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Transit and Infrastructure All things T or civilly engineered within Boston Metro. |
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#1 | |
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Join Date: May 2006
Location: Approaching a City
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Commonwealth Avenue Improvement Project
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#2 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Boston
Posts: 2,189
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very nice.
speaking of comm ave. Has anyone seen a newly constructed house close to bc (not sure of the stop). It is right next to some row housing and it drives me insane with fury. SO out of place its not even funny. |
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#3 |
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 51
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Like this project a lot. Almost anytime when more green is added and public areas are made safer, I am up for the project. Looks like the area will be a major improvement once it is completed.
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#4 | |
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http://www.vanshnookenraggen.com | http://futurembta.com | http://hyperrealcartography.tumblr.com brivx: well, my philosophy is: as designers, we make a good theater, we dont direct the play |
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#5 |
Administrator
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I think its great that this stretch of Comm Ave has been acknowledged, urbanistically, as a very bad problem. However, I think this solution misses the mark.
It seems "greenify it" has become, much to my dismay, the automatic answer to any and every urban design decision Boston has faced in recent years. In this case it fails to address the real problem that plagues this particularly bad stretch of Comm. Ave. It is particularly bad because it is a streetscape designed with an utter disregard for the public realm. BU has transformed their piece of Comm Ave into nothing more than a strip of parking lots, open plazas and buildings that are badly scaled and ignore the street. Theyre installing a "vegetative buffer" to seperate the campus from the street when they should be doing the complete opposite -- attempting to establish some kind of relationship between their bleak, very inward-looking campus and the sidewalk. It wouldnt be hard to figure out. All they would have to do is look a few blocks west, or even at whats left of their old campus. Still, at least theyre doing something, and I'll give them credit for that. |
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#6 |
Senior Member
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But college campuses naturally are somewhat inward-looking, defining a boundary between themselves and the outside world. Look at Harvard -- they have a fence around the whole Yard, with just a few gates to the surrounding streets.
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#7 |
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Join Date: Jul 2006
Posts: 4,199
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I was hoping the left turn lanes would be removed, The sidewalk by the building is large enough
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#8 | |
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Join Date: May 2006
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#9 |
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The model I was thinking of was not so much Harvard as UCLA or Berkeley or Ohio State. The campus borders an urban commercial district, but still stands somewhat off from it, with a definite boundary of green.
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#10 |
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Join Date: May 2006
Location: Brookline
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If the city truly wanted to pony up and get a job done right they'd bury the B line all the way out and make a head house at packard's corner. There'd be less congestion above ground without the tracks and busses would work fine for the students.
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#11 |
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Join Date: May 2006
Posts: 536
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I think BU needs to step up to the plate and ask themselves what can we do to integrate Comm. Ave. into our campus. Merely hiding the campus, through the use of greenery, is not an end-all/be-all.
The real issues are the speed at which the traffic flows and the the pedestrians who cross the street whenever and where ever they please. |
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#12 |
Senior Member
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Northeastern University also has a busy street at its front door, with a streetcar median. Is it a model to follow, or one to avoid?
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#13 | |
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Join Date: May 2006
Location: Brookline
Posts: 723
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Comparing these two campus situations is apples and oranges. |
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#14 | |
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Join Date: May 2006
Location: Back Bay, Boston
Posts: 145
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...NU & BU can't be compared, since NU is mostly secluded from Huntington whereas BU is mostly lining Comm. Ditto for Berkely & UCLA. NYU seems a bad comparison too because the surrounding streets aren't so high-volume/high-speed. (Is that true? My memory's fuzzy on NYU.) The best comparison I can think of is the University of Pittsburgh, which has large portions on Forbes & Fifth Ave's, both of which are wide (~4 lanes) high-speed/high-volume roads (still not as much as Comm though). There's no trolley, but Fifth has a bus lane that runs opposite traffic. (Both roads are one-way and in opposite directions, much like Ave's in Manhattan.) Urban grit is just part of the campus there, and must be for BU as well. Not that they shouldn't plant trees, but they shouldn't try to be Harvard or NU either. They can't- not unless they buried Comm Ave in its entirety, or at least the car portion. Forbes Ave looking towards the Cathedral of Learning: ![]() ![]() |
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#15 |
banished
Join Date: May 2006
Posts: 315
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it's the grit that I like about bu. The fact that it doesn't seem like a campus, it seems like part of the city.
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#16 |
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Join Date: Jul 2006
Posts: 4,199
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Heres how the work is going
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#17 |
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Join Date: Jul 2006
Posts: 4,199
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September 22
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#18 |
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Join Date: May 2006
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No matter how much they do it always seems to look the same.
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#19 |
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Join Date: May 2006
Posts: 1,617
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pics
Here's a link to some pics:
http://www.bu.edu/cap/maps/index.html Too bad they didn't include bike lanes in this project. The trees along the trolley path will make drivers feel they are going fast and should help reduce the speeding in this area. |
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#20 | |
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Join Date: Jul 2006
Posts: 4,199
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Re: pics
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