This Sunday: Going Green on Route 16!

[ron_newman]

Route 16, from Broadway to Dilboy Field, will be closed to car traffic this Sunday from noon to 4 pm for the SomerStreets 'Going Green On Route 16' festival. Bring your bicycles, your roller skates, your skateboards, your Razor scooters, or just your shoes to enjoy a traffic-free afternoon on the parkway next to Alewife Brook.

The event will include live music, recreation programming, environmental exhibitions, sports demonstrations, face painting, a recycled sculpture contest, free swimming at Dilboy Pool, and more.

(Wouldn't it be nice to do this every Sunday, like Cambridge does on Memorial Drive during the summer and fall?)

Comments

[turil.livejournal.com]

It's pretty much the same as when Memorial Drive closes to motorized traffic every Sunday in the summer. Motorized traffic manages to find a way around things there, so presumably people will figure something out in Somerville, too. But yes, it is going to make driving a car less convenient for a brief period of time.

[boblothrope.livejournal.com]

The immediate road network can't handle the amount of traffic that uses 16. Mem Drive has Soldiers Field Road and Mass Ave as alternate routes.

A big part of the problem is the incompetent way the authorities handle these closures.

Will there be signs on Route 16 at major intersections before the closure, sending you down alternate routes? Or will everyone just happily proceed down 16 until they get stuck in the jam and it's too late to avoid it?

With the Mem Drive closures, even with several decades to figure this out, they don't post any signs on River Street telling people not to turn left onto Mem Drive west. So people who don't happen to know about the closure are forced back across the river at Western Ave, along with everyone else stuck in the jam.

And they don't reprogram the light at JFK and Mem Drive, so it wastes a lot of time giving left arrows for turns you can't make.

(Yes, I've written to the DCR about this, but haven't gotten a response.)