Why Are Boston Streets So Confusing?

why does Boston have such confusing streets why is it so hard to drive in Boston well a lot of it has to do with the confusing Street Network there's no great in central Boston but is that a Labyrinth of narrow streets meeting at odd angles the myth is that they simply paved over old cow paths that's not strictly true though cows were absolutely regular users of bosses city streets until the 1820s we have to go back even farther to understand the reason for Boston's Network let's start at 16 30. the year Boston was officially founded at that time there was a Puritan settlement in Charlestown across the Charles River but the colonists found it difficult to find fresh water one important geography note here Boston has added a lot of land to its Shoreline over the years and in 1830 the shaman peninsula where central Boston is located looked more like this anyway across the river on the Chalmette Peninsula lived one European settler all by himself William blackston he had a Hut in an orchard but most importantly he had a really good spring all to himself he he wrote a letter to the Puritans across the river inviting them to settle near him instead and they accepted blackston lived on the west side of the peninsula but the Puritan setup shop on the east side as it had the best natural harbors and was close to the spring here's what the street Network looked like around that time already you can see it was kind of well a mess no neat and orderly grid here the kind of modern drivers would appreciate but the Puritans had their reasons you wouldn't know it from walking around Boston today but the Boston of 1630 was a mix of Hills entitled marshes with precious little flat dry land here let me show you the hills and marshes you can see how most of the streets are careful to avoid these obstacles Braxton himself kept 50 acres of land right here south of Beacon Hill so that was off limits to roads and development as well Braxton actually left for uninhabited Rhode Island five years later apparently he was the kind of guy who really needed his space Governor Winthrop bought Braxton's plot when he left and it became Boston Common for the next 100 years it would be both a pleasure ground and a working pasture many of the households of Boston had a cow and people would walk them through the streets to Boston Common to let them pasture there it wasn't uncommon for 100 cows to be munching away while picnickers hung out nearby what emerged was a street Network that connected important Harbor locations while avoiding natural obstacles but did it really preclude the Puritans from setting up a grid I mean other colonial cities like New Haven and Philadelphia were built with a grid right away why not Boston well what if we take a typical block from the Philadelphia grid plan and overlay it across Boston the result is really not much better than what you have now you have maybe two major streets going north and south through the most important part of the city and getting anywhere else requires zigzagging maybe there's a grid dimension in orientation better suited for Boston but it would be hard to figure out when every area seems to be diagonal from everything else grids make more sense when you have a large expanse of land it makes it easier to add on to the city just add another standard block to the outside edge grids facilitate the efficient sale of land it can make it easier to grow rapidly Boston in the 1630s was worried more about survival than rapid growth Boston's weather oscillates between bitter cold in the winter too sticky hot in the summer between the hills and the swamps Farmers found Rocky glacial soil that was difficult to Till There is no no cash crop in the area like tobacco and cotton in the South just the sea and trade basically nothing in the early fundamentals of Boston suggested it needed a grid in anticipation of rapid growth it only had 10 000 people 100 years after its founding and when Boston did need to expand it didn't do so in an orderly way this is different than what happened down south in Manhattan New York grew in an organic boston-esque way in the 17th and 18th centuries but then planned for the orderly development of the rest of Manhattan in 1811. back in Boston there was no large swath of land to expand into here's a look at the original 1630 land area compared to today's it's totally different Boston is barely connected to the mainland by a narrow strip of land Boston had to expand into the sea in one of the first landfill projects was the Mill Pond by the 1830s there were no Mills that needed it and it was stagnant and gross bostoners were busy lopping off the top of Beacon Hill in Copps Hill to expand the city and needed a place for the dirt and gravel to go they solved two problems at once and got a lot more usable land area modern day Causeway Street is named after the dam that created Mill Pond in about the same location it was back then the filled in area is a nice little grid but it doesn't really line up with anything else the street networks in the newly lowered Beacon Hill and cops Hill areas weren't particularly grid-like the closest thing Boston has to an orderly Manhattan style grid is the Back Bay neighborhood it's a story similar to The Mill Pond infill project there was a mill Dam that separated the Charles River from the pond which used to be tidal Flats here's what that looked like back in 1858 by that date the city was already a year into filling in the Mill Pond to make a new residential neighborhood for Boston's Elite filled with Victorian mansions in orderly rows today's Beacon Street was the Old Mill Pond Dam and the neighborhood is now home to other 19th century Treasures like Trinity Church the Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Public Library some of the straight streets in the Back Bay were carried through to tie to other parts of the City Beacon Street continues Southwest and a few others go Southeast but in general outside of Back Bay Boston devolves into a clash of grids without any single organizing Force now this is a complete tangent but New Orleans is the poster child for clashing grids the city expanded along the Mississippi and every expansion oriented the grid to The River's Edge those grids continue to Fan out from there and you end up with lots of weird intersections along the seams Market Street in San Francisco might be the most famous grid seam Street in the U.S and they ended up shutting it down to traffic in part due to the weird intersections along the length of it okay back to Boston I think we've established the history of Boston's growth made it difficult to have an orderly easy to understand grid pattern this results in intersections that make it difficult to drive let's look at the intersection right here at the corner of Back Bay where it meets the rest of the city you have a nice orthogonal intersection cut through by Columbus Avenue creating a challenging six-leg intersection it's definitely not an ideal intersection to drive through if only for all the time spent waiting for the other legs to go first these kind of intersections can not only be confusing but they can be dangerous for all Road users for example one study found that non-orthogonal intersections posed a significantly higher crash risk to bicyclists due in part to visibility issues with tight angles combine that with the wide rows and higher speeds that you find in the previous intersection and you get a recipe for crashes drivers intuitively understand when a place like this feels less safe and they get stressed out making them not want to drive there thus begins Boston's reputation for being confusing to drive in a generally hard place to drive what can a place like Boston do to make their City more legible particularly to visitors who may be unfamiliar with the crazy network of streets wayfinding and signage are big ones I've heard from native bostonians that their City could be difficult to navigate in the past because street signs were obscured or missing nothing was labeled basically I found Boston to be reasonably well signed when I visited but I didn't drive so I had more of an opportunity to search for obscured signs or just use my phone to navigate wayfinding and signage deserves its own video but science can definitely make a complicated Street Network more legible to users city planners also need to make sure they don't add too many signs which result in clutter that makes it hard for Road users to understand what to pay attention to when signs aren't enough it might be better to simplify the intersections themselves it's become quite popular recently to eliminate right turn slip Lanes or add traffic diverters to close off some turning options at intersections to make the traffic run smoother and eliminate confusion now sometimes diverters can make things more complicated as they create dead ends but they make intersections safer for all users and by reducing choice they can make it easier to navigate a complex City street system finally if a city is very difficult for drivers to navigate maybe it's best to reduce driving as much as possible places like Boston are fairly dense with a decent mass transit system by U.S standards I found the t-system to be very easy to navigate and understand in contrast to the street Network for drivers cities like Boston can lean into that Simplicity instead of bending over backward to make it easier for drivers Boston was founded almost 400 years ago well before the car was around contrary to popular lore they didn't pave cow paths but they certainly didn't foresee 20th century Transportation options either transportation is about to get even more complicated as the US begins to transition away from gas powered cars to Technologies like electric vehicles these fights can get politically charged and you might not have noticed the U.S House of Representatives passed a bill prohibiting bans on gas-powered cars this is an effort by the conservative-led house to counter the Biden administration's push to Electrify the nation's vehicle Fleet you may not have heard about this story because it was really only reported in conservative news sources I know that's the case because I'm using ground news a website that Aggregates news articles and can tell you the political lean of various sources there's this handy graphic over here that shows that 69 of the sources on this story lean right then you can even choose your preferred news source based on political lean if you don't have time for that ground news presents summaries that also have their own political lien that's pretty cool ground news was designed by a former NASA engineer on a mission to give readers an easy data-driven way to read the news I certainly find it helpful when researching video topics I can better understand what's true and what's not and what's Spin and what's not my favorite feature might be the blind spot feed which highlights stories that are disproportionately covered by one side of the political Spectrum it can help you find stories that you might have missed had you stayed in your curated social media bubble ground news is a fantastic tool for sifting through all the daily misinformation and bias they provide you with all the information you need to be a better critical thinker and I can't recommend them enough in fact I believe ground news is so useful that I'm offering 30 off their Vantage subscription you can only access this discount through my link so go to ground.news City beautiful or click on the link on screen or in the description to support an independent media platform working to make the media more transparent

Channel: City Beautiful

Views: 261,003

Keywords: city planning, town planning, urban planning, urban design

Id: XxYxaabPxko

Length: 10min 25sec (625 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 26 2023