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Category Archives: Commentary & Analysis
LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND ECONOMIC GROWTH: Three Choices, None Simple
There can be no question about the transformative power of today’s metropolitan economy. Major cities around the country hope to ride the wave of the growing financial, research-based, and digital business sectors. City leaders are doing what they can to make the place attractive to exploding numbers of higher-income young professionals these firms employ as […] Continue reading
ACTIVE TRANSPORTATION IS PRIMARY PREVENTION: The Evolution of Public Health From Quarantines to Mass In Motion
Public Health has its origins in catastrophe, the realization that if an out-of-the-ordinary pestilence is suddenly sickening large numbers of people there must be a general cause rather than individual failures. In contrast to Medicine, which traditionally is about treating an individual’s existing disease, Public Health seeks to keep large groups from getting sick. In […] Continue reading
Posted in Commentary & Analysis, Obesity, Public Health, Road Design, TRANSPORTATION HEALTH and SAFETY, Walking
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THE PURPOSE OF TRANSIT: Neither Reform Nor Revenue are the Needed Starting Point
It’s now semi-official – everyone agrees that the MBTA needs both reform and revenue. No one says (publicly) that the current T and Commuter Rail budget is too big for its mission. And that’s where the agreement ends – with the question of what is the MBTA’s mission, vision, and values: what exactly are we […] Continue reading
Posted in Commentary & Analysis, Government Reform, MassDOT Transformation, transit, Transit & Livability
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QUESTIONING COMPLETE STREETS: An Open Letter to the Cambridge City Council
Having a vision of the kind of city you want is an essential foundation for purposeful and effective governance. Some cities do a coherent overall process, such as Somerville’s SomerVision or Boston’s forthcoming Imagine Boston 2030. Cambridge has constructed its vision together piecemeal, through policies around a variety of quantitative and qualitative issues. In either […] Continue reading
Posted in Commentary & Analysis, Road Design, ROAD DESIGN AND MODE CHANGE, Safety, Walking
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JUMP STARTING COMPLETE STREETS: Focusing on Kids (and others) When Progress Slows
Every street should be safe for walking and bicycling. This is an essential component of the Complete Streets design philosophy that has emerged in recent years as the “new normal” for roads – although the gap between policy and practice often remains wide. Because the core issue is mobility, Advocates compliment this “everywhere for everyone” […] Continue reading
Posted in Commentary & Analysis, Road Design, ROAD DESIGN AND MODE CHANGE, Safety
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OUT OF THE SNOW, INTO THE PARKING MESS
Parking is a problem. When it snows it’s a nightmare. We start looking around, getting frustrated, maybe nasty. There seem to be parking spots everywhere except where we want to go. Parking is the explosive trap door of community transportation meetings – anything that reduces the number of spots anywhere evokes outcry. This winter’s climate […] Continue reading
Posted in Boston Transportation, Commentary & Analysis, CREATING SUSTAINABLE CHANGE, Parking
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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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OLYMPIC OPPORTUNITY? — Region Gains Only If We Demand the Benefits First
The best and perhaps only argument for holding the 2024 Summer Olympics in Boston (and Cambridge) is that the deadlines and international media scrutiny will force us – meaning city, state, and federal governments as well as local universities – to make the infrastructure investments that we already know are needed but that are unlikely […] Continue reading
Posted in Boston Transportation, Commentary & Analysis, CREATING SUSTAINABLE CHANGE
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COMMONWEALTH AVENUE: Grand Boulevard, Dangerous Street
Stretching from the Public Garden out to Weston, Commonwealth Avenue meanders past sculptured medians, historic parks, heartbreaking hills, ponds and rivers, and an enormous number of residences and businesses. Although various crossings are frustratingly congested, in general the number of cars has been steadily dropping while the number of trolley passengers, bicyclists, pedestrians, and runners […] Continue reading
Posted in Commentary & Analysis, Road Design, ROAD DESIGN AND MODE CHANGE, Safety
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WALSH ADMINISTRATION NEEDS A TRANSPORTATION MAP: Which Way On Comm. Ave. Design?
Mayor Marty Walsh visibly cares about helping underserved communities. And he is aggressively promoting the continuing building boom and accompanying (construction) jobs, as expressed in his statement to the Chamber of Commerce that “we hit the ground running…in development, education, housing, public health, and infrastructure.” Unfortunately, it appears that the Mayor currently includes transportation as […] Continue reading
Posted in Boston Transportation, Commentary & Analysis, Road Design, ROAD DESIGN AND MODE CHANGE, Safety, TRANSPORTATION HEALTH and SAFETY
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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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THE DANGERS OF SAFETY: Why Focusing on Car Accidents May Hurt Our Health
Everyone officially puts “safety first.” Everyone wants to prevent accidents. Car crashes are treated as lead stories on TV news – the images are horrific and we all fear our vulnerability. But, in fact, our roads are safer than ever. In 1956, when Interstate construction began, the national fatality rate was 6.05 per 100 million […] Continue reading
Posted in Commentary & Analysis, Obesity, Public Health, Safety, TRANSPORTATION HEALTH and SAFETY
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ROADS ARE NOT THE DESTINATION: Celebration and Concern on the MassPike (Allston-I-90) Project
As our nation has painfully learned over the past fifty years from the destructive practices of the Interstate’s old scorched-earth invasion, focusing a transportation planning process on the need to satisfy car traffic trends is dangerous. (Full disclosure: I live in a house that was supposed to be ripped down for construction of the stopped-at-the-last-minute […] Continue reading
Posted in Commentary & Analysis, MassDOT Transformation, Road Design, ROAD DESIGN AND MODE CHANGE, STREET LIFE & LAND USE
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MAKING “COMPETE STREET” OPERATIONAL: MassDOT Actives “Active Streets Certification (and Grant)” Program
City after city has found that making their streets safer and friendly for everyone – more walkable, bikeable, transit accessible and “socializable” – makes them more attractive to current and prospective residents and businesses. Not to mention the positive impact on reducing pollution, promoting public health, and dealing with climate change issues. The basic idea […] Continue reading
Posted in Commentary & Analysis
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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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Project Selection Criteria: Public Hearing Testimony
The following was submitted to the state Project Selection Advisory Council at their 7/29/14 public hearing in Boston. Thank you for the opportunity to comment on this incredibly important topic. And thank you for all the work that you have already done on this incredibly complicated issue. My name is Steven E. Miller; I’m a […] Continue reading
Posted in Commentary & Analysis, CREATING SUSTAINABLE CHANGE, Government Reform, MassDOT Transformation, Road Design
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FROM BETTER TO WORSE ON COMMONWEALTH AVE: City Leaders Need To Step Up For Their Own Policies
For a while it was feeling like stodgy Boston was jumping back into the elite group of city’s whose actions around transportation (and its joined-at-the-hip land-use twin) set the pace for the rest of the country. Our environmentally-based Smart Growth policies were state-of-the-art, which became even more valuable as climate-change storms and rising sea levels […] Continue reading
Posted in Commentary & Analysis, Road Design, ROAD DESIGN AND MODE CHANGE, Safety, transit, Walking
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MOVING BEYOND CAR LEVEL OF SERVICE (LOS): Measurable and Meaningful Criteria for Transportation Investments, Project Designs, and Development Mitigation (revised)
Scaled from A to F like an elementary school report card, automobile Level of Service (LOS) metrics are easy to measure and easy to understand. LOS is, essentially, the average amount of delay compared to a “free-flowing” road where everyone is moving at full design-speed – congestion! It is a powerful indicator: it has a […] Continue reading
Posted in Climate/Energy/Environment, Commentary & Analysis, CREATING SUSTAINABLE CHANGE, Government Reform, MassHighway/DOT, Project Management, Road Design
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FREE AND EASY: Open Ended Bicycling
Every year I am part of a group that does a one-day ride from Boston to Provincetown, about 146 miles. We’ve done it in blazing heat and nor’easter rainstorms – that was the year we later realized that each of us was secretly hoping our bike would fail so we’d have an excuse to drop […] Continue reading
Posted in bike culture, Commentary & Analysis, Public Health
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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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A NOTE FOR THE NEXT GOVERNOR: Travel is the Least Important Thing about Transportation
Congratulations on your election. As you know, that was the easy part! Here’s something waiting for you: our transportation system is in crisis. We can’t seem to generate the political will needed to raise the money required to upgrade our decayed rails, roads, bridges, and sidewalks to meet the needs of today – much less […] Continue reading
Posted in Commentary & Analysis, CREATING SUSTAINABLE CHANGE, Government Reform, Road Design, Safety
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TIME TO GET SERIOUS ABOUT SAFETY: Looking Beyond Traffic Lights
My tolerance may have been low because of the bicyclist who had been run over that afternoon, the 8th Boston-area death in the past two years – five by right-turning trucks, two by buses, one by a drunk driver – and I was thinking that it could have been me. But there it was, the […] Continue reading
Posted in Commentary & Analysis, Road Design, Safety, TRANSPORTATION HEALTH and SAFETY, Walking
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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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STEERING THE ORGANIZATION: Using Decision-Point Criteria to Achieve Goals
MassDOT is legitimately proud of its progressive policies about creating a sustainable, multi-modal transportation system. But the transfer from policy to facts on the ground has been very uneven and incomplete. This isn’t surprising: as with many other endeavors, road construction is a complex and multi-player process with gridlock and human life at stake. It’s […] Continue reading
Posted in Commentary & Analysis, CREATING SUSTAINABLE CHANGE, Government Reform, MassHighway/DOT, Road Design
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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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PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT FEEDBACK: It’s Hard to Stay on Route if You Don’t Know Where You’re Going
MassDOT deserves enormous credit for trying to connect its investment decisions with the desired outcomes. It’s a challenging and complicated undertaking, constrained in many ways by federal reporting requirements, limited data, and unverified impact-calculating methodologies. The fact that their first attempt, the very impressive WeMove Massachusetts: Planning for Performance tool, is deeply flawed (for example, […] Continue reading
Posted in Commentary & Analysis
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GETTING MORE EGGS FROM THE GOLDEN GOOSE: “Nobody in this Country got Rich on their Own.”
It takes resources to run a city. Of course, the most important resource is people: the capabilities and creativity of its work force, the strength and resiliency of its families and neighborhoods, the civic engagement of its residents – and if Mayor Walsh is really smart he will find many ways to encourage city volunteerism […] Continue reading
Posted in Commentary & Analysis, CREATING SUSTAINABLE CHANGE, Government Reform
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SMART CITIES, POWER POLITICS, & QUALITY OF LIFE: Technology and What It’s Used For
Techno-utopians. It wasn’t long ago that we were being told that digital Information and Communication Technologies would solve nearly every problem and transform the world in wonderful ways, small and big. Cars would be routed around congestion; government would more accurately chart population needs. Although there were some efforts to broaden the scope of “smart” […] Continue reading
Posted in Commentary & Analysis, CREATING SUSTAINABLE CHANGE, Government Reform, Safety
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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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