Steve Miller of Livable Streets wrote another great blog post, this one reflecting on three major roadways: Casey Overpass, McGrath Highway and Rutherford Avenue, referred to by Steve as the “Three Sisters” as all are three crumbling structures are under intense revisioning. Two of these serve Union Square: McGrath Highway abutting Union Square and Rutherford Avenue just down Washington Street near Sullivan Square.
Image from Utile study on the de-elevation of McGrath Highway.
Efforts to re-conceive these areas as less vehicle focused has gotten some unexpected push back. While residents wish for “complete streets” where bicycles and pedestrians, trees and an active streetscape are present along with vehicle traffic, there’s been skepticism that these roads, presently gritty, congested with traffic and desolate, can be anything other than ugly pass-throughs. The presentations by planners of a better future are tough for some to believe. Here’s the intro to Steve’s piece:
“The Casey Overpass and the McGrath/O’Brien Highway are on two ends of the Boston area. But what happens to each of them (as well as with Rutherford Avenue in Charlestown) will set a pattern for years to come about how MassDOT deals with the public and how much the public will be able to affect MassDOT. Will MassDOT invest in extensive community input processes? Will community-oriented transportation advocates be able to present a united front against those who want to maintain the car-centric designs of our transportation system? The stakes are high….
This post was meant to be about three of the old highways now falling down and the increasingly bitter policy disagreements within nearby communities over what to do about it. But as I thought more about these debates, it became clear that a significant secondary theme is that so few people trust the traffic engineers or their organizations – starting with total lack of belief in the validity of the traffic prediction models being used by MassDOT. The models feel like such opaque black boxes of unknown facts and hidden formulas that they simply feel like fantasy projections of agency desires – and there is little trust of those desires either. Applauding the projections that support one’s position and denouncing the rest is neither useful, logical, nor fair. The problem is that without analysis it’s all guesswork and power plays, which is not likely to end up creating optimal outcomes either.
The distrust is so deep that people are throwing the baby out with the bathwater – refusing to accept that the models’ results have any usefulness, even in situations where they actually can help compare alternatives.
The three projects each involve analysis of comparisons, and in comparison situations it doesn’t matter if the numbers are wildly inaccurate – each alternative will be distorted in the same manner giving some legitimacy to the analysis of the differences, if any, between the options. Maybe it is a local result of public disgust at the Big Dig. Maybe it’s that American culture is simply anti-government, a tendency the Tea Party car worshipers have successfully tapped. Maybe it’s that we’re in the middle of several levels of global transition from the automobile age into something else, and Transportation Departments around the world still represent so much of the archaic and destructive past practices. Whatever…. The sad result is that MassDOT’s efforts to open up the public process all the way back to the conceptual stage – at least in locations where advocates are active and vocal – have degenerated into shouting matches between the already-convinced partisans.
The danger is that we become so divided that we seem to have lost our collective ability to push past those with a stake in maintaining the car-centric past; that we end up spending hundreds of millions of dollars – and ultimately billions of dollars – recreating the roads that we already know will not carry us into a better future. Former Secretary of Transportation Jeff Mullan once said that in addition to creating one agency out of the five that were pushed together as part of transportation reform, one of MassDOT’s key challenges is regaining the trust of the public. The merger has happened. MassDOT has shown a new openness and ability to be innovative in both construction and operations, saving money while improving performance. There is, of course, more to do – perhaps finding ways to open the black box of prediction and decision-making should be next.
Read the rest of the post.
