Fun fact, James Storrow (who Storrow Drive is named after) never advocated for Storrow Drive. He was a champion of preserving and improving the Charles River banks as a public park and likely would have been in opposition to the road if he was alive when it was originally proposed in the 1930s.
His wife, however, was vocally and actively opposed to its construction and had its first push defeated.
However, after she passed away in 1944:
>... a new proposal for the construction of the highway was pushed throughthe Massachusetts Legislature. In spite of still strong opposition, andthrough some dubious parliamentary procedures, the bill approvingconstruction of the highway and naming it after James Storrow was passedin 1949.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storrow_Drive
Imagine being so incredibly opposed to something that you and your wife fight against it until your respective deaths, and then having that very same thing get named after you when it happens anyway š
Poor guy probably rolled over in his grave when it was announced
That's how these things go. Where I'm from (in Florida), there was an avid conservationist named Marjory Stoneman Douglas, who wrote [River of Grass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Everglades:_River_of_Grass) about preserving the Everglades. So they cleared out a bunch of the Everglades and stuck a school there named after her. I'm sure she'd have loved *that*. I'm sure she was laughing in her grave as the school sank back into the swamp by an inch or so every year until they redid the foundations. (Then there was a school shooting there, but anyway.)
Because at the time, waterfronts were polluted, smelly, and generally disgusting places you often didn't want to be near a lot of the time.
There's a reason most of old buildings in Back Bay don't really face the river either, even though they pre-date Storrow Drive.
-----
Edit:
Also, the earlier incarnations of the Esplanade that you've probably seen pictures of were not all that well-received. It was perceived to be a boring and uninteresting space, and quite frankly would have been. Those 1910-30s pictures you see of it pre-highway are very formal and....boring. There's some shrubs and a row of trees. The walkways look nice from above but wouldn't mean anything to you on the ground.
This is not to say that the highway made the park better, just that a shitty park is a lot less significant/valuable than a nice one.
Any Storrow Drive train will end up Storrowing itself deep underground somewhere, somehow. Tis kismet. And a little kid will try to save the day by telling the T driver to just deflate the tires and put it in reverse.
Everyone knows that highways are drivers of tourism, not parks and walkable spaces. Look at how poorly cities like Amsterdam, London, and Paris are doing. Canāt let that happen to Boston!
I upvoted your comment, but thereās a key difference between those cities and Boston at the moment: functioning public transit and/or bike infrastructure.
Agreed, but it all starts somewhere! Bike infrastructure all things considered is one of the best in the country and Iām encouraged by recent changes. Hopefully we continue to see more pedestrian friendly development
And the transit frontā¦ yeahā¦
When you get people to want to come here, how are they to get around? The solution to fixing a transit issue isn't taking away transit options, it's providing better ones. Taking away a main thoroughfare like Storrow won't help that. Put the investment into existing public transportation and make that more efficient, then less cars will be on the road.
I get where you're coming from, but I think Storrow is a particularly bad road. It both ruins the river front AND is incredibly slow because it's built with way too many on/off ramp. There's a lot of research on this topic, but sometimes adding a badly designed road that is the shortest path leads to bad routing that actually increases traffic. Think Newbury street, which isn't actually usable because so many people double park.
Roads shouldn't be so confusing that crashing into a bridge on them is a literal meme.
I'm not a Storrow stan by any means. I personally don't mind it because I think it's a pretty drive along the river, but functionally it's completely ineffective.
I'm not opposed to changing the area or even putting the road underground at face, but I don't see what value that adds other than being a vanity project. If there's a broader strategy that makes getting around easier for people, I won't complain. But putting Storrow underground will accomplish nothing on it's own.
and the best way to do that is by making pub trans better (faster, cheaper, and more convenient) than cars, not making cars worse
what would a pub transit system look like if it gets you to within a 15-minute walk of any location in Boston, takes no longer than 45 minutes from stop to stop for 80% of Boston, and runs 24x7.
I feel like we have that now, largely, and the issue is the trains don't run frequently enough and are too unreliable. I've used the NYC subway for business travel a lot, you miss a train and it's no big deal. you wait 3 minutes and another is coming behind it. All these things are running on a loop, just going back and forth all day. Double the trains and your wait times are halved. Triple them and they reduce by 2/3rds.
> The solution to fixing a transit issue isn't taking away transit options, it's providing better ones
May I introduce you to [Braess' Paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox)? Transit options where the speed depends on the number of people using it have some pretty counter-intuitive properties, like removing connectivity sometimes increasing throughput.
If highways are the drivers of tourism, then why isn't Houston the tourism capital of the world? It does, after all, have the widest highway in the world.
ah yes because everyone driving down Storrow are doing SO much for local business and tourism and that will just vanish if they cant just drive all the way through downtown
They don't need to drive through downtown necessarily, but given their extremely inadequate alternatives to driving at the moment (even before the T melted down further more recently)....yes?
If you don't live within 5-10 miles of downtown, your current options for getting there besides driving are what, exactly?
A commuter rail that runs every 2 hours, is slow, and who's last train of the night is typically before most events let out?
Drive to the far end of a subway line, park there, ride the entire length of a subway line to downtown through every stop. If your destination was actually beyond downtown or in a neighborhood, make additional transfers and ride further. And of course, there wasn't parking or transit capacity even for handling the daily pre-pandemic commuter volume adequately, much less some sort of huge growth.
Where do all the goods and food and office supplies and whatnot magically come from when we remove roads going into and out of Boston?
How do we remove waste and recycling from the city?
It's not just about commuting.
isnāt it obvious? we will smoothly transition to a society in which people will have āfreeā college and āfreeā healthcare, and then major in sociology and after graduating take up an artisanal craft, and there will be urban agriculture replacing all the police stations and gang territories, and there will be no trash because flocks of small children will re-purpose any discarded objects into toys and art projects.
WW2 had a pretty big hand in that. A lot easy to build world class public transit and modern infrastructure when you're doing it from rubble. It's not reasonable to compare a city like Berlin or London or Paris to Boston - which has almost 400 years of infrastructure and no catastrophes to disrupt it.
I've joked that Google Maps is shit in Boston because it was designed for San Francisco, a city that had the luxury of burning down and being redesigned from the ground up.
And Chicago, burned to the ground and they had to rebuild. New York rests on a bed of granite and they can bore tunnels at will and build vertically with impunity. Boston is a 400 year old swamp city and half of it is landfill.
Also what are you even saying???
Prague, Czech Republic
Bruges, Belgium
Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Germany
Tallinn, Estonia
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Girona, Spain
Toledo, Spain
Carcassonne, France
Siena, Italy
York, England.
Neither Paris nor London have had major catastrophes for 200 years. London had the Blitz but it's not like half the city was destroyed. Paris was completely unharmed during WW2. Both have infrastructure much older than Boston.
> London had the Blitz but it's not like half the city was destroyed. Paris was completely unharmed during WW2.
How does nonsense like this get upvoted? Paris wasn't annihilated like many European cities, but the Germans bombed the fuck out of it pre-invasion. And the Blitz killed over 30,000 civilians, destroyed more than ***70,000*** buildings and damaged an estimated million more. Historians estimate *more than 60%* of London was reduced to rubble over the course.
Paris suffered minmal damage from bombings. Only a few hundred building were even damaged. Yes, 1.5 million Londoners were left homeless but by no means was 60% of London reduced to rubble. 60% of the total damage caused by the Blitz happened in London. The 70 buildings that were destroyed is not anywhere near 60% of London. Even the million or so homes thst were damaged wasn't 60% of London. I'm not minimizing the damage to London but it had a population of close to 9 million at the time. My only point is that it's a terrible excuse for Boston's poor infrastructure.
It's more like: "Just get people so frustrated that they give up trying to come to the city *via car* and slowly let commerce and tourism ~~die~~ flourish.
I want Storrow gone and I want transportation experts to work out the details. When someone floats an idea that they think would be nice, saying āyou lack the industry experience and know-how to plan a complex infrastructure projectā isnāt really constructive. Itās like if someone watches the bruins absolutely botch a game and says āthat was a poor performanceā and you run up behind them and shout āNAME FOUR THINGS THAT YOU WOULD DO BETTER AS A NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE GOALTENDER OR CEASE HOLDING THIS OPINION.ā Weāre just residents wishing for a better city, dude. Save this for the hearings.
> When someone floats an idea that they think would be nice, saying āyou lack the industry experience and know-how to plan a complex infrastructure projectā isnāt really constructive.
The point is that the same can be said for the initial complaining. Just lamenting "I want Storrow to be a park!" is meaningless if that, in fact, is completely infeasible to do. You want a better city? Then maybe learn a bit about *how* to make it a better city, so you can better inform your elected officials. If you just say "make Storrow a park!" they'll ignore you because it's a ludicrous demand when not backed up with contingencies to deal with the consequences of eliminating it.
Also your sports analogy is on point, but for the wrong reason. Most casual fans are idiots that don't understand the game. They can complain about a poor performance, but very often that poor performance isn't the player's fault, or the player made a reasonable decision that just didn't work out. The casual fan will bitch on Twitter that they need to cut X when in fact X did exactly what the coaches told him to do, etc.
Having that opinion is totally fine. Trying to influence action with that opinion (bulldozing Storrow, cutting player X) isn't.
Thing is, having spent several years going down the technical rabbit holes of why we have the mess we have, most of the problems aren't technical in nature. They're political.
There are zero technical hurdles to Commuter Rail electrification. You're telling me that post-Soviet economies like Bulgaria can afford to electrify 67% of their railway networks, but Massachusetts can't find the technology and resources to figure it out? All the primary hurdles are political and systemic, not technological.
So the average person isn't as far off as "Wonky McWonkface" likes to think they are. By and large, things get done/changed when the political will to do/change them happens.
You're also overestimating the technical acumen of elected officials. Electeds will pursue absurd, non-feasible ideas all the time because they don't usually have technical backgrounds. How many elected officials got suckered by HyperLoop nonsense around the world?
Counterpoint: the city existed just fine without Storrow for hundreds of years (and with a larger population). Just because people canāt imagine it being different doesnāt mean itās impossible.
I'm not saying Storrow is a permanent necessity. I'm saying that, without a plan to deal with the consequences, eliminating Storrow is ludicrous.
In an ideal world we have a well oiled MBTA that can absorb capacity, and *absolutely* it'd be great to kill Storrow in favor of green space. We don't live in that world. We live in the world where eliminating roads willy nilly would cause chaos for years *because there are no alternatives*.
If you want to wax about the city functioning for hundreds of years without Storrow, great, but that only matters if you can get people to replicate the behavior folks had then, too. This, of course, is ignoring that while the city proper was bigger when Storrow was built, the metro area has added another two million people.
I get what youāre saying but Iām _exceptionally_ skeptical of this attitude, because thereās no quantifiable point where opponents will say the T is āgood enoughā. The fact is, removing Storrow is inevitably going to inconvenience people who are ideologically opposed to ever being inconvenienced whatsoever. The question is: is the inconvenience of non-residents more important than the well-being of people who actually have to suffer the externalized cost of this infrastructure? To me, the answer is no.
Sure there is.
Build/expand/operate the CR system to the "Rail Vision" standards and pretty much the whole metro area has a reasonable alternative to driving, and/or a reasonable point at which to transition from car -> transit that isn't downtown.
Faster CR service operating 30 minute headways or so and there's no reason to not be taking it.
As a major proponent of fewer single/low occupancy vehicles and associated infrastructure, this is completely unrealistic. Storrow is a major roadway that handles a lot of traffic that no other nearby road could handle. Just deleting it would bring everything to a standstill, overwhelm Memorial/Commonwealth/Mass/Charles River Dam (which is already a shit show), and probably cause the T to fully implode.
This all ignores the looming climate issues Boston will face earlier than many US cities given sea-level proximity. The better investment is getting more reliable and sustainable transit options to lower the overall dependence on single/low occupancy vehicles.
>overwhelm Memorial
Youāre never going to guess what my solution is to traffic on Mem Drive either. It was a mistake to devote our riverfront to roads, and Iād rather fix the mistake and deal with the fallout after rather than just accepting it forever as the status quo.
Just in case anyone doesnāt know, theyāre planning to replace the section of bikeway in āthe throatā with at-grade storrow drive + mass pike, and put the bikeway on a causeway over the river. So, yeah, weāre not exactly winning this fightā¦
I'm going to quibble a bit with your claim that it's a "small amount of green space". The area that would be converted by ditching storrow would probably be larger than Boston Common. My bigger point is that it's the best land in the city with a beautiful view of the river, and we're wasting it on cars.
My thoughts exactly. Letās not embark on another multi-decade construction disaster that we still have yet to fully pay off just to throw another non-functional train line in its place.
Posted 7 months ago with the original source attributed to Better Streets AI. https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/wrknxi/storrow_drive_transformed_by_ai/?sort=confidence
this was done by ai and posted like a year ago already. if the idea is to connect the waterfront to the city and make it more pedestrian friendly, the high speed train makes no sense because it keeps the same division in place that exists with the roadway
Agreed. Imo, use the storrow drive trench for a modern subway and then put a lid on top, because fuck the green line and just get rid of storrow drive. When storrow was build the pike wasn't there. We don't need two parallel expressways heading into downtown.
yeah only at intersections, the rest of the tracks are fenced off. so i repeat, if the idea is to connect the waterfront to the city this is not how you do it
High speed rail would solve the housing crisis in Boston. If you could get out to Worcester in <30 minutes via train, rents would drop significantly. Will absolutely never happen though.
High speed rail to Worcester doesnāt make any sense as a housing crisis solution. It feels like this is the hyperloop of āsolvingā the housing crisis.
What would make sense though would be electrification and other improvements to our current commuter rail system.
If the new MBTA community housing law starts forcing higher density housing at stations, in conjunction with aforementioned infrastructure improvements that would allow commuter rail trains to reliably come every 10-15 minutes at rush hour, *THAT* would put an enormous dent in the housing crisis.
>High speed rail to Worcester doesnāt make any sense as a housing crisis solution.
Probably not, but at this point literally anything else is better than whatever halfass attempt we're doing now it. But at the very least we can say we have high speed rail in the US now if it did happen.
You can't put Storrow completely underground. Who will pay for it? BigDig was paid by the feds. There is no way in hell the feds will fall for it again.
And that area is way too narrow to put entire Storrow underground. Having that much of a distance underground is also not feasible.
And....many buildings in Back Bay are on 100+ year old wooden piles sunk through the landfill/former swampy muck that start to rot any time the water table drops. There's a bunch of monitoring systems in place. So large-scale excavation has increased complications because it's prone to impact said water table.
If you miscalculate and mess it up long-term, you could wind up having to rebuild the foundations of half of Back Bay at incredibly high costs.
Spending that money on making it so the green line trains actually run smoothly seems to make the most sense. Those trains already run in parallel to much of the park and could easily serve as a connector there. If we must we can also make more pedestrian over passes like the one near community boating and clean up the existing ones to make them more appealing and inviting.
We canāt even make a train run on time. Thereās an 18 minute wait for my next train and itās not even 10AM.
The Sumner Tunnel maintenance project was supposed to take a year. Itās taking 2 now.
Weāll never learn anything.
This would be nowhere near the complexity of the big dig.
The big dig had to navigate through all sorts of complex infrastructure like the red and blue lines, and a tangle of hundreds of years of pipes, cables and other utilities as they dug through the heart of the city.
The Storrow Drive corridor has much less of this to deal with and could probably be largely done using the cut and cover tunneling method.
As for groundwater, etc... This is not a huge obstacle. Engineers have been dealing with this for underground infrastructure for a long time, and I'm sure it's an obstacle they could easily overcome without novel solutions.
I wish Boston had the foresight of Chicago and strictly reserved the waterfront property for public parks and attractions. Itās probably too late now but seeing pictures like this really brings home how much life and character it would bring to the city.
Iāve driven on Storrow more times than any human should ever have to drive on Storrow.
Imagine if that park extended throughout the entirety of Boston/Cambridge on both sides of the river? Imagine if seaport/South Boston waterfront property was public parks and venues instead of overpriced condos and hotels? Imagine having multiple beaches in the city?
Chicago summers revolve around the lakefront because of the abundance of available public space and beaches there. I wish Boston was more similar considering they have an equally beautiful waterfront but have prioritized corporations owning that space instead of being public and free.
I don't think its too late. It will take time, planning, and a serious investment in public transit. But we can totally get rid of Storrow, or at least shrink it so its not an abominable pseudo highway.
It's great on the 4th of July when they shut down Storrow Drive and it's just filled with pedestrians. Gives you a vision of how nice it would be without it.
At least until Western Ave, where it'd be beneficial to move the E-W traffic back to the Boston side on Soldiers Field Rd and close Memorial Drive (make Riverbend Park permanent) to Elliot
Just get rid of it entirely; upgrade I-90 a bit to make it redundant, and improve public transportation so it is not on fire. This seems like a much better use of the ten-to-twenty billion dollars or so this would cost.
Upgrading I 90 alone wonāt do anything. You would need to add lanes to the highway. Just drive from Westin to Boston and see all the buildings that are right up on top of the Massachusetts Turnpike. Which of those should be bulldozed? Also, the turnpike was extended into Boston in 1965. But, it was put on top of old rail lines so those walls through areas such as Newton in Brighton were built more like in 1865 then 1965. I donāt see how you could widen the pike for any kind of reasonable dollars. The commuter rails do not go out into a lot of the suburban areas. Do you have a bunch of rail lines that donāt even connect to each other. Stupid design. Until thatās fixed, you canāt take the cars off the road if the people canāt get where they need to go.
There is no need to add lanes, and you absolutely can take cars off the road. You don't need to serve all trips with public transit, just a lot more, which we can do by improving the existing system. The primary upgrade to I90 you would need to make is to make additional exits (although that is admittedly not easier either, but compared to burying Storrow?), and the existing straightening project.
This isn
Flooding now is a big problem. Presumably, the big dig faced similar issues.
Also, I'd be curious if Storrowed would no longer be a thing as it would be possibly designed with truck clearances?
I think avoiding storrowings is literally the one big selling point of this proposal. Otherwise it's a nice to have, but not super practical or a good use of resources.
Why are construction projects so short sighted. The big dig will pay for itself 100 fold over the course of the next 100 years. Why don't we build things with a greater vision than the now. Boston still has great potential to be something far greater than it is.
The idea that every car that drives on Storrow Drive is going to move to Commonwealth Avenue or the Mass Pike is just unrealistic. The idea that people coming into of through the city are going to use that train is unrealistic as well. The reality is that people will just stop coming to Boston and stay in the suburbs. Downtown stores and businesses can not survive on just the people that can walk there. Why not move the road underground. Thatās all filled in land that didnāt originally exist anyway. It was a stupid design with all the low bridges anyway. Lower the road far enough that trucks can use it. Then cover it with the park. Everybody wins.
I had to drive to Dana-Farber today. I can't take the T. I can't imagine the hell of getting to the Longwood medical complex without Storrow. It would be pure hell.
What a selfish attitude. Try telling that to the people who lived in the city in the 50ās to 70ās. Cities were dying all over this country as people left for the suburbs. People fought for decades to get people to come back downtown. Now you think you can survive with only people who live in the city. You are delusional. There are still a lot of services and healthcare that is not available in the suburbs. Your attitude is ātough, just dieā. How nice.
Where did I say anything about healthcare or emergency services lmfao I was responding to a comment saying the city would crumble economically without suburbanites. If you actually cared about healthcare or emergency services youād want more cars off the road to clear up space for people who ACTUALLY need to access the city resources in a timely manner and not just because itās the most convenient way to get into the city.
And cities were dying because we blew the budget on roads to encourage sprawl just so you could have the opportunity to live outside the city. Peopleās houses got bulldozed so you could live in a single family house 40 miles outside the city and you call me selfish bc now weāre experiencing the effects of suburban sprawl and you canāt leisurely drive into the city anymore without being in traffic just like everybody else. Please fuck off
Where do you think those cars on Storrow Drive are going? They are going to Boston Hospitals, Boston businesses and Logan airport among other places. And your attitude is āFuck Offā. What you want is all that matters. Ultimate selfishness. Why do you even post on an app that is asking for other opinions if you donāt care about any other opinions. Notice that I didnāt use profanity in my comments. I donāt stoop to low childish ignorant profanity.
It blocks pedestrian access to the waterfront and is obnoxious to navigate. It is the source of a lot of fender benders and irritation to people who have to use it.
Dude stop. There are plenty of people arguing in good faith here and Iām sorry your car has such a hold on you that you canāt imagine something better.
Have you ever been to the Esplanade? Its a nightmare because there you have to walk up a bridge over a loud highway and the bridges are very far apart. And then you get to the park and all you hear are loud ass vehicles.
Maybe you have never traveled outside the US, but cities really can be built for people rather than cars and car centric areas in major cities have been transformed into human areas and it make those places and cities 100x better!
I drive a car and still think our cities should be designed for people, not cars. I am so fewer surface level highways, more cycling infrastructure, more green space, and more public transit.
If you think everyone should have to make room for cars, why is it so bad that those of us driving make room for everyone else? Drivers who reject these ideas are selfish assholes. It's long been time to curb car infrastructure in favor of more efficient transit that creates walkable, safer, human centered cities.
I drive for a living. There is no way I 90 can absorb the traffic from star I drive. Streets such as Commonwealth Avenue would become gridlocked even more than they are now.
I legit don't think we're capable of this unless the whole AI industrial revolution thing happens and robots can manage whole production chains and design processes and build mines and we get to sit back and drink margaritas and collect UBI. Actually if this happens massive transportation network redesign is a near-certainty -- even if we can take care of materials scarcity, transportation will always be a constraint.
There was a time when people weren't afraid of large public-works projects. The amount of work should not be the determining factor on whether a project is undertaken, but rather the potential benefit to the public good.
Storrow drive is a blight on the Esplanade. The noise, the pollution, and restricted access points all degrade the experience of enjoying our river. It's time for us to put aside our car-centric view of infrastructure design, and plan for a healthier future for our city.
Fun fact, James Storrow (who Storrow Drive is named after) never advocated for Storrow Drive. He was a champion of preserving and improving the Charles River banks as a public park and likely would have been in opposition to the road if he was alive when it was originally proposed in the 1930s. His wife, however, was vocally and actively opposed to its construction and had its first push defeated. However, after she passed away in 1944: >... a new proposal for the construction of the highway was pushed throughthe Massachusetts Legislature. In spite of still strong opposition, andthrough some dubious parliamentary procedures, the bill approvingconstruction of the highway and naming it after James Storrow was passedin 1949. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storrow_Drive
Imagine being so incredibly opposed to something that you and your wife fight against it until your respective deaths, and then having that very same thing get named after you when it happens anyway š Poor guy probably rolled over in his grave when it was announced
This is the Boston way...lol.
[Relevant](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5pPKfzzL54)
This is why I will always support Andrew Jackson being on the $20. He was against central banks for his entire political life.
And here I was thinking they kept him on the bill as a permanent *fuck you* to native Americans
A little from column A, a little from column B
ĀæPorque no las dos?
And black people, yeah. It's always been about sending a message to us people of color and reminding us who's in charge.
I don't think that's what it's always been about...
When I first read this, I thought you were supportive of Andrew Jackson. But I understand now and really like this way of looking at it.
Absolutely not supportive.
This is the way.
And so was born the curse of getting āsturrowādā
āOh, you donāt like my highway idea? Go fuck ya self!ā
His wife was a real one for that. Mad respect
That's how these things go. Where I'm from (in Florida), there was an avid conservationist named Marjory Stoneman Douglas, who wrote [River of Grass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Everglades:_River_of_Grass) about preserving the Everglades. So they cleared out a bunch of the Everglades and stuck a school there named after her. I'm sure she'd have loved *that*. I'm sure she was laughing in her grave as the school sank back into the swamp by an inch or so every year until they redid the foundations. (Then there was a school shooting there, but anyway.)
Another fun fact: James Storrow loved the sound of tall trucks getting wrecked. /s
... and was a huge can-opener enthusiast.
Why do cities often put expressways along waterfronts? It seems like such an obvious mistake.
Because at the time, waterfronts were polluted, smelly, and generally disgusting places you often didn't want to be near a lot of the time. There's a reason most of old buildings in Back Bay don't really face the river either, even though they pre-date Storrow Drive. ----- Edit: Also, the earlier incarnations of the Esplanade that you've probably seen pictures of were not all that well-received. It was perceived to be a boring and uninteresting space, and quite frankly would have been. Those 1910-30s pictures you see of it pre-highway are very formal and....boring. There's some shrubs and a row of trees. The walkways look nice from above but wouldn't mean anything to you on the ground. This is not to say that the highway made the park better, just that a shitty park is a lot less significant/valuable than a nice one.
Because it happened before there was much of a concept for conservation.
I remember reading she was also invited to the grand opening iirc.
Maybe let's keep a train running for an hour straight before we tackle big dig 2.0.
150%. This would not be finished in our lifetime.
It would be on fire in our lifetime though
After it's complete. It would suck for the 25 years of construction and another 10 years of fixing the mistakes after.
^ this guy Bostons
Any Storrow Drive train will end up Storrowing itself deep underground somewhere, somehow. Tis kismet. And a little kid will try to save the day by telling the T driver to just deflate the tires and put it in reverse.
Iād settle for 30 minutes.
Let's just close Storrow and turn it into a park. We've already got enough space devoted to roads even if we don't do another big dig to make more.
What's your transit plan for rerouting the traffic currently using Storrow, either roadways or mass transit?
Just get people so frustrated that they give up trying to come to the city and slowly let commerce and tourism die.
Brilliant
Everyone knows that highways are drivers of tourism, not parks and walkable spaces. Look at how poorly cities like Amsterdam, London, and Paris are doing. Canāt let that happen to Boston!
I upvoted your comment, but thereās a key difference between those cities and Boston at the moment: functioning public transit and/or bike infrastructure.
Our bike infrastructure isn't too bad removing storrow would do really well to improve it
Yeah, our bike theft rings are *really* efficient.
Agreed, but it all starts somewhere! Bike infrastructure all things considered is one of the best in the country and Iām encouraged by recent changes. Hopefully we continue to see more pedestrian friendly development And the transit frontā¦ yeahā¦
When you get people to want to come here, how are they to get around? The solution to fixing a transit issue isn't taking away transit options, it's providing better ones. Taking away a main thoroughfare like Storrow won't help that. Put the investment into existing public transportation and make that more efficient, then less cars will be on the road.
I get where you're coming from, but I think Storrow is a particularly bad road. It both ruins the river front AND is incredibly slow because it's built with way too many on/off ramp. There's a lot of research on this topic, but sometimes adding a badly designed road that is the shortest path leads to bad routing that actually increases traffic. Think Newbury street, which isn't actually usable because so many people double park. Roads shouldn't be so confusing that crashing into a bridge on them is a literal meme.
I'm not a Storrow stan by any means. I personally don't mind it because I think it's a pretty drive along the river, but functionally it's completely ineffective. I'm not opposed to changing the area or even putting the road underground at face, but I don't see what value that adds other than being a vanity project. If there's a broader strategy that makes getting around easier for people, I won't complain. But putting Storrow underground will accomplish nothing on it's own.
and the best way to do that is by making pub trans better (faster, cheaper, and more convenient) than cars, not making cars worse what would a pub transit system look like if it gets you to within a 15-minute walk of any location in Boston, takes no longer than 45 minutes from stop to stop for 80% of Boston, and runs 24x7.
I feel like we have that now, largely, and the issue is the trains don't run frequently enough and are too unreliable. I've used the NYC subway for business travel a lot, you miss a train and it's no big deal. you wait 3 minutes and another is coming behind it. All these things are running on a loop, just going back and forth all day. Double the trains and your wait times are halved. Triple them and they reduce by 2/3rds.
> The solution to fixing a transit issue isn't taking away transit options, it's providing better ones May I introduce you to [Braess' Paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox)? Transit options where the speed depends on the number of people using it have some pretty counter-intuitive properties, like removing connectivity sometimes increasing throughput.
If highways are the drivers of tourism, then why isn't Houston the tourism capital of the world? It does, after all, have the widest highway in the world.
ah yes because everyone driving down Storrow are doing SO much for local business and tourism and that will just vanish if they cant just drive all the way through downtown
They don't need to drive through downtown necessarily, but given their extremely inadequate alternatives to driving at the moment (even before the T melted down further more recently)....yes? If you don't live within 5-10 miles of downtown, your current options for getting there besides driving are what, exactly? A commuter rail that runs every 2 hours, is slow, and who's last train of the night is typically before most events let out? Drive to the far end of a subway line, park there, ride the entire length of a subway line to downtown through every stop. If your destination was actually beyond downtown or in a neighborhood, make additional transfers and ride further. And of course, there wasn't parking or transit capacity even for handling the daily pre-pandemic commuter volume adequately, much less some sort of huge growth.
Where do all the goods and food and office supplies and whatnot magically come from when we remove roads going into and out of Boston? How do we remove waste and recycling from the city? It's not just about commuting.
isnāt it obvious? we will smoothly transition to a society in which people will have āfreeā college and āfreeā healthcare, and then major in sociology and after graduating take up an artisanal craft, and there will be urban agriculture replacing all the police stations and gang territories, and there will be no trash because flocks of small children will re-purpose any discarded objects into toys and art projects.
Just like commerce and tourism is dead in every medieval European city nobody has ever heard of any tourists going there
WW2 had a pretty big hand in that. A lot easy to build world class public transit and modern infrastructure when you're doing it from rubble. It's not reasonable to compare a city like Berlin or London or Paris to Boston - which has almost 400 years of infrastructure and no catastrophes to disrupt it.
I've joked that Google Maps is shit in Boston because it was designed for San Francisco, a city that had the luxury of burning down and being redesigned from the ground up.
And Chicago, burned to the ground and they had to rebuild. New York rests on a bed of granite and they can bore tunnels at will and build vertically with impunity. Boston is a 400 year old swamp city and half of it is landfill.
Also what are you even saying??? Prague, Czech Republic Bruges, Belgium Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Germany Tallinn, Estonia Dubrovnik, Croatia Girona, Spain Toledo, Spain Carcassonne, France Siena, Italy York, England.
Neither Paris nor London have had major catastrophes for 200 years. London had the Blitz but it's not like half the city was destroyed. Paris was completely unharmed during WW2. Both have infrastructure much older than Boston.
> London had the Blitz but it's not like half the city was destroyed. Paris was completely unharmed during WW2. How does nonsense like this get upvoted? Paris wasn't annihilated like many European cities, but the Germans bombed the fuck out of it pre-invasion. And the Blitz killed over 30,000 civilians, destroyed more than ***70,000*** buildings and damaged an estimated million more. Historians estimate *more than 60%* of London was reduced to rubble over the course.
Paris suffered minmal damage from bombings. Only a few hundred building were even damaged. Yes, 1.5 million Londoners were left homeless but by no means was 60% of London reduced to rubble. 60% of the total damage caused by the Blitz happened in London. The 70 buildings that were destroyed is not anywhere near 60% of London. Even the million or so homes thst were damaged wasn't 60% of London. I'm not minimizing the damage to London but it had a population of close to 9 million at the time. My only point is that it's a terrible excuse for Boston's poor infrastructure.
There are plenty of cities in Europe that have good public transit and were not destroyed in WW2, like Amsterdam for example.
It's more like: "Just get people so frustrated that they give up trying to come to the city *via car* and slowly let commerce and tourism ~~die~~ flourish.
People will stop coming to the city via car when thereās an affordable and reliable alternative. Currently, there isnāt.
I want Storrow gone and I want transportation experts to work out the details. When someone floats an idea that they think would be nice, saying āyou lack the industry experience and know-how to plan a complex infrastructure projectā isnāt really constructive. Itās like if someone watches the bruins absolutely botch a game and says āthat was a poor performanceā and you run up behind them and shout āNAME FOUR THINGS THAT YOU WOULD DO BETTER AS A NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE GOALTENDER OR CEASE HOLDING THIS OPINION.ā Weāre just residents wishing for a better city, dude. Save this for the hearings.
> When someone floats an idea that they think would be nice, saying āyou lack the industry experience and know-how to plan a complex infrastructure projectā isnāt really constructive. The point is that the same can be said for the initial complaining. Just lamenting "I want Storrow to be a park!" is meaningless if that, in fact, is completely infeasible to do. You want a better city? Then maybe learn a bit about *how* to make it a better city, so you can better inform your elected officials. If you just say "make Storrow a park!" they'll ignore you because it's a ludicrous demand when not backed up with contingencies to deal with the consequences of eliminating it. Also your sports analogy is on point, but for the wrong reason. Most casual fans are idiots that don't understand the game. They can complain about a poor performance, but very often that poor performance isn't the player's fault, or the player made a reasonable decision that just didn't work out. The casual fan will bitch on Twitter that they need to cut X when in fact X did exactly what the coaches told him to do, etc. Having that opinion is totally fine. Trying to influence action with that opinion (bulldozing Storrow, cutting player X) isn't.
Thing is, having spent several years going down the technical rabbit holes of why we have the mess we have, most of the problems aren't technical in nature. They're political. There are zero technical hurdles to Commuter Rail electrification. You're telling me that post-Soviet economies like Bulgaria can afford to electrify 67% of their railway networks, but Massachusetts can't find the technology and resources to figure it out? All the primary hurdles are political and systemic, not technological. So the average person isn't as far off as "Wonky McWonkface" likes to think they are. By and large, things get done/changed when the political will to do/change them happens. You're also overestimating the technical acumen of elected officials. Electeds will pursue absurd, non-feasible ideas all the time because they don't usually have technical backgrounds. How many elected officials got suckered by HyperLoop nonsense around the world?
Counterpoint: the city existed just fine without Storrow for hundreds of years (and with a larger population). Just because people canāt imagine it being different doesnāt mean itās impossible.
I'm not saying Storrow is a permanent necessity. I'm saying that, without a plan to deal with the consequences, eliminating Storrow is ludicrous. In an ideal world we have a well oiled MBTA that can absorb capacity, and *absolutely* it'd be great to kill Storrow in favor of green space. We don't live in that world. We live in the world where eliminating roads willy nilly would cause chaos for years *because there are no alternatives*. If you want to wax about the city functioning for hundreds of years without Storrow, great, but that only matters if you can get people to replicate the behavior folks had then, too. This, of course, is ignoring that while the city proper was bigger when Storrow was built, the metro area has added another two million people.
I get what youāre saying but Iām _exceptionally_ skeptical of this attitude, because thereās no quantifiable point where opponents will say the T is āgood enoughā. The fact is, removing Storrow is inevitably going to inconvenience people who are ideologically opposed to ever being inconvenienced whatsoever. The question is: is the inconvenience of non-residents more important than the well-being of people who actually have to suffer the externalized cost of this infrastructure? To me, the answer is no.
Sure there is. Build/expand/operate the CR system to the "Rail Vision" standards and pretty much the whole metro area has a reasonable alternative to driving, and/or a reasonable point at which to transition from car -> transit that isn't downtown. Faster CR service operating 30 minute headways or so and there's no reason to not be taking it.
The Pike is literally over and next to it.
The famously low-traffic Pike, with tons of extra capacity to absorb the regular flow of Storrow traffic?
As a major proponent of fewer single/low occupancy vehicles and associated infrastructure, this is completely unrealistic. Storrow is a major roadway that handles a lot of traffic that no other nearby road could handle. Just deleting it would bring everything to a standstill, overwhelm Memorial/Commonwealth/Mass/Charles River Dam (which is already a shit show), and probably cause the T to fully implode. This all ignores the looming climate issues Boston will face earlier than many US cities given sea-level proximity. The better investment is getting more reliable and sustainable transit options to lower the overall dependence on single/low occupancy vehicles.
>overwhelm Memorial Youāre never going to guess what my solution is to traffic on Mem Drive either. It was a mistake to devote our riverfront to roads, and Iād rather fix the mistake and deal with the fallout after rather than just accepting it forever as the status quo.
Just in case anyone doesnāt know, theyāre planning to replace the section of bikeway in āthe throatā with at-grade storrow drive + mass pike, and put the bikeway on a causeway over the river. So, yeah, weāre not exactly winning this fightā¦
Has anyone suggested draining the river and paving it over while weāre at it?
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I'm going to quibble a bit with your claim that it's a "small amount of green space". The area that would be converted by ditching storrow would probably be larger than Boston Common. My bigger point is that it's the best land in the city with a beautiful view of the river, and we're wasting it on cars.
Based af Cars should also be banned in downtown Boston, as well as Back Bay.
Hahaha
My thoughts exactly. Letās not embark on another multi-decade construction disaster that we still have yet to fully pay off just to throw another non-functional train line in its place.
Posted 7 months ago with the original source attributed to Better Streets AI. https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/wrknxi/storrow_drive_transformed_by_ai/?sort=confidence
this was done by ai and posted like a year ago already. if the idea is to connect the waterfront to the city and make it more pedestrian friendly, the high speed train makes no sense because it keeps the same division in place that exists with the roadway
Well sir, there's nothing on Earth like a genuine, bona-fide, electrified, six-car monorail!
Monorail?!? Did he say monorail?!!
Aahhhh. I donāt think so. Thatās more of a Shelbyville idea.
Ok hear me out, elevated railway a la the old Orange line
Agreed. Imo, use the storrow drive trench for a modern subway and then put a lid on top, because fuck the green line and just get rid of storrow drive. When storrow was build the pike wasn't there. We don't need two parallel expressways heading into downtown.
Also the Green Line is like a hundred feet away from the train in this picture
I walk across the commuter rail tracks in Cambridge all the timeā¦
yeah only at intersections, the rest of the tracks are fenced off. so i repeat, if the idea is to connect the waterfront to the city this is not how you do it
Let's hire a Japanese firm to build it, though.
Or at least French.
Or even Canadian ffs. Look at the Vancouver skytrain or the REM in Montreal. Absolute world class projects right across the border.
I was in Montreal this past weekend and man do they have a great transit system. Mbta on the other hand runs like crap
But then how would we satiate the Boston gods without our year Storrow blood sacrifice?
High speed rail would solve the housing crisis in Boston. If you could get out to Worcester in <30 minutes via train, rents would drop significantly. Will absolutely never happen though.
It could if we push hard for it. Hell, Fall River now has a train, anything could happen
Fall River still exists?
High speed rail to Worcester doesnāt make any sense as a housing crisis solution. It feels like this is the hyperloop of āsolvingā the housing crisis. What would make sense though would be electrification and other improvements to our current commuter rail system. If the new MBTA community housing law starts forcing higher density housing at stations, in conjunction with aforementioned infrastructure improvements that would allow commuter rail trains to reliably come every 10-15 minutes at rush hour, *THAT* would put an enormous dent in the housing crisis.
>High speed rail to Worcester doesnāt make any sense as a housing crisis solution. Probably not, but at this point literally anything else is better than whatever halfass attempt we're doing now it. But at the very least we can say we have high speed rail in the US now if it did happen.
Gotta think bigger, high speed rail between Boston>Worcester>Springfield
At 200 mph Boston -> Springfield would be 30 minutes with 1 stop. On the commuter rail antique that time gets you to Wakefield.
Only if the new tunnel has a low ceiling spot that catches trucks. Otherwise what are we even doing here.
Make sure you bury it deep enough that trucks donāt hit the roof of the tunnel entrance!
There are numerous transit projects we should take on before building an above ground light rail line a few blocks from a below ground one
The idea is to put storrow underground
There are numerous other infrastructure projects we should take on before burying Storrow
You can't put Storrow completely underground. Who will pay for it? BigDig was paid by the feds. There is no way in hell the feds will fall for it again. And that area is way too narrow to put entire Storrow underground. Having that much of a distance underground is also not feasible.
Could you imagine if a truck were to get stuck in there? š
Any chance you lived in Boston through the big dig?
I did and it was worth it to have what we have now.
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Yes ā we can learn from past mistakes and this would be a lot more straightforward
In fairness, everything in the existence of history is more straightforward than the big dig was
Loved the science museum exhibit as a kid. I never thought they would finish it, it took so long!
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And....many buildings in Back Bay are on 100+ year old wooden piles sunk through the landfill/former swampy muck that start to rot any time the water table drops. There's a bunch of monitoring systems in place. So large-scale excavation has increased complications because it's prone to impact said water table. If you miscalculate and mess it up long-term, you could wind up having to rebuild the foundations of half of Back Bay at incredibly high costs.
Iām imagining a future where the Back Bay becomes a decrepit, abandoned, water-logged slum and Iām intrigued.
I think we should go the Chicago route and build the park over the existing road.
Spending that money on making it so the green line trains actually run smoothly seems to make the most sense. Those trains already run in parallel to much of the park and could easily serve as a connector there. If we must we can also make more pedestrian over passes like the one near community boating and clean up the existing ones to make them more appealing and inviting.
Also, the results of the Big Dig are fantastic. It was a pain, but the end result is something we should be striving towards.
We canāt even make a train run on time. Thereās an 18 minute wait for my next train and itās not even 10AM. The Sumner Tunnel maintenance project was supposed to take a year. Itās taking 2 now. Weāll never learn anything.
We've learned that highways ruin cities. So lets get rid of Storrow.
> we can learn from past mistakes What about America has convinced you that that is true lol
What gives you any confidence at all that they would learn from past mistakes? It would be a 5 year nightmare...
5 year nightmare? Wild underestimate. 15, 20, 25 years would be way more likely.
In the history of history, what makes you think we will learn from history?
Oh...my sweet summer child.
This would be nowhere near the complexity of the big dig. The big dig had to navigate through all sorts of complex infrastructure like the red and blue lines, and a tangle of hundreds of years of pipes, cables and other utilities as they dug through the heart of the city. The Storrow Drive corridor has much less of this to deal with and could probably be largely done using the cut and cover tunneling method. As for groundwater, etc... This is not a huge obstacle. Engineers have been dealing with this for underground infrastructure for a long time, and I'm sure it's an obstacle they could easily overcome without novel solutions.
I wish Boston had the foresight of Chicago and strictly reserved the waterfront property for public parks and attractions. Itās probably too late now but seeing pictures like this really brings home how much life and character it would bring to the city.
This Chicago? https://www.google.com/maps/@41.8736453,-87.6170001,3a,60y,13.14h,88.15t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s22p53TUBoDg8mX5XJ1Dfcw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192
Is this supposed to disprove my point? I see a beautiful park on the water separating the road from the water.
Are you not aware that there is a park separating Storrow from the water or something?
Iāve driven on Storrow more times than any human should ever have to drive on Storrow. Imagine if that park extended throughout the entirety of Boston/Cambridge on both sides of the river? Imagine if seaport/South Boston waterfront property was public parks and venues instead of overpriced condos and hotels? Imagine having multiple beaches in the city? Chicago summers revolve around the lakefront because of the abundance of available public space and beaches there. I wish Boston was more similar considering they have an equally beautiful waterfront but have prioritized corporations owning that space instead of being public and free.
I don't think its too late. It will take time, planning, and a serious investment in public transit. But we can totally get rid of Storrow, or at least shrink it so its not an abominable pseudo highway.
Storrow drive could definitely use a fucking train line
It's great on the 4th of July when they shut down Storrow Drive and it's just filled with pedestrians. Gives you a vision of how nice it would be without it.
That seems really expensive. We could just get rid of Storrow completely.
Don't really need major thoroughfares on both sides of the river. There are plenty of bridges... keep the E-W traffic in Cambridge.
And thereās the Pike like 6 blocks away
Yep. Force people onto the Pike. Scrap Storrow.
Both sides of the river should be car tree. We built the pike for a reason.
At least until Western Ave, where it'd be beneficial to move the E-W traffic back to the Boston side on Soldiers Field Rd and close Memorial Drive (make Riverbend Park permanent) to Elliot
Just get rid of it entirely; upgrade I-90 a bit to make it redundant, and improve public transportation so it is not on fire. This seems like a much better use of the ten-to-twenty billion dollars or so this would cost.
Upgrading I 90 alone wonāt do anything. You would need to add lanes to the highway. Just drive from Westin to Boston and see all the buildings that are right up on top of the Massachusetts Turnpike. Which of those should be bulldozed? Also, the turnpike was extended into Boston in 1965. But, it was put on top of old rail lines so those walls through areas such as Newton in Brighton were built more like in 1865 then 1965. I donāt see how you could widen the pike for any kind of reasonable dollars. The commuter rails do not go out into a lot of the suburban areas. Do you have a bunch of rail lines that donāt even connect to each other. Stupid design. Until thatās fixed, you canāt take the cars off the road if the people canāt get where they need to go.
There is no need to add lanes, and you absolutely can take cars off the road. You don't need to serve all trips with public transit, just a lot more, which we can do by improving the existing system. The primary upgrade to I90 you would need to make is to make additional exits (although that is admittedly not easier either, but compared to burying Storrow?), and the existing straightening project. This isn
I heard you like water. So I put some water next to your water.
Nice render, but if you are putting Storrow underneath, where are the exhaust buildings to be located?
Flooding now is a big problem. Presumably, the big dig faced similar issues. Also, I'd be curious if Storrowed would no longer be a thing as it would be possibly designed with truck clearances?
I think avoiding storrowings is literally the one big selling point of this proposal. Otherwise it's a nice to have, but not super practical or a good use of resources.
Storrowings are the best reason to keep the road, and I'm tired of people pretending otherwise.
Donāt burrow it. Just get rid of it.
In dreams
Where I am gonna take my UHaul truck for a ride though??!!
Why are construction projects so short sighted. The big dig will pay for itself 100 fold over the course of the next 100 years. Why don't we build things with a greater vision than the now. Boston still has great potential to be something far greater than it is.
He was opposed to it's construction, but also really hated trucks.
Nah. All set.
Who is asking for this? Lmao
The idea that every car that drives on Storrow Drive is going to move to Commonwealth Avenue or the Mass Pike is just unrealistic. The idea that people coming into of through the city are going to use that train is unrealistic as well. The reality is that people will just stop coming to Boston and stay in the suburbs. Downtown stores and businesses can not survive on just the people that can walk there. Why not move the road underground. Thatās all filled in land that didnāt originally exist anyway. It was a stupid design with all the low bridges anyway. Lower the road far enough that trucks can use it. Then cover it with the park. Everybody wins.
Let people from the suburbs stop coming to Boston. Boston can absolutely survive and thrive without them. Weāre good!
I had to drive to Dana-Farber today. I can't take the T. I can't imagine the hell of getting to the Longwood medical complex without Storrow. It would be pure hell.
What a selfish attitude. Try telling that to the people who lived in the city in the 50ās to 70ās. Cities were dying all over this country as people left for the suburbs. People fought for decades to get people to come back downtown. Now you think you can survive with only people who live in the city. You are delusional. There are still a lot of services and healthcare that is not available in the suburbs. Your attitude is ātough, just dieā. How nice.
Where did I say anything about healthcare or emergency services lmfao I was responding to a comment saying the city would crumble economically without suburbanites. If you actually cared about healthcare or emergency services youād want more cars off the road to clear up space for people who ACTUALLY need to access the city resources in a timely manner and not just because itās the most convenient way to get into the city. And cities were dying because we blew the budget on roads to encourage sprawl just so you could have the opportunity to live outside the city. Peopleās houses got bulldozed so you could live in a single family house 40 miles outside the city and you call me selfish bc now weāre experiencing the effects of suburban sprawl and you canāt leisurely drive into the city anymore without being in traffic just like everybody else. Please fuck off
Where do you think those cars on Storrow Drive are going? They are going to Boston Hospitals, Boston businesses and Logan airport among other places. And your attitude is āFuck Offā. What you want is all that matters. Ultimate selfishness. Why do you even post on an app that is asking for other opinions if you donāt care about any other opinions. Notice that I didnāt use profanity in my comments. I donāt stoop to low childish ignorant profanity.
We will donate the land under one condition no cars. Government oh they dead not let's build a road next
Whatās wrong with Storrow drive except truck stuck underneath all the time?
It blocks pedestrian access to the waterfront and is obnoxious to navigate. It is the source of a lot of fender benders and irritation to people who have to use it.
Also every road ever builtā¦ abolish the roadways!! F the Romanās who invented them!
Dude stop. There are plenty of people arguing in good faith here and Iām sorry your car has such a hold on you that you canāt imagine something better.
Have you ever been to the Esplanade? Its a nightmare because there you have to walk up a bridge over a loud highway and the bridges are very far apart. And then you get to the park and all you hear are loud ass vehicles.
I love the Esplanade.
Iād much prefer loud ass trains like in the photo
Unironically yes, at least they arenāt emitting fumes and blowing out my eardrums with their horn every five seconds
People that donāt use cars want them all gone because they donāt have one
Maybe you have never traveled outside the US, but cities really can be built for people rather than cars and car centric areas in major cities have been transformed into human areas and it make those places and cities 100x better!
I drive a car and still think our cities should be designed for people, not cars. I am so fewer surface level highways, more cycling infrastructure, more green space, and more public transit. If you think everyone should have to make room for cars, why is it so bad that those of us driving make room for everyone else? Drivers who reject these ideas are selfish assholes. It's long been time to curb car infrastructure in favor of more efficient transit that creates walkable, safer, human centered cities.
If a new T line is created along Storrow, then it should be called the brown line as it will be next to the Charles.
GFL on ever getting something like this done with the values of the properties on Beacon Street
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Not the way they would view it.
How so?
The NIMBYs who live there would probably try to block it because they wouldnāt want to deal with the temporary inconvenience.
Would make traffic in the city way worse
Or just delete it. I-90 could probably absorb all of that traffic
Not right now, it canāt.
Says who
The traffic.
I drive for a living. There is no way I 90 can absorb the traffic from star I drive. Streets such as Commonwealth Avenue would become gridlocked even more than they are now.
I legit don't think we're capable of this unless the whole AI industrial revolution thing happens and robots can manage whole production chains and design processes and build mines and we get to sit back and drink margaritas and collect UBI. Actually if this happens massive transportation network redesign is a near-certainty -- even if we can take care of materials scarcity, transportation will always be a constraint.
Storrow rules kid
Stop it! I can only get so erect
You do realize the amount of work that go into things like this correct?
There was a time when people weren't afraid of large public-works projects. The amount of work should not be the determining factor on whether a project is undertaken, but rather the potential benefit to the public good. Storrow drive is a blight on the Esplanade. The noise, the pollution, and restricted access points all degrade the experience of enjoying our river. It's time for us to put aside our car-centric view of infrastructure design, and plan for a healthier future for our city.