Blog - Articles tagged as planning

Last fall, the Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA) forecasted that the proposed 161-acre Suffolk Downs Redevelopment project in East Boston and Revere would generate 72,316 new average daily vehicle trips at full build-out. The BPDA-approved Master Plan (for the Boston portion of the site) shows that the project (as currently proposed) would include up to 6,760 new parking spaces to accommodate those trips. To mitigate the effects of these increased driving trips and parking availability, Suffolk Downs developers are required to enter into a “Transportation Access Plan Agreement” with the city, holding them accountable to limit the number of vehicle trips...

Part 3 of a series on developing Destination 2040, the Boston Region Metropolitan Planning Organization’s (MPO) next Long-Range Transportation Plan (LRTP). Destination 2040 allocates funding to major transportation projects in the Boston region and guides the MPO’s capital investment programs and research studies. Parts 1 and 2 of this series presented the vision and investments eligible for inclusion in Destination 2040. On July 18, 2019, the MPO board agreed to a draft plan. Destination 2040 is available for public review and comment until August 23, 2019.

Large US cities are notorious for traffic congestion, and Boston is no exception. But not all congestion is the same. A bottleneck (or choke point) is different from a traffic jam, for example. Unlike congestion caused simply by heavy traffic volumes, a bottleneck is a recurring disruption of traffic at the same location in a roadway, which is usually caused by a specific physical condition—such as, the road design, abrupt changes in alignment, lane drops, merges and diverges, badly timed traffic lights, sharp curves; or other physical constraints that can make a roadway unable to handle the volume of traffic it receives...

On June 7, following a four-week pilot, the City of Boston announced the permanent installation of a bus lane on Washington Street between Roslindale Square and the Forest Hills MBTA station. This corridor was identified as a candidate for a bus lane through MPO staff work, which examined corridors in the Boston region where buses are routinely delayed in traffic.

The Boston Region MPO has developed an interactive dashboard that tells the story of how the Boston region’s transportation system has changed over time. 

At the October 6 meeting of the Boston Region MPO, board members voted to initiate a study to research ways to reduce wait times for bus passengers on corridors in which multiple bus routes operate, so-called “trunk sections” of the MBTA bus network.