Tag: Storrow Drive

Science Proves Once Again That My Life is Hell with Boston Traffic Study

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Boston Globe – “Boston must have the worst rush-hour traffic in the country. Now you can back that up with numbers. Gridlock during the peak of the morning and evening commutes was worse in Boston in 2018 than in any other major metropolitan area, even Los Angeles with its infamous traffic, according to a report from Inrix, a transportation data firm that publishes annual rankings of congestion around the world.”

Well I’m glad the tweets that I fire off in a blind rage during my commute aren’t completely falling on deaf ears. I can’t say I’m entirely surprised by this study though.

“Essentially, Inrix measured the time penalty for driving during rush hour, and there Boston topped the list of US cities: Commuters who drove at the worst peak hour conditions would have spent 164 hours in traffic that they would have avoided under regular conditions. On this metric, Los Angeles ranked sixth, behind Washington, D.C., Seattle, Chicago, and New York.”

Well no kidding. I can get to my office on a Saturday morning in like 15 minutes, but 8 am on a Monday? That’s an hour. 5 pm on a Wednesday? 90 minutes maybe.

It also didn’t help that the city of Boston decided it would be a good idea to REMOVE A LANE on Storrow Drive, one of the most congested areas of traffic in the entire city. Ya know it’s only where 93 flows into North Station, the Museum of Science, and Cambridgeside Galleria, which is the only mall in the area.

If you look at some of my tweets from my time spent sitting in traffic over the years, you can actually see my will to live remain gainfully employed slowly deteriorating.

Will The Mass. Pike Overhaul in Allston Lead Red to Finally Have a Mental Breakdown?

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Boston.com – After years of debate, state transportation officials Thursday announced the final design on the biggest highway project in Boston in a generation: rebuilding the Massachusetts Turnpike at ground level in Allston and elevating a section of Soldiers Field Road along the Charles River onto a new viaduct above the highway.

I think one of the cooler daily blogs (I think it is the only daily blog) that we put out here at The 300s is Red’s #RushHourRap blog. It’s always sweet to learn about some old school hip hop you don’t know about.

What you may not have gathered from that blog is that the reason Red has a knack for musical discoveries is that he spends half of his waking life stuck dead in traffic commuting to and from work, surfing satellite radio for anything that will entertain him enough to keep his finger off the detonator of a suicide vest. It is the brutal, tedious way so many of us go through our Corporate American life. It is especially draining in the avant garde design of the Boston commute infrastructure. It is the bottleneck of the rat race.

And now, the state is sure going to make it worse. Not only are they going to conduct construction in around the areas Red has to navigate Monday through Friday, but Massachusetts has a rich history of completely fucking these kinds of problems up. So not only we staring down the barrel of typical construction traffic, we are looking at a full fledged clusterfuck of heavy equipment, detail cops, and broken dreams that will for sure go about 100x over budget, which currently stands at $1.1 billion.

So is this it? Is this the “improvement” that finally sends our Founder and EIC over the edge? Is he going to be found Kony 2012’ng down Storrow Drive after having moved 100 feet in three hours? I hope not, but I won’t hold my breath.

T’s and P’s old friend, T’s and Ps.