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Category Archives: Road Design
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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THE ART OF TRANSPORTATION (AND URBAN) PLANNING: Going Beyond the Technical Specs
It is through our built environment that we shape ourselves and the world. Living, working, and moving around in dysfunctional, cramped, unsafe, polluted, or just ugly places not only affects our mood and health but also our relations with those around us and the natural environment. The need to maximize the positive impact of our […] Continue reading
Posted in Commentary & Analysis, Government Reform, Project Management, Public Health, Road Design, ROAD DESIGN AND MODE CHANGE
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