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Water-main break makes a mess of Harvard Square traffic; some businesses forced to close
By adamg on Fri, 09/04/2015 - 8:20am
The hole at 7 a.m. Photo by Erik Maki. See it larger.
Cambridge Police report on the water-main break at JFK and Mt. Auburn streets this morning:
Inbound traffic to Harvard Square from Memorial Drive will be closed. Traffic coming east from Mt. Auburn Street will be diverted to Eliot to JFK Street outbound to Memorial Drive. Motorists are encouraged to avoid the area during the AM commute and likely through the weekend.
Without water, some businesses have shut.
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Comments
Is the water off the streets?
Is the water off the streets? I have to go to work and a meeting. Just wondering.
Crisis = Opportunity
Let's just make Harvard Square a pedestrian paradise and never let the cars back in (trucks during certain hours for deliviers are fine).
Crisitunity!
Crisitunity!
DTX all over again
"Let's just make Harvard Square a pedestrian paradise and never let the cars back in "
That's what they did to Downtown Crossing. And we all know how THAT turned out.
Ever go there?
It does just fine during working hours. Also, how would a perpetual traffic jam on a colonial era street layout improve things at all?
Turned out fine
I hardly ever fear for my life crossing Winter Street. Not so much the crosswalk betweek Dickson Bros and Crema in Harvard Square.
harv square traffic
it cant possibly get worse. I drive the greater boston area quite a bit for work and the square and longwood medical areas are by far the worst, most congested areas.
Ever been to SF? LA?
Traffic in Boston sucks, yeah, but it's not worse then many west coast or dense southern cities. Boston is bad at rush hours but otherwise is manageable unlike LA/SF with 24h gridlock in places.
Cross Bronx Expressway
The worst traffic in my opinion is on the Cross Bronx Expressway. There is never any good reason to be on that road. There are other ways to get to the GW bridge if you absolutely must cross it, but if you take the Cross Bronx to get there you'll still be waiting to cross it tomorrow.
One advantage to California
Lanesplitting by motorcycles is legal, which gets you past the freeway jam-ups, and the weather is such that you can reasonably use a motorcycle as a commuter vehicle 12 months a year.
Not for everybody, I know, but I'd certainly take full advantage if I lived there.
long island expressway on friday in the summer
wanted to kill myself.
Motor vehicle traffic IS increasing
Government data says so:
http://thehill.com/policy/transportation/251609-feds-us-drivers-break-mi...
http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=10902#more-10902
Historic data: http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/travel_monitoring/tvt.cfm
National is not local
Also, it is not ideal in colonial layouts, and Harvard Square is one.
It can be decreased through more reliable public transit and cycling accommodations. See also: Germany.
Just because other parts of the US are being turned into traffic clusterholes doesn't mean that we need to rip down a compact urban layout to accommodate your sloth. Like that worked so well downtown, anyway.
Want to go fast in your car? Stay out of Cambridge. Go on the highway, or move out of the city.
Clearly you ignore the facts
Local traffic is also increasing. I understand its a lot of work to click your mouse and face a harsh reality you prefer to deny, but Mass rural and urban traffic is increasing more than the national average in the early 2000's, and nationally its almost 3 times that rate for June to June in this past year. That's great news meaning the country is recovering from a long recession. Especially telling is the chart on page 9 of this file:
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/travel_monitoring/15juntvt/15j...
where driving miles are increasing faster than before the economy started slowing in 2005, then faltered in 2007.
So "more cars" is the solution
Matches well with my "Bacon, Rice Krispie Squares and Orange Soda" weight loss solution
More sidewalk sure isn't
which is what Cambridge and Boston City planners have done in the past 40 years. They've not shown data of excess pedestrian traffic.
Let's check again after this weekend
Pedestrian traffic might surge now that people know they can walk around Harvard Square without having to dodge your demolition derby co-contestants. I'm sure going to go.
Redit Boston has photos from 1972
from before travel lanes were removed from Harvard Square to make traffic worse. It was a more vibrant area then with no Starbucks or national retail stores.
Photos are not reality
Photos are a snap in time. Ask somebody who was around for a dose of reality. Even in the 1980s, areas off Mass Ave did well because they weren't a massive car sewer for the area. Mass Ave? Not so much.
Admit it: you have no interest in visiting or shopping in this area, anyway - not like people who go there on the T and walk through there and live there. You want it to be a convenient cut through at high speed, damn the local culture, just like you demand that the rest of Cambridge and Arlington be created for your driving convenience.
Good thing is that municipalities are starting to say no to sewering that gives no benefit to the community. I'm hoping that Medford gets run by grownups so we can do the same with the blighting of the square by traffic sewering of people who never spend a dime there, but whose driving repels the locals.
Vibrancy
is a function of commercial rents. The main reason that H^2 has ended up full of the same national chain shops and restaurants you can find in any mall is that they're the only businesses that can afford the rent.
Less Harvard office space too
back in the day made more space and lower rents for diverse retailers. More and cheaper parking always helps businesses.
Nice pics
People were so colorful in the 70s!
oof
I used to work literally across the street from where this photo was taken. I'm always glad not to have to commute to Harvard Square anymore, but today, I'm especially glad.
Too bad
that hole didn't open up bigger and just suck all that elitist nonsense straight to the bowels of the Earth.
Definition
Elitist = Better educated than you
Elitist = farther left of center than you
Elitist = more urban than you
Also
Elitist = been there for way more than 350 years longer than you.
Elitism simplified.
The assumption that your stupid fawking credentials and school are more significant than the actual things you do.
Boston 2024 was chock full of clods with the very bestest credentials from the very spiffiest schools, but they still sucked at getting 2024 over and looked like idiots when they tried to cobble the venue patchwork together.
And how can we forget the original Best and Brightest, the morons from Harvard and elsewhere that ran our part in the Vietnam War?
And the most disgusting thing about the degree snobs who claim to be 'progressive' is their complete fail at grasping the importance of an egalitarian basis for a genuine progressive outlook. Everyone matters or no one does.
Woody Guthrie is your role model here, not some presumptuous shithead from Harvard or MIT.
https://youtu.be/XaI5IRuS2aE
Gee, tell us how you really
Gee, tell us how you really feel.
I note that you made no mention of how important these schools are to our economy though.
The local economy.
Pales in significance to the ruination of a country the size of California through vicious and hare brained war policies that involved an interesting Harvard cast. This would include the Bundy brothers, Kissinger, General Westmoreland, (B School) and others.
So parochial sniveling about how locals get jerbs couldn't be more pathetic and useless.
What about neo-cons?
and how they got the US to invade Iraq, upsetting the middle east all in a quest to empower Israel and control oil? Yeah, I know they weren't Harvard men...