Boston

3 Days - 3,038 Photos from Robbie on Vimeo.

This is a fun video compiled from over 3,000 photos taken in a 3 day span in and around Boston. Nothing profound, but a very cool use of technology. Since this was taken with a digital SLR, the end result is effectively High Definition video, so click through to the Vimeo site for the full effect.

What might have been. After the Second World War, the country went on a highway-building binge, and Massachusetts was part of that craze. During that time, such major highways as Routes 128, 95, and 93, the Southeast Expressway and the Central Atery were all either expanded to major highway status or built from scratch. Yet the plans were even more ambitious than eventually realized, as transportation czars drew up plans for an extensive highway network that would have included an Inner Belt Expressway, that would have been part of I-95 and the never-built I-695.

In 1948, the Massachusetts Department of Public Works (MassDPW), led by commissioner William F. Callahan, proposed a controlled-access, multi-lane loop route to connect downtown Boston with other radial expressways. By serving crosstown traffic, the “Belt Route” was to relieve a large portion of the 15,000 through trips on Boston’s antiquated street network.

Forming a 7.3-mile-loop around the southern, western and northern edge of downtown Boston, the route of the Inner Belt Expressway was described in the Master Highway Plan for the Boston Metropolitan Area as follows:

The selected route begins at the interchange between the Southeast and Southwest expressways near Massachusetts Avenue and Southampton Street, and extends in a westerly direction via Roxbury Crossing to connect with Huntington Avenue, Jamaica Way and Brookline Avenue. From this point, it extends in a northerly direction to cross Beacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue paralleling the Cottage Farm (Boston University) Bridge across the Charles River to connect with the Western Expressway (early I-90 alignment). From this point, the Belt Route passes through Cambridge in a northeasterly direction to Somerville, making an interchange connecting with the Northwest Expressway (unbuilt US 3-MA 2) in the vicinity of Washington Street. From this interchange, it travels in an easterly direction paralleling the Boston and Maine Railroad, crossing its main yards to an elevated interchange just west of City Square, where it connects with the Northeast Expressway (US 1).

Interchanges were to be constructed at the following locations:

• Southeast Expressway (I-93) / Southwest Expressway (unbuilt I-95), Boston
• Washington Street, Boston
• Columbus Avenue, Boston
• Brookline Avenue, Boston
• Worcester Turnpike (MA 9), Brookline
• Beacon Street, Boston
• Commonwealth Avenue, Boston
• Soldiers Field Road, Boston
• Western Expressway (early I-90 alignment), Cambridge
• Massachusetts Avenue (MA 2A), Cambridge
• Northwest Expressway (unbuilt US 3-MA 2), Cambridge
• Northern Artery / Medford Boston, Somerville
• Northeast Expressway (US 1), Somerville

The Inner Belt Expressway was to continue south along the route of the elevated Central Artery, providing connections to downtown Boston and Logan Airport. Note that there was to be no direct connection to the Northern Expressway (I-93), due to its close location between the Northwest and Northeast expressways. (Engineers sought adequate spacing of access points to controlled-access routes.)

You can get a better idea of the unbuilt portions from this map:

The portions in red were never built or remained as smaller city and state roads and routes. The dotted lines represent major highways planned but never built. You can also see the ring road. Remnants of the unrealized portions of this grand plan still exist.

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This interchange at the intersection of I-95 and I-93/Rte 128 in Canton would have been just one waypoint on the way into the city until construction was halted. Now it’s half of a working clovercleaf, while the other half lies fallow, melting back into the forest from which it had been carved fifty years ago.

How would the city’s character have been different had all these roads been built? Would some neighborhoods thus cut off from the downtown have withered or thrived? How would the economy and the rise of the suburb been affected? Would more business have moved to the suburbs or would they have stayed in the city? Would we have been even more of a car culture, a la Southern California, or would the commuter train and subway system have remained? Interesting to speculate.

What’s also interesting speculation is whether the era of such major highways, at least in the densely packed Northeast, are forever part of history, with our major road projects only being envisioned to repair and rebuild what’s in place.

Boston Mayor Tom Menino has a column in the local newspaper Boston Post-Gazette. Last week he recalled that March 17 is not just St. Patrick’s Day, but also the Suffolk County holiday of Evacuation Day—Boston City workers get the day off, essentially— which recounts, well, let’s let the mayor tell you.

“On March 17, 1776 the British Army finally left ‘the colonies,’ by way of Boston Harbor after being beaten in the American Revolutionary War.”

I’m not sure what Washington was doing at Yorktown but apparently the British had been gone for years. I wonder if Washington had held up a big billboard after the Battle of Bunker Hill: “Mission Accomplished.” I guess the years between 1776 and 1783 only count as a “quagmire” for the American troops.

Way to set an example for all those kids in school, Mr. Mayor. Maybe they should administer MCAS to politicians before they can take office.

To update from yesterday, we ended up with nearly a foot of snow on the ground, but the worst part was what it did to the commute. Not everyone was a prescient as me — ahem, I left at noon — and by the time people were leaving work around 2, the snow was already sticking and creating a mess. It was the commute from hell for many people.

My poor sister was traveling from Norwood to Peabody—a journey that normally takes about an hour without traffic—with her 4 kids and husband and while they started at 1 pm they didn’t get home until after 6 and perhaps almost 7. Some folks at work who didn’t leave early were still stuck there as late as 8 pm.

On the other hand, I breezed right home even faster than usual and the snow only started sticking just as I got a few miles from home.

Anyway, this morning on my way in to work I noticed a few more characteristic foibles of New Englanders in the snow, mind-boggling behaviors that make you wonder what they’re thinking. For one thing, I saw people using snow blowers to blast snow out into the street as cars are driving by. For one thing, it obscures their vision. For another, it undoes the plowing, making the street slick and difficult to drive on.

Then there are the people who are too much in a hurry to take the snow off their cars. I have seen people literally dig out portholes in the front and back windows and driver’s and passenger’s windows, leaving everything else covered, including headlights, taillights, and directional signals. Not to mention the eight-inch-thick slab of snow on the roof that comes flying off in one great mass as soon as the rocket scientists hits highway speeds.

Driving in to work this morning, I saw cars entombed on the side of the road, cars abandoned in the middle of the street, folks walking on heavily traveled byways because the sidewalks were covered and more.

A few years ago, after an even bigger storm, my car got stuck in a snow bank because some coffee-junky parked his Subaru Outback on a narrow corner of a barely plowed street outside a Starbucks, forcing me to swing wide and into an unplowed abyss.

Wow, I don’t usually start getting this antsy about snow stupidity until sometime in February. I must be getting old. I should move to Texas.

That image is the new headquarters of WGBH, the public broadcasting powerhouse that originates in Boston. The building sits next to the Massachusetts Turnpike in Brighton, and in fact, juts out over the highway. Over the past few months they’ve been doing some work on the side of the building and just this week switched on a giant “digital mural,” which the rest of us would call a TV billboard. To be sure, this isn’t broadcasting TV shows, but it is showing moving images.

Does anyone else think this is a bad idea? I drive this route every day and yesterday was the first day it was switched on. There’s a straight stretch of highway headed eastbound just before it, about a half mile long. That thing is jumping and moving and is distraction from the road. How long before the first accidents caused by driver distraction? Didn’t anyone think about this?

I’m also worried about the trend. How long before regular billboards are replaced by jumping and moving video images designed to distract even more? Do-gooders are trying to ban cell-phone use while driving. Is that more distracting than a video billboard?

Whatever the intent, this is just more visual pollution and a road hazard.

P.S. Last week, while they were testing it, the mural was displaying a gigantic yards tall and wide Microsoft Windows error message. I wish I’d photographed it. I can’t wait for the first blue screen of death.

Photo by Jeff Goldberg/Boston Herald