A lot of ink has been spilled over the Reid Overpass proposal. For those who don’t read the news, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation aims to replace the crumbling brick structure that carries Memorial Drive traffic where the road intersects with the Boston University Bridge. The designs MassDOT presented range from unimaginative to dangerous, with acres of pavement, suburban quantities of car lanes and inadequate space for pedestrians and cyclists. Other writers have made more sober critiques of the proposals than I will: See this piece in The Independent, and alternate proposals by Ari Ofsevit from the TransitMatters board and professor Peter G. Furth.
The only means of input the public has is writing letters to the project team. Even entities such as the City of Cambridge and the Charles River Conservancy, which in theory should have been consulted as part of the design process, have been relegated to the inbox.
My assumption, based on understanding that public input does not factor into the outcomes of these projects (e.g., the bumbling approach to the plan to realign Interstate 90 in Allston), was that these letters go unread. Still, I was compelled to write MassDOT and was surprised when I got a response. I was even more surprised when I saw that the person who responded to me was upset. While I don’t want to spread negative energy, this was a new development. I shouted into what I thought was void, and here the void was, writing back to me.
This is from the end of the letter:
“One thing our team would like to underscore to you, given that several of our team members are veterans of projects similar to this one, is that while we have goals to which we design such as improving safety for all users, balancing mobility and livability, avoiding impacts to parkland, there was no directed outcome and is no directed outcome for the project. That is in part why options both with and without a bridge were shown on the 6th, because the community clearly wants to have a discussion. If there were a directed outcome, our presentation would have had one concept in it, not four, and we would not have taken the time to step through two concepts already dismissed by the project team as being the things you cite as problematic: too much pavement, too many lanes, too daunting to cross, etc.
“We have received a good number of comments since the 6th giving us specific comments about the comments shown at the meeting. If you have some specific suggestions, we would be happy to have them.”
First of all: Okay, diva! Put me in my place! I love a passive-aggressive email as much as anyone. Second, your team includes veterans of projects similar to this? So it has experience building meat grinders?
Traffic engineers live in a world of cognitive dissonance because they have two competing goals: First, many have generational guilt over what urban renewal did in the 20th century. They do not want to be seen as the same people who paved over our cities and destroyed neighborhood after neighborhood, steamrolling anyone in their way. So they must use lofty blue-state vagaries such as “environmental justice,” “green space” and “multimodal transportation,” and more importantly, they must never, ever be accused of not listening to the community.
The dissonance comes from when they pave over our cities anyway. Traffic engineers have scarcely been able to update their methods since the days of urban renewal. Industry leaders can claim that things have changed, but the purpose of a system is what it does, and MassDOT’s current purpose is to ensure that lots of cars travel quickly through our cities. Another writer could argue that its purpose is to convert pedestrians into corpses, but I won’t, as it seems unfair.
My letter managed to get MassDOT staff both ways: I said they don’t listen, and that they were “wreaking havoc” and “playing Sim City.” This is what upsets them: the dissonance, the grinding in their brains when they realize they are not urbane or creative, they are not designing something “sustainable” or even useful. They are playing a game of paint-by-numbers and failing at even that.
It’s interesting that this is the one area of civil and urban engineering where you and I have absolutely no say. As with the Allston highway project, Bowker Overpass, McGrath Highway and countless other hack jobs, safety, climate change and community wishes are secondary to increasing vehicle throughput at any cost. Compare this with other areas of society: For housing projects, anyone can galvanize a group of people large enough to stall it indefinitely, even if it results in the project never being built. We can give property owners a special form of rent control, because, well, they deserve it for being so great and keeping rents low! Even bus lanes can be stopped, with millions in federal funding forfeited, because someone has the mayor’s ear.
We do these things, even when economists say they are bad for society, because we, the people, are in charge. This is not a technocracy. Yet when it comes to MassDOT, we just aren’t smart enough to know what we want, and it needs to guide us in the right direction. Somehow, this small group of engineers has us by our throats.
The profession of traffic engineering is so incurious that it fascinates me. I can think of questions all day: If we built a road that did not help cars drive fast, would the city burst into flames? Do you ever consider that your model could be biased or incorrect? If you want to know if an overpass is necessary, why not pay a state trooper to close it for two weeks to see what happens? It’s always the same patronizing approach, explaining to the masses that we don’t understand the intricacies of traffic modeling. Do you think a traffic model invented bike lanes? No. People got on their bikes, rode them down the street and died, again and again, until bike lanes became a thing.
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