Re:Let's build houses for people, not cars
by dsfyu404ed on Tuesday August 27, 2019 @05:13PM
(#20814451)
>It's not even remotely controversial when I've seen it done, like downtown streets in Boston made pedestrian only. The vast majority of people (who are on foot) love it.
Those roads are not anywhere that anyone was formerly commuting through though and were already well served by mass transit (they're basically underneath the intersection of all the main subway lines.
The entire Boston area transit network (including road, light rail and heavy rail) is what you get when you write your master plan on a deck of cards, shuffle it and then flush it down the toilet. They should have stuck with their road and rail plans from the 1940s. 695 should exist (that would solve a lot of the commuter traffic east of I95) though they probably would have buried it by now like they did with the rest of the highway. Orange line should run all the way from 128 in the north to 128 in the south (where there would probably be massive park and rides). The North/South station connector should exist. Etc. etc. If they had just followed their own damn plan they could make the dense parts of Boston/Camb more pedestrian friendly and generally have more freedom to do "good urban transit" type things because you wouldn't have surface roads functioning as major arteries that you can't interrupt.
Boston is an example of good urban transit only so far as it was lucky enough to be a big enough city back in the day when big projects got done that it consequently has a subway. The rest of the region is a dumpster fire of things that were supposed to interconnect but don't.
Those roads are not anywhere that anyone was formerly commuting through though and were already well served by mass transit (they're basically underneath the intersection of all the main subway lines.
The entire Boston area transit network (including road, light rail and heavy rail) is what you get when you write your master plan on a deck of cards, shuffle it and then flush it down the toilet. They should have stuck with their road and rail plans from the 1940s. 695 should exist (that would solve a lot of the commuter traffic east of I95) though they probably would have buried it by now like they did with the rest of the highway. Orange line should run all the way from 128 in the north to 128 in the south (where there would probably be massive park and rides). The North/South station connector should exist. Etc. etc. If they had just followed their own damn plan they could make the dense parts of Boston/Camb more pedestrian friendly and generally have more freedom to do "good urban transit" type things because you wouldn't have surface roads functioning as major arteries that you can't interrupt.
Boston is an example of good urban transit only so far as it was lucky enough to be a big enough city back in the day when big projects got done that it consequently has a subway. The rest of the region is a dumpster fire of things that were supposed to interconnect but don't.