Reasonable Shovel Ready-able Pitches

Charlesgate is un-bikeable, and the sidewalk along the existing bridge is narrow and scary even for pedestrians.
I would widen the Bowker on its west side over the Mass Pike. That side has space on both ends for a wide ped/bike pathway (shown in yellow) without encroaching onto the greenspace too much. When the portion of the Bowker north of here is torn down someday, this on-ramp and bridge over the Pike portion would still be usable.

50601499823_f4364efbce_c.jpg
 
I would widen the Bowker on its west side over the Mass Pike. That side has space on both ends for a wide ped/bike pathway (shown in yellow) without encroaching onto the greenspace too much. When the portion of the Bowker north of here is torn down someday, this on-ramp and bridge over the Pike portion would still be usable.

50601499823_f4364efbce_c.jpg
Yeah, this is pretty much exactly what I pitched.
 
I don't think that will happen to be quite honest.

Seriously, why not?

Just this weekend after 4 years of an ANTI-SCIENCE Presidential Administration:

1) Musk routinely landed (ho-hum) another rocket booster ever so sweetly and gently on its feet within inches of its target
2) a 94.5% effective vaccine (leapfrogging a 90% effective vaccine and at lower storage temp reqs) was announced within MONTHS (something that used to take DECADES for a 50%-70% effectiveness).

The self driving pod technology isn't perfected yet, but has made advances in leaps and bounds in the past 15 years. The economic/real estate property need is CLEARLY there in urban centers. We are talking TRILLIONS of dollars of real estate freed up and more efficient and prodcutive urban economies as a result. Money talks.

By 2035, this is going to be in place - - at least in urban centers of forward thinking progressive cities elsewhere in the world - - why not here? 2035? This is a layup.
 
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Seriously, why not?

Just this weekend after 4 years of an ANTI-SCIENCE Presidential Administration:

1) Musk routinely landed (ho-hum) another rocket booster ever so sweetly and gently on its feet within inches of its target
2) a 94.5% effective vaccine (leapfrogging a 90% effective vaccine and at lower storage temp reqs) was announced within MONTHS (something that used to take DECADES for a 50%-70% effectiveness).

The self driving pod technology isn't perfected yet, but has made advances in leaps and bounds in the past 15 years. The economic/real estate property need is CLEARLY there in urban centers. We are talking TRILLIONS of dollars of real estate freed up and more efficient and prodcutive urban economies as a result. Money talks.

By 2035, this is going to be in place - - at least in urban centers of forward thinking progressive cities elsewhere in the world - - why not here? 2035? This is a layup.

Prolly not the right thread for a breakout sidebar. . .

TLDR version: There are known chaos factors that AI...any presently kown form of AI...simply cannot anticipate for traffic on city streets. It's chaos that exceeds limited-access roadways or results reproducible in a lab setting, and the tech completist enough to tackle that isn't yet the stuff of whitepapers let alone production environment. "80/20" rule isn't good enough..."99/1" isn't even good enough.

Second...the production AI for self-driving today is so error-prone it trailing its own self-predicted rate of improvement by years. And nobody is totally sure why because the best researchers in the land can't fully quantify where it's whiffing. That's...um...bad for future prognostication. You shouldn't for example, have closed-course self-driving demo races where a Jetsons Shit demonstrator car decides to up and crash itself into a wall on Lap 1, like that viral blooper from last month. That was *supposed* to be a layup right now in 2020; it wasn't.


YMMV on if it ever hits that threshold. But 2035, 15 years from now? Not a chance in hell...way too over-optimistic. The best money and minds are already behind it...and it's running way way far behind that pace. 15 years is not a long time; advancement is falling too far behind a pace that'll net results anywhere close to that timeframe. That much you can predict with fast-increasing reliability now.
 
I'll chime in on this tangent just briefly to say that hardware specifically to run AI is still in its infancy and that affects what people even think is possible. There is a leapfrog relationship between the hardware and software sides of AI. As one side of the coin advances, it moves the goalpost for the other. The visionary software people are always a step ahead of the hardware, but they don't actually invest much effort developing neural nets that can't be run in a reasonable amount of time with a reasonable amount of power. The hardware people (thats me!) work on efficient implementation of the most advance neural nets that software has dreamt up to date. With each new generation of hardware, the software folks have a new frontier to consider what is even possible.

The difference in AI between today and 2035 will look like the difference in your cell phone from 2000 (literally a telephone with 12 keys) to 2015 (full touch screen with natural language interface straight out of Star Trek). I don't know if that will be enough for self-driving cars, but it is going to be some serious "Jetson's shit" by today's standard.
 
Prolly not the right thread for a breakout sidebar. . .

TLDR version: There are known chaos factors that AI...any presently kown form of AI...simply cannot anticipate for traffic on city streets. It's chaos that exceeds limited-access roadways or results reproducible in a lab setting, and the tech completist enough to tackle that isn't yet the stuff of whitepapers let alone production environment. "80/20" rule isn't good enough..."99/1" isn't even good enough.

Second...the production AI for self-driving today is so error-prone it trailing its own self-predicted rate of improvement by years. And nobody is totally sure why because the best researchers in the land can't fully quantify where it's whiffing. That's...um...bad for future prognostication. You shouldn't for example, have closed-course self-driving demo races where a Jetsons Shit demonstrator car decides to up and crash itself into a wall on Lap 1, like that viral blooper from last month. That was *supposed* to be a layup right now in 2020; it wasn't.


YMMV on if it ever hits that threshold. But 2035, 15 years from now? Not a chance in hell...way too over-optimistic. The best money and minds are already behind it...and it's running way way far behind that pace. 15 years is not a long time; advancement is falling too far behind a pace that'll net results anywhere close to that timeframe. That much you can predict with fast-increasing reliability now.

Key words in that post "presently known form....".

I say this on a day in which the SECOND (in 8 days) mRNA vaccine ever know to humankind is being unveiled to the world. Where was that capability even 5 years ago? Where was Space-X? How many people paid by credit card (let alone cellphones) in grocery stores 15 years ago? How much cheaper was coal than solar back in 2005?????? Robert Murray died last week waiting for personal government financial aid. How powerful was he in 2005?

What if these automated pods are made of exteriors 3 or 4 times thicker and just as pliable as 2 liter coke bottles? If this is indeed just for urban core centers, the speed limit on these vehicles could be maxed at 15-20 mph. How dangerous is that?

Btw, everyone is focused merely on the automated vehicle. What about the OTHER SIDE of the safety equation? What about also transforming the physical aspect of the sidewalk/crosswalk with virtual and changeable barriers that can rise or fall with traffic signalling? How dangerous are today's evolving and multiplying bike lanes with the flex posts for increased safety? Too many people are thinking within concrete enforced boxes right now. The future will deem those barriers quaint.

As Fattony wrote regarding the evolution of smartphones from 2000-2015 - - 15 years is a long time these days. To paraphrase the well-worn phrase "Necessity is the mother of invention", I'd say trillions of dollars in real estate and urban economics benefits is the mother of invention. Money talks and there are trillions at stake. It might not happen in Boston by 2035, but I'm pretty damn sure it will in places like the city centers of Singapore or Tokyo or London or Portland, Oregon. Boston, most probably, would be a middle-to-late adopter. Places like Cambridge/Somerville might go earlier. It's only an opinion, and everyone is entitled to their own, but I'm looking forward to watching this play out.

Once again, just LOOK at the picture in the OP:

 
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^
There's a whole thread for this here:
Connected/Automated vehicles and infrastructure in Boston

(I'm a believer that self-driving tech will incrementally improve from now to like 2050, but fully autonomous vehicles in urban areas will take the longest to develop. Every new car will be self-driving on the highway before any new car will fully be able to confidently navigate city streets.)
 
^
There's a whole thread for this here:
Connected/Automated vehicles and infrastructure in Boston

(I'm a believer that self-driving tech will incrementally improve from now to like 2050, but fully autonomous vehicles in urban areas will take the longest to develop. Every new car will be self-driving on the highway before any new car will fully be able to confidently navigate city streets.)


Thanks, I'll bring it there. (The folks OUTSIDE of cities won't go for it - 'My God, my Gun and my Truck' - it will be a necessity inside the urban core, though)
 
Bike lanes and bus lanes in Charlestown. There is currently none except for a partial painted unprotected sharrow bike markings on Main St., and a small disconnected bike segment near the Schraffts at Sullivan. Charlestown's almost entirely cut off from the rest of the metro area if one's biking/transit/walking, because of the highways surrounding it.
 

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