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The speed-bumpiest road in Boston
By adamg on Mon, 01/20/2025 - 9:24am
Last week, as part of its "safety surge" program, Boston installed 13 speed bumps on Allandale Street in Jamaica Plain, between the parkway and the entrance to Allandale Farm, which turns out to also be the town line with Brookline. That's 13 speed bumps on roughly a half mile of road. On the plus side, the slower speeds could reduce the odds of serious crashes - and could give your passengers more time to enjoy looking at Curtis and Willard, the farm's two beefy bois.
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Comments
On The Down Side...
This slows down people in an emergency trying to get to the Faulkner.
It's academic until it's your Nana in cardiac arrest.
Citation needed
Whenever someone doesn't like the road change they always argue that it's a public safety risk because maybe, possibly, emergency vehicles will go slightly slower.
Of course they ignore the current public safety risk that was the target of the road change to begin with. Take comfort that when you're hit by a car, the ambulance can arrive sooner, they suggest.
If getting emergency vehicles to their destination is the #1 priority, the only solution is to greatly decrease other cars on the road and/or create lanes specifically for emergency vehicles.
How Many Years? Be Honest
How many years of playing SimCity and not interacting with the real world makes you an authority on road safety?
There is already an enforcement mechanism for public safety in place. It is called the Boston Police Department.
Pull over speeders. Issue tickets and don't be too concerned that the guy in the Honda CRV with the modified exhaust is not going to get into HBS because of some speeding tickets.
By the way - I would pay to see you walk up and down Allendale Street and tell abutters face to face that they are taking part of their front yard to add an emergency lane.
Have you been down Allandale Street?
Without getting into the argument about whether 13 speed bumps are too many on a half-mile of road, there is no place to pull over anybody on the street - it's basically a narrow country road in the city (at least until it gets to South Brookline, and then it's a country road in the country).
I keep seeing the ambulance argument. Boston ambulances probably wouldn't be coming from the Brookline side of the road anyway, and the Faulkner emergency entrance is just off Centre Street, before the bumps begin.
Issue for Brookline ambulances? Possibly. To start, I suspect most people in Brookline would be taken to one of the Longwood hospitals or St. E's. Yes, there's part of Brookline where Faulkner is the closest hospital, but for most of those streets, you can get to Faulkner almost, if not just as, easily via VFW Parkway and West Roxbury Parkway.
Why not just privatize the
Why not just privatize the road and put a gate on it?
Is there a history of
Is there a history of accidents on Allandale Road? It’s basically a straight shot. Would seem difficult to screw it up.
yes there is
mostly single car crashes in bad weather around one curve on the road. These speed bumps are simply insane though. I'll bet 10K that enough important people will be getting calls about this and those bumps will be taken out. Even ambulances with patients will be impacted and that will be the main reason these bumps will be taken up.