Activities in the Fenway, Urban Ring planning

Bob La Trémouille reports:

1. General.
2. The Monday Meeting, Urban Ring Citizen's Advisory Committee.
a. General. Two or three rail crossing options.
b. The consultants.
3. Fenway neighborhood meeting.
a. Longwood Hospital Area Tunnel.
b. Yawkey Station.

1. General.

Last evening, the City of Boston conducted a meeting of residents of the Fenway neighborhood. Monday I attended a meeting of the Citizen's Advisory Committee on the Urban Ring.

2. The Monday Meeting, Urban Ring Citizen's Advisory Committee.

a. General. Two or three rail crossing options.

Urban Ring planning is of major importance on the Charles River. The Fenway neighborhood is smack in the middle of the most complicated maneuverings.

One of the key requirements in the bizarre bus planning in place of the rail transportation that makes sense is that the bus planning do nothing to impact rail in the area. Naturally, the "planners" are working to impact rail planning to push the option favored by Harvard, MIT and Boston University.

There are two key possible crossings of the Charles River. One is the Kenmore Crossing with a station under Brookline Avenue between Kenmore Square and Fenway Park. That station is, from a transportation point of view, excellent. It provides an ideal connector between commuter rail, the proposed Urban Ring Subway and the three Green Line branches, plus it gives excellent support to Fenway Park.

The other option, the BU Bridge crossing, give BU a private station within view of Marsh Chapel, and gives MIT and other Cambridge developers their own private station. There is a third station under Park Drive between the Riverside and Cleveland Circle Green Line branches.

The Kenmore crossing has one station in a part of the proposal where the other has three stations. Two of the BU Bridge crossing stations are so close together as to be silly. This is needed to attempt to duplicate the connections the Kenmore crossing does in one elegant package at Kenmore.

Harvard seems to be pushing a different route for the benefit of Harvard. That route would include the two stations where the Kenmore crossing has one.

The BU Bridge and Harvard alternatives would move the Fenway Park rail station two blocks further away from Fenway Park to connect to the Marsh Chapel station.

b. The consultants.

The consultants dropped the other shoe on Monday. They are proposing that, in the name of buses, the state build one of the two BU Bridge crossing stations as part of the bus planning. And they are supposed to do nothing which will prevent the Kenmore crossing?

The proposed station would be on the edge of the Fenway neighborhood, connecting Fenway Park station to Beacon Street / the Cleveland Circle line.

3. Fenway neighborhood meeting.

The meeting last night impacted two urban ring options.

a. Longwood Hospital Area Tunnel.

The people at Longwood seem to be hardening on a subway tunnel called a bus tunnel to service Longwood and get traffic off their streets. The proposal is firming up as a tunnel to the Riverside line, hitting the Riverside line west of Park Drive and west of the Fenway Park station.
The City of Boston is proposal a small vehicle path in the same area.

I raised the point. They provided two answers: (1) Boston's planning is for the next two years. The Urban Ring is ten years out. (2) They think it all can be fit in.

b. Yawkey Station.

The state people show a bus route to Yawkey Station, the commuter rail station servicing Fenway Park. It seems to do a loop in the large parking lot at that location.

In the fine print of the city's plans for Brookline Avenue, they mention that changes, general, may have to be made for mass transit purposes. That would be the bus maneuverings at Yawkey Station.

More news on Brown Beauty and her babies

Bob La Trémouille reports:

The goose parents take their babies around to show them off, and to show the babies their world.

I understand Brown Beauty even brought her babies over to the traffic island which is their least dangerous source of food.

The reprehensible people from the city and state in their heartless starvation abuse on the beautiful animals have created a situation where they have to cross traffic to get food. Brown Beauty showed her babies that food.

One of the two babies died of natural causes.

The other "disappeared."