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The same drive through Cambridge and Boston 50 years apart

Drive Through Boston - 1964 and 2014

By now, you've probably seen MIT professor Kevin Lynch's movie of his drive around Cambridge and Boston in 1964. Danny Shaw recreated that famous drive this year - and put the two side by side.

Via Boston Reddit.

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Comments

Great job matching frames. It's amazing how much is unchanged in 50 years.

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I love that they included a map at the end. Will be watching it a few more times.

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There's actually a map following their position in the background of the video the whole time! It's a neat touch to keep track of where they are. The map tracker is accurate above the two feeds, not below.

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Far less painting of center lines and lane lines. I wonder what the elapsed time was for each version and how much compensation one or the other needed.

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Stupid traffic calming.

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The vastly increased number of pedestrian and vehicular fatalities back there were natural selection filtering out all the stupid people! /sarc

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Very nice.

For me, the most interesting parts were the differences that wouldn't have occurred to me (as opposed to knowing that such-and-such a building didn't exist 50 years ago).

The two that stood out were seeing the (different) bridge on Summer St (presumably crossing over the RR tracks at the present-day South Boston Bypass Rd) and the stretch of Storrow Drive (along Back Bay) with no median barrier.

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Yeah I noticed that too, further proof (if you needed any) how truly bizarre Storrow is/was.

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Main St, Cambridge and Kenmore Square are also extremely different.

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Great shot of the 9 city blocks blown up for the Fed Reserve Building. Here's a link to the old layout if anyone's interested.

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And so many traffic lights in 2014.

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Be honest -- how many of you played punchbuggy while watching this? ;-)

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When he leaves Storrow Drive at Kenmore, Kevin drives under what appears to be the Bowker Overpass (the one that covers the Charlesgate Park) under construction. In 2014, there are wooden planks keeping pieces of concrete from falling down onto cars, and the overpass is being repaired.

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This looks like prof. Wanunu and his team made all his efforts in remapping and recording the whole journey. The video editor only did compose the video. However the video editor has taken all this rights to himself. Also in the old video the contributor's identity comes first, but in the new video the video editor passed the contributor's identity to the end of the video and published as if this is his original work. This is really awful. Please give necessary credits to relevant people !!

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I wish I could slow down even a little bit more so you can really take in the details. Which streets have more tress? Which streets have taller buildings? It certainly felt like Memorial Drive has a lot more stoplights now!

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