To make things even more fun, Winchester Street and Cedar Street are closed to all but abutters, enforced with bollards, thereby shutting off my usual route for my weekly journey across Somerville to my therapist. It appears that pretty much every small road between Ball Square and Davis Square is similarly blocked.
No doubt by request of the people who live on those streets, who don't want through-drivers using them as detours. Score one for people reaping the benefit of the GLX while not paying any of the pain of its construction. Nice work if you can get it.
Those streets are the designated pedestrian and bike detour; that separation makes sense if all the traffic from Broadway is being diverted onto smaller streets.
I suspect it is more the *landlords* who will be benefiting without the pain. The people who are actually living there still have many of their usual routes blocked by the construction.
I suspect, but can't really prove, that much of the dollar value that the GLX will add to real estate in the area is already "baked in" (i.e. reflected in current property prices). Real estate agents have been hyping the "Coming real soon now!" GLX to prospective buyers since it was on the drawing boards.
« “Once we build the railway, the value of land rises and we capture the increase in value,” says Jacob Kam, managing director and soon-to-be chief executive, of Hong Kong’s Mass Transit Railway (MTR) Corporation.
This “rail plus property” model allows Hong Kong’s public transport company to be self-financing – unlike most of its counterparts around the world, many of which are loss-making and need to be subsidised by government. »
I don't know enough about this topic to have any idea how applicable it is to Massachusetts, but it did turn on a light bulb for me: The MBTA is creating real estate value using public funds (right?), and wealthy, private speculators are taking it for their own profit.
Here's the dirty little secret: Somerville is not actually enforcing those "closed to through traffic" signs; they're there to discourage people from driving through residential neighborhoods instead of taking the official detour routes.
On the other hand, I'm told that Medford PD is actually enforcing the residents-only restriction on Winchester St.
Yeah, Winchester is maddening. I've been taking that home for a decade now, and suddenly my usual route is cut off, making life much harder. (But Cedar is *not* closed, making it dreadful for us locals...)
Avoid Cedar St at all costs -- completely irrelevant and incompetent traffic "direction" at Cedar and Morrison from Somerville's finest, thereby creating monster backups on both streets for no apparent reason. If you're going to install human traffic control systems, at least make them marginally competent at their jobs...
ymmv, as always, but that's 15 minutes of my life i'll never get back, and a valuable lesson learned (stay the f*ck away from Cedar, Morrison, and other affected streets for the duration).
On the one hand, I mostly agree. OTOH, I live on Murdock (off of Cedar, with no other exit), so I have no bloody choice. It's a horrifying mess at rush hour, costing me an extra 15 minutes any time I need to travel between 4:30 and 7pm...
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Date: 2019-03-30 01:29 am (UTC)Here's an interesting piece related to all this: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/mar/19/how-public-transport-actually-turns-a-profit-in-hong-kong
« “Once we build the railway, the value of land rises and we capture the increase in value,” says Jacob Kam, managing director and soon-to-be chief executive, of Hong Kong’s Mass Transit Railway (MTR) Corporation.
This “rail plus property” model allows Hong Kong’s public transport company to be self-financing – unlike most of its counterparts around the world, many of which are loss-making and need to be subsidised by government. »
I don't know enough about this topic to have any idea how applicable it is to Massachusetts, but it did turn on a light bulb for me: The MBTA is creating real estate value using public funds (right?), and wealthy, private speculators are taking it for their own profit.
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Date: 2019-03-30 04:30 am (UTC)On the other hand, I'm told that Medford PD is actually enforcing the residents-only restriction on Winchester St.
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