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Casey Overpass: A New Bridge Is Better
By Ferris Wheels Bike Shop on Tue, 11/29/2011 - 5:59pm
A Forest Hills bridge is a connector, not a barrier, because it keeps 24,000 vehicles per day that are not going to local destinations off local streets. With the bridge, the traffic volumes on New Washington Street are kept relatively low, about one-third of what traffic volumes would be without a bridge. This is the central argument for building a new bridge—the quality of the pedestrian, auto, bike, and transit experience would be degraded with the addition of 24,000 vehicles per day, the additional lanes required to accommodate these regionally vehicles, the additional signals and travel time required for vehicles to maneuver a contorted and convoluted surface street pattern. A new, modern bridge would allow a simpler, reduced traffic surface street that would help reconnect the area divided by the 1950s Casey Overpass.
Please visit the new website for pro-bridge advocates: RebuildCasey.org
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Comments
I wonder if the anti-car crazies will win anyway
I agree that a new bridge is vastly better for this whole part of Boston. But the people who think cars are bad and that no one should be driving them seem to be running this process. It will be depressing if they win, and very bad for all the neighborhoods around here that will become choked with cars. It's interesting to see that these "no cars" people are taken seriously by anyone at all. Where are the grownups?
The Forest Hills area is
The Forest Hills area is already choked with cars due to its poor layout and uncoordinated stop lights. Its amazing how many people who are not traffic engineers think they can analyze this complicated series of elements (intersections, crosswalks, bus stops, subway, commuter rails, traffic circles, arterials, highways . . .) and conclude that the bridge must stay. Similar numbers of cars travel through big complicated intersections that have no overpass and work better than forest hills does. Consider the huge intersection at the landmark center (Boyleston, Brookline, Fenway, Park), a mess but better than forest hills with its overpass. I am inclined to believe the analysis of a traffic engineer over a local yahoo (no offense intended to local yahoo analysts) . Also, by removing the bridge, Forest Hills will become a coherent neighborhood again. Cars are only a part of the equation, not the overriding priority!
When the citizenry stopped the Southwest Expressway from tearing through Roxbury, JP, Rozzie, Hyde Park, they forever screwed people in cars trying to get from points south to points north (and vice versa) but they saved a lot of neighborhoods from becoming no-mans lands (consider the neighborhoods around the southeast expressway). We are in a post Moses era when neighborhoods matter more than cars.