Residents caught for decades in a Cambridgeport traffic “vortex” were offered hope of escaping Thursday – though not necessarily with their simple solution, and not necessarily soon.
The simple solution: Reverse the direction of one-way traffic on Glenwood Avenue.
During a meeting held by state planners about a coming redesign of the nearly 90-year-old Reid Overpass and its rotary, neighbors pleaded to see work expanded to the streets feeding cars into the area, where they said traffic seems to be increasingly backing up.
“Zoom out a little bit,” a resident said. She urged a look at how once a car enters the area below Chestnut Street and between Magazine and Brookline streets, city-imposed traffic patterns make it impossible to avoid the rotary. “It would be helpful to rethink some of those one-way streets so you could get out of this trap and get back onto Magazine Street or someplace, because it’s like a vortex.”
In addition to pressing the case with the state, resident Robin Brenner showed up with clipboards and a printed petition to gather names from among the meeting audience at the Morse School.
“We’ve had only one way out of our neighborhood since the ’70s. What happens is we are always ending up at the [rotary]. It’s unsafe, and it’s annoying,” Brenner said.
The problem is clear: Tufts, Henry and Granite streets and Glenwood Avenue are all one-ways that either feed cars straight to the rotary or to Pearl Street, a one-way that also forces cars to Granite Street – and from there to the rotary. Neighbors want a way to get back to Magazine Street, which they could take either north toward Central Square or south toward Memorial Drive, and from there could go either east or west while avoiding the rotary. Tufts and Granite would go on leading drivers to the east; Glenwood would be the escape to the west.
As neighbor Denise Sullivan explained – shaking, she said, because she felt so passionately about it – the “vortex” was created when two-way streets were changed decades ago at the behest of families with children in an increasingly dense neighborhood. “They needed to make it safer because there were a lot of children here, and back in those days, we all played in the streets,” Taylor said.
The efforts were led by one family at Pearl and Glenwood, now long gone, who rallied neighbors to set out lawn chairs in the street to make it impossible for cars to turn, Taylor said. The protest became policy.
The problems this causes have been brought to the city but “ignored,” Brenner said, which inspired her to try to get neighbors organized. “I posted on a listserv and a lot of people came out of the woodwork and said, ‘Yeah, we’ve got to do it, finally.’”
The state staffers said their powers were limited, but they were checking in with the city on the rotary work; transportation planner Erin Fredette offered assurance that studies were taking into account “all the surrounding intersections so we’ll have a better sense of how this fits into the overall network and how we can best manage that traffic,” and designs had signalization in mind to work on problems extending far up into Cambridgeport.
“We do recognize that is a pain point,” Fredette said, focusing on the where Waverly and Granite streets intersect east-west with the north-south Brookline Street.
Cambridge senior transportation manager Bill Deignan spoke briefly Thursday to assure Brenner and her neighbors that “we’ve heard loud and clear” about the vortex problem through a Cambridgeport group online and other emails.
“The city will start a process at some point, I can’t tell you exactly when, to talk to the neighbors about street direction changes off Magazine, Granite, Pearl, those streets. I don’t know what form that will take. It’s going to be probably some larger forms as well as particular streets,” Deignan said, with a warning that city planners often find it hard to reach a broad consensus for change: “Certain people on certain streets like things the way they are.”
Brenner didn’t mind getting attention for the vortex before she had a chance to file her petition.
“Hey, listen, as long as it works,” Brenner said.
