The current Casey Bridge over Forest Hills in Jamaica Plain is falling down and is scheduled for demolition. The Department of Transportation (DOT) wants to replace it with a ground level highway nightmare. Forest Hills is a transportation hub for Mattapan, Hyde Park and some of Dorchester. Those people were consulted only at a few, barely publicized meetings. Jamaica Plain has been extensively consulted and is split on the issue of a new bridge, which would be much more expensive.
DOT is following the old model of “Sock it to the black guy”, pioneered by the planners of the Inner Belt.
I have just recently joined the campaign to reverse this decision and build a bridge. We hold signs on the bridge, where traffic is very slow due to the bumpy road. In my 48 years of political activism, I have never seen such a positive response. It would be harder to give away ice cream on a hot day, than to give these frustrated commuters a leaflet.
I am reaching out to Blue Mass to find help, connections and Ideas on how to reverse this dreadful and dreadfully unfair decision. If Deval Patrick understood how much that bridge is hated and how unfair the proposed plan is, he would be terrified. DOT is cutting the legs off his base of support.
Jeff Ferris has been the point man on this campaign. Here are some links.
This is just a brief intro, lots more info to follow.
Please help.
would be a disaster. There’s enough traffic below the bridge as it is. Once again we have a case of this Commonwealth not wanting to pay for things it needs because, if we ever get sufficient revenue to make our roads and MBTA better, someone in Billerica or Mansfield might vote for a Republican next time instead of a nominal Democrat who spends 80% of the time acting like a Republican.
Deval Patrick, though, doesn’t have to worry about support. He’s not running again.
…that places like Billerica or Mansfield would object to funding infrastructure? Both are served by the MBTA and everyone is served by roads.
If you had ever worked on a campaign that encompasses the 4th Middlesex Senate district, you’d understand the Billerica reference. Arlington and Lexington tend to offset the more conservative electorate of the rest of the district.
that our 80% Democratic legislature can’t possibly raise enough revenue to fix our problems, because some “Democrats” represent districts where the voters would go bonkers. Those towns and others like them, where Scott Brown got over 60% twice and Deval Patrick lost by 20+ points in 2010, are exactly the places where said voters would go bonkers.
Still doesn’t make it logical to vote against their interests, at least if anyone is willing to take the lead and explain why such things are in their interest.
Anyone who viciously insults the interests of the voters in Mattapan, Dorchester and Hyde Park will find it much harder to get their votes in the future.
Sorry, Peggy, but you’ll need to come up with other reasons other than racial bias as to why the at grade option was decided upon. Of course the decision to build an at grade vs. another bridge involved mostly JP residents–we’re the ones who have to live in the neighborhood during the construction and with the eventual end product, not just when we’re commuting. The whole premise that there was racial bias involved in the decision is incomprehensible. Clearly some opponents of the at-grade option will stop at nothing to try to alter the decision that’s already been made. We’re all grown-ups here, just because you didn’t get your way doesn’t mean that things won’t still turn out alright.
Being white myself, I cannot claim to understand the nuances of racial bias. It has just been my observation that articulate and relatively well-off people tend to demand and obtain better municipal services. Over the more than 35 years that I have lived in JP, as it became richer and whiter, the electrical power is now reliable, the ground based telephones stopped having interference, roads are regularly resurfaced and The Arboretum is no longer a unmaintained wilderness. Community pressure pushed those providers.
Alternatively, the overwhelming pro-bridge feelings of it’s commuters have not been channeled into effective action. No one from DOT tried hard to get their opinions registered. Meetings were held, but the outreach was ineffective. Anyone willing to read Jeff Ferris’ PDF tomes will see the DOT wanted to avoid a bridge and shaded it’s analysis that way
Construction will be a bear no matter what. I do agree that “some opponents of the at-grade option will stop at nothing to try to alter the decision that’s already been made.” It’s not over till it’s over.
As I see it, the bridge is not so important to JP residents, because we don’t need to travel on it. We are already here.
Yes, services and roads have gotten better in JP over the last 30+ years, just as they have everywhere else in the City. I don’t see that as having any obvious connection with the increasing percentage of more affluent people in JP. I also don’t remember the Arboretum ever being an “unmaintained wilderness” in the last 30 years. Perhaps you are just talking about the marshy section on the south side of South Street near Forest Hills? I was unaware that the limited development of that portion was attributable to lobbying by affluent white people.
And its not like the immediate neighborhood around the bridge would be described as the rich or particularly white section of JP.
….and I certainly can’t blame Peggy for not reading Jeff Ferriss’s 28-page (!) PDF, but if she had, she’d see the community representatives from Mattapan who attended 4 to 6 community meetings each.
It’s also disingenuous to pretend this debate is about public transportation. Buses now have to wend their way through a complicated mess of an intersection that is nearly impassible at rush hour and has been for years. Funny how these activists have been silent on this issue for years even as the busiest bus route in the city has been consistently messed up by this intersection.
A bridge suits the needs of out-of-town car commuters very well and does not serve the neighborhood at all. This sad attempt to paint this as a racial issue appears to signal that the pro-bridge crowd is out of real arguments.
with the 203 traffic heading above the rest, how do you imagine it will be better when it’s all on the ground? I think it would be an even worse disaster for buses and cars alike.
can move from his bridge in Waltham to this bridge and using the endless supply of billy-goats he will inevitably capture, the bridge will fix itself soon enough. Much like global warming has simply “fixing itself” under his watchful troll eyes, so everything will be rainbows and unicorns.
People always seem to forget this. If it’s less convenient to go this way, perhaps folks from Milton and Canton will–gasp–find another way to get to work!
My point is that it really can’t get much worse at rush hour. The new design seems to improve the traffic flow by eliminating left turns at Washington, Hyde Park, and South Streets. Probably it won’t be as good as the state says. Probably it won’t be the disaster that bridge proponents say.
about too many people from Milton or Canton taking the overpass. If they work over by Faulkner or in south Brookline there are easier ways to go. Every time I’ve ever taken it was to go to/from Mattapan and Dorchester. Exactly what alternative route should people take? The one-lane Walk Hill St. that’s already slow, that doesn’t go through to Centre Street or the J-Way, so you’d have to take 203 anyway?
but I guess I just feel like the convenience of drivers going through the neighborhood shouldn’t be the overriding concern in this planning process.
Sorry, I’m just checking back in.
As fenway 49 writes, Rt 203 and Blue Hill Ave pull people from ‘inside’ the city, Mattapan, Dorchester and also Hyde Park, through Forest Hills. People are probably working in the Medical Area, judging from traffic on the Arborway.
Public transportation, i.e. bus to Forest Hills, then a transfer, so as to get to ones real destination, is not an easy way to travel, compared to my short walk and a jump on the Orange Line. Even the #39 is endurable, if it is the only bus ride. Two slow, traffic choked, back-to-back trips would be quite a pain.
Having stood on the Casey Bridge with a sign, at rush hour, to my eye the commuters don’t appear to be wealthy suburbanites. Many of the cars are not new and quite a few carry more than one person or are local tradesmen.
Jamaicaplainiac disregards “the convenience of drivers going through the neighborhood”, but that is the problem of living in a city. JP gets the Arboretum and the Pond, those folks deserve a bridge.
Actually, the problem of living in a city is that the needs of car commuters don’t necessarily take precedence as they do in the suburbs. It’s not clear to me that anyone “deserves” a flyover on their way to work. But if they do deserve it, why stop there? Let’s widen the whole Arborway, build some overpasses, take out all the lights and make it into a real highway. Surely this will make the lives of car commuters even easier.
We live in Roslindale, and my wife takes that route to get to Quincy once a week. The combination of the Arboretum, Franklin Park, Forest Hills Cemetery, and several train lines makes it difficult to get to 203 except by that route. It seems likely that you have not spent much time thinking about this.
Having said that, it is not obvious to me that a multi-lane surface road solution would necessarily be inferior to rebuilding the existing configuration. The current configuration clearly has a lot of problems that could potentially be relieved by a new configuration. The devil is in the details.
Images of under bridge parks, see links compiled by Jeff Ferris
http://www.rebuildcasey.com/home/iconic-under-bridge-spaces
Judging by the boarders at the South St tennis courts, this skatepark would be a popular amenity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Burnside_Skatepark_Portland,_Oregon.JPG
Except for people who live in the immediate vicinity of the intersection, the issue for most people is going to be traffic flow for their favored mode of transportation (cat, bike, bus). But most of the arguments against seem to be focused on perceived unfairness in the decision process and the aesthetics of potential designs. I doubt that the unfairness argument will be all that effective at garnering support; you could probably make a reasonable argument that every public project in the City suffers from various types of bias during the review process. People don’t necessarily care about “fairness” as long as they get what they want.
If you want to win this argument, you need to convince people that the surface design will lead to more traffic problems than the bridge approach. I just don’t see that in this presentation. After all the inevitable solution to an unfair process will be more hearings and more delay. I suppose that is OK as long as the bridge can still be used in its current state, but would be bad if the bridge had to be shut down without a plan in place for replacing it.