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Boston's other linear park

Lawrence Harmon takes a look at the Southwest Corridor Park, which opened 20 years ago today.


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The Kennedy is the "other" linear, until proven otherwise.
One of my favorite places to ride is the SWC, a pretty peaceful ride from Forest Hills all the way to Back Bay.

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From the Arboretum to Copley, there's no better route. My favorite section: Behind the Back Bay houses, where you share the path with Au Pairs and people of various European derviation. It's like biking through back alleys in London or Paris.

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maybe they can use this milestone to catch up on some of the deferred maintenance of the asphalt and cobbles, i'm sick of having my wheels trued three times a year....

Also it would be great to know the numbers on usage-- to me, empirically and anecdotally it seems to be getting higher and higher. I would love to know at what point we will see an improvement at the Jackson Square/Centre Street intersection. It needs a wider curb cut or a traffic table and some vehicular reconfiguration badly.

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Too true. That cross at Ruggles near the new dorms is no treat, either. I'm lucky if my momentum is the only thing it kills.

That whole stretch near Northeastern is kind of lunar, come to think of it. Even on a cyclocross with the fat tires in place, tree roots make parts of the path more like jumps than bumps. That basically forces everyone into the street on Columbus, which defeats the purpose of the path. Considering the much higher volume you just mentioned -- including folks to whom "on your left" is a lost phrase in a dead language -- it would be helpful to have infrastructure that matches the demand.

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Last year they repaved an entire section of the SW Corridor bike path, between Green St. Station and Boston English High School. It had been completely overrun by tree roots, but now it's the smoothest, finest bike path section in the city.

I always like when the big street fair takes over the section just below Stony Brook (which happened last weekend). The Corridor is almost always a good ride.

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Trying to find somewhere to train other than the hazardous city streets.

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I ride down the SWC pretty frequently on my fixed gear, coming from the hill to school at NU. The stretch between Mass Ave and Ruggles St is pretty haggard, but beyond or before that, the path path is great.

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after moving to jp i bought a bike with 27x1-1/4 wheels because my 700c road bike wheels were getting all jostled in a way i did not like. Also I don't know what level of 'training' you're talking about but you will have to stop every 1/4 mile or so, and having to negotiate with walkers, a surprising amount of bikers (yay), and occasionally the rogue toddler or pooch-- I'd suggest passing it by a few miles and hitting the roads in the Stony Brook Reservation. And if you're training for hills you can go out another few miles into the Blue Hills. Also around Concord are primo training roads: smooth, wide shoulders, and the drivers in my experience are courteous and quite used to see cyclists.

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Are there off-road bike paths at the Reservation?

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There is nowhere in the city of Boston where you can safely train on a road bike. You can pedal around, and commute, and even wear spandex, but neither the streets nor the paths are safe for going 18-25MPH on a bike. If you really want to train at speed, you'll have to get pretty far from downtown.

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I'm just learning and need some smooth pavement with soft grass to crash in!

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Reconfiguration of the Centre St crossing is coming by the end of next year. It's part of the street improvements that are part of the Jackson Square redevelopment effort.

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And here I thought the Linear Park ran from Cedar St. Somerville, past Davis to the Minuteman Bikeway.

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Neither the Minuteman nor Davis are technically in Boston...

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The Southwest Corridor should be used as an example of how to build a linear park that is not a glorified median strip.

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After a couple minutes, I thought the 'other' one was the Comm Ave Mall.

I guess I'm not fully accustomed to the Greenway but I always regard linear parks as narrower. Not that it's bad that the RKG is wider, y'understand.

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Let's stop to consider the people who lost their homes so that you could bitch like the Princess and the Pea about your bike path.

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Didn't they lose their homes for the highway project that never happened? The bike path was a filler after the Gov stopped that, no? I can't imagine eminent domain being used for a bikepath.....

and beyond that, there are probably very few steps any of us take in a city with such a long varied history that aren't the result of someone somewhere in history losing a house on that spot. If we held a solemn vigil everytime we encountered some urban development that involved a controversial land acquisition some time before we were born the workday would be over before any of us ever finished our morning commutes.

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Those unfortunates lost their homes for a highway, not the park or the bike path. The destruction of peoples homes preceded the bike path by almost 30 years.

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The land-taking along the Southwest Corridor happened what, 25 years ago? So why are there still so many vacant lots along Columbus Ave between Ruggles and Jackson Square? Columbus Ave. is weird - 6 lanes, no parking - just a fast way to get from one end to the other. There's no other street in Boston quite like it.

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Dan d’Heilly, one of the volunteer directors, was examining cracks in concrete bulkheads above the Orange Line tracks and counting missing basketball rims along the corridor on a recent morning. He’s big on both accountability and Web design. That’s why you can go to the group’s website and click on any of 24 South End plots along the corridor to find out the name of the volunteer who tends it and their wish list for improvements.

As far as he and his volunteers seem concerned, the park only exists in the South End.

I doubt any of them have walked more than a few blocks past Mass Ave. You know, where the park has pavement has several-inch-high pavement cracks? Meanwhile, Danny wants irrigation systems and fancy lighting? I'd settle for ANY lighting and some safe paths south of Mass Ave.

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I don't know how Brett knows Dan d'Heilly, but he makes a good point about volunteers sticking close to home. I volunteer in the South End, and rarely see JP volunteers on clean-up days.

I can say for certain that on April 24, Park Serve Day, the Southwest Corridor Park Conservancy organized volunteer teams to work on the corridor in Mission Hill and at Bromley Heath. I know because I was the team leader at Jackson Square.

And you talk about the park having pavement with cracks? The SWCP Conservancy convinced DCR to do about half a mile of repaving on the bike path - 100% south of Mass Ave.

Finally, if you had a clue, you would know that the irrigation system for this park fails all the time, from Forest Hills to the Back Bay station. Worse, it could stop working entirely and that would be a disaster for the park - splash pools and community gardens would stop functioning, and the trees, grass, and shrubs would all suffer.

The single biggest problem this park has is an aging water system. The DCR says it will take millions to replace, and nobody knows where that kind of money will come from!

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