Storrow Drive tunnel replacement

As far as making Storrow a boulevard let's agree to disagree.

But to be clear, the tradeoff of removing grade separation would make it more dangerous for pedestrians, motorists, and cyclists and worse for the environment. Also, you shouldn't just make a road narrower, nor is it desirable to do so. If you want to change a road's character in a comprehensive way (like turning Storrow into a boulevard) so be it, but 12 foot lanes with a shoulder and a bike lane segregated from traffic would be the safest way to do things. It's easy to get caught up in the idea of lowering the speed of traffic and forget about the overall mission of safety and efficiency.

And traffic lights (like stop signs) are not, should not, and cannot be used to slow down traffic. They are used to assign the right of way to vehicles with conflicting movement. In general, the more stop lights there are, the more fatalities - pedestrian, cyclist, and motorist. If Storrow were at-grade, they would be necessary, but not desirable.
 
Eliminate Storrow Drive/Soldiers Field road between Allston and Arlington Street, and reduce the width of the remaining section (Arlington Street to Craigie Bridge) to 2 lanes each direction. Utilize the abandoned roadway areas for parkland and a surface light rail line linking Allston to North Station, tying into the Green Line just west of North Station.

A solution suited to the age of $6/gallon gasoline.
 
How do you reconcile these two statements?

massmotorist said:
A spade is a spade and a road is what it is, not what it is arbitrarily declared to be. The numbers on the signs say 40; that limit achieves zero to nine percent compliance rate depending on the area and has no empirical basis.

The 85th percentile is around 60 and the 50th percentile is in the low to mid fifties. Engineering and traffic safety principles dictate a proper limit of 55-60. Legislatively, it's a limited access freeway. Statutorily, it's an unposted prima facie 50 mph zone. Only administratively is it deemed a parkway with a 40 mph limit; that has been found arbitrary, capricious, and unenforceable by the Appellate Division of the District Court where it has been properly argued and briefed.
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If you want to change a road's character in a comprehensive way (like turning Storrow into a boulevard) so be it, but 12 foot lanes with a shoulder and a bike lane segregated from traffic would be the safest way to do things. It's easy to get caught up in the idea of lowering the speed of traffic and forget about the overall mission of safety and efficiency.
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If you build wide 12 foot lanes and to interstate highway standards, then you'll end up with a situation where the 85th percentile speed is around 60mph, boulevard or not. People tend to travel at the highest speed that they feel the road is designed to handle, regardless of the signs. And there's no way that highway speeds are safe or tolerable for a park-side boulevard.

Narrowing seems to be the only way that actually works at convincing drivers to slow down. Do you have a better idea? I would love to hear it.
 
Not sure how turning Storrow into a boulevard changes the overall efficiency of the system seeing as how it's already redundant with an underutilized Mass Pike extension from Downtown through Allston.
 
underground said:
Not sure how turning Storrow into a boulevard changes the overall efficiency of the system seeing as how it's already redundant with an underutilized Mass Pike extension from Downtown through Allston.
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Bingo. You've got to get some new Pike ramps on the WB side and eliminate the tolls to/from Storrow. Then get rid of the induced demand trap of the Bowker, reconfigure that wacky interchange into a cleaner setup that doesn't require 6 fricking lanes between Mass Ave. and the tunnel or that long parallel merge between Charlesgate and Mass Ave., reconfigure the Charles Circle interchange more compactly to eliminate that weaving. Let the prevailing traffic flow be an asynchronous Pike WB/Storrow EB and you've got a basis to start stepping down speeds, compacting the 6-lane midsection and maybe even lane-dropping WB between Leverett and Charles so the whole setup is 3 lanes EB/2 lanes WB. With the reclaimed space put to better use for quasi-real shoulders, curve and merge easing, etc. Tweak the road design after you've finished the Pike work and Storrow interchange-compacting work to reflect and encourage that asynchronous travel pattern and it gets a lot better.

I still think it's going to be many decades before people are comfortable with the idea of eliminating it, but DCR and MassHighway can be helping themselves a lot today simply changing their expressway mentality with the parkways. This city has lots of asynchronous-direction traffic patterns on the AM and PM commutes. Simply acknowledging that fact and incorporating it into their road design options can do a lot to calm Storrow's dysfunction.
 
The idea of "boulevarding" Storrow is not a matter of increasing its efficiency, but rather changing its function. As an east-west highway, Storrow stinks and I believe that there is no way to make it better. Instead of trying to make it something that it cannot be and that the nearby Pike does better, we should change the function. MassMotorist is correct. Stoplights are not good for slowing traffic - they are for assigning right of way. These can facilitate the entry of vehicles onto the roadway from places that there was no access previously - like lots of the streets on Beacon Hill and Back Bay.
 
Semass said:
As an east-west highway, Storrow stinks and I believe that there is no way to make it better.
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It's actually a pretty useful highway for driving between the North/West End, Beacon Hill, Back Bay, and Kenmore. But something more along the lines of Mem Drive or even Comm Ave with well timed lights would be just as useful.
 
Matthew said:
How do you reconcile these two statements?


If you build wide 12 foot lanes and to interstate highway standards, then you'll end up with a situation where the 85th percentile speed is around 60mph, boulevard or not. People tend to travel at the highest speed that they feel the road is designed to handle, regardless of the signs. And there's no way that highway speeds are safe or tolerable for a park-side boulevard.

Narrowing seems to be the only way that actually works at convincing drivers to slow down. Do you have a better idea? I would love to hear it.
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I didn't say to interstate standards, that's impossible (sight lines, exit geometry, etc). Just to modern roadway standards.

Prevailing travel speeds are based on a wide variety of factors, not just lane width. Sight lines, the presence of sidewalks and pedestrians, geometry, trees. There's lots of things that can be done to make roads slower but not less safe. You just need to change the character of the road. Roundabouts are great for intersections if the volume is right (and those I actually support, unlike the rest of these measures). There's neckdowns, raised intersections and crosswalks, etc. Most of these I hate but at least they're actual engineering solutions (unlike lower speed limits) and they don't decrease roadway safety (like narrow lanes and high curbs).
 
Neckdowns are a form of narrowing. And maybe I didn't make this clear: but when I said narrowing I didn't necessarily mean narrow lanes, but narrower overall right-of-way. Even if you only have a single 12 foot lane, if you surround it with 50 feet of wide open space, even with greenery and sidewalks, people take it as license to speed. It's like a racetrack.

I'm aware of a bunch of the techniques that are practiced to try and keep road speeds under control, but as far as I know, the only effective and non-annoying one is to keep the right-of-way narrow. This also has the benefit of wasting less space, meaning you can afford smaller blocks and more frequent turning opportunities, which is good for city vitality. It's also much easier for pedestrians to cross.
 
Is any hope of just not having the road at all? You know that would make the Esplanade feel reach super awesome? If it was River|Park|Building. Imagine the feel of walking/running/biking of the Charles River at one side and the quaint brick buildings on the other side. Even remaking Storrow Drive into a boulevard will still have the same deadening effect as it will have the cars speeding by a few inches you and acting as a barrier to the Back Bay. It's a testament of how awesome the Esplanade is that it can take a highway and the it is still an awesome place. A boulevard won't do that .

My idea have been and still remains of why can't we deck over it. Not with buildings down the whole stretch as some linked to some proposal - it seems unprofitable, but more akin to a really big and parked-up pedestrian bridge. It doesn't have to be the entire stretch either, just at strategic sections (like the Hatch Shell area, BU Beach, and maybe the Muddy River area if the Charlesgate overpass is solvable). From a casual observer, it would look like a grassy knoll flood wall.
 
I thought about that for a while. First, it probably would be a hard sell with the politics. But even assuming that gets settled, I'm not sure it's necessarily a good idea to cut all vehicular access off to the length of the Esplanade. I think some sort of small road might be appropriate (like Riverside Drive in Manhattan; actually, smaller -- no parking lane).

One of the reasons is safety. If you spend time on the Esplanade you'll eventually see a police car driving on the pedestrian walkway. That's because there's no other way for a police vehicle to access the Esplanade because Storrow is so impenetrable. That's unsafe. The Esplanade is part of a city and enabling some vehicle circulation is essential. I think that's a lesson learned from the mistakes of urban renewal: superblocks turned into crime havens because police vehicles couldn't penetrate, and there was nobody casually passing by too many places, leading to blind spots. And then on the other extreme, the superblocks were surrounded by extremely wide, nasty high speed roads which discouraged walking.

The Esplanade to this day still has problems with random weirdo crime, especially at night. I wonder if it's related to the way it's cut off from the normal city.
 
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My idea has always been to add ramps to the Pike, eliminate Storrow as a highway, put the Blue Line in a (relatively) cheap box tunnel, with stations at the Hatch Shell and Mass Ave, put on top of the box handsome buildings a-la the rest of the Back Bay, and a street called "Esplanade Road" which would be 1 lane each direction w/ parallel parking, that connects to the A-H streets in the Back Bay. All buildings would have retail required on the bottom 2 floors. And the park would be extended to the street.

Yeah I get why Storrow is there and I do use it on occasion but in the long run a Blue Line to Kenmore would > than anything Storrow gives. Greater good and all.
 
I'd bet no mass transit option along that corridor would get 25% of the daily trips Storrow does. I like ant's idea, depress the highway and maybe build over it. I don't know why people oppose grade separation so much; it's by far the safest option and the best way to let cars do their thing while accommodating other modes. You can say "get rid of urban highways" till you're blue in the face but the fact is it's not going to happen. So instead of envisioning a perfect world of mass transit and walking, you gotta compromise and accommodate the interests of everyone.
 
A subway under Storrow would greatly augment the over-burdened hub and spoke system. It would provide critical E-W connections to alleviate the Green Line.

Also, the reason we don't like grade separation so much is due to the fact that it does just what it says - separates:

Mass Pike - giant scar through the Back Bay, separating the city fabric
Storrow Drive giant scar along the Esplanade physically separating the shores/parkland of the Charles from the city!

Apparently you think driver safety comes before well-functioning cities. Safety is something that can be easily fixed depending on the design adjustments. The point is NOT that cars should always travel 60 mph on Storrow and we should make the road safe to that standard. We should instead look at how to repair the fabric and design a new road that is just as safe for lower speeds.
 
massmotorist said:
I'd bet no mass transit option along that corridor would get 25% of the daily trips Storrow does. I like ant's idea, depress the highway and maybe build over it. I don't know why people oppose grade separation so much; it's by far the safest option and the best way to let cars do their thing while accommodating other modes. You can say "get rid of urban highways" till you're blue in the face but the fact is it's not going to happen. So instead of envisioning a perfect world of mass transit and walking, you gotta compromise and accommodate the interests of everyone.
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Oh I understand where you're coming from, sure. I'm in client service. Main office is in Back Bay but I travel around the region depending on the client. I'm primarily a driver.

But I look at it this way:
1. Pike is undercapacity w/in 128.
2. Memorial Drive is across the river.
3. Blue -> Kenmore would generate great ridership. But more importantly it relieves the crush by getting riders out of the park/dtx/state mess and improve performance on ALL lines. More importantly, it's prohibitively expensive to build subways in urban Boston. A box tunnel along the Charles might be one of the few opportunites we get to fix some of the chronic problems w/ the T, and do so within a reasonable cost
4. It's the freaking esplanade.

I guess our difference is -auto tunnel vs. -blue line. I think the blue line wins. How much traffic does Storrow carry btw? Look at some of the Urban Ring MPO estimates for riders. That will provide a vague comparison. I think 25% is a very low estimate.
 
datadyne007 said:
A subway under Storrow would greatly augment the over-burdened hub and spoke system. It would provide critical E-W connections to alleviate the Green Line.

Also, the reason we don't like grade separation so much is due to the fact that it does just what it says - separates:

Mass Pike - giant scar through the Back Bay, separating the city fabric
Storrow Drive giant scar along the Esplanade physically separating the shores/parkland of the Charles from the city!

Apparently you think driver safety comes before well-functioning cities. Safety is something that can be easily fixed depending on the design adjustments. The point is NOT that cars should always travel 60 mph on Storrow and we should make the road safe to that standard. We should instead look at how to repair the fabric and design a new road that is just as safe for lower speeds.
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But you need some kind of grade separation for there to be a functioning transportation system. Surely no one here advocates for the Red, Blue, Green, and Orange lines as well as all commuter rail to be at-grade. Remember, tunnels are grade separated.

So if it's recognized that major regional transportation arteries (both transit and highway) need to be grade separated in order to be high functioning, then the issue isn't grade separation, it's a desire for less functional roadways, which I don't think is a good thing.

The point is, for a city to be world class all its infrastructure needs to be adequate to serve its needs. We can't just advocate for eliminating the modes we don't like. I can sympathize with the idea that certain highway infrastructure acts as a scar to the urban landscape, but why not heal the scars while keeping the infrastructure? It doesn't have to be either-or. You keep the high-volume, high-speed traffic off city streets, providing walkers and cyclists with safer options and motorists with more efficient commutes. Better for everyone, and it's the best way to facilitate economic development.
 
Max Power said:
3. Blue -> Kenmore would generate great ridership. But more importantly it relieves the crush by getting riders out of the park/dtx/state mess and improve performance on ALL lines. More importantly, it's prohibitively expensive to build subways in urban Boston. A box tunnel along the Charles might be one of the few opportunites we get to fix some of the chronic problems w/ the T, and do so within a reasonable cost
4. It's the freaking esplanade.

I guess our difference is -auto tunnel vs. -blue line. I think the blue line wins. How much traffic does Storrow carry btw? Look at some of the Urban Ring MPO estimates for riders. That will provide a vague comparison. I think 25% is a very low estimate.
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If I thought a subway was a good idea I'd say go for both. But on one side you'd have the Charles and on the other you'd have the Green Line less than 1/2 mile away, running parallel.

The Pike's an interstate with few exits while Storrow is a major limited access arterial. They serve different functions. And Storrow goes to a different area of downtown than the Pike. Its weekday traffic volume is 80,000-130,000 depending on what section.

Local roads don't have the capacity to handle people going from the Pike to where Storrow takes them and there's no room for them to expand. Plus, adding too many exits to an interstate leads to problems both in terms of congestion and accidents (see: Central Artery viaduct circa 1995).
 
I think people who advocate the riverbank subway forget that there is so much else we could do with the money with more ridership per dollar. Like getting the best possible signal system for the Green Line where signal blocks are all digital, not based on some archaic physical block where fixed lights tell the driver to go or not. Or upgrade the Green Line to heavy rail. I see no reason for the riverbank subway. If you want the Blue Line to hit up Allston/Brighton, Newton Corner, Newtonville, West Newton, etc, then I just see going via Kendall - MIT @ Mass Ave - Cambridgeport being so much more valuable.
 
There is something to be said for redundancy in a transportation network, though. As traffic patterns will tell us, most trips on the Green Line are originating or terminating at Kenmore/Hynes/Copley/Arlington/Boylston/Park/Government Center. If you send the Blue Line via Cambridge, that means we still only have one hamstrung, ancient line coming from the west into the most heavily patronized part of the Green Line network.

To make any major upgrades or refurbishments, we're going to have massive inconveniences, lengthy delays and inevitable cost overruns. The only scenario where wholesale refurb/upgrades on the Green Line would be able to get done quickly and efficiently is to close sections of it at a time; and let's face it, there's no way the MBTA would be allowed to do that for the Central Subway (well, almost no way - we'll see if they end up closing Government Center). At least if a Riverbank Subway were built you'd be able to close stations/segments of the Green Line for refurbishment and upgrades, by rerouting people destined for Hynes/Copley/Arlington/Boylston to their Riverbank counterparts.

Now as for closing Storrow in order to build the Riverbank... even if temporarily... well, that's a task of mythic proportions.
 
A few thoughts:

1. I think there's a disconnect between MassMotorist and Matthew/datadyne007. I think Matthew(maybe datadyne007) is thinking in terms of getting rid of Storrow Drive as an artery road so the arguments is designs for a moderately used city road or to just a campus-style service road. Meanwhile, I think MassMotorist is viewing Storrow Drive as a major artery road so the arguments is designs for a major artery road (if it going to remain an artery road, then it might as well remain with an aim for minimizing danger rather than making a trade off to reduce speed by decreasing safety - reducing the speed but keeping that many cars is still going to separate the river from the city anyways).

2. Above, the point was just made that the Pike is under-capacity. I have to ask if that is really true. When I first heard that, it what made me conclude the idea that we can just outright shut down Storrow Drive. But I have to wondering how to rework ramps to replace Storrow. Even more important is taking the traffic from points north that currently goes down to I-93 then into Storrow.

2. b. Let's assume we can just remove Storrow in the artery mode from anything east of the rail yard near BU with some exits. Storrow's exits are at BU, Charlesgate, Beacon St. near the Public Garden, Charles MGH, Science Park, and finally I-93/Tobin Bridge.

Looking at the map. The BU area could be reworked. Perhaps with reusing Storrow and University Rd (but a small price considering Storrow gone eastward). Perhaps Buick St or even reworking Mountfort St. the giant area circle road. Charlesgate area looks harder, but still doable since Charlesgate no longer have to connect to Storrow. The tracks probably have to be buried.

East of that. It starts to look much harder. Definately the Pike can't replace Storrow's role around Charles MGH, traffic would have to go to I-93 and exit from there. MassMotorist might have a point from this here on.

3. My idea is decking mostly like a pedestrian bridge over the highway - just really big. Not depressing then decking. Highway or subway. I mean is it really possible? It is already barely above sea level. Granted, I know the Green Line need to pump all the time for it to not be underwater, but now the idea is putting that with only 10-40 feet of ground from a river. Going full underwater tunnel treatment by being next to a river might not be worthwhile. A decking with the height of pedestrian bridges seems more plausible. It can be roads or rail. I just like imagining going down the Charles with no rush of cars dampening the feel. Imagine a grassy knoll (fake) floodwall or a brownstone in that place instead
 
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