1. Report.
A. General.
B. Bus route CT2.
C. BU Bridge.
D. BU Rotary.
2. Analysis.
A. General.
B. Bus route CT2.
C. BU Bridge.
D. BU Rotary.
3. Summary.
1. Report.
A. General.
The Citizens Advisory Committee on the Urban Ring met October 24, 2011 in the Boston Redevelopment Authority board room in Boston City Hall.
This committee is hardly a citizens committee. It is overwhelmingly a bunch of big big entities, businesses and non profits.
Most of the meeting concerned Chelsea and other areas to the north. These areas are far advanced in planning but are not really relevant to this blog.
There were also extended discussions of Melnea Cass Boulevard traffic. That gets much closer since the portion of the traffic they are interested in also crosses the Charles River. Melnea Cass Boulevard is south of Ruggles Station. It connects Ruggles Station to the Southeast Expressway / I93.
Discussions in the area we are concerned about were favorable to responsible development in the area and thus, of course, a step back for the goals of Cambridge.
B. Bus route CT2.
The Longwood Medical Area’s transportation company has been studying rearrangements of bus routes impacting the area.
The Longwood representative emphasized that the institutions are the second largest sources of employment in the City of Boston. A comment was made that some of their efforts are on a scale larger than the comparable aspects in the state of Rhode Island.
The representative presented a report on a bus study they are doing.
Longwood reemphasized Longwood’s support for a bus tunnel starting near Ruggels station on the Orange Line and providing Longwood service at a station under the traffic circle at Longwood and Louis Pasteur, The tunnel would come to ground near Yawkey Station and thus near Kenmore Square.
Longwood is studying the possibility of moving service on the CT2 bus from the BU Bridge to the Mass. Ave (named “Harvard”) Bridge, then apparently stopping at Kenmore and going up Brookline Avenue. They are talking of merging CT2 and CT3.
C. BU Bridge.
Repairs will be completed within the next few months.
There were discussions that the lane alignment in the ultimate bridge are not completely firm yet. It seems firm that there will be bike lanes on either side and three auto lanes between them. The exact alignment of those travel lanes is still under discussion.
Cambridge affirmed its wishes that the three lanes be arranged with less travel lanes for vehicles entering the bridge and more for vehicles departing the bridge. Thus on the Cambridge side, the western of the three lanes would be heading toward Boston while the middle and southern lanes would be heading toward Cambridge. The opposite alignment would occur on the Boston side.
D. BU Rotary.
MassDOT wants to rebuild the bridge over the Mass. Pike that connects to the BU Bridge. The exact alignment is still uncertain but the entities are pushing for four lanes, two in each direction, connecting the BU Bridge to Mountfort Street. There were vague comments about Brookline’s concerns in the matter.
2. Analysis.
A. General.
The game on the Urban Ring is almost always the location of the ultimate subway line. As usual, Cambridge is supporting the destructive alternative which also performs inferior to the good alternative.
The friends of Cambridge complicate things with a barrage of lies that there is only one alternative subway line, the bad one. Last I heard this lie kept getting repeated on behalf of the local Sierra Club branch. Just a brief look at the key people there shows a bunch of people with connections to Cambridge’s extremely bad city manager / city council.
The environmentally responsible, functionally far superior alternative is the heavy rail Kenmore Crossing (of the Charles) alternative which I first proposed in 1986 and which was accepted as a formal alternative in 1991. This alternative uses the same technology as the subway systems Orange Line. It would connect to the Orange Line at Ruggles Station, a little south of the Longwood Medical Area, have a stop at the LMA’s Longwood / Louis Pasteur stop and then stop above the Massachusetts Turnpike under Brookline Avenue. It would provide direct connection to the existing Green Line (streetcar) station at Kenmore, have excellent connections to the Red Sox at Fenway Park and to Commuter Rail at Yawkey Station.
Cambridge’s alternative would, among other thing move Yawkey Station from its current location near Fenway Park to a location near Marsh Chapel, the heart of the Boston University campus.
The legislature has decided. The legislature is spending something like $10 million upgrading Yawkey station in place, thus choosing the responsible Kenmore alternative for the Urban Ring subway.
B. Bus Route CT2.
A highly responsible phase 1 for the Urban Ring subway would be a spur off the Orange Line to the Yawkey-Kenmore stop as a temporary terminus for the Urban Ring subway. This spur exactly fits the LMA bus tunnel proposal except that it would go slightly further on both ends, directly connecting to Ruggles and to the Yawkey-Kenmore stop.
The current route of the CT2 bus dates back to the thinking on this matter before my suggestion of the Kenmore crossing was made a formal part of the proposal. The idea was to have a busline which, as much as possible, followed the path of the Urban Ring subway.
The LMA suggestion of moving the CT2 bus to the Mass. Ave. bridge and then to Kenmore and Brookline Avenue, moves the path from Cambridge supported streetcar alternative alignment to the Kenmore Orange Line alignment.
The LMA is recognizing reality. It is going with the responsible proposal for the Urban Ring, with the Red Sox, and with the legislature.
And Cambridge is stuck with its friends running around lying that the alternative supported by the legislature, the LMA, and by people who understand the alternatives, does not exist.
So lies, as is so common, are pretty much all Cambridge has going for yet another bizarre, environmentally inferior proposal.
C. BU Bridge.
The Cambridge position seems to align it with MassDOT.
D. BU Rotary.
Here again, there are a lot of games going on.
The bureaucrats have changed the proposal on the table from subway to buses.
Bus improvements make excellent sense in the outer areas of the Urban Ring concept, and are going forward in the outer areas where they make sense.
The core area needs that subway system.
So the people fighting for Cambridge’s silly and destructive streetcar alignments maneuver over various bus proposals attempting to ensure that their silly alternative is made a fait accompli through maneuvers over buses.
They have lost, but they are backfighting through various techniques.
The BU Rotary argument is closely connected to the Grand Junction bridge which goes through the destroyed nesting are of the Charles River White Geese.
BU has agreed to destroy a building next to the BU Bridge which it has been using for an affiliate high school.
The idea is to maneuver traffic under the BU Bridge at that point and onto the Grand Junction bridge.
In the background as well, is Harvard.
Harvard bought an area in Allston roughly the size of Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood. This is the off ramp from the Massachusetts Turnpike to Allston and Cambridge, a portion of the Massachusetts Turnpike, and the Beacon railroad yards.
Harvard made this purchase months after a state study showed that the Grand Junction bridge could be used for an off ramp from the turnpike, thus allowing it to build on the current off ramps.
Anything which converts that railroad bridge to highway use also benefits Harvard. The distance of the rail yards from the destroyed nesting area by rail is perhaps half a mile. Harvard’s purchase is visible from Magazine Beach.
Another factor in the BU Rotary calculations is Harvard’s wish to provide access to its purchase.
The responsible way to provide Harvard access would be a streetcar line off the Commonwealth Avenue Green Line which starts as a spur above the Massachusetts Turnpike just west of the BU Bridge. That spur would be built on air rights until crossing Cambridge Street (the extension of the first bridge west of the BU Bridge), and then would go underground through the Harvard Business School / Stadium area and connect to an existing tunnel stub at Harvard Station.
All sorts of machinations are under the surface concerning transportation for that area.
3. Summary.
There are a number of links posted on the blog to past very extended discussions of the Urban Ring.
This meeting is a good sign.
The "reprehensible" (to quote that civil rights judge) government of the City of Cambridge moved a tiny bit back in this arena.
