Friday, May 05, 2006

Boston Planning Inadequate, aka: InfraSUCKture


WASTELAND
I was checking out the excellent pixel art of Eboy featuring excellent pixel represenations of cities and concepts and came upon a design he did for Boston Magazine for an article byPhil Primack entitled The Waste Land (which i can't find on their wesbite).

The article talks about the proposed Greenway plan for the Big Dig. Here is an article which may be the one in question (at a different site).

NORTH STATION SUCKS TOO:
Not realizing that Boston Magazine had any useful articles, I checked out if this article was available online (its not as far as i can search), in the process finding another Primack article about why MBTA's North Station is so awful. A part of it is the obvious: its being in the FleetCenter/TD BankNorth Garden. The current North Station was supposed to be temporary.

(an aside here to point out that the 'A' line of the Green Line of the T being suspended was "temporary" in the 50's, the 'E' line being cut off at Heath St was "temporary" in the 80's)

The article is Dysfunction Junction. from September 2002 and yet still accurate (not entirely sure about the water fountain).

"Bob Egan, the MBTA's project director for North Station, says he didn't assume his post until 1999 and doesn't know the details of the original agreements or, for example, why there's not a single water fountain in the entire station."

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your comments are valid but slightly disorganized. I would prefer a blog entry with more coherent structure.

Jasonik said...

if you replaced "blog entry" with "lifstyle" you would have written a valid critique of myself. Candy dishonorable radio syntax, Macho Man Randy Savage.

Anonymous said...

In a nut shell you have explained why traveling through N Station is often dreaded by the non-sports fans of Boston (who must wade amongst those full of the abnoxious spirit of large scale events on their way to finding a nice place to read by themselves).

Anonymous said...

Surely you’ve read of the North Station expansion plan, going into effect soon. It’s half-assed to be sure, but it might be slightly more pleasant.