The areas that seem very congested these days where I Travel.
#1 Woburn Cummings Centers are a disaster
93/128 cloverleaf that's a Top 5'er interchange replacement
#2 Route 128--North & South (North Shore Mall)
North Shore segment of 128 is another one that needs to get up to interstate standards on inner and outer shoulder width so it flows better around a disablement. Lot of substandard accel/decel lanes at the exits too. The further you push east, the older and more substandard the infrastructure gets. This is another "eat your peas" one like Route 6 where modern standards w/no capacity expansion solves most of the problems.
Also...quite badly needs that Peabody/North Shore Mall commuter rail extension.
#3 Burlington Mall area (Absolute Nightmare)
3/128 incomplete interchange. Another one from a canceled highway that's carrying more volume than a half-cloverleaf was ever designed to. The backups into Lexington don't ease until this piece of shit gets blown up and remade as a flyover. Another critical priority.
Well, we all know what a hopeless cause the SE Expressway is because they grabbed every inch of asphalt for travel lanes. No place to absorb disablements, and the lanes (esp. when the zipper is active) are so tight any flow kink anywhere amplifies for miles. Expressway is THE poster child for capacity doing more harm than good. I don't know how this is fixable without doing something controversial like eliminating the zipper to restore full shoulders and blitzing a "Fast 14"-style bridge replacement to widen as many shoulder pinches on spans as possible. It's probably impossible to fix this.
Somerville/Medford would flow better if they fixed the string of shitty interchanges at McGrath, Mystic Ave., and 16. Reading/Woburn would work better if the 128 cloverleaf were fixed. Other than that it is an 8-lane full-spec interstate with good exit layout. That's pure, raw volume and not a whole lot they can do about that other than more transit...LOTS more transit.
Yup. And let's see 6 get all its sub-interstate spec parts smoothed over and a full commuter rail extension before pondering capacity-increasers. And then build the Bourne Flyover, then the Southside Connector before pondering half-billion dollar bridges. They are so far in the hole on easy finesse work to the 6 shoulders and ramp geometry that they have no idea what its true level of service is as an expressway.
Definitely agree Newton-Allston around the problem interchanges that need to be nuked and remade. Open road tolling will snap the rest of it Sturbridge-Framingham into line since the tolls themselves are what cause the backups. Especially at 84. I bet the Friday afternoon 10 miles in hell between 290 and 84 vanishes in entirety when the I-84 exit goes full speed limit. Rest to the west probably gets mitigated well enough by fixing the 291 clusterfuck and continuing to siphon more long-distance trucking to Albany onto rail intermodal (those volumes have already started to level off with the CSX freight project).
I'd like to see how well the Weston tolls respond to open road tolling before prioritizing that interchange's redesign. It might buy 10 or 15 years to take care of other top interchange priorities if that one got better in the process.
#7 Boston:
**Seaport District/Greenway Way (getting stuck in these areas at rush hour is painful)
**Comm Ave/Storrow Drive/Fenway
No good ideas for downtown, but Storrow and Fenway are prime induced demand locations ripe for a taming. Bowker in particular, with more Pike WB ramps and toll-free travel between Southie and Allston yanking a lot of traffic off Storrow that should be using the Pike.
Comm Ave. just needs the rebuild project to keep proceeding west to Warren St. And rebuild the BU Bridge batshittery. The lane drop east to Kenmore actually improved things with the capacity reduction by eliminating so much weaving and timing the lights better. That'll help to the west, as will compacting the Mountfort/Carlton/Bridge octopus. I think this will get better over time. And don't underestimate the impact of simply replacing all the 'dumb' BTD traffic lights with smart signals. It's not just transit priority that benefits if they're programmed for better flow.
