you said. I'm arguing that people will act in the way that benefits them the most. If they can afford a car, prefer a car, prefer the stores they can get to with a car, and can commute to work quickly in a car, they will own a car. Furthermore, if they can live in a place where they can own a car comfortably and maintain a comfortable lifestyle in their phase of life, they'll do it. They won't willingly abandon their car while raising a family just because Boston is awesome for you to live in.

The funny thing is that car travel will always look really attractive -- in the abstract -- in a compact city like Boston. And as long as car travel is rare, it will be the most effective way to get around. But the moment that everyone decides to use a car, then all of a sudden it sucks for everyone. And if you try to design a city where everyone CAN use a car, it starts to look like Houston or LA, and you lose what made car travel attractive in the first place: the relatively short distances are replaced by much longer distances that take you just as long (or more) to cover, but now you absolutely require motor vehicle assistance to do it.

Yes, it's a continuum. There are car-centric hellholes all around this country. This, however, is a conversation about Boston. Our suburbs are 400-year-old villages with narrow, windey roads where speeds are kept down. They have pedestrianized centers, many with rail access. We already have one of the most extensive and well-used transit systems in the country.

Are you seriously arguing that by allowing existing traffic to flow through Downtown Boston, the Tip O'Neill Tunnel has placed the city on the path to becoming Houston?

It did, and we have. The Big Dig mostly just pushed the bottlenecks outwards. And subdivision development hasn't stopped. Maybe the state zoning reform will address that.

Outwards to where? Where are they? F-Line had a post about this a while back, but the tailbacks are much shorter now. There aren't mythical bottlenecks somewhere out in the suburbs that didn't exist before the Big Dig.

Are houses being put up in suburbs? Yes. But again, this isn't Dallas. There aren't huge forests being swept away for new gridded subdivisions. A mcmansion here and there? Sure. A brownfield site like South Weymouth being turned into a neighborhood, sometimes. You make it sound as if they're clearcutting out by 495 while the city rots. The city is getting a TON of new housing. Construction in Somerville, Cambridge, Allston and Brighton is booming.

You're upset that road engineers aren't making bike lanes wide enough for your liking, and that the T hasn't got signal priority. Ok. A car-first training for road engineers is an issue, and agencies are slowly trying to deal with that. Transit priority on the C-Line has nothing to do with cars, it's held up by internal politics within the T and the Town of Brookline.

In short, in the middle of the biggest development and investment boom in inner Boston in 60 years, nearly all of it geared toward (or at least required to acknowledge) improving transit access and streetscape, you're claiming that Boston is becoming a low-density auto strip, and all you can point to to illustrate this is that the bike lanes aren't wide enough?

 

[Matthew]

When did I say making it impossible? You keep jumping to that extreme. It will never be impossible. All I'm saying is that at some point we have to accept that there is a zero sum game between adding car capacity and having a nice city. We can't have it both ways, no matter how much money we spend or wish it.

Many of your other claims are verging on overwrought or sound similar to the highway pushers of the 50s. Boston wasn't saved by the central artery: things got much worse afterwards. There's a much more complicated history here than highway=economic development.

If you truly believe that nobody wants to live in a city and will jump for the white picket fence plus minivan ASAP, then what's the point of this discussion? There's no way for that to be reconciled with a densely populated compact city. None. There will always be a place for that out in the suburbs, and that's fine, but you cannot seriously be expecting to attract families to Boston on the terms set by suburbs.

Perhaps that's where we differ. I believe that there's plenty of people, and families too, who are not looking to live the stereotypical suburban life, and Boston can attract them by being a traditional city. What we can't do is out-suburb the suburbs. They will always win if we fight on their terms.

If you don't believe that, very well.

Oh and regarding the bike lanes, don't focus that exclusively. I just have that in mind at the moment due to some recent local issues. In general, Boston officials talk a good game about urban transportation and housing reform, but when push comes to shove, it's back to the same old, same old. I was just pointing to bike lanes as an example of there being much heat and little light.

Off to Oakland now, enjoy.

 

[Equilibria]

Boston wasn't saved by the central artery: things got much worse afterwards. There's a much more complicated history here than highway=economic development.

My argument is that the Central Artery is way more than a highway. I would never say that Boston was saved by a highway - highways destroyed Boston in the 50s and left us with a diminished city. The Central Artery is an urban renewal project in the true sense of the term - it's renewed the city and allowed it to grow explosively in a way that would never have been possible without it.

If you truly believe that nobody wants to live in a city and will jump for the white picket fence plus minivan ASAP, then what's the point of this discussion? There's no way for that to be reconciled with a densely populated compact city. None. There will always be a place for that out in the suburbs, and that's fine, but you cannot seriously be expecting to attract families to Boston on the terms set by suburbs.

I don't. I expect suburban life to go on in the suburbs, and urban life to go on in the city, with both lifestyles lived by the people who want them. My only case is that if you make the city inhospitable for the suburbanites, the city will suffer economically. That's it. I'm not calling for new freeways or even new capacity, just common sense infrastructure that makes the system work. If that's $20 billion worth of transit, great. In the Big Dig's case, it was $35 billion worth of highway tunnels.

Have a wonderful time in Oakland. It was nice debating you .

 

[Proposition Joe]

Suburban life is propped up by a lot of poor public policy and has many negative effects on the economy, the environment, and public health. It is unlikely that our current urban/suburban configuration is going to last for very long.

 

[underground]

Boston wasn't saved by the central artery: things got much worse afterwards.

Where exactly is it worse in Boston because of the Tip? From the North End and surrounding areas, things are undeniably better. Connectivity between neighborhoods is better. The parks are better. New businesses have been opening up. New construction is going up. New North Station Under is one of the best station in the system. Causeway Street is slowly becoming less of a disaster area. We've got bike lanes all over the place. Spectacle Island is amazing. Leverett Circle is actually cross-able on foot. City Square is actually a place again. We're actively working to redesign Rutherford Ave and Sullivan Square. On and on. Seriously, where is it worse? Want to argue the money would have been better spent on mass transit? Sure, I think that's a pretty solid argument. But that the Tip made things actively worse? There's no evidence.

 

[fattony]

Where exactly is it worse in Boston because of the Tip? From the North End and surrounding areas, things are undeniably better. Connectivity between neighborhoods is better. The parks are better. New businesses have been opening up. New construction is going up. New North Station Under is one of the best station in the system. Causeway Street is slowly becoming less of a disaster area. We've got bike lanes all over the place. Spectacle Island is amazing. Leverett Circle is actually cross-able on foot. City Square is actually a place again. We're actively working to redesign Rutherford Ave and Sullivan Square. On and on. Seriously, where is it worse? Want to argue the money would have been better spent on mass transit? Sure, I think that's a pretty solid argument. But that the Tip made things actively worse? There's no evidence.

I think some terminology got jumbled in their back and forth. Central Artery = the original viaduct. CA/T = the Big Dig.

The original central artery may have seemed necessary or prudent at the time, but it was a disaster and the city did continue to decline for a long time. We were choked nearly to death by it and we are very lucky that so much of the city escaped the wrecking ball. Bringing a pipeline for cars into the city was the mistake. You rightly point out that burying the elevated artery and everything that came with it has been a major boon to the city.