FW: Market St/Brighton Ave Lanes

[Holm, Angela]

Please see responses from Nicole Freedman regarding your bike lane questions below.

 

Best,

Angela

 

Angela L. Holm, Esq.

Neighborhood Coordinator, Allston-Brighton

Mayor's Office of Neighborhood Services

Room 708, City Hall

One City Hall Square

Boston, MA 02201

T:  617-635-3485

F:  617-635-3498

TWITTER:  @ALHAllBri

 

 

Hi Angela,

 

Please see responses that you can forward to the constituents.

 

“Why do the bike lanes end at Commonwealth Ave and not extend across Beacon St to Clinton Rd. boundary with Brookline.  Is Boston cooperating with Brookline bike initiative?  No reason why not!!!  Unless BDG is making a fuss.”   Thanks for the email.   That is a great question.  Bike lanes do get installed on a city by city basis.  With that said, we have worked before with Brookline and neighboring cities.  I will reach out to them now and let them know this lane is coming in case they are in a position now or in the future to continue the lane.  Thank you.

 

“Whats the plan for safe access to the bike trails on the Charles from Leo Birmingham Pwy? Currently I merge with the 4 lanes of traffic to get into the middle lane which puts me on the right hand side of the two lanes that go left. Not a very safe feeling.”   Thank you for the email.  The area you mention is certainly a challenging intersection. We are looking at it as part of our bike network plan and will make recommendations to the State.  This project is straightforward striping ie paint only project with a short time line.  I suspect that fixing that intersection is more of a reconstruction project.

 

Which led to this question : ” Or from Market Street? That intersection is terrible for bicycles.”  The bike lanes along Market Street and Chestnut Hill will definitely help with safety issues.  The bike lanes are known to reduce cyclist crashes.

 

 

Nicole Freedman

Director, Boston Bikes

One City Hall Square, Rm 932

Boston, MA 02201

Nicole.Fr...@cityofboston.gov

(617) 918-4456 (work)

(617) 504-2879(cell)

 

 

[fr...@amacher-associates.net]

Hi,

I am all in favor of these bike lanes.

As a trustee of The People for Riverbend Park Trust in Cambridge (the park is the area on and around Memorial Drive that gets closed to cars on Sundays), I have the following thoughts and proposal:

It is wonderful that Cambridge and Boston are some of the first US cities to provide bike sharing stations throughout the two cities. Together with the many bicycle paths or lanes throughout Cambridge our city has made a big step forward in helping people to leave their cars at home and enjoy our city up close and in person.

We would like to offer a slightly modified idea for enhancing the bike commuting experience without at the same time making it hard for pedestrians to feel safe from being hit by fast moving commuter bikes. there are also pedestrian who commute and/or enjoy our river front. Our approach is to use one of the Memorial Drive car lanes for bikes. The three car lanes would shift to the center of the street allowing bike paths along both sides in both directions. Having three rather than four lanes of traffic should not substantially affect the car traffic if the center lane is always assigned to the traffic approaching an intersection . This would make it easy for cars to turn without impeding traffic. After crossing an intersection, cars would have to go unto a single lane.

This should be possible without affecting the density of cars, but would help safety and reduce air pollution by slowing cars down.

Also people would not start switching from cars to bikes.

Bicyclists could go as fast as cars in our proposal and  would not affect the people walking along the rivers edge.

This proposal would separate bikes from pedestrians to both's advantage and would also entice people out of their cars. It would not be a very expensive transformation.

We can think about traffic in the old way, which was the way we got more highway lanes per capita in Boston than even Los Angeles. It is well known that if you build streets, they will fill up with cars.

That inhumane approach has been disastrous to many parts of cities. It has made many parts of cities dangerous and polluted, not a place to be in for peoples enjoyment. We have a chance to show that a different approach will work over time. This particularly applies to Riverbend Park. It goes from Eliot Bridge to Western Avenue.Many more people can travel in the same space by bicycle than by car. If we continue kowtowing to the car/highway lobby, there is no end in sight. There will have to be widened highways and our linear parks will not survive with increased population. Yet Cambridge's citizen desperately need this green space along the river for sustainable living, since there are not many parks in our city.

In a recent issue last fall of the AIA magazine "Architect" they talk about spontaneous Intervention and how people have, in a stealth way, drawn bike lanes on a street and transformed a neighborhood. The bike lanes were kept afterwards, because the people and the agencies saw that they work. This meant a more immediate transformation, not the lengthy process that you have to go through with the smallest changes.

Please let me know what you think.

Franziska Amacher AIA LEED AP

 

AMACHER & ASSOCIATES, Architects

237 Mount Auburn Street

Cambridge, MA 02138

617 354 8707

 

www.amacher-associates.net

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