NYC pedestrianisation

If Mass. Ave. were narrowed to two lanes, wouldn't traffic disperse itself among four or five parallel streets, each of which are also two lanes? That doesn't strike me as a bad thing. Grids are good for dispersing traffic.
 
The Southwest Corridor makes the parallel streets discontinuous from Columbus Ave towards Back Bay, the streets from Huntington Avenue to Boylston Street aren't continuous or paralell for the most part, and then the Back Bay grid is opposite to the major direction of traffic along Mass Avenue. Below Columbus Avenue towards City Hospital, diverting cars onto side streets would make the intersections worse. Worchester St. and Square is a quiet narrow, so that would be a bad idea to put traffic there. Northhampton, Southhampton, Lenox, etc. streets aren't wide or safe for that matter either.

Ralph Adams Cram's Dartmouth Street bridge (can we get the island while we're at it?) would have cut half the traffic off the Harvard bridge and Mass Avenue if it had been built. If the Southwest Corridor Park and other developments didn't truncate the side streets of the South End to Huntington Avenue, it would have diverted more traffic as well in a natural fashion. Through traffic needs to be kept off Mass Avenue through dilution in the first place, not diverted off an already clogged street.
 
(EDIT -- What Lurker said ^^)

That depends on where we're talking about, Ron.

The "grid" between the Back Bay and the South End is thinly connected from Arlington to Dartmouth, and then walled off (Exeter through Hereford) by Copley Place and the Pru.

This is less of an issue for an avid bicyclist like yourself (fewer issues with one-way streets and "adaptive way-finding"), but if you're in a car, and you need to get from Novartis to BU Medical Center, Mass Ave is the only game in town.

Mass Ave is an arterial street, and should remain so. That said, perhaps some of the "letter" streets could be better adapted to the needs of bicycle traffic.
 
Memorial drive needs to be more pedestrian friendly.
 
^^ and it would not be that difficult either. It works really well around harvard, but the path gets too narrow as it approaches the BU bridge, and the stretch past MIT is terrible and needed resurfacing years ago. They should pave a second path closer to the road (maybe just over the cowpaths that have been worn by necessity) or maybe even through the wasted space of the median.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top