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Sal LaMattina doesn't just get hit by Segways
By adamg on Sat, 04/24/2010 - 10:37am
In an article about the mess that is Cross Street (that plaza between the Greenway and the North End at Hanover that can't decide if it's a road or an outdoor seating area), the Globe reports the city councilor has been hit by a car twice there.
Meanwhile, Matt Conti says he was misquoted in the article and explains the issues along Cross Street and what he'd do about them.
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Comments
that block is just pathetic,
that block is just pathetic, and true insight into the misdirected priorities and outmoded thinking that still predominates in this city. Measuring on google earth, of the mammoth space between the face of the businesses and the park across the street, 65'--6 lanes!!!-- is given over to car traffic or parking, meanwhile pedestrians get a measly 6'- 9' space to share with cafe tables on one side of the bollards, and 8' on the other.
How Menino can say things like "The car is no longer King in Boston" or "Boston is America's Walking City" with a straight face is beyond me. Contrast this to what Bloomberg is doing in NYC, taking out whole blocks of vehicular traffic in the city's most iconic and commercial squares. Meanwhile up here in Boulevard City pedestrians still have to press those big metal buttons from the 1960s and 70s to be able to be cycled into the traffic light. Next time you are in Chicago, NYC, or even Cambridge, try finding one of those.
Most of the big metal buttons I've encountered
in Boston are faux. At many intersections (Boylston at Tremont and Boylston at Washington for example), the signals have an automatic pedestrian phase that will come on regardless of whether the button is activated or not, and the button does NOT override the normal cycling of the signal. A long since retired MassDPW engineer once told me that having the buttons with automatic ped phases gave people reassurance.
BTW, I don't personally agree with the logic behind that idea - either you have the "all the time" phaisng OR the buttons, but not both, as NYC and Chicago seem to have figured out years ago.