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An ode to Storrow Drive
By adamg on Sun, 03/06/2011 - 9:41am
Karin really likes driving on Storrow, at least, after rush hour.
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And the people who actually
And the people who actually live in town and are trying to enjoy a little bit of peace in the parks along Storrow and Memorial would really like it if all the cars found somewhere else to make their noise pollution and air pollution.
Yeah!
Fucking cars. Driving on our streets like they were made for them 'n' shit. The nerve.
Most of the roads in the
Most of the roads in the older part of Boston were not, in fact, made for cars :P
I'm with the OP. Living and working alongside Storrow/I-90, it is regrettable that the city designed a set of roadways to cut off pedestrian access to a nice recreational area. Certainly, it makes the difference to BU between having no campus (status quo) and having a nice campus (which would be possible if not for Storrow).
I'm firmly in the camp that cities should be built for humans to inhabit, first and foremost. We're still recovering from decades of mismanagement, particularly the 60s and 70s, where the school of thought was that cities were to be converted into large highway interchanges, with some office buildings too.
Shut it down! (Storrow)
I'd love to see some ideas to shut it down, especially since it's going to cost taxpayers 100's of millions of dollars soon to rebuild the tunnels in the northern section.
Traffic could easily be routed to 90 E/W over by the Cambridge street bride and old CSX rail yard. Then you could reconnect the city to the waterfront from BU all the way to Mass General, fill in the tunnels, and make the Back Bay even more appealing.
A small ramp could also connect just past the 90 interchange to the BU bridge for access to BU/Cambridge, and west of Kenmore and Fenway. Maybe keep one surface lane either way running down the length of the old road, but make sure to put in stop lights and slow traffic way down so it's only used by local traffic. The speed limit would be 30MPH with mandatory stops, down from the unofficial 50-60MPH people do now.
I'm willing to bet 90% of the traffic uses it to bypass 90 to get to north station, the hospital and 93 anyways. Better to dump them into the highway system already there, and the big dig, than ruining the park and costing taxpayers.
Consider ...
The feds WILL NOT pay for renovating the inadequate and unmaintained Storrow Drive - it will be on the state to rebuild it, it will cost massively, and it will be cut to two lanes or eat more waterfront because it is substandard.
The Pike is a federal road. They might be willing to kick in to make upgrades to the pike necessary to get rid of Storrow Drive.
A member of our local sports fraternity was in the back
of the car one day. As we sat in traffic on Storrow east at rush hour, he looked across the Drive and saw all the people jogging on both sides. He then said to me;"look at those dumb motherfuckers, carbon dioxide out, carbon monoxide in."
I just gave him the all purpose "Yessir!"
Gosh. I, for one, would
Gosh. I, for one, would really love for Storrow Drive to be torn up and converted back into parkland. It's such a poorly designed road, and such a blight on the city.
Here's some food for thought for the skeptics:
1. Tearing it up would open up a HUGE amount of land for parks, all the way from North Station, through the Esplanade, Charlesgate and past BU.
2. Beyond providing more land for parks, tearing it down would hugely improve connectivity, between BU, Back Bay Fens, Cambridge, Back Bay, Beacon Hill and it would allow thousands of new cyclists to get around Boston. (Remember, cycle share is coming here!)
3. Storrow drive is totally redundant. Just look at the map. We already have a large, better designed East-West highway in Boston.
4. It's fast and dangerous, but it has very low capacity. Most of the way it's only two lanes in each direction. The real throughput of the road is even lower than that because the on and off ramps can't handle the traffic and create choke points. Quite often, I find myself going faster than traffic as cycle from Dartmouth St. to Mass Ave. along the esplanade.
Every so often when I'm alone
Every so often
when I'm
alone in the park
and when
there's no other traffic
I imagine
a park that
is just a park
no whoosh
no roars
no engines
just peace
I was originally going to copy the structure of the poem, but I couldn't identify it. Apologizes for likely failing for likely a bad emulation of the post.
Imagine an Esplanade that line right up to the buildings. So peaceful. So beautiful.
I hope that one day the tunnel just collapse (with no one getting caught) causing the entire shut down of Storrow Drive. I hope that such a long term shut down would inadvertently show that Boston can function without the highway and an Esplanade with no highway hurting the atmosphere would show that we don't need it (I hope we don't really need it). What I know for sure: James and Helen Storrow would smile in their graves.