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Ban Newton motorists?
By adamg on Wed, 11/28/2007 - 1:38pm
Brookline selectmen vote to pursue plan to wall off Heath Street in the face of plans for another mall/condo project on Rte. 9 in Newton. No word if Newton Mayor David Cohen plans to stand in front of wall and exclaim "Mr. Selectmen Chairman: Tear down this wall!" In any event, Brookline can't become the Hermit Kingdom of the West and wall itself off from the outside world just yet - its plan needs state approval.
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Comments
Hmmmm....mixed feelings about this:
On the one hand, it can be fun to have barbecues, dancing parties or whatever on the rooftops, but yet I think that the idea of playing full-scale soccer or other ball games or having really wild, drunken parties on rooftops is a recipe for disaster, imho.
First of all, the average apartment building rooftop is probably way too fragile for soccer-playing, and, without something such as a wall or sturdy iron railing on the rooftop to prevent these kind of horrific falls from happening while students are partying, dangers can and do abound.
Maybe what the city should do is to consider having iron railings or half-sized walls built on the rooftops of apartment buiildings to prevent disasters from happening.
Wrong topic, maybe?
Wasn't this about blocking Heath Street?
Whooooooaaaaa!!!
My above reply was to the thread about the question of banning rooftop parties in Boston.
How the hell did it get in here??
Maybe not
I can understand how Brookline might not want to have Newton residents wantonly playing soccer or firing up barbecues in the middle of Heath Street.
Walling Off?
I don't think this is an attempt to wall off Brookline so much as to protect the people who live around Heath Street, their children, and their houses, from people who drive too fast on an inappropriate road. I sympathize, because my street is a cut-through full of speeding jerks too.
It's also probably got little to do with Newton motorists, and probably more with Rossie, JP, and West Rox motorists. I'll even admit to being part of the problem. Sometimes when I'm coming in Rt. 9 towards Rossie, I'll turn on Florence (which becomes Heath) to cut the corner. It's kind of a debate about which road is worse. And it's entirely true that if the Omni area were again something that had traffic, there would be that many more people turning off on Florence instead of going past the Omni to the Hammond Pond.
It seems like, for now, their strategy is not to repair the road, ever, until the potholes become worse than speed bumps. It's working on me. The single best thing that could be done to reduce traffic on Florence/Heath is to repair Rt. 9. It's too bad they can't make a full-fledged service road for Rt. 9, to separate mall traffic from through traffic.
They could
Like they basically did out in Natick and Framingham with Flutie Pass (my date with destiny: I covered that road's opening - Doug cut the ribbon at the Natick end and yelled to his wife, "Laurie, you can go shopping now!") and all those turn lanes.
Of course, that would require trying to convince landowners to give up land for the road. And working with, oh, the neighboring community (and for what it's worth, it took ten frickin' years to get Flutie Pass built, in part because Natick and Framingham kept bickering over who would be in charge of construction). Far easier to just build a wall.
Westwood is trying to do the same thing
Westwood is trying to do the same thing to Canton st at Rt 128. They want to block access at the highway interchange so that people can't cut through when the new development goes in near the Westwood railroad station - one of those high-end "lifestyle" shopping malls. They want the money from the development, but they dont' want the traffic on their streets.