Affordable housing money wasted on pointless parking spaces

Just a quick blog post on something I noticed yesterday. A quote from a letter filed with the BRA regarding a new project on Telford Street:

At the recently constructed Charlesview project across Western Avenue from the Telford Street project site, the fully occupied 240 unit residential development has about 180 spaces of its 248 space parking garage used. Since there is no additional fee for parking above monthly leases at Charlesview, these numbers represent a true parking demand of about 0.74 spaces per unit.

Think about how much affordable housing money has been wasted on these luxurious accommodations for automobiles -- which aren't even being utilized.

Sickening.

The Epic Journey Across Ruggles Street at Southwest Corridor Park

I've been gathering footage around town with my digital camera. Here's my first attempt at creating a video, about a poorly-timed signalized crosswalk near Ruggles Station:

Vertical farming: stupid idea, or stupidest idea?

Article: Vertical farms offer a bright future for hungry cities.

My impression: It seems like it's just another set of wildly Utopian schemes along the lines of Ebenezer Howard's "Garden Cities." Except, instead of returning people to the farm, it's returning the farm to the city. The goal seems to be the same: curing those wicked sinful city folks with some virtuous farming and "green" space (of a sort).

However, if for whatever insane reason "vertical farming" takes off, I will then propose a revolutionary idea: "horizontal farming." It's where you go out to a place with lots of cheap land, abundant water and sunshine from the sky. Then you use the natural dirt and soil to grow lots of crops at very low cost, using machines such as "tractors" and "combines" to save labor. Finally, you ship it off to market using a highly efficient, fancy new technology called a "freight train." This lets you free up all that valuable land occupied by vertical farms in cities, turning it over to be used by much needed housing developments, employment opportunities, schools and parks.

The perversity of the Beacon Hill historic district

Beacon Hill (the neighborhood, not the state house) is in the news this past week for the Beacon Hill Architectural Commission's (BHAC) refusal to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Apparently, accessible pavers and handicap ramps, they claim, would mar the historic character of the neighborhood. Adam has some fine snark in response:

Yes, they would seriously detract from the hundreds of colonial automobiles parked on colonial asphalt underneath all those colonial Resident Parking signs when their drivers (garbed in breeches, no doubt) aren't busy stopping for colonial traffic signals and colonial stop signs.

Here's what Mark Kiefer, a member of the BHAC, and apparently the most oblivious person in the city, had to say about tactile strips which help the visually impaired:

“It’s a matter of the visual impact,” he said. “We don’t want prominent things people will see commonly to smack of modernity.”

I happened to stop by Beacon Hill this weekend and it reminded me just how hypocritical, stuck-up, and snobby these BHAC cretins are. Here's Bowdoin Street, near the edge of the historic district, where a historic six-lane highway leaves hardly any room to pass by on the sidewalk. Apparently, this scene does not "smack" Mark Kiefer "of modernity" at all?

Historic SUV parked on historic asphalt next to charming lamppost blocking historically small sidewalk.
Approximately 75% of the street width is devoted to automobiles and fast-moving vehicular traffic. 

Bowdoin Street is 60 feet wide from curb-to-curb, easily enough for 4 travel lanes and 2 parking lanes. Or maybe it should be 4 horse lanes and 2 horse post lines. Because history. Anyway, BHAC is curiously silent about the heavy presence of parked cars and speeding vehicles on this street, while people walking try to squeeze by scattered obstacles and bottlenecks.

My impression of Bowdoin Street is that it is a half-victim of urban renewal, actually. It was originally constructed as a 40-foot street in 1727. I haven't found records of the widening, but, the far side of the street all looks like relatively newer construction with a historic-looking facade. If I had to take a guess, I'd say this is probably a victim of the Boston City Planning Board's insane zeal for street widening at any cost. Or, maybe Ed Logue and the BRA, since it is Government Center-adjacent. Whichever way it came about, here's how I'd describe it: not historic.

My post last year about the horrifically wide streets around the Public Garden also touches upon some Beacon Hill streets, notably Charles Street and Beacon Street:

Massive motorway -- tiny, oft-obstructed sidewalks. Ridiculous.

Nothing more historic than a four-lane highway. Right?

Beacon Hill does have some truly charming and wonderful streets. And even a historic feel, if you can overlook the omnipresent automobiles. But it's completely insane for the snobs at BHAC to be complaining about handicap ramps, unless they are prepared to stand up against all the BMW and Lexus owners who litter the historic streets. And while we're at it: modern plumbing and electricity too. Beacon Hill wants to pretend to be some kind of half-museum: pro-preservation, but only when it's convenient.

I understand the desire for historic preservation. I am, after all, a huge fan of narrow, medieval-style streets, such as those still found in some parts of Beacon Hill. I realize that historic preservation movements managed to save some parts of neighborhoods from the horrors of urban renewal and modernism. But there's a point where the movement becomes self-parody. This is one of those points: when cars are treated with more respect than people, the neighborhood has lost its way.

Remember the reason why historic preservation resonates with people: it's because the architecture of the latter 20th century is so terribly inhuman. Therefore, we cling to anything from the past, to buildings built during a time when designers still remembered how to relate to the human beings walking on the street. In a way, we're still stuck in the architectural Dark Ages, trying to feel our way out, trying to relearn was what forgotten during the modernist era. But one new idea that we do have right, in law if not in fact, is the notion that the city should be accessible to all its citizens.

Beacon Hill, get your streets in order. Put people first.

weMove Massachusetts: A disappointing, flawed plan for performance metrics that will repeat the mistakes of the past

This month, MassDOT announced a new plan called "weMove Massachusetts" which introduces the idea of using performance metrics to help plan investment in transportation. Sounds good, right? I was looking forward to reading about a scientific approach towards selecting projects that help people access the opportunities in their lives, while steering towards overall goals like "GreenDOT." But instead of that, when I read the report, I found the same bad old attitude that you also find at the Texas Transportation Institute. The main automobile measure is regressive. The sole metric for bicycle usage is almost completely useless. The transit metrics range from irrelevant, to poorly designed, down to outright worthless. There are no walking metrics in the report. Many of the metrics don't even involve actually measuring anything in the real world!

Metrics have consequences

Before I go into the specifics, let's take a quick step back and think about what we actually want out of our transportation metrics. There are two main ways of looking at transportation broadly, and both have their uses, depending on context: mobility vs accessibility.

Mobility measures the amount of traveling you are able to do: e.g.

• How fast can you go?
• How far can you go?
• How easy is it to move around?

Accessibility measures the amount of opportunity that is open to you because of transportation: e.g.

• How many jobs/needs/activities can you reach in a reasonable amount of time?
• How many choices do you have about getting to your destinations?
• How is your quality of life improved by transportation?

These are not completely distinct viewpoints. For example, you could increase the number of jobs available to you by improving the speed of transportation. On the other hand, you could also achieve the same by having the economy add more jobs within your existing range, or by moving to a region with more job density. The latter is, broadly and superficially, the way cities form.

However, choice of viewpoints does matter when trying to put together cost/benefit analysis for new transportation projects, and it is very important to choose carefully. A metric is a convenient number which tells you something useful, but it is also an intentional oversimplification which can lead you astray if not used judiciously. Unfortunately, our MPO has a history of abusing metrics, and traffic engineers are infamous for applying the wrong tools to our cities, causing terrible destruction in the process.

Is there an ideal general metric at all? I don't think so, but the closest one I believe is the last example I cited above: "How is your quality of life improved by transportation?" Ultimately, transportation is about giving you the ability to live your life as you see fit, to take advantage of the opportunities open to you, and to keep you safe while doing it. The problem with this formulation is that it is very vague and broad, making it difficult to quantify. That's intentional: "quality of life" means as many different things as there are different people, so there really is no one way to interpret this. Instead, when designing performance metrics that are more easily quantifiable, this principle is what you should be striving to justify your decisions by: how does your work help people live the life that they want to live?

Without further ado, I will jump into the "weMove Massachusetts" report and its many flaws:

Pavement, Bridges

I've grouped these two together because they have a similarity: obviously you don't want roads to crumble or bridges to collapse. But, the metrics assume that the status quo is sustainable and desirable, and all that is needed is an influx of money to repair what we have. A very, very large influx of money: $544 million a year on Pavement and $447 million a year on Bridges. That's a billion dollars a year for what will basically only benefit motor vehicle modes. This is not to deny the need for such repairs or such infrastructure. We need some of it. But do we need ALL of it? There should be some cost/benefit analysis applied to the two largest line items in the transportation budget. These metrics do not enable that. There is no consideration given to whether a lane diet might be a better way to go, for safety and money-saving purposes. And there is no consideration given to whether an overpass should be removed instead of rebuilt, even though 1950s traffic levels on it long ago disappeared. Is every square inch of asphalt sacred? Must we continue to perpetuate the mistakes of our forebears, at any cost, without thought?

Mobility

This metric is one of the worst in the document. It's basically lifted straight from the highway-crazed Texas Transportation Institute. Sure, this metric is fairly easy to quantify, but it reduces the whole notion of "mobility" down to one, highly confounded number: hours of delay per 1,000 miles traveled in a private vehicle. To understand why this is a bad metric, even from a driver's standpoint, consider the following tale of two commuters, Alice and Bob:

Alice lives in Waltham and works at an office near Rt 128 in Waltham, about 2 miles away. Under ideal conditions, her commute travel time is 5 minutes by car. However, under typically congested circumstances, it usually takes her about 10 minutes by car.

Bob lives in West Stockbridge and works at a shop in Westfield, about 40 miles away. Thanks to the sparse population, Bob can almost always drive 60 mph from start to finish, for a commute travel time of 40 minutes each way.

I cannot speak for the relative happiness of Alice and Bob, since it would depend on their (fictional) personalities. However, I can point out that Alice only spends 20 minutes a day commuting, while Bob spends 80 minutes a day just getting between home and work. Yet, according to this "mobility" metric of MassDOT, Alice is suffering terribly from delays, while Bob is doing great. Assuming 250 working days per year, Alice puts in 1,000 VMT/year for her commute, and experiences "delay" of 41.6 hours/year.

Viewed through the prism of this mobility metric, the DOT would rate Alice's commuting experience as being miserable, slow, and hellish. But that doesn't make sense from a common sense perspective. Alice only has a 10 minute commute! I bet most people would love to be in her situation, rather than being stuck in a car slogging it out 40 minutes each way. The DOT's metric is completely at odds with the principle of "improving quality of life." Not only that, the metric completely ignores all other modes of transportation. Two miles is not that far. That could even be walkable on a daily basis. It's easily bikeable within 15 minutes. If Alice is the sort of person who values getting exercise to and from work, it could easily be made possible. Or perhaps she would rather take a bus, the 70A, and do some reading on the 15 minute trip. Bob has none of those options: he is a captive car commuter. The only option he has is to car pool with someone else. But the metric doesn't even care about that: since it measures vehicle-delay rather than person-delay, your passengers may as well not exist.

The story of Alice and Bob is a bit too neat, obviously: in the real world, there are many other factors. But it's meant to illustrate a point: the mobility metric chosen by MassDOT is aimed in the wrong direction. The metric of "delay per vehicle-mile" is not designed to produce good transportation outcomes for people, but rather, to produce more funding for expensive road-widening projects which line the pockets of connected contractors and please the egos of highway engineers. The footnote to this metric tells it all:

Funding for mobility projects includes any projects that will increase roadway system capacity such as additional lanes, bottleneck removal, intersection improvements, etc.

MassDOT will claim that Alice is "suffering" from tremendous delay as justification for widening the streets in her neighborhood, installation of fancy traffic engineering techniques such as grade separation and complicated traffic signal phases. All of which will degrade the quality of life in her neighborhood. To be fair, in this day and age most of that will be shouted down by commuter opposition, but this is the same kind of metric that was used to shove these kinds of "improvements" down the throats of our communities in the past. More insidiously, planners will use this delay metric as justification for furthering suburban sprawl, instead of creating compact, walkable neighborhoods. The "delay per vehicle-mile" metric is complete garbage and thoroughly inappropriate for an agency which claims to be about promoting "smart growth" and "green travel" mode shift.

Safety

Safety is important. Everyone knows that. But, this particular way of doing it is an example of a metric which sounds good at first, but is actually quite mediocre, or downright dangerous, when you look at the details of how it is actually implemented. Why is there a focus only on intersections and interchanges. That seems strange. Although those are certainly higher risk locations, crashes can happen at any place. Why the restriction? The answer is found in another section which fills in some of the details:

Roadway safety is typically measured by the number of crashes. Crash rates cannot be easily projected into the future using the types of performance curves applied to other highway metrics. Therefore, safety performance was measured by the number of high-crash locations that can be improved over time for an average cost of $500,000/intersection.

So basically, they claim that they cannot get a good metric for "crashes prevented per dollar" and therefore, as a proxy, they will just count the number of intersection projects that can be funded, assuming half-million dollars each. Here's a litany of problems with this approach:

1. There's nothing about "intersection improvements" which necessarily implies better safety.
2. DOTs have a history of making "improvements" that make streets more dangerous for walking and biking. For example, street widening is sometimes considered a "safety improvement" even though it will end up producing more injuries, particularly to vulnerable road users.
3. The real danger to safety comes from speeding vehicles. Again, "intersection improvements" says nothing about this, and the metric is completely mum about speeding elsewhere on the street.
4. The metric encourages spending money on intersections and interchanges, but it does not actually measure whether that money was spent in a worthwhile way.
5. It assumes that spending a half-million dollars is all that you need to do to "fix" an intersection.
6. Severity of crashes is not considered at all. If you had to pick a design based on safety consequences, which would you select? (a) One person will die each year in a severe crash, or (b) ten people will be slightly injured a year in minor crashes. Obviously, zero injuries or deaths is best, but if you had to choose, then I think that (b) is a much better outcome. The metric considers none of that.

If you are going to adopt performance metrics, then you should actually go out and measure something in the real world. This so-called "safety metric" does not do that: instead it simply divides the amount of money available by the number of intersections, and calls it a day.

Bicycling

Behold, the only bicycle-focused metric in the entire report. The main mobility metric only focuses on cars, so this one should partially make up for that, right? Right? Yeah right. This metric is the first one in the report where you start to think that this whole document is really just a long, boring joke. If you try to consider it, there are a variety of ways you might go about quantifying bicycle performance (not endorsing any particular one): bicycle-miles traveled, % mode share bicycling, % population that owns a bicycle, % population that considers bicycling, number of comments on the Internet complaining about bicyclists, etc. What all these metrics have in common is that they involve making measurements in the real world: something must actually be counted, a number that cannot simply be conjured out of thin air.

This is in stark contrast to the proposed MassDOT metric: completion % of the Bay State Greenway, a network of off-street cycle paths. The DOT's metric is computed by looking at the budget documents and comparing whether or not the Bay State Greenway is funded under both budget scenarios. Since it is, the metric is set at 0% from now until the end of time. The genius who put this one together probably thought he or she was pretty clever to insert a "performance metric" which required a grand total of 30 seconds of work behind a desk, and will never need to be revisited again.

Complete and utter failure. Secretary Davey, this is a disgrace.

Walking

Just kidding. There are no walking metrics in the report. Well, I suppose you could pray that the "Safety" metric will bring "intersection improvements" that actually benefit pedestrians, and that the "Mobility" metric does not end up destroying the walkability of streets which used to be safe before the traffic engineers got their hands on them.

Transit

The tone of the report changes once it reaches the transit metrics. Prior to this, the metrics were somewhat broad or simplistic, but the transit metrics are very precisely chosen. Unfortunately, they are chosen rather poorly for planning purposes. I was told by some MPO staff that the MBTA was responsible for their metrics, and that does seem to be the case because these metrics are largely only of interest to someone working in the T's maintenance department. Since there are so many, I will group a bunch together and address them at once:

• MBTA Bridge condition: the % of bridges that are in state of good repair.
• MBTA Elevator/Escalator condition: the % of elevators/escalators that are in state of good repair.
• MBTA Station Accessibility: the % of stations that comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act and the MA Architectural Access Board standards.
• MBTA/RTA Bus and Train performance: the % of vehicles in state of good repair.
• MBTA Signal performance: the number of annual signal failures.

All of these metrics are important -- to the people in charge of maintaining the system. However, these metrics are fairly irrelevant to the average customer. Reliability is important to the customer, certainly, but we don't go through the trouble of providing public transportation because we really like to do bridge or signal maintenance: the purpose, the reason for existence of the system, is making transportation available to people. People want to know that when they show up at a train or bus station, a vehicle will arrive in a reasonable amount of time. They want a system which gets them where they need to go, which gives them access to the city region and all of the opportunities contained within. Specific "state of good repair" statistics are part of the internal implementation of reliability. I suppose it's fair enough that they are being open about it and including it in the report. Fine. But then, where are the metrics which actually measure what people want out of a public transportation system? Not present in this report. Maybe the closest is another maintenance statistic:

Again, we have a performance metric based on delay, like what cars get. Good? Not quite. One improvement is, at least in this case, positive values don't imply a need for highly destructive road widening, since that is not on the table. So, improvements to delay are probably all upside, no downside other than cost. What else could be wrong? Well, it's another case of the same disease which seems to periodically infect planning at the Boston MPO and the DOT: vehicle-itis, the curious syndrome in which transportation agencies forget that their job is to help human beings, and instead focus entirely on pieces of steel and fiberglass.

This metric, like the mobility metric before, only focuses on the delay to vehicles, rather than people! In the other case, you might shrug it off because the average car only carries a few people at a time (although that attitude still screws over carpools). But it is huge loss when you neglect to account for the fact that a train could easily be carrying over five hundred people who are all delayed when the vehicle is delayed. The next time the Red Line breaks down, think about this: the MBTA, MassDOT, and the Boston MPO have all committed to the belief that your time, as a transit rider, is only worth 1/500th the value of anyone who happens to drive alone in their car.

A lot of perversity about our transportation system can likely be explained by this attitude:

• The ever-increasing insertion of delays into the routine of T travel. From completely pointless, customer-loathing tactics like "Front Door Only alighting," to random "safety stops in the middle of tunnels" that are never fixed, to schedule management that hasn't changed since the early 20th century, to deferred maintenance up the wazoo, it's all part of a culture of not caring about the riders on-board the vehicles.
• The continuing refusal to use signal priority for transit vehicles on the surface. Both Beacon St and Huntington Ave have the technology installed to do it. But the MBTA can't be bothered to implement this modern technique which is used all over the country and the world. In their eyes, a train with 300 people on board is not worthy of causing ten seconds of delay to a precious private automobile.
• An almost complete lack of bus lanes outside of the gimmick lanes on Washington St -- which don't extend into the part of the city where bus lanes are desperately needed. This one's on BTD as well, but the MBTA should be pushing hard to improve the ridiculously slow speed of its buses.
• The achingly slow turnaround time on the barest of improvements. The key bus route improvement project took about three years. Not because it was hard (it's not). Not because it was expensive (it wasn't). But because nothing happened for two years and then finally bus stops started getting moved, and painted in the street, within a few months at the end of last year.
• The truly pathetic state of some of the stations, particularly on the surface, where there's nothing more than a few feet of asphalt with cars zooming by, inches from your body. And that's on a section of roadway that was rebuilt relatively recently!
• The fingernail-pulling it takes to get sidewalks, crosswalks and bus stops shoveled clear of snow around here.

Choosing good metrics for transit is not easy, as it depends on the context and what you are trying to accomplish. But you cannot reasonably plan a transit system without using metrics which count people. Some examples of useful mobility-style metrics might include, but are not limited to: boardings per mile, net cost per passenger, average passenger load, or number of people unable to board vehicle due to crowding. Some examples of useful accessibility-style metrics are: number of jobs available within a 30 minute transit trip, number of people within a 5 minute walk of a frequent transit stop, number of people with disabilities who successfully navigate your fixed-route system, or percentage of riders who claim [dis]satisfaction with the transit system.

Conclusion

I know that I have been a bit crass about the problem here, but it is only because a strong tone is necessary. The "weMove Massachusetts" plan is terrifyingly terrible. It represents a large step backwards, encoding 1950s-style thinking about highways into a document which pays lip service to "smart growth" and "green travel" but does nothing to promote either. It is so bad, that I can only recommend one course of action: rip up the "weMove Massachusetts" document and start over from scratch. This time, choose empirical metrics which require real-world measurements, categorize them under either "mobility" or "accessibility," and justify why the people of Massachusetts should care about the metrics. I propose that the guiding principle be: "transportation investments that improve the quality of life of people in the Commonwealth" but I am open to suggestions.

I also want to add a note about GreenDOT: supposedly, it is a goal of MassDOT to triple the mode share of walking, bicycling, and taking public transportation. This report talked about that goal but, like with many other things, did not really go into any significant detail about it. However, I did hear from MPO staffers that the metric used will be "person-miles" for each of the "green modes." In other words, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts will either seek to encourage three times as many people to walk, bike, and ride transit; or, the Commonwealth will seek to force all current walkers, bikers and transit-riders to travel three times as far as they do today. According to the metric, either one works. Okay, that sounds a bit ridiculous, but that's because "person-miles" is not a good metric for walking, biking or public transportation in cities. If you want more details, read those links, but suffice to say: there's no public good served by forcing people to walk, bike or ride buses further and further away. Distance is not a virtue in itself.

I just wish that the people who put together metrics at our departments of transportation, and our organizations of planning, would put in even an ounce of thought into their work.

For more reading on metrics, and mobility vs accessibility, I recommend this paper by Todd Litman.

The streets around the Public Garden

There is an upcoming public meeting to discuss the possibility of a two-way cycle track around the Public Garden. I encourage people to attend. The mess of one-way streets around the Public Garden (and around downtown Boston) makes it difficult for bike riders to get around safely. It's good that they are looking into fixing this. Perhaps it can integrate with Connect Historic Boston. But there's so much more to these streets than just cyclist safety, as important as that is.

As anyone who has lived, or visited, here knows, the streets around the Public Garden and the Common are some particularly nasty, wide, one way racetracks. It seems absurd: the Public Garden being one of the jewels of Boston with so much money and effort invested in it, yet it is surrounded by a sea of pavement. How did it get to be so screwed up?

Well, we've heard about the dirty 1970s and the damage wrought on this city by traffic engineers and leaders who seemed determined to gut every nice aspect of town and turn it into a giant highway/parking lot. But it goes further than that. From the Ninth Annual Report of the City Planning Board (1923):

Boston was one of the first cities in this country to adopt the expedient of one-way streets in order to lessen congestion and confusion.

It must be hilarious, to generations of lost drivers, that they thought these one-way streets would actually "lessen confusion." But what's sadder is that this attitude comes from a time when pedestrians were being driven from the streets, murdered in mass numbers (200,000 in the 1920s), and stripped of their traditional rights to the street as a public space. The elites wanted wider streets for their cars and trucks, even though the vast majority of citizens did not possess either. And the elites got what they wanted. The City Planning Board, which had been formed only a decade earlier, seems to have viewed its job as primarily being about identifying blocks for destruction with the goal of widening streets.

They even sliced off a piece of the Public Garden itself -- unthinkable today -- and claimed that there was "no opposition" from the public:

Unfortunately, the matter had progressed beyond the stage of a public hearing before coming to the attention of the Board, and there being no opposition from the public or from the Transit Commission to a taking in excess of its recommendation, a further strip of the Public Garden was taken, and Boylston Street widened between Church and Arlington streets to a width of 120 feet.

And that's where it remains today.

The proposed cycletrack is a better use of all this excessive street space than current conditions. But there's an even better solution: Two-way complete streets. There's simply no sense in having a high-speed one-way loop around the Public Garden. It's incredibly irresponsible on the part of BTD. This aggressive engineering of multi-lane one-way streets here, and in adjacent blocks, is ridiculous, reckless and unjust. Let's take a tour:

Boylston Street is 120' from Garden to building line. I've noticed that crossing at this intersection (~80') is difficult for seniors because BTD doesn't care enough about pedestrians to set the timing right.

Well at least there's a nice sidewalk. You can see how the street flares out though.

Arlington Street is about 50' curb-to-curb. That's wider than Memorial Drive.

This bit of devilish engineering has more in common with a highway ramp than a city street.

Westbound racetrack, but not so helpful for people trying to go east.

Just ridiculously wide. Beacon Street varies between 50' and 65' curb-to-curb along this stretch.

This section of Charles Street is 45' wide curb-to-curb and functions as a one-way speedway. What in the world for? It's supposed to be a shopping street. There's simply no sane reason for it to be one-way, with so many lanes.

The sidewalks are tiny, pitiful, and difficult for people with disabilities to navigate. Or just difficult for crowds, period. Wide streets, tiny sidewalks. This street is a disgrace.

Back to Beacon Street. Hey look, it's two-way, and the world didn't end. Too many lanes though. This is highway-thinking, not city thinking.

What "genius" thought a HIGHWAY between the Public Garden and the Common was a good idea? The roadway is 70' at this point. That's almost as wide as the nearby Mass Pike.

The fact that I can take these pictures indicates that this road is massively over capacity. It's like standing on a drag strip.

Tiny or impassable sidewalks, giant roadway. Yes you can walk through the parks, at least. But you can't ride there. And what kind of message does a 4-lane highway send about our city?

One rider braves the racetrack.

Just think about how much tax money gets sucked into maintaining this ridiculously wide monster road. It's anti-urban and it confuses drivers too. What a waste.

BTD probably thought putting a dinky little planter with some flowers in it is all that's needed to make everything better. Nothing that actually involves making the street safer or more human-oriented.

I guess the walk wouldn't have been complete without a large SUV running through the red light as I'm trying to take a picture.

The cycletrack idea is better than nothing, but it's a band-aide. The real problem is that our streets are still largely unchanged from the highway-crazed, anti-city transportation departments of past decades. What would really help everyone -- pedestrians, cyclists and drivers -- would be to discard all the ridiculous over-engineered intersections, and replace all the wide one-way streets with two-way streets that meet at simple, well-understood intersections. I also propose the following rules of thumb for city streets:

• First, ensure sufficient walking space. If you can't guarantee 10' sidewalks then consider a "shared, slow street" concept.
• If the street is wide enough for two lanes then it should be a two way street.
• If the street is wider than that then either widen sidewalks (for slow streets) or create bike lanes (for slightly faster streets).
• If it is even wider than that, then consider wider sidewalks, street parking, separated cycle tracks, buffered bike lanes, or bus lanes if there is a route.
• If the street is really wide, then implement the Complete Streets concept. But why is the street so wide? Perhaps it should be narrower.

There really isn't a place for more than one travel lane in each direction on most city streets. Perhaps the busiest, widest and most central streets could have more, assuming there doesn't need to be a bus lane there. Intersections should be kept as simple as possible. Traffic signals which attempt to be too clever just confuse people, and almost always wind up screwing over pedestrians. Fancy traffic engineering is not appropriate or necessary. The point of a city street is not to be a sewer or a conduit, but to be part of our shared inheritance, our public open space, a public way that is open to everyone for business or pleasure. Having streets around the Public Garden designed in a way that is more appropriate for the city may even obviate the need for cycle tracks, and make it safer for pedestrians and drivers as well.

Boston MPO memo fails to understand purpose of HOV lanes

The Boston MPO recently released a memo titled Screening Regional Express Highways for Possible Preferential Lane Implementation. Quote:

The preferential lanes envisioned in this study would usually constitute specialized, separate lanes, generally constructed in the median of an expressway. The adjacent main travel lanes could continue to accommodate their full lane capacities, up to around 2,200 vehicles per hour, depending on the design standards of the roadway. With preferential lane eligibility set to allow fewer vehicles, perhaps 1,500 per hour, buses and other users of the preferential lane would be able to travel at posted speeds. Depending on traffic conditions, users of the general-purpose lanes would continue to experience delays either as a result of heavy traffic or from queues forming at bottlenecks.

It is sometimes suggested that an HOV lane could be implemented by converting a general-purpose lane for the exclusive use of HOVs. Since it is assumed that any preferential lane eligibility rules would result in fewer vehicles in the preferential lane than in the general-purpose lanes, the result would be a reduction in total expressway capacity. Reducing the capacity of a congested expressway would seriously worsen congestion and queuing within and leading to the capacity-reduced corridor, as well as on nearby surface roadways.

Here's the author's reasoning:

• General purpose lanes have a capacity of 2,200 vehicles per hour
• HOV/preferential lanes should be limited to 1,500 vehicles per hour
• 1,500 is less than 2,200
• Therefore, general-purpose lanes should never be converted to HOV lanes.

Have you spotted the flaw yet? It's the measurement unit: vehicles per hour. The author considers that all vehicles are equal with regards to congestion. Therefore a single-occupancy car is equal to a four-person carpool, and both are considered equal to a bus carrying 50 people. This memo blithely ignores the entire purpose of HOV lanes -- which is to expedite the movement of people, not pieces of metal.

The front door jam

Riding the 57 bus, as I often do, I noticed that we easily caught up to a Green Line train that was travelling along the same road. The bus stopped at the light just at the right position to frame this picture, showing why the "B" line is so slow compared to the 57 which parallels it along Commonwealth Avenue. Riders were stuck while alighting from the train, attempting to push out at the same time that riders were boarding and attempting to pay their fare. It wasn't even that busy, but the front door was not designed to handle this kind of two-way access. Then the bus took off, leaving the Green Line train behind, hobbled by management that punishes riders and refuses to modernize stations and operations.

Obnoxiously wide roads

There should be a hall of shame for intersections like this one on Wallingford Road in Brighton. It's in a deeply residential neighborhood a few blocks away from Commonwealth Avenue. Presumably there are families and children living all around it. Can they really be happy about being forced to cross an Interstate Highway-scale road with cars whipping around the slight curve at high speed? My estimation is that this asphalt atrocity covers approximately 15,000 square feet (one-third of an acre). By comparison, my apartment building has a footprint of about 8,500 square feet (one-fifth of an acre). The curb shown in the distance is about 200 feet away from the camera. There are no curb cuts or crosswalks. As far as I can tell, the city doesn't want anyone to walk here.

Don't Walk

There is an intersection along Commonwealth Avenue, at Babcock Street, which always puzzles me when I am walking there. At one corner, there is a pizza shop. Catercorner to that is a charter high school. The other two corners have bus stops. When you cross Commonwealth Avenue, there are pedestrian signals to guide you. But when you cross Babcock Street, there are no pedestrian signals. What's worse, there is a green arrow telling drivers that it is always OK to turn right -- next to the high school -- but no safe phase for pedestrians. Children are given the option of crossing against a green arrow, crossing against the light, or not crossing at all.

I figure that it is only a matter of time before a tragic accident occurs: when someone comes speeding around the corner, and doesn't slow down because they are given a green arrow. I finally got around to taking pictures and filed a Citizens Connect report about it last month. A few days later I received this response:

status: Closed. Case Noted. Pedestrian walk indications will be installed under a massachusetts department of transportation project which is in the final design stages.

That is interesting. They did not link the project, but I believe that they are referring to MassDOT #606284 based on the description: Improvements to Commonwealth Avenue from Amory Street to Alcorn Street. I haven't found any more information on this, and it doesn't look like much has happened yet. I know this intersection has already existed in this state for at least three years, and it looks like it will be awhile yet before it is fixed.

Update: I've heard that this project may be scheduled for 2015, so I suppose we have that to look forward to.