[dsfyu404ed]

Regional transit policy needs to be what's best for the region. You can't let city specific special interests stall that because it does not work out well in the long term.

Look at Boston. They canned I695 to stop a couple neighborhoods from being demolished and in doing so basically required all the major surface roads to handle significant commuter traffic (killing how many people over the years?) because they became the de-facto main arteries and horribly compromised future subway lines at the same time (in addition to a laundry list of other negative downstream effects).

[mehhh]

Think of all the people who live closer to the urban core in Boston now, due to this decision not making long distance commuting easier.

Portland started ripping out freeways after I-205 destroyed multiple neighborhoods, and Seattlites organized to stop the central district freeway after watching I-5 vivisect the city, paving parks and neighborhoods.

[dsfyu404ed]

Short term framing of "destroying neighborhoods" is exactly why we can't get anything done. For some reason everyone wants to try to freeze development so that things stay the way they are or revert to some past state. This is frankly stupid and in the long term has terrible outcomes. Look at SF to see what this does. Yes, any time land is taken by the government it sucks for the people there. Nobody is disputing that. What we are saying is that this short term pain is necessary for longer term and bigger picture improvements.

Look at the wealth disparity between the Worcester area (tolerable commuting access by rail and car to Boston) and the Fitchburg area (far less tolerable commuting access by rail and car to Boston) and then say that. As regrettable as it may be the best way for people who do not live in Boston to move up the economic ladder is to commute into Boston where you can make the big bucks and for practicality reasons doing so in a car is the least worst choice available to most people. Literally no party involved likes this arrangement but forcing every commuter that has to go somewhere between I93 and I95 onto surface roads ASAP does nobody any good. I'd call it cutting off your nose to spite your face but spiting one's face implies a level of forethought that was clearly absent.

Any major city is going to have a huge number of car commuters no matter what and decreasing the distance between the highways and their destination makes all the infrastructural changes at the surface road level that make a city less car centric more palletable.

The thing that really pissed me off about I695 isn't the specific highway or lack thereof specifically but that is represents a turning point prior to which it was possible to step on a few toes in order to get something that benefited everyone done and after which everything had to be compromised to hell and back in order to not run afoul of even the most microscopic stakeholder. This has just as big of an impact for public transportation infrastructure as it does for private transportation infrastructure and one would have to be a very near sighted fool to cheer that.

At the end of the day it comes down to regional interests vs local interests. The way I see it is that if Boston had built good highways in the 50s and 60s they would have been building subways in the 90s and '00s instead of digging overpriced tunnels. By caving to special interests they screwed themselves onto on a path that led us to where we are today.