I went to this last year, it was fascinating and filled me with hope that it is not only possible to build a great bike infrastructure but that there are smart people out there doing the planning for it.

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Friends of Northeastern University’s Transportation Engineering program:

You are invited to the final presentations of the Class of 2009 senior design projects in transportation engineering, to be held Wednesday April 22, 6:30 pm, in 108 Snell Engineering Center. The students will present designs for four outstanding bikeways:

- a cycle track (separated bike path) along Boylston Street from Fenway to the Public Garden, and all the way around the Public Garden

- a cycle track parallel to the Harbor Commercial Street in the North End to Kneeland Street in Chinatown

- a cycle track from Melnea Cass Blvd. to UMass, via Southampton, Preble, Old Colony, and Morrissey Blvd (right past the Globe)

- a greenway along Lee / Clyde Streets in Brookline for walking and bicycling

Each design demonstrates the feasibility of “road diets” that make it possible to make roadways narrower, providing the space needed for traffic-separated bike paths — exactly what Boston most needs to promote bicycling and bicycle safety.

Please see the attachedflyer.
(pdf)

Peter Furth and Dan Dulaski
Faculty advisers

You are cordially invited to the final presentations for the senior design projects (capstone projects) in transportation engineering, Tuesday April 22, 6:30 pm, in 108 Snell Engineering Center. The presentations, entitled “Boston Greenways: Eight Missing Links” are co-sponsored by the Emerald Necklace Conservancy, MassBike, WalkBoston, the Fenway Alliance, and the Solomon Fund, as well as the projects’ client, the City of Boston.

In case you missed it, the students’ work was featured in last Sunday’s Globe

The final presentation is open to the public, so please feel free to invite interested people. It will consist of a plenary session lasting about 1.5 hours in which the projects are all presented, and will be followed by a time for participants to view the designs in more detail and discuss them with students teams, who will be stationed around the lobby of the Snell Engineering Center.

PROJECT LIST
1. Charlesgate path: multiuse path along and under the Bowker overpass connecting the Back Bay Fens with both the Charles River bike path and the Mass Ave bridge.

2. Arborway: new traffic circulation scheme for Arborway between Jamaica Pond (Kelly Circle) and the Arboretum (Murray Circle), with the goal of concentrating through traffic in the inner roadway and restoring the park / path function of the medians between the inner and outer roadways, allowing the Emerald Necklace paths to extend from Jamaica Pond to the Arboretum.

3. Route 9 Crossing for Muddy River path: building on last year’s project, a more detailed design
of improvements to bring the Muddy River path across Route 9 and across Brookline Ave to Netherlands Road. Includes bridge alternatives, embankment modifications, and traffic circulation changes with associated traffic signal studies.

4. World Series path: multiuse path between Ruggles Station and Fenway, including a modified Huntington Ave crossing. This path has same function, but a different alignment, as the Linking the Corridors Path.

5. Bike lanes on Commonwealth Ave. from the Public Garden to Kenmore Square.

6. Bike lanes on Commonwealth Ave. from the BU Bridge to Warren Street via Packard’s Corner.

7. Bike lanes on Dartmouth Street (Back Bay)

8. Bike lanes on Summer Street / L Street from the Fort Point Channel to the L Street Beach in South Boston

This past Wednesday my rear tire went flat on the way to a LiveableStreets Alliance lecture. My innertube needed to be replaced (the presta valve tip broke off) but the lecture lightened my mood with some interesting information on how roads are engineered.

Backtracking for just a moment, I have had some brushes with LiveableStreets folks before at some other bike events. The group seems pretty solid despite their small size, dedicating themselves to presenting a fresh vision of street design engineered to meet human needs as much as motor vehicular ones. Basically, they’re working to change Boston.

The talk was entitled “Dirty Little Engineering Secrets Revealed,” and it was a powerpoint presentation given by former LiveableStreets Alliance co-founder and president Jeffrey Rosenblum. (Jeff now works for the City of Cambridge, helping their street planning.)

The talk spanned elements of psychology, engineering and design. The dirty secrets revealed were completely expected: there was a whole generation of engineering that devoted itself to the car and that is reflected in street design. This extends into the urban areas and the purpose of the street as a functioning place of commerce and burgeoning life has been replaced with one of traffic and single-minded transport.

When a street is designed there are studies done, stages of planning and review, lots of referencing to standards guides, and usually after all of that is there any public involvement. (Then, of course the street is constructed with whatever variance, no construction job ever goes 100% to plan.)

The studies are generally car-centric. Traffic numbers, connections, types of vehicles and their purposes, types of streets connected, etc. The result of a study is a report a few inches thick. How much of that for bikes? Nil.

The street gets planned following guidelines. The guidelines used were printed with some degree of flexibility which in practice is never used. When challenged why lane widths can’t be made more narrow to accommodate a bike lane they often reference the Green Book, but neglect the flexibility it allows for.

LiveableStreets works to draw attention to that flexibility factor. The current generation of engineers are still following the idea that streets need to be designed to achieve maximum throughput, with multi-lane highways often considered the pinnacle. In urban arenas this does not make sense. The next generation of engineers may have a more modern view but it will take a while for their designs to become commonplace. Political pressure and general public knowledge can help to advance this progress.

Bikes aren’t the only things that lose out to the current models of street design. Pedestrians and anyone with a permanent or temporary handicap are often considered only in the later design revisions. Engineers understand that at any one time a certain percentage of the population will have their mobility hindered and may require more time for crossing, ramps, adequate sidewalk conditions for wheels, and usually as short of a distance between entering and exiting the road as possible. That doesn’t mean design works all of this in all the time.

Highlighting the lapse in thinking with pedestrians in mind was a series of photos of the Longfellow Bridge. On one end there are no crosswalks to get someone walking from one area to the sidewalk that spans the bridge. The sidewalk itself is less than the normal width, and is peppered with obstructions. One argument states there aren’t enough pedestrians using the bridge to warrant improving the sidewalks. This is a backwards argument – if it was a better medium there would be more usage. Realistically the issue here is the same issue with any redevelopment: money.

Along with more flexible engineering there was also an example of a more radical approach which plays much more with social engineering aspects: naked streets (in large part due to late Hans Monderman. The idea here being that you should treat motorists like adults, they’ll know how to react with people walking all around them even with no signs regulating them to be courteous and yield. Intersections with no signs, which makes motorists behave differently. The result: rational decisions are made by all street users.

There was more in the talk and the discussion that followed. Time was up and I was left wanting more so I hope there will be other presentations in the future. The more we know about the limitations, the more we can maneuver within them.