From what I’ve read, Boston does have a pretty gnarly NIMBY problem, which is why housing is so expensive there (and the population is starting to flatline). Part of the problem, or so I theorize, is that Boston is not very big in terms of square mileage, so regional growth depends heavily on the policies of neighboring municipalities like Brookline, Somerville, and Chelsea. If any of those towns feel like blocking new development, Boston can’t really do much about it.
Sidenote, my wife and I are flying up there tonight. Haven’t been back to New England since my parents moved away nearly four and a half years ago. I’ll try to remember to snap some pics for this thread.
Up in DC for the weekend. Won’t spam with the obvious typical DC pics haha
I’m staying in this amazing new district called “The Wharf” which features some amazing buildings and completely hidden (I think it’s all underground) parking up against the Patomic.
Wharf is a nice development. The river helps immensely…
I believe Hoffman was also involved at the Wharf?
So, they’re involved locally in Seaboard and the RusBus tower developments…?
Concept rendering for Austin’s future light rail. That being said we totally should not even deal with at-grade light rail. If we are going to do rail eventually it should be not have any at-grade crossings. They are always slower and less efficient. When I used to work in West LA the new Santa Monica metro extension opened and even though my apartment and work were both on the line it was completely useless as it took longer than driving and there was so many car accidents
I think this is really great to see. Anything that puts NC on the map is good for Raleigh too. Plus Wilmington is already one of my favorite cities here.
We’re back! Sadly, I didn’t really get any pictures of the infrastructure because I was too busy enjoying myself. That being said, a couple relevant takeaways (using pictures I found online).
First, the new center-running busway Boston just opened on Columbus Ave was fantastic. It’s New England’s first, and was an excellent preview of what’s to come here. The one glaring contrast between what they have and what we’re planning is the number of lanes we’ll be working with. Crossing from the platform to the sidewalk was comfortable and easy, even in the dark, because we were only dealing with one lane of traffic. Additionally, the travel lanes were pretty narrow thanks to wider sidewalks, so cars weren’t moving as fast anyway. It has me wondering how comfortable our BRT stations are going to feel with two lanes of higher-speed traffic on either side. Here’s a picture of one of the platforms from Streetsblog MASS:
Second observation: man, people in Cambridge love their bikes. We stayed near Central on the Red Line, and every day we saw tons of bikes chained up on the racks next to the station. Even when you moved away from transit stops, you still saw plenty of cyclists and chained-up bikes. They were also pretty common in downtown Boston, but Cambridge was on another level (I hear good things about Somerville as well, but we didn’t make it out there). The difference, of course, was ease-of-use. Cambridge has an increasing number of raised, curb-separated bike lanes, often accompanied by protected intersections and, when necessary, dedicated signals for cyclists. Here’s a great example of a newly-implemented road diet:
From what I’ve seen on Twitter, Cambridge has aggressively pursued an expansion of protected bike infrastructure, especially during the pandemic. I’ve been amazed at how quickly they’ve been able to implement some of these projects using a strategy known as tactical urbanism. It does seem like Raleigh has been exploring this tactic more, but I do feel like we could be doing more. The biggest barrier, I’d assume, is the level of control that NCDOT has over many of the streets in our city. I’m hoping this new text change will really up our game here, but time will tell.
