Washington Square - update

I've been waiting for a long time to see a detailed drawing of what the new Washington Square rotary is going to look like. I'd lift the drawing in this article, but you can click on the link yourself and then click on the diagram of the new intersection to see a large image of it.

The first thing I noticed in that drawing was that the front of the train station will never be accessible from Washington Square again. It's been orphaned out of the loop.

When the construction work orphaned the front of Union Station a few weeks ago, it created an additional traffic congestion problem that I was sure would disappear once the work was finished. But now, according to what I see in that drawing, the situation is rendered permanent.

I can only hope that Don Landgren, Jr., whose name appears at the bottom of the drawing, got this part of it wrong. As drawn, the only access to the front of Union Station will be in one direction off of the new Front Street extension, and the only exit will be outbound onto the beginning of Grafton Street. (That driveway in front of the station is too narrow for two-way traffic doing drop-offs and pickups, and doubling its width to accomodate two-way traffic would destroy part of the original architecture, so it's one-way going from left to right in the drawing.)

If Don's rendering of the new intersection is accurate, this thread on Washington Square may well have a much longer life to it than the already mountainous pile of pending rants I've been holding back on the subject all this time. But the prospect of that drawing being the final configuration really begs for some of my previously witheld pessimism to be cut loose...

Before it's even completed, what I see for the future of Washington Square is simply a big reduction in the volume of traffic that can queue up inside the rotary. By making it smaller, that volume simply backs up onto the intersecting streets. By making it smaller AND slower, that queue up during rush hour can only be worse than it ever was before construction began.

One can hardly fail to notice how traffic has queued up much worse during rush hour each morning and afternoon, since construction began. All that has actually happened, though, is the closing of one lane around the rotary, where there used to be two. In other words, with a 50% reduction in the rotary's traffic handling capacity, all this additional traffic backup has ensued. Dramatically increased backups onto Shrewsbury Street, Grafton Street, and Summer Street, along with long queues of traffic backing all the way out to Southbridge Street on McGrath Boulevard have been the norm, ever since construction began on Washington Square.

The new rotary's capacity will be only about 10% of what the old rotary could queue up, so somebody please explain to me how we'll ever see the end of all this traffic backup...

If we add to that a shifting of traffic access to the front of Union Station only via the points shown in the drawing, all we have to look forward to with the new (even smaller and slower) rotary is the prospect of daily gridlock from the reduced capacity of the traffic circle, plus the added traffic having to go all the way around the station, just to get to the front.

Of course, I could very well be wrong in my pessimistic forecast. I'll be the first to admit it if what I see coming doesn't actually happen. Believe me, no-one would be happier to see traffic flowing more smoothly through this section of town, once the construction is done.

But it's sure beginning to look like the next question we may need to start asking about this multimillion dollar project is, "Que Bono?"