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Take a ride on the gondola
By adamg on Mon, 03/12/2018 - 9:29am
It's just a parody account for now, but see what life would be like with a gondola that would glide like a cloud over the traffic-choked streets of the Seaport, because obviously spending $100 million on a gondola would be way sexier make far more sense than using the money to figure out how to expand Silver Line service or just give everybody who works in the area a bicycle.
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Comments
A bike and
a boat.
Europeans got us covered
https://www.shuttlebike.com/en/
How about doing the following
How about doing the following:
1.An elevated monorail from South Station through the Seaport down Broadway to City Point? This could even be extended to North Station along the Greenway as a North/South connector later on following the Atlantic Avenue El precedent.
2. Add guided buses (simple off the shelf add-on technology) to the Silver Line so that they can run faster through the tunnels along with signal priority at D street?
Or. Some reality
The City of Boston, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Conservation Law Foundation, ABC, and ITDP come together; dissolve the past restraints that are killing the Seaport, and use each piece of infrastructure for its highest and best use. LRT Green Line trains in the Seaport tunnel. BRT on Summer. Direct links to Logan
How about restoring the
cuts to the school system and the bus program instead of a sky based soon to be rescue gondolas?
What's $100 million among friends
$100 million for gondolas, $100 million for a bridge to nowhere, $100 million overspending on schools (according to a BPS commissioned analysis), $100 million here, $100 million there. Sooner or later it adds up to real money.
Oh wait...
Totally Impractical — Few Words Rhyme Very Well With "Gondola"
Cola
I met her in a club down in new SoBo
Where you drink champagne and take rides in a gondola
Order Another Rum And Cola—There're Severe Delays On The Gondola
Here's a gondola
in Hispaniola.
https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g147290-d312221-Reviews-Te...
Why are people so negative
Why are people so negative about this idea? First off, that $100 million is to be privately financed so no reason it has to crowd out other options like expanded silver line and bike lanes. Second, if the studies are to be believed, it would handle a lot of passengers - up to 4000 per hour. That's a good thing, right? Also, its a proven technology. If they can build these on tops of mountains they can certainly do it here. Finally, would be pretty cool. How often do you hear that about Boston?
Because "we can't"
is the go to for some.
Why would Boston give away airspace to this?
To serve a few wealthy people?
Why were we so negative about the Olympics?
Because both are ridiculous. That's why.
Another Boston 2024!
You're exactly right.
I can smell taxpayer $$$$$ right away.
This time, the developer(s) will cash in big and the well-to-do residents and tourists will enjoy a fun luxury at our expense.
Seems to me that the T could use the $100 million right now. It needed the extra $13 billion then, years ago. (Remember the Big Dig? It was supposed to cost $2billion but overruns rang it up to $15billion. Btw, where did those contractors go and Kerisiotis and Dukakis? What a deal, plus we drew the contempt of Congress and Federal subsidies. LOL)
Oh, urban developers!
Gotta love em!
Yes. + The Mexico gondola has a 400ft incline. Globe dishonesty
The Globe and its gondola boosters are being dishonest with the public yet again. Trying to frame a Mexico City slum gondola with a 400ft incline as a model for the flat Seaport is astounding. I have been on the M.C. gondola. It is terrible. Using slum-favela gondolas from Mexico, Colombia, and Bolivia as models shows a dangerous gap in communication. If Boston builds a Seaport gondola, it will be the LAUGHING STOCK OF THE US. The Big Dig jokes still roll across the US
Your argument relies on a CAPITALIZED PHRASE
I really don't understand why people are so negative. The crab metaphor really applies here. Are you 100% sure this will fail?
The Tram Things Have Their Place
http://www.gobytram.com/
The "Flying Twinkie" in Portland Oregon was built to centralize parking near a freeway, yet carry people up to a huge medical complex 500 feet up in the West Hills, where parking was difficult and getting all the workers in and out of the area was getting kind of dangerous.
The seaport needs fewer car lanes and more transit. Total joke that it was built without those things. Redeveloping a warehouse/industrial district was not a new endeavor and Boston tried to create its own Las Vegas rather than look to the experience of other communities.
Well, A Subway Is Also Proven Technology
They're built all over the world, providing excellent reliable service. They could certainly do that here too (and did in the past), but nowadays they can't.
Hence, the skepticism they'll be able to handle a gondola.
Yeah
what you're forgetting is.. once the developer decides it isn't worth running the thing any more. They say 'it goes or the city needs to pick up the tab". So we would inherit a mode of transportation that is expensive per rider to run and not really feisable.
4000/people per hour isn't very much. It's also costly per rider.
The money would be better spent giving it to the T to improve the Silver Line there or put BRT, or even light rail up and down Summer street. Not some boondoogle like a gondola. But no, we can't fix transit in this area, we'd rather just throw money at something else than try to fix what we have.
oh and "proven technology". Yeah maybe for the swiss alps in 1923. Spare me this argument. And so is a monorail but we aren't building one of those.
Are we Disney? Yeah we're not looking for 'cool', we're looking for practical solutions to ease traffic congestion in the seaport.
Gondola
Billions were spend on the Big Dig to put that ugly road underground and now let's clutter up the air with gondolas. How much per ride, will that cover the cost of the maintenance/labor? How many state employees will be making six figures working on the gondola system? What happens when a gondola starts smoking (a la Red Line), where do people go in those death traps? 4,000 people riding an hour...Have you seen how long it takes 10-15 people just to enter/leave one subway car? Sorry this isn't Wachusett Mountain, it's a stupid idea.
Ya know what would be even more cool?
Having a beautiful, modern subway system that runs like a charm and where the actual tunnels and signals are not collapsing and working.
Code cracked
C = S
Q = L
B = E
E = U
N = N
T = G
Nice try Shirley. This is a bad idea for reasons Cybah has already laid out but then you drive in from Milton when you come to the city anyways, right?
Good Detective Work!
( it's certainly her style — peppered with rhetorical questions )
Funny, but were this actually a reporter shilling,
and were it exposed, it would be very difficult for a real news organization to keep employing them.
It would be as shameful as when the Globe was cheerleading the Olympics scam against Boston. Then the fake journalist and editors responsible were fired. Right? Right?
One thing that must suck: to have trained as real journalist, and be really smart and principled, but there aren't enough jobs, so you end up underemployed, yet you can see people in nice journalism jobs who are doing very bad journalism, and they keep the jobs.
Oh well, I tried. No, I'm not
Oh well, I tried. No, I'm not Shirley by the way, and I live in Cambridge, not Milton. I'm all for improving the T and putting in more bike lanes ((I commute into Boston by bike and T btw but who cares). I just don't get why it has to be an either/or proposition. A developer wants to put up their own money to build it. There's nothing I see that prevents doing all the other improvements. I'm certainly no expert so maybe it'll turn out that its not feasible. I just don't see why it has to be dismissed out of hand. I'll leave it at that.
100% Privately Funded? No Tax Breaks Or Public Commitment?
You know, I've got a lovely bridge you might like to buy. It connects Boston with MIT and is named after a recipe for sweet and sour beets!
The Seaport is
indeed a traffic choked clusterf*ck. But whose fault is that?
Now to relieve poor foresight and planning, we have this pie in the sky prospective plan to install a gondola system to get those "young urban professionals" in and out of the port. Ha.
The city is made up of more than just "young urban professionals" the last time I checked. We should be focusing on how to better improve systems that the majority of commuters take on a daily basis: commuter rail and the subway. I know they are not "sexy" but nevertheless needed and used by the majority of the masses.
And in regards to Ari's co-authored treatise on how to make the Silver Line better, I had to chuckle. And a dedicated bus corridor (BRT?) on Summer Street? Um, where?, oh, let me guess, removing a car traffic lane?
Remove all car traffic lanes
Had the seaport been built with the same concepts as the twenty-years older Pearl District, car traffic would not have been a problem.
WTF did they build this mess with so many car lanes? When better schemes were proven? When there is no way it could work?
TL/DR take out car lanes. Put in transit. That is what should have happened from day -3650.
You obviously don't work in the Seaport
Summer street is only choked at South Station.
Get out a little more and look.
Yes
Removing car traffic lanes.
Summer isn't exactly a crowded street - in fact, it is a death-by-taxi zone most of the day due to unenforced speed limits, unenforced crosswalks, and the stupidity of not having bike lanes on the least traveled way.
It doesn't go anywhere. Go out and see for yourself.
When you include parking,
When you include parking, drivers have SIX lanes on Summer Street. Plus there is a median. Plenty of space to put in a bus lane. Designing the Seaport around cars has been a huge failure. Cars are a terrible use of space. Time for something more efficient.
Yes.
Removing a lane of traffic probably won't lead to more congestion. Look what happened when the Longfellow Bridge was reduced from two lanes to one going inbound. Did traffic double? No, it got cut in half. Induced demand is a wonder. If we build wide roads for cars, we're going to get a lot of cars on wide roads.
Summer Street has a maximum throughput of ~1200 vehicles per direction per hour (see here). And 1200 vehicles can be handled by a single lane, although queues might be longer. Plus, for 23 hours of the day, demand is lower anyway.
Right now the 7 bus runs 20 buses per hour with probably 60 passengers each and capacity is constrained by the number of buses which the T has, not a lack of demand for ridership. That's 1200 passengers, as many as are otherwise on the street in private vehicles. Put 60' buses on the route, and you're up to 1800 passengers. Double the frequency and you're at 3600, or triple what the roadway carries in private cars.
Now, if you make the buses faster and reliable (there's room on the buses for people, they don't get bunched and stuck in traffic) some number of people will switch to riding them! Going from South Station to the Convention Center? Instead of an Uber, you'd take the bus, because it's going to be faster, and there aren't 85 people waiting for the next bus which isn't coming for five minutes, but 25 people waiting for the bus coming in two minutes. So now that 1200 number comes down a bit, and can easily be handled by a single lane of traffic. Provide safer cycling infrastructure and some people will grab a Hubway (or a BlueBike, and good lord this is bad marketing to change the name) instead.
So, yes, definitely get rid of those goddamn traffic lanes. We should not be designing our roadways to carry as many cars as possible, but as many people as possible.
It'll Always Be "Route 128" — It'll Always Be "Hubway"
Realiry check: not everyone
Realiry check: not everyone is physically able to ride a Blue Cross Blue Shield Medical Health Insurance rental bike to and from work.
Buses
nearly all the comment was about buses tho..
How resilient is a gondola line...
...in high wind? If I remember correctly, they shut down the one which goes to Roosevelt Island from NYC when winds near 40 mph. Given our recent spate of weather and the more frequent occurrence of high-wind events throughout the year, is the Seaport really the best place for this?
About as resilient as at ski resorts.
Ever heard of wind hold? 30 mph winds can cause it, and given how winds can develop in to wind tunnels between buildings, winds there are probably more variable than elsewhere. It's also considerably windier in Boston than in Mexico City.
And then you have to shut down the system to clean up the vomit.
There's Nothing That Can Possibly Go Wrong
Well, any change to the
Well, any change to the silver line tunnels would instantly rack up more costs than the gondola.
$100 million
would build a nice size garage that you could double your money in less than ten years.
Butbutbut...
Butbutbut...
They can't build the Seaport Gondola until they build the Seaport-Financial District pod monorail first! They promised!
Silly project that tax payers
Silly project that tax payers would have to end up coughing up money for. This is Boston, not Disney World. We need money for essential infrastructure, more homeless shelters, not amusement park rides for businessmen man-babies.