F-Line to Dudley
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Cohesion is the problem with Alewife. OK...so the first boxes to go up on Cambridepark Dr. in a worse early/mid-90's economy were a little too car-centric. That's fine...that 1970's-anachronism strip mall asphalt moonscape was the only big slab of commerce anchoring the area, the light industry that took up the whole area between the parkway and Belmont town line up Concord Ave. was blighted and dying, and the New Boston economy hadn't revved up enough to have coattails in Cambridge and Somerville. There was basically no reason to be there unless you were going to the movie theatre or rolling at Lanes. But very little of it had been redeveloped, so there was plenty of time to hone that plan.
What happened after New Boston terraformed the rest of Cambridge? They never got around to honing that plan. The office boxes got bigger and denser, the residences started working into the mix on New St., Concord Ave., and Cambridgepark. The path system got usefully infilled. OK...there's a start.
But everything save for the smallest ones like 603 Concord has got a damn parking garage or giant-ass lot! And the greenspace around those buildings is that perjorative Greenspace™® buzzwordy variety that's more office campus "Keep off the grass" exclusive rather than inclusive. People are encouraged to use the paths, but are shunned from actually milling around Cambridgepark Dr. There's never any people out-and-about all day the further up the street you get from Alewife...just the 9-5'er and lunch rushes from the office buildings. The only major attraction to living there is that the parking space-to-residence ratio is so high it's a good place to live near the city...where you never go into the city and always car-commute to work or play outbound on 2. This despite the largest structure dominating the whole skyline being the Red Line station with its giant bat-signal T logo that's been visible for a mile around since 1985. Why build to encourage more suburban isolation when these people should be economically directed inbound to spend their money and leisure time in the Cambridge CBD('s)?
Nobody's tried to redevelop the Mall and aging Best Western with a little less parking overdose. I get that Whole Foods is extremely busy and Apple Cinemas is a legit evening/weekend institution that would be a terrible loss if it went like Lanes & Games. But so much of it is time-specific induced demand. I know, because I lived on Walden St. and would contribute to the problem by lazily driving several blocks the back way down Field + New from an apartment where you can see my unit AND the Mall from the tops of one of the Danehy athletic fields! All to fill up a whole trunk of groceries instead of getting my exercise carrying a few bags across Danehy Park like my lazy ass should've been conditioned to do every time. Has anyone thought to do anything to tame this? No...they won't even grade a path up the hill to the parkway sidewalk, so people still prop up a shopping cart and climb the same makeshift worn dirt path they did 20 years ago. Across the street they just made the strip mall bigger on the ex- Ground Round property with that utterly useless TD Bank strip. And then plunked yet another useless strip at far denser Concord Rotary down the street with that Sleep Number plaza with large lot...that I have never ever seen more than a handful of cars in because what's the walkup traffic to a fucking Sleep Number store in North Cambridge.
The traffic is 3x as bad as it was 15 years ago because of the near 1:1 car-to-person capacity that's featured in buildings actively being constructed in 2016...not 1994. They're making exactly the same exact mistakes with Fawcett St. and Acorn Park...no adjustments or applied knowledge whatsoever. Fricking garages everywhere! Everybody bitches about the Alewife park-and-riders, but the T garage capacity has been static (even lowered as it crumbles without state-of-repair) and at-capacity for years. It isn't growing. Everything else new is feeding the induced demand. It's getting taller and denser, but they have not wavered on parking capacity despite the most frequent and highest-capacity subway line on the system being right there...and being right there in the empty reverse-commute direction for anyone else who wants to work here!
And they aren't adjusting. The ability to improve 2 is sealed because of that goddamn Acorn Park massing right up against the "sidewalk" to nowhere instead of building vehicular access on the rear driveway where buffered by absolutely senseless amounts of perjorative Greenspace™®.
The only money spent on traffic control at the rotary was that pointless add-a-lane widening this past year that did nearly nothing for traffic light cycles.
- No thought whatsoever is being given to geometrically realigning the Cambridgepark/Rindge intersection to eliminate the back-to-back light cycle trap...even though BOTH streets have side room right now today to shift.
- No thought has been given to the geometry of the Acorn Park Dr./2 interface. You can't get there at all from the 2EB Lake St. exit because the ramp misses the rear intersection by 100 stinking feet. You have to slam the brakes and bang a 90-degree right off the Alewife exit ramp at a blind intersection to get there at all.
- MassDOT could fix Acorn Park & 2 and do some genuine good de-isolating it from the uey required from 2WB for $500K by eliminating the second superfluous loop onramp from Lake St. further back, taking the entrance lane from that into a lengthened decel lane, and adding a straight-ahead lane on the exit loop ramp to the traffic light for Acorn Park. Then making the second intersection a one-way only dump onto the Alewife ramp at a traffic island and mini-merge, eliminating the 90-degree hard rights that cause so many traffic backups and accidents. Has anyone official proposed that? Of course not!...it's too cheap and obvious compared to mergeless add-a-laneing of the lights.
- Where' the Alewife busways to Mass Ave. that have been proposed for 20 years now? The buses are getting hammered by the same traffic increases. Why isn't MassHighway targeting that for offloaded relief. The grass medians on the parkway out to Mass Ave. are tailor-made for doing it cheaply. No...let's blow our wad on mergeless rotary add-a-lanes while Sen. Brownsberger and the City Council blankly nod.
This is present-day Cambridge??? How can this massive area of growth still be a giant planning blindspot. It hit peak car oversaturation more than a decade ago, and they're just piling on like nothing's changed. I want to believe in Equilibria's Occam's Razor theory that any plan just went out the door when the developers twisted arms, and the car-centric cycle just kept repeating itself when every subsequent developer went "Me too!" But I'm not sure I can get my brain to believe that after 10 years of other side of Danehy being my home...my longest-duration home in the 20 years I've been in Boston. It's just too big an inexplicable brain fart when they actually pay attention more or less to this sustainability shit in every other ward of the City. Why here? Why this degree of a lapse? It doesn't make any sense.
[/end rant]
Sorry for the wall of text. I just despair at what a senseless disengaged cock-up this whole area has gone. And it's now too far built out to correct the course. It'll grow...it'll expand the tax base handsomely. And it'll be completely unnavigable and gridlocked for a generation because they sealed off all means of mitigation for this bender of car-centric redev. It's just a senseless WTF? from a city that can/does/should know better.
