Next big highway project?

As far as sprawl and low density goes, I'm living in Chicago. You ain't seen nothing, and neither had I.

What's wrong with low density, anyway? McMansions and subdivisions are bad, we can all agree on that, but when done right low density towns are quite charming. In fact, that's the landscape New England in known for.
 
I'm pretty sure he was talking about McMansions on 2 acre plots and not ye olde New Englandy villages.
 
The article below doesn't directly address NE's low-density development patterns, but rather the consequence of those patterns. My earlier comment was just meant to dispel the myth that suburban sprawl is a sunbelt problem -- many Mass. residents live in low-density towns where you have to drive twenty minutes to get anywhere.

As for why our suburban development is so dispersed, low-density, and fragmentary:

1. Minimum acre lot sizes and other "exclusionary zoning" laws (which ensure that whatever new housing gets built is invariably, large single-family homes that generate more tax revenue).

2. NIMBY opposition to higher density and multi-family development, which is perceived to lower home values.

3. An old rural road network that has not been filled in much over the decades (development follows the contours of our old twisty farm roads, rather than a more urban grid network).

4. Dispersed land-ownership -- ie, most parcels of land are small, unlike the vast tracts of land out West that get developed in one fell swoop.

5. The region's wealth; New Englanders can afford, and often prefer, to live in big houses on big lots.


Stopping forest loss in the land of Thoreau
States like Massachusetts are losing 72 acres per day to urbanization.
By Caitlin Carpenter | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

It's enough to make Henry David Thoreau weep.

New England ? the home of Vermont maple trees bursting with sweet syrup, and balsam fir and red spruce spread across New Hampshire's White Mountains ? is losing its forests.

Of all America's forests under pressure from development, New England's are shrinking the fastest.

The problem is severe enough that some conservation groups say they have limited time to act.

"The window for conserving forests is closing," says Andy Swinton, director of field science with The Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit habitat conservation organization. But "there's really an opportunity here, because the next 20 years will determine the character of New England forests. This is a race against time, and the time to act is now."

The region's forests had made quite a comeback in the past two centuries: As agriculture declined, fields went back to wooded land. Now, however, those forests are under threat ? from homeowners, this time. In their push to create more housing in an area where home prices are already through the roof, developers are moving into wooded land.

The numbers are stark, particularly in southern New England. By 2050, 70 percent of Rhode Island and 61 percent of Connecticut will be urbanized, according to a recent report in the Journal of Forestry by two researchers with the US Agriculture Department's Forest Service. Massachusetts is already losing 40 acres a day to development, estimates Mass Audubon. These three states will lose the highest percentage of forest of any state by mid-century, the Forest Service researchers say.

Part of the reason for the region's forest loss is its population density. Its urban areas are already so developed that they're pushing out, often into surrounding forests. The other factor is New England's development pattern and lifestyle.

Take long-distance commuting. The Southwest may be famous for its vast metropolises, but the trend is actually more pronounced in New England, says Kathy Sferra, a land protection expert at Mass Audubon.

For example: To be able to afford the cost of living, many workers live in less expensive housing far from the urban centers where they work. That leads to more crowded highways. In addition to the 40 acres the state loses every day to sprawling development, it loses an additional 38 acres to the "hidden" cost of development, such as road construction.

And, as in the rest of New England, most of Massachusetts' residential developments are low density, meaning few people living in large houses on big lots.

Residential lot sizes have increased 47 percent since 1970 in Massachusetts, according to Mass Audubon. New England's average lot size for new residential construction is the largest in the country at 1.3 acres, and its median lot size is three times the national average, says the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Real Estate and the Massachusetts Housing Partnership.

Meanwhile, the state's household size has shrunk 20 percent since 1970 to 2.5 people per household. Small wonder then that while New England's population increased 6.6 percent between 1990 and 2000, its total housing units grew 7.4 percent, according to the Rhode Island Department of Labor and Training.

Houses are also getting bigger. The National Association of Home Builders found that 40 percent of new homes in the Northeast have four or more bedrooms, making the region the national leader in terms of the size of homes.

These trends have spurred conservation groups to work more strategically, buying and protecting large plots of land in key areas rather than small, isolated locations.

"We've learned that doing conservation willy-nilly doesn't help because we end up with fragmented forests," says Mr. Swinton. "Since development is going to happen, we now know we need systematic, collaborative planning with the government, land trusts, and nonprofits to make sure that development and conserved forest area are intelligently designed."

For example: The Nature Conservancy worked with West Greenwich, R.I., and other conservation groups to purchase 1,700 acres of forest surrounding its town in an effort to protect the land. The conservancy's Borderlands Project is looking to accomplish a similar feat in another town in Rhode Island or Connecticut.

Conservation groups are also helping local governments improve their planning for infrastructure that leads to development, such as roads and Interstates, while minimizing sprawl and forest destruction.

State governments are also getting involved. Last month, Connecticut Gov. Jodi Rell (R) created a state office to "plot a new, antisprawl course." Rhode Island is now developing a land-use plan to encourage urban-center development. Massachusetts announced Aug. 4 that it would spend $50 million on conservation over the next five years, an increase of $20 million over its conservation spending during the past four years.

Forest-conservation groups next want to convince New England state governments to allocate some of the revenue generated through their greenhouse-gas reduction initiative to forest protection, according to Swinton.

Conservationists say that they'll need to bring all their tools to bear on the challenge of deforestation.

"Forests in this area made a comeback in the last century, but it looks like the pendulum is swinging in the opposite direction," he says.
 
Sounds Specious

The problem with those kind of estimates is that they blend National Trends with local percentage numbers, etc.

While its true that we may be McMansioning and developing large houses on large lots -- we just aren't doing that much building -- because there are few lots available to build on.

I doubt that more than 1000 houses have been built on new lots in Massachusetts in the past year. In a Town of 30,000 such as Lexington, there are essentially no un-built-on buildable lots. That's why we have tear-downs.

This is certainly true for all the towns and cities inside Rt-128 and mostly true for town and cities inside Rt-495.

One of the major reasons that Massachusetts has trouble attracting major business development is the difficulty in finding reasonably priced housing for the employees.

In contrast in Texas there are thousands of acres that are developed as single family housing by a single developer over a year or two. There isn't a piece of land the size of what I saw once near DFW airport {25,040 acres for sale} in the entire state of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island or even New Hampshire and Vermont -- there might be one in Maine however.

So before you worry too much about the loss of forests and suburban sprawl in Greater Boston -- check the numbers

Westy
 
What nobody mentions is the prohibitively high cost of bringing water and sewer lines to much of rural New England. So lots have to be large if the homeowner is relying on septic and wells.
 
One of the big seeling points to annexation back when Boston was eating up Roxbury, Dorchester, etc, was that the city would extend the water and sewer lines.
 
Yup; Needham actually preemptively developed a water and sewer system to prevent Boston from having a good case for annexing it.
 
No, or at least not entirely. The water comes from a reservoir that drains off the Charles. It results in nasty problems sometimes when the reservoir gets clogged/contaminated.
 
Boston Area Water Systems

Even Cambridge has its own water system -- that's what Fresh Pond is all about as well as the Hobbs Brook Reservoir between Waltham and Lincoln.

Remember that all of the Greater Boston was once individual towns and later some cities that had their own wells and surface reservoirs.

As th populations grew and they tapped-out the local sources, the Legislature created first the MDC to bring water from the emptier places to the west such as Natick and Sudbury.

Still later the MDC built the Quabin and connected it to Sudbury via a near surface aqueduct {Hultman} that runs under a mound like a glacial moraine along the Turnpike / Rt-9. There is a quite good website with a lot more detail [url]http://www.mwra.state.ma.us/04water/html/hist1.htm [/url]

Relatively recently the Legislature created the MWRA and it absorbed the old MDC plumbing. But if you were an autonomous entity {Cambridge, Lexington, etc} that was buying all or some of your water from the old MDC and distributing it to your residents -- then the only thing that changed was the supplier's name. The Cities and Towns pretty much still handle the local connections and the distribution mains. The MWRA pretty much just delivers water to the outer-edge of the network of a participating City or Town -- this is not necessarily the best from a Systems-Engineering perspective -- but given the politics of Massachusetts -- its all there is and likely to be -- barring a MEGA Reorganization that would create an Metro County {all of the stuff inside of I-495 including the T and Logan and the MWRA}.

Westy
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Personally, I believe that the Southeast expressway needs a major overhaul. For a major artery, the road is terrible. It needs to be wider than 8 lanes. It's pathetic that during rush hour, the road is down to 3 lanes in one direction. What should be done is a widening project that would add a lane in each direction.

Or, create and elevated HOV lane similar to what is done down in Houston and on parts of the 405 out in Los Angeles.

The Pike also needs to be widened between 128 and downtown Boston.

It's sad that the people designing Boston and the metro area did not plan to allow for growth. The highways around the city are far inferior to those in cities like Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Atlanta, etc. They are not nearly wide enough.

I would also like to see better lighting on the highways, the current lights are poor and some don't even work. The Pike between 128-downtown has pretty good lighting. But everything else could use work.
 
The highways around the city are far inferior to those in cities like Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Atlanta, etc. They are not nearly wide enough.

That's a fact that I am extremely proud of. Instead of wasting money widening highways (which would only worsen traffic by encouraging more people to drive), why don't we calculate how expensive it would be and then funnel those funds straight into public transportation. THAT would help solve traffic issues, Houston and Atlanta can keep their wide highways.

Also, how do you propose the Pike and SE Expwy be widened? You have to remember that, unlike the suburban wastelands of the South, these highways are hemmed in by a dense urban city right up to the edge.
 
It's not that they didn't plan for growth but that the original plan was never full realized. There was supposed to be a second highway, I-95, coming from the Southwest. That was never built so all the traffic that would have gone on the SWE ended up on the Southeast Expressway and 128.

Had the SWE been constructed the SEE would have only served the south shore and been able to handle much of the growth.
 
The rush-hour use of breakdown lanes as travel lanes is a much better alternative than widening highways. It seems to work wherever it is used now, and I wish it had been considered for Route 3 north of Boston instead of spending all that money to widen that road. Perhaps the Pike should consider it?
 
vanshnookenraggen wrote:

"It's not that they didn't plan for growth but that the original plan was never full realized. There was supposed to be a second highway, I-95, coming from the Southwest. That was never built so all the traffic that would have gone on the SWE ended up on the Southeast Expressway and 128."

The SW Expressway (I-95) could have functioned only if the Inner Belt (I-695) had also been built. Without the Inner Belt, all of the traffic from the SW and SE Expressways would have ended up on the Central Artery, which even with the additional capacity provided by the Big Dig project would have been undersized for that amount of traffic.

The Inner Belt Expressway was impossible to build; it would have wiped out a huge swath of residential and industrial land, plus destroy much of the dense urban "feel" of Cambridge. In Boston it would have ruined the Fenway strip of park land between Brookline Ave and the Museum of Fine Arts.

Boston and its environs are much too dense to insert widened or new expressways. Rail transit development is the obvious answer to congestion in the eastern Mass. area.
 
I don't understand why we have to talk about highways, etc. Hypothetically if there wasn't so much political pressure, etc. couldn't one year of the USDOT budget (a large portion which goes into paving roads and highways that don't need to be paved,) pretty much build a world class high speed rail network?
 
Yes, but all the union and non-union hacks that currently eat their fill of pork would throw a fit if their gravy suddenly was going to another type of construction project that they couldn't dip into.

My biggest question has always been, why a century later are we still using crummy asphalt instead of some more advanced material that has better longevity? Beyond keeping buddy buddy jobs on the payroll for yearly repairs, I can't understand why roads aren't built of better materials. Cobblestone seems so much better in many ways on roads that don't require high speeds.
 
We need highways for trucking. Trucking for the last 50 years was THE way to get goods in and out of cities. If cities hadn't built highways they would have strangled on traffic. The auto-centric growth attributed to highways wasn't envisioned at the time they were being developed. I never saw highways as a bad thing, just our over dependence on them.
 
I agree we need a basic highway system for freight movement (although much more development of rail freight line capacity is needed as well). Urban roadways are also needed to handle a moderate amount of car traffic. However, commuter automobile traffic is not something we should build additional highway capacity for. Los Angeles has one of the most extensive freeway systems in the country, yet it has one of the highest congestion rates, also true of many similar cities in the US.

As the adage goes, you cannnot build your way out of congestion, because addtional highway lanes cause more sprawling development served by the enlarged highways, and the increased road capaity also draws commuters away from rail or bus transit.

If the Inner Belt, SW Expressway (I-95), NW Expressway through Cambridge (Route 2), and the NE Expressway through Lynn and Saugus (I-95) had been built in the late 60's as originally planned, these roads would have ended up just as congested as is our current road system. Also, the enlarged highway system would have resulted in fewer commuter rail and transit lines. I doubt if the Red Line extension, the restoration of the Old Colony commuter rail lines, and much of the commuter rail we have today would have happened if these expressways had been built.

Not to mention the destruction of large parts of Cambridge, Boston and other areas, and the liklehood that Boston and Cambridge today would look more like Dallas Texas than the dense, transit oriented communities that they are, or at least are becoming.
 
Could the SEX (heh..) have conceivably been built leading straight into the urban street system, as Route 2 does to the north?
 

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