Saw my first Massachusetts Smart Car today - with an appropriate license plate - getting onto Rte. 9 in Chestnut Hill (also included my speedometer in the photo just to prove I'm not one of those insane people snapping photos while moving). He broke 60 on the hill down to Rte. 128, then zipped on up to 128 north (and not even pedaling very hard, that I could tell). As you can see, from the back, it basically just looks like a Mini or Matrix beaten with an ugly stick; it's only when you pull up next to it that you realize how different the thing is (says the guy driving around in a giant red space egg).

Large hunk, weighing several hundred pounds, fell on Rte. 9 from Parker Street in Newton Tuesday night. No one hurt.

Oh, hey! Looks like the bridge was already in bad shape last fall, when Google took this photo:

Brookline selectmen vote to pursue plan to wall off Heath Street in the face of plans for another mall/condo project on Rte. 9 in Newton. No word if Newton Mayor David Cohen plans to stand in front of wall and exclaim "Mr. Selectmen Chairman: Tear down this wall!" In any event, Brookline can't become the Hermit Kingdom of the West and wall itself off from the outside world just yet - its plan needs state approval.

Sharon Gartenberg picked up some software at Office Depot at Shoppers World today, then wanted to get to Circuit City across Rte. 9. She hoofed it:

... Turns out there's actually a halfway decent pedestrian crossing on Rte. 9 at the Framingham-Natick line. What's crazy is that you'd never know it when you're in Shoppers World. There's nothing that leads you from the parking lot to the sidewalk to the crosswalk. There's no visual cue when you're in the parking lot, that you can do anything else on foot except get back in your car and drive. Likewise, once you reach the sidewalk, it's clear you're not actually meant to walk on foot from the sidewalk into Shoppers World. The mall and the sidewalk are side by side, but totally disconnected. Everything about the streetscape says these are two separate worlds, and you're not meant to get from one to the other if you're a pedestrian. It's insane. ...

With little else to do during a monumental turnpike backup last week, Liz composed a prayer that begins:

Oh merciful heavens, hear my cry! Your child mourns in the dark valley of the Turnpike, and wails upon the stones of 128, and gnashes her teeth and heaps ashes upon her head when she hath the folly to attempt Route 9 as an alternate route. Oh, maketh my lane to clear, oh Lord! ...

Neal Simpson has the details on an accident yesterday afternoon that sent two to the hospital.

At least seven cars hit by softball-sized rocks thrown from the Connector Road overpass in Westborough - two motorists injured.

Just ask the parents of the baby born at a Newton Getty station this morning (it's on Rte. 9 eastbound, just past Eliot Street). The owner helped, and boy is he pumped:

Around Natick posts an aerial photo showing what the intersection of Rte. 9 and Speen Street looked like back when what is now the Natick Mall was the Natick sewer beds - a place where raw sewage from Natick and Framingham was pumped to dry out in the open air (thanks, Dave!). That ended, of course, when the mall was built in the mid-1960s.

Ed. Natick trivia note: The intersection of Speen and Rte. 9 is called the Beetleback now because when the state was planning to replace a standard intersection with that weird cloverleaf, South Middlesex News Editor Bob Moore looked at a map and exclaimed "that looks like the back of a beetle!" and made his reporters refer to the plan as the Beetleback.

I had to bring the Focus into the shop today (see: I never have to worry about forgetting to get the oil changed - every four or five months, something new goes wrong and I have to bring it in, and while you're at it, could you throw in an oil change, guys, oh, and by the way, how much you think I could get when I trade this in for a real car?), so I got a chance to observe the commuters on Rte. 9 this morning while getting a ride to work in the courtesy van.

I was just fascinated by the executive-looking guy in the silver Mercedes driving in the slow lane on Rte. 9 between the turnpike and California Avenue: He had a PDA propped against his steering wheel and the entire time, he was looking down at it while he was doing something with it with his right thumb. Do Benzes have auto-piloting now? For somebody who was not actually looking at the road, he was doing an excellent job of keeping his car in the lane.

We caught up with him again at the Southborough line - where he was still working that PDA.