REVISITING SULLIVAN SQUARE: When Updating a Plan is a Step Backward
Situations change and the plans we’ve made to deal with it have to change, too. But the new plans should be at least as good, at least as effective for dealing with the situation, as the originals. Which is the unsettling aspect of Boston’s current revisiting of past decisions about what to do with Sullivan Square, at the Somerville end of Charlestown’s Rutherford Avenue.
Read moreROADS AND ROSES: The Functional and Cultural Importance of Design and Beauty
In 1912 nearly 23,000 immigrant mill workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, led by a multi-ethnic coalition of the city’s women, walked off their jobs to protest yet another pay cut. With the help of the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World (IWW – the “Wobblies”), they fought not only for better wages and working conditions but for respect and a better life – for beauty in the ways most meaningful to them. As the famous song phrases it: “Give us bread, but give us roses too.”
We need to have the same demands of our transportation systems – not just the vehicles (cars, trains, buses) that are our immediate focus of attention and use but also the corridors and buildings. While some of our transportation infrastructure is privately owned -- and the current Republican-run federal government seems eager to expand that percentage – most of it is public land, owned collectively by ourselves as a “public right of way” to preserve our ability to move and assemble without restriction.
Read morePEOPLE PRIORITY STREETS: Neighborways, Slow Streets, and Safety Zones
Roads are for moving on. But they are also for being in. There is a growing effort to reclaim the historic role of streets as a neighborhood’s collective front yard, a place for people to meet and talk, to sit and look or eat, and for their children to play. From temporary Play Streets and Open Streets to more permanent Shared Space, Neighborways, and Slow Zones, there are a growing menu of strategies for combining the two roles of streets as travel corridors and public space – the largest single asset owned by most local governments. And along with these is a re-emergence of “traffic calming” as a positive goal.
Read morePARKWAY DANGER ZONES: Can DCR Turn The Corner?
If the Legislature and Administration gives the Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) the staffing and funds for implementation, the agency’s current Parkway Design Study could be a game-changer. The new Urban Parkways and Path Advisory Committee (UPPC) has been providing the recently consolidated Planning & Engineer Departments with lists of particularly dangerous locations and has offered to help them prioritize future road projects. (Readers – are there more places you’d add - see below?) While supporting efforts to increase DCR’s drastically inadequate levels of funding and staffing, Advocates are also pushing the agency to better coordinate with local (and state) Vision Zero efforts and begin making immediate, low-cost, visible changes in Parkway conditions to make them safer and more inviting for walkers, cyclists, bus riders, and neighbors.
Read moreTraffic Congestion: Why It’s Increasing and How To Reduce It
The statistics show that each of us is driving less. So why do our roads feel more jammed up? Why does it take longer to get anywhere? And what can we do about it? Some politicians have begun blaming Traffic Calming and bicycle lanes for the backups; saying that Complete Streets and pedestrian bulb-outs are making roads less safe because less accessible for emergency vehicles. Is there any truth to this? More fundamentally, is car congestion a problem to be solved or a solution to a problem?
Read moreActive Transportation is Primary Prevention: The Evolution of Public Health From Quarantines to Mass In Motion
Public Health has its origins in catastrophe, the realization that if an out-of-the-ordinary pestilence is suddenly sickening large numbers of people there must be a general cause rather than individual failures. In contrast to Medicine, which traditionally is about treating an individual’s existing disease, Public Health seeks to keep large groups from getting sick. In contrast even to Preventive Medicine, which tends to focus on increasing compliance with medical prescriptions, Public Health is about wellness and well-being – a holistic concern with an entire population’s overall quality of life. And in Massachusetts, a national leader across a wide range of Public Health issues, one of the most innovative and powerful strategies to improve population health has been the Mass In Motion program.
Read moreQuestioning Complete Streets: Having the Courage of Our Vision and Values
Having a vision of the kind of city you want is an essential foundation for purposeful and effective governance. Some cities do a coherent overall process, such as Somerville’s SomerVision or Boston’s forthcoming Imagine Boston 2030. Cambridge has constructed its vision piecemeal, through policies around a variety of quantitative and qualitative issues. No matter the process, these days the resulting vision statements almost all aim for a combination of livability, stainability, prosperity, and diversity with the specifics addressing things like schools, housing, services, open space, and mobility. For example, in terms of mobility, SomerVision (slogan: “An Exceptional Place to Live, Work, Play, and Raise a Family”) sets a goal of having “50% of New Trips via Transit, Bike, or Walking.”
The most powerful, but hardest to really accept, aspect of creating a vision involves making choices – a public a statement that the city’s residents prefers one type of future over another, one direction over the multitude of other possibilities. Like growing up, having a vision implies accepting that you can’t have it all – that achieving your top priorities means you can’t do something else, and most importantly that equalizing things means that whatever was previously getting more than its fair share will have to get a little less.
Read moreJump Starting Complete Streets: Focusing on Kids (and others) When Progress Slows
Every street should be safe for walking and bicycling. This is an essential component of the Complete Streets design philosophy that has emerged in recent years as the “new normal” for roads – although the gap between policy and practice often remains wide. Because the core issue is mobility, Advocates compliment this “everywhere for everyone” approach with concerted efforts to create seamless networks of sidewalks and low-traffic-stress routes (paths and protected bike lanes or cycle tracks) along major “desire lines” connecting most residential areas with most schools, parks, recreational, shopping, and work areas. Or at least a set of “key routes” across town. Many Advocacy groups put considerable effort into sketching out these networks and routes – trying to combine directness with safety, beauty with speed, ubiquity with practicality. To paraphrase a slogan from the Greenway Links Initiative I’ve been working on in the Metro Area: Big enough to be inspiring, simple enough to be understandable.
Read moreParkways Moving Forward: DCR is Not The Highway Department
It’s a pleasure to be able to praise a government agency: civil servants who try to live up to their public service mission are over-worked and underpaid relative to private sector peers – and always under appreciated! It’s particularly a pleasure to praise the Department of Conservation and Recreation’s (DCR), a woefully underfunded agency whose roadway department has been exasperatingly difficult to work with in the past. Which is why we have to hope that newly inaugurated Governor Baker’s announcement of a freeze on hiring and contracting will not derail DCR’s historic commitment to create an updated Master conceptual Plan for how their metro-region parkways can reclaim their Olmstedian heritage and be once again made more park-like and more bike-and-pedestrian-friendly — as well as estimates of what it would cost to properly operate such a system.
Read moreCommonwealth Avenue: Grand Boulevard, Dangerous Street
Stretching from the Public Garden out to Weston, Commonwealth Avenue meanders past sculptured medians, historic parks, heartbreaking hills, ponds and rivers, and an enormous number of residences and businesses. Although various crossings are frustratingly congested, in general the number of cars has been steadily dropping while the number of trolley passengers, bicyclists, pedestrians, and runners has been steadily increasing. The busiest sections are the least fancy: the Mass Ave. crossing, Kenmore Square and the BU corridor, Packards corner to around Warren Street. The BU bridge area is the thickest of all with huge numbers of rushing students, growing cohorts of cyclists, and frustrated car drivers trying to squeeze through the spaghetti mess from Longwood Medical Area to Storrow or (via Cambridge) the Mass Pike. Much of the rest of Comm Ave has relatively light (and therefore, because of the invitingly wide lanes, fast) car traffic.
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