Gateways between urban and greenspace

I took a bike ride around the Middlesex Fells Reservation, which is a large green space with a sizable pond and beautiful 8 lane interstate running through it. It has nice walking and mountain biking paths, and also hosts a zoo, ice rink, nature center, etc. Parts of the space are quite lovely, with only the low roil of traffic in the distance to disturb the serenity. Unfortunately the gateways to this reservation of land is on hidden neighborhood streets and via busy roads that are unfriendly to bikes and pedestrians (Such as Woodland Rd. and S. Border Rd.) The type of gateway that is lacking is one that connects a business district or densely populated neighborhood. I can make a safe assumption that few people that live in Medford, Cambridge, and Somerville, which are all dense urban areas to the south, have ever visited this reservation by foot or car. Bus service is also poor, which I can attest to from direct experience trying to reach the park from just a couple miles south.

It's perfectly understanding why protected open spaces do not lie in close proximity to urban centers. The whole purpose of a preserved open space is to protect an area that was far enough from urban areas to have been left alone, or had an important water source or geographic feature to discourage development. But the fact that this open space is so close to dense urban areas suggests that there ought to be some inviting gateways from the urban space to the green space, so that all the people who live densely will actually be encouraged to access it without a car.

Davis Square in Somerville is densely populated and serves as a popular destination due to a Red Line subway station, it's proximity to Tufts University, and the fact that it is two subway stops from Harvard but much less commercialized in feel (which all the cool kids appreciate.) The A on the map is Davis Square, and B is the closest point to the reservation, a whopping 2 1/2 miles away. But for the walker or biker, there is no friendly way of transport, but for snaking one's way through a maze of residential streets, and then still must they content with crossing three numbered highways (the thick yellow ones, that represent some degree of misery to traverse comfortably.) You could argue that there isn't any real reason why Davis Square should be comfortably connected to the closest significant green space in the region. After all, why would people that live in an urban environment without a car desire access to peace and tranquility? You might instead agree that access is appropriate, but why not just rely on public transit. After all, that town of Winchester looks pretty sizable, isn't there a convenient bus to get there? In fact it is possible to reach the B marker on buses, one just needs to allow 30 minutes and one transfer to get there, not to mention up to 30 minutes wait for the first bus to come. Now, I'm not saying I've never taken two buses for thirty minutes to arrive at a destination 2 1/2 miles away, but it certainly isn't on my list of favorite things to do. And, just in case you were wondering, this is probably the easiest part of the park to get to. If you want to go the popular Spy Pond (with zoo, ice rink, etc) try going to Boston first. It takes over an hour, two subways, and a bus, to arrive at Spy Pond from Davis Square (distance: 4.8 miles).

I'm also well aware that transit service is based on demand, at least in theory. In reality good transit service creates demand--if you see that a subway goes to a nice large park you're more likely to want to visit that park. When I lived briefly in Montreal, I would look at the subway map on the weekends to find out which green spaces I could access from a subway station. A lot of people use metro maps as a destination guide. But fewer people look at a map and then decide to take two buses to get to a green space that's 2 1/2 miles away.

We need to start thinking about our population centers with good transit, like Davis Square, and figure out how to create inviting gateways to the nice places that people should be able to visit easily. In the case of Davis Square to Middlesex Fells Reservation, there are some fairly obvious routes that would serve large populations and connect several urban centers with the reservation. To the left are the existing passenger rail and bike routes relevant to connecting Davis Square to the reservation (the Green Line is due to arrive in 2014, and I may be missing a couple of dedicated bike/pedestrian paths, but probably not important ones.) Notice that there is actually a lot of passenger rail service in the vicinity. The purple lines are commuter rail service, so only run about once every hour or two.

There are a couple key connections obviously missing to make it easy to go from Davis Square to the reservation. The first is an east-west rail connection between Davis Square, the Green Line extension and the Orange Line. Such a service could probably be effectively done by a streetcar with dedicated right of way that arrives at frequent intervals, say every 5 to 10 minutes. The other problem is that the 93 highway represents the ideas route to the reservation, since it splits it in half. If only there was some justification for putting a rail route along the 93 highway. If only there were ten of thousands of people that needed to travel that corridor to get to Boston in an efficient and reliable way. The solutions are to create an urban ring line that connection the various rail lines that extend from Boston (located 5 miles south) and to use the center lanes of the interstates for passenger rail service. Both of these solutions add massive numbers of riders to passenger rail system, and happen to connect places like Middlesex Fells Reservation and Davis Square with easy reliable connections.

I don't want to suggest that rail is the solution to all of our gateway problems. It would be just as well to connect Davis Square to the green spaces that surround it with more bike/pedestrian paths. But to do so we can't rely on abandoned railroads. We need start identifying residential streets and arterial roads that can be converted to non car use. There is enough redundancy in most road systems that this should be desirable. Even should a residential road be split in half, with one side dedicated to walking and pedestrians and the other for local car access, we could accomplish a lot. The walking/biking path could be separated by small trees or a nice fence or wall. Cars wishing to access the driveway on the path side of the street would be infrequent, and the right to park a car in those driveways could be purchased and removed by the city. Eventually all driveways on the path side of the street could be eliminated, creating a car-free corridor where all houses still have road access for deliveries and emergencies.

This rendering is incomplete, but one can image that cars would be limited to a 15' wide road, and the remaining 15' could be given to bicycles pedestrians and a protective green strip. Only cars that had business with the houses on the street would be allowed access and great care would have to be taken crossing the pedestrian path into driveways. The cross-path access would be eliminated as soon as the city could take away the homeowner's right to use the driveway for parking. Then the homeowner could reallocate the driveway to better uses. The 15' wide road could be divided into 10' of driving space and 5' of parking on the right side, if the residents on the street desired that.

In summary, there are all kinds of significant steps we can take to improve transit, pedestrian, and bike access between urban centers and green spaces. All of these measures would likely be economically beneficial to the city and homeowners, and would certainly increase quality of life and improve the city's environmental performance. I'll write further on this subject in subsequent posts.