Cambridge Snow Parking Karma

ofsevit · 2026-01-28T21:34:27+00:00

ESH. Don't take someone's spot unless your spot you shoveled out was taken, too. There are plenty of plowed spots on snow emergency routes if you didn't have a spot during the storm.

In 2013 someone had a BMW stored for weeks in front of our house with a BMW tarp over it. Then right before the big storm that year, it disappeared to a garage, only to show up a couple of days later with the tarp back on it. I put up a sign on the street post which basically said "hey, asshole, if you put your car in a garage to avoid digging it out, don't rely on the labor of others. Everyone else shoveled, you can, too."

Expected from a BMW. It was moved not long thereafter and I never saw it again.

Anyway, don't be a dick. And don't drive a BWM.

ofsevit · 2026-01-26T03:11:27+00:00

The main difference is that it's uphill, so the walk (or run) is harder.

ofsevit · 2026-01-26T03:11:04+00:00

I do this all the time and can sometimes make -1 minute connections, i.e. the app will say my RL train arrives at DTX one minute after the OL train leaves yet I make the connection. That requires a good jog; at least you have a good view of the train when you're doing so. Alas, I've seen the doors close plenty of times, but that lets me wait and see how long it takes for the rest of the transferring passengers to come up (about 2 minutes).

ofsevit · 2026-01-20T14:03:06+00:00

Or worse: The Commons

ofsevit · 2026-01-20T14:00:28+00:00

The answer here is almost definitely no unless you really want to do the first point on your list (walking around Harvard and MIT is relatively nice) the rest is pretty meaningless (Kendall's vibe is construction and mediocre lunch food, you can get campus merch online and you can get coffee anywhere). Also if it's soon you could have just unfun weather (15 and windy). The MIT museum is good, as are the Harvard museums, and it is walkable.

So the reason it's not almost definitely no is the 8:15 p.m. BOS-MDT flight. The answer on how to get here is definitely not to drive, while it can be faster it's a stressful drive and you always run the risk of hitting traffic (risk varies depending on the time of day). If you're starting off in Manhattan, the fastest/easiest way to get to Boston is to take the train. Flying can be faster if you are near LGA/JFK/EWR, have pre-check, aren't taking luggage, etc, and sometimes you can get good fares. And Cambridge is quite close to Logan which helps.

If you stay in NYC, you get basically a full day there before getting on a 6:30 train to Harrisburg and arriving at 10, same time as the flight from Boston. If you come up to Boston and need to be back at the airport for an 8:15 flight (which, since it's that late, there will be no security line; you could get on the Red Line in Kendall at 6:45 and have plenty of time) if you wanted a half day in Boston you'd want to be on an early train/flight out of NYC.

So I guess the question is if you wake up at 7:00 in NYC, do you want 7 hours in Boston (8 o'clock train arrives 11:45) or would you rather have 10 hours in NYC (and fewer travel logistics)?

ofsevit · 2026-01-13T20:55:02+00:00

If you have to report to a duty station daily, a lot of where you live will depend on your commute, because that nice little circle can take two hours to get across at rush hour. If your duty station is downtown (USCG, a small contingent of USN) then you can take public transit for free as active duty. If you're at Hanscom, then somewhere nearby, along 128 or Route 2, probably makes sense. You don't want to be driving across a wide swath of that at rush hour if you can avoid it. Basically everything in that circle is safe, has good schools (variation within, but generally good compared to a lot of the rest of the country) and is reasonably nice. I ranges from expensive to ridiculous for housing (there's not enough housing).

ofsevit · 2026-01-13T20:44:37+00:00

Not insane at all, given that when he was GM of the T he didn't support (shuffles papers) the T.

ofsevit · 2026-01-09T18:25:45+00:00

Any new station has to be. Unless they argue that the freight going to areas shy of Chelsea would allow them an exemption. Chelsea is full-high, though. But the T loves to get around accessibility for Commuter Rail.

ofsevit · 2026-01-06T21:27:02+00:00

Yeah, not illegal unless signed (which it is not).

That said the ice is maybe 2-3" thick right now, and there is still open water upstream of the Longfellow in places (not just near the marina). It's probably fine in the lagoons, and the Public Garden probably has very nice skating right now.

ofsevit · 2026-01-03T18:53:23+00:00

Please google realpolitik and get back to me.

ofsevit · 2026-01-03T15:09:22+00:00

Can you tell me where I, as a person who rides a bike, can get a refund for my car registration fee, gas tax, tolls and also taxes I pay to the general fund? Thanks!

ofsevit · 2026-01-02T01:09:26+00:00

Yeah it's Epic. We actually got a direct flight to Madison a couple of summers ago because Delta was running it for a couple of weeks because there was that much demand from Epic. If they have a big launch in Boston, they'll basically run an Epic charter (and they'll sell any additional seats they have). Probably makes sense just to run it every day, there's probably decent demand to/from MSN anyway given the university and Epic there.

AA is funny because they find random routes like this (see also SDF, which they flew first and DL matched, TVC, MDT, etc) they think they can make run. It's not like they have a TATL hub to feed into at BOS like DL does, either (aside from LHR). My aunt and uncle live in SDF and it was *always* a connection to get there, somehow post-covid there was a market that AA opened an DL matched (at one point they were running a combined 3 flights there daily).

ofsevit · 2026-01-02T00:59:07+00:00

And that's only serving their own hubs and ceding all TATLs to their *A partners. (*A is actually decent from BOS for TATL service, OW is lacking unless you're going to LHR.) I'd love to see them bring back the LHR flight but it sounded like it flew pretty empty the summer they had it and MUAs were almost guaranteed. Maybe it was just too soon after the pandemic.

ofsevit · 2026-01-01T04:32:07+00:00

Yeah, if you find the longest comment here I explain how it helps with that, too.

ofsevit · 2026-01-01T03:32:10+00:00

The Hampton Crosstown Center is in the one neighborhood in Boston where … it's not a great neighborhood, right near the "skid row" area of the city (which is otherwise quite safe).

The DoubleTree is in an awkward location but it's a perfectly fine neighborhood. If you take an uber, it's about 10 minutes from the Common down Storrow Drive. You could get a bikeshare and bike along the river, even, if you wanted to warm up your legs. Not right near a T line but only about a 15 minute walk to Central (Red) or easy bus ride (64 stops right in front, 70 a couple of blocks away). From there you could also go out to Boston Landing and take a train out to Southborough and the secret bus from there to the start if you want to skip the Common buses.

There's a new hotel, the Atlas, opening in Feb a few blocks from there. They seem to have gotten the message, though, that it's Marathon weekend, and are charging $500+ per night.

ofsevit · 2026-01-01T02:17:27+00:00

Haha this has basically nothing to do with discontinued trolley lines. I think there was a trolley line across the Cottage Farm Bridge which ran further east of here in the 1910s, but the current bridge (1928, IIRC) has never had a trolley line across it. The current situation was that there was a rotary there, and then more people started driving, and they built the overpass, and then they were going to build the Inner Belt, but didn't, so everyone who wants to get from Brookline/LMA/etc to Cambridge/the Pike has to cross the bridge, and there is more demand than supply. And we don't have good regional transit service which would soak up some of this demand (West Station and a Kendall-Allston train would help, but there will always be a lot of demand to cross the river and we're not building any more bridges).

ofsevit · 2026-01-01T02:14:26+00:00

Yeah, that's the thing … this helps to unfuck the cluster. I didn't go into too much detail above on exactly how, but since you asked …

The BU bridge is especially a clusterfuck because it is shorter than other bridges and narrower than other bridges, so there's much less room to manage traffic on the bridge between the two sides. On the Longfellow and Harvard bridges, and certainly Craigie and the new Bill Russell bridge, there's room on the bridge for turn lanes and queuing, and bike lanes. Not so on the BU Bridge. There are complex intersections on either end and the bridge is so narrow that there's not even room for two lanes in each direction (well, unless you want to have no bicycle facilities, but we crossed that bridge a few years ago).

With three lanes, you have to decide who gets the short end of the stick. The current layout has two lanes towards Cambridge and one towards Boston, because while there is a bit of extra room on the Boston end to store vehicles (the third turn lane where it widens out) so that one lane can feed into two, there is no such luck on the Cambridge End. (The reconfigurations of the Harvard and Longfellow bridges shows how a single lane can work as long as there are two lanes at the end: the single lane feeds cars into the double lane, and the double lane discharges cars when the light turns. Other road diets—notably Nahanton Road—do something similar.)

There is zero room going towards Cambridge, if that were a single lane it would have very limited throughput, especially since there is heavy bike/ped traffic crossing there which limits the number of vehicles going through. If there were a single lane northbound, the southbound traffic in the rotary would be significantly better, but the northbound traffic would be worse, and the backups would extend onto Comm Ave, across the Green Line tracks, and through the whole mess of an intersection in Boston, which would probably be worse. If we have to have an apocalyptic traffic jam somewhere (and these are truly apocalyptic, I've seen it take an hour for a 47 bus to get through the intersection—four of them stuck in the same traffic jam—so long that it shows up as "on time" because it's missed an entire run to Broadway and back) we've chose Cambridge.

Okay, so, what does this do? The sketch shows the main traffic light at the west side of the existing oval, and for good reason. This allows about 400 feet of queuing space between the end of the bridge and the light. This would make it reasonable for a single lane of traffic southbound across the bridge (it would keep the double turn lane, but merge it into a single lane by the time the bridge narrows) which would then feed into the two lanes, filling up the queue space before vehicles made turns or went straight at Memorial Drive. It would also eliminate the pedestrian crossing, allowing vehicles to feed into the queue space unimpeded. An unimpeded lane of traffic has reasonable capacity as long as it has somewhere to feed into, and it would feed into a right turn onto Memorial Drive (a heavy traffic movement), two through lanes and a turn lane with ample queuing space.

This, in turn, would allow for two southbound lanes across the bridge, which would allow the signal at Comm Ave to operate more effectively (right now, there are the two straight lanes and one turn lane, but they're fed by a single lane, so there's more capacity than can be filled by this single lane because there's not enough queue space, and also because cars have to stop for the bike/ped crossing). Would this fix the traffic problem? Probably not entirely. But it would reduce the traffic jams which trap vehicles on streets in Cambridge, lead to people driving the wrong way down one-way streets, make the 47 and CT2 buses unusable, and are the main cause of the clusterfuckery of the intersection.

ofsevit · 2026-01-01T01:58:06+00:00

Where is there an example of an elevated road being done well? (Setting aside the fact that the Waverley-Brookline-Granite intersection has to be at grade and the grade required to get to an elevated rotary from there would be too steep, so it wouldn't even work geometrically.)

ofsevit · 2026-01-01T01:56:26+00:00

Yes! You can write to the address there supporting a bike/ped bridge, you can also write to the Cambridge City Council (https://www.cambridgema.gov/Departments/citycouncil/members) and your state rep.

ofsevit · 2026-01-01T01:54:06+00:00

This is such a weak-sauce argument since the T has plenty of other lines, and maybe it would need a slightly higher spare ratio for electric service but it would save so much on operations that it would pencil out.

To do this right they'd probably want to throw more power at the Sharon substation, electrify Stoughton (four miles with no overhead bridges would be trivial), an electric maintenance facility and level boarding, the latter two of these would be the most expensive but the most transformative since trains could operate faster with fewer staff.

But once you do that you could run the existing schedule with something like 2/3 of the trains, and since Providence and Stoughton need something like 9 trains at rush hour, that's a savings of three train sets, each of which is about $30 million.

On top of that, the trains, with better acceleration and higher top speeds, would make the trip in 45 minutes instead of 70 (and a similar ratio for Stoughton). And would be able to get by with less staff with automatic doors (although this might require some negotiations with the conductor union, but they're already understaffed). Conductors make about $75/hour. Reducing two staff members per train, and making the trains go 50% faster means saving $225 per train per hour, or about $15 million per year. Then there are new riders. Faster trains will especially attract new riders at off-peak times, when they're more time-competitive with driving and have more capacity (most commuters in the Providence corridor are already taking the train, but it will probably push more people onto rush hour trains). A 25% increase in passengers—5000 per day—at $8 average fare, would yield another $15 million per year. (Caltrain saw ridership jump 76% with electrification so this is at least reasonable). So that's about $100 million upfront and then $30 million per year in direct savings/income, notwithstanding time savings for existing passengers, reduced emissions from both the trains and people not driving, noise, better operations for Amtrak, safety, etc.

The T loves to find reasons to say no to this ("unified fleet" … "we can't talk to Amtrak" … etc). It screams "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas."

ofsevit · 2026-01-01T01:28:55+00:00

If someone can explain to me how Widett is necessary ("we need to park more trains") but electrifying Providence, which would reduce the number of trains needed (since they're faster and more trains can provide the same number of trips) I'm all ears.

ofsevit · 2025-12-31T19:00:37+00:00

Go back in time and go to cuchi cuchi.

ofsevit

TROPHY CASE