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Category Archives: Advocacy
PARKWAYS MOVING FORWARD: DCR is Not The Highway Department
It’s a pleasure to be able to praise a government agency: civil servants who try to live up to their public service mission are over-worked and underpaid relative to private sector peers – and always under appreciated! It’s particularly a pleasure to praise the Department of Conservation and Recreation’s (DCR), a woefully underfunded agency whose […] Continue reading
Posted in Advocacy, Commentary & Analysis, Government Reform, Road Design, ROAD DESIGN AND MODE CHANGE
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WALK, BIKE, RUN: Unity and Tension In Non-Motorized Alliances
It wasn’t that long ago that Boston’s walking, bicycling, and transit advocacy groups saw each other as part of the problem. Faced with the hostile fragmentation, government policy-makers moved slowly or not at all. Boston wasn’t unusual. To the extent that cities had active transportation advocacy groups, the discordance was common. Today, urban areas (and […] Continue reading
Posted in Advocacy, Commentary & Analysis, CREATING SUSTAINABLE CHANGE, Walking
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TRUCKIN’ ON: Reducing the danger of Trucks and other Large Vehicles
Trucks are only 4% of vehicles in the United States but cause about 7% of pedestrian fatalities and 11% of cyclist fatalities. The disparity is even higher in urban areas – a London analysis found that the 4% of vehicles that were trucks were involved in nearly 53% of cyclist fatalities. In Boston, 7 out […] Continue reading
Posted in Advocacy, Safety, TRANSPORTATION HEALTH and SAFETY
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STABILIZING EQUITABLE COMMUNITIES: Gentrification, Displacement, and Markets
It wasn’t long ago, when regional rail-trail conversions were the leading strategy for creating multi-use non-motorized travel corridors, that the biggest opposition came from suburbanites fearing that the bike paths would bring intruders (meaning poor or Black people) into their backyards and lower their property values. Today, as the action has shifted to our reviving […] Continue reading
Posted in Advocacy, Commentary & Analysis, CREATING SUSTAINABLE CHANGE, Government Reform
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DANGER FROM BELOW: Our Leaky Gas Pipe Infrastructure
It’s bad enough that rain-water run-off from our streets takes oil-derived toxins, metal and synthetic dust into our soil then into our groundwater and rivers. But it also turns out that human-injected poisons seep up from below our roads, destroying plant life, killing soil, and creating explosive danger on the surface as well. The volatile […] Continue reading
Posted in Advocacy, Climate/Energy/Environment, Commentary & Analysis, Public Health, TRANSPORTATION HEALTH and SAFETY
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CHARLES RIVER BRIDGES FALL OFF THE SCHEDULE: State Needs To Find Funds Without Skimping on Surrounding Improvements
While work on the Longfellow and Anderson bridges is moving forward, plans for repairing and upgrading the in-between River Street and Western Avenue bridges and the messed-up intersections leading to them on both sides of the Charles River have suddenly disappeared from MassDOT’s Accelerated Bridge Program (ABP) agenda. The bridge’s structural deficiencies are still there […] Continue reading
Posted in Advocacy, Commentary & Analysis, MassHighway/DOT, Road Design, ROAD DESIGN AND MODE CHANGE
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MASS PIKE EXITS: Master Key for Unlocking Boston Roads from Esplanade to Allston
In real life there are no magic wands whose waving causes all problems to disappear, no magic pill that makes everything better. But sometimes there are Master Keys that open a series of blockages and create new routes forward. Even in transportation. One possible Master Key is finding ways to install new on/off ramps on […] Continue reading
Posted in Advocacy, Commentary & Analysis, MassHighway/DOT, Road Design, ROAD DESIGN AND MODE CHANGE
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EFFECTIVE AND DEMOCRATIC CITY (AND TRANSPORTATION) PLANNING: Neither Top-Down nor Bottom-Up Is Enough
The Human Scale is a wonderful movie based on the powerful insights and work of progressive urban planner, Jan Gehl; it’s now available in CD format. Everyone who loves cities should see it. In potently visual scenes, the film lays out his critique of today’s automobile-focused high-rise urban design, the dangers of top-down authoritarian planning […] Continue reading
Posted in Advocacy, Commentary & Analysis, CREATING SUSTAINABLE CHANGE, Government Reform, MassHighway/DOT
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SLOWING TRAFFIC TO A TARGET SPEED: How To Make Our Streets Safer
We’ve all seen the graph: a person hit by a car going 40 miles per hour (mph) has an 85% chance of being killed. Reducing the speed to 30 mph cuts the odds of death in half; reducing speed to 20 mph drops the fatality rate by an astounding 94%. Even more dramatically, at 5 […] Continue reading
Posted in Advocacy, Commentary & Analysis, History, MassHighway/DOT, Road Design, ROAD DESIGN AND MODE CHANGE, Safety
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McGRATH HIGHWAY REPAIRS: The Occasional Superiority of Short-Term Solutions
Both Advocates and Public Agency leaders can find a number of lessons in the multi-level effort to deal with the McGrath Highway corridor in Somerville – which has resulted not only in a commitment from MassDOT to explore ways to eventually replace the crumbling neighborhood-dividing “Chinese Wall” with a less intimidating ground-level road, but a […] Continue reading
Posted in Advocacy, Commentary & Analysis, MassDOT Transformation, Road Design, ROAD DESIGN AND MODE CHANGE
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OPENING STREETS, CHANGING POLICIES: Creating Space for Neighborhood Revival and Transportation Reform
Movement building requires organizing activities and programs that have inherent value and meet people’s immediate needs while also raising their awareness of the importance of larger reforms and putting pressure on relevant officials and power brokers to implement those changes. It’s a tricky combination to achieve. Providing free breakfast to low-income kids, for example, makes […] Continue reading
Posted in Advocacy, Commentary & Analysis, Public Health, STREET LIFE & LAND USE, Walking
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LEGACY TIME: Styles and Strategies for the Political Administration End Game
Tom Menino’s tenure is now measured in weeks. Deval Patrick is entering the monthly count-down period. But neither of them has left yet. And until they do, advocates (and everyone else) seeking to advance their issues will have to deal with how these elected executives and their administrations function during their lame duck days — […] Continue reading
Posted in Advocacy, Commentary & Analysis, CREATING SUSTAINABLE CHANGE, Government Reform
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