Beacon Street Cycletrack Design: From Bad to Worse. Way Worse.

[samcoren.livejournal.com]

I'd like to preface this post by saying that there's a Bike Committee Meeting Tuesday 11/18 7pm in the city hall basement lounge. These meetings are open to the public and if you're more interested in what's going on with this cycletrack business or haven't been to one yet before and you bike a lot around town you should go. Why? Because maybe if there were more people involved and aware of such projects it wouldn't have come to this....

Background: There's been a ton of hubbub about the Beacon Street Reconstruction project. Everyone agrees the street needs some major rehab, after all, it sucks equally for pedestrians, cyclists, and motorists. But people are in an uproar over removing parking from Oxford to Washington on the even-side of the street for the installation of cycletracks. Some cyclists have also voiced disagreement with the proposed design (not wanting it unless it could extend the whole length of the street, pedestrians using it as sidewalk extension, having to go up and down for every intersection/driveway, etc). Over 700 residents, business patrons, and business owners signed a petition against the parking elimination that was based on the flawed parking study, which was presented to the Transportation Director and the Mayor's office.

After the 11/13 public meeting about the track, the Board of Alderman passed a resolution requesting the office of strategic planning and development to consider alternatives, recognizing the potential consequences of such a large parking elimination on both businesses and residents on the street.  It seems like there's a lot of rushing from the Transportation Department to move forward with presenting design changes on the cycletrack to MassDOT with little regard for actually getting changes vetted by the bike committee or the actual property and business owners of the street...

So what has changed between the design presented in October and November and this latest version and why is this "worse" for cyclists and the neighborhood in general than previous iterations? I'll walk you through it since it's a large doc. Unfortunately, you won't find this doc on the city's website yet, and I've been told that some of the Bike Committee hasn't even had a chance to see it. So in the interest of keeping everyone updated in a timely fashion, here you go....

View the full PDF here:   http://www.scribd.com/doc/117151104/Design-Exception-Report-Reduced-File-Size-2

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