City Tour Review

CITY minus TRAFFIC

Freshgate Tunnel

A brief review of the City Tour

You have just toured a vision to transform a significant area of the city.

The City Tour showed one set of ideas about how the Charles River Embankment — the "Central Park" of Boston — could be transformed if automobile traffic could only be removed. The Charles River banks without automobiles.

The City Tour showed many ideas for:

Institutional expansion - most notably speculation of how Harvard might expand, but also how other schools and institutions might be affected.

Open space expansion - expanded urban parklands, enlarged routes for non-auto travel, and new underground parking along the Charles River Basin.

Neighborhood expansion - sites for new affordable housing, new community facilities, and the altered quality of living conditions that reduced traffic and increased open space provides.

The City Tour showed expansion of existing uses between Fresh Pond in west Cambridge, the William E. Smith Playground in Allston (beside the Herter Center, Publick Theater and WBZ), and Charlesgate (the entrance to the Emerald Necklace park system in Boston at Fenway) — seven miles of parkways and bridges to put to alternative uses if there were no auto traffic. Highlights from the tour include the following possibilities:

On the Boston side of the Charles, no auto traffic beside the river from the William E. Smith Playground to Charlesgate.

A closer view between the BU Bridge and Charlesgate with no Storrow Drive:

On either side of the Charles River, no auto traffic between the Eliot Bridge and the Western Avenue Bridge.

In Cambridge, on the land where Fresh Pond Parkway presently runs between Huron Avenue and Brattle Street, only auto traffic from the abutting homes.

Also in Cambridge, no auto traffic where Fresh Pond Parkway presently runs from Brattle Street to the Charles River.

No Bowker Overpass at Charlesgate.

The City Tour also showed a total of seven non-auto bridges between Cambridge and northern Allston. This total includes the existing Weeks Memorial Footbridge (which is between the Anderson Bridge and Western Avenue Bridge).

Three existing bridges over the Charles River would no longer be for autos:

Eliot Bridge

Anderson Bridge

Western Avenue Bridge

located where Soldiers Field Road crosses the river to Greenough Boulevard

located where North Harvard Street in Allston crosses the river to John F. Kennedy Street in Cambridge

located where Western Avenue crosses the river from Allston to the Riverside neighborhood in Cambridge

	Additionally, the City Tour has three new non-auto bridges:
	One new bridge crossing the river from the entrance to the William E. Smith Playground in Allston to a proposed site for 650 units of new housing along the former Greenough Boulevard in Cambridge.
	Two new bridges between the Anderson and Eliot Bridges.
	These seven non-auto bridges, and an absence of auto traffic on either side of the Charles River for 1.7 miles, would create an extraordinary urban park, unlike any on earth in a major industrialized city. The existence of such a park would have extraordinary consequences for the character of future development of Allston and Cambridge, beyond Harvard's plans.
	Since 1976, on every Sunday throughout the summer, a section of Memorial Drive has been closed to traffic, creating "Riverbend Park" for one day a week. In the City Tour you just saw, Riverbend Park would become a year-round amenity on the Cambridge side and would exist on both sides of the Charles River. It would extend west to Fresh Pond, south to the William E. Smith Playground, and east to Charlesgate.

This vision could be realized with a 17,000-foot long, deep-bore tunnel for automobiles. (Like the existing parkways it would replace, most of the tunnel system would be exclusively for cars and light vehicles.)

This website gives this imaginary tunnel the provisional name Freshgate because it extends from Fresh Pond in the west to Charlesgate in the east.

A preliminary view of the Freshgate Tunnel, including all access ramps, street reconfigurations and open space expansions, is shown in the Tunnel Tour, which is available from the City minus Traffic home page.

Click here to return to the City Minus Traffic home.

CITY minus TRAFFIC

Freshgate Tunnel

3. The Tunnel Tour

Before you take the Tunnel Tour, here is a sketch showing a possible cross-section of what the Freshgate Tunnel might typically look like as it goes along underneath the banks of the Charles.

Please note that the tunnel lanes that you will see in the Tunnel Tour are shown diagrammatically, with east- and west-bound lanes situated side-by-side instead of the over-and-under arrangement shown above. The purpose of the flattened diagrammatic presentation is to make the tunnel concept clearer.

An actual tunnel system would take years to design and could take many different forms. The tunnel shown above is just one possible variation. (It is based on a recently built deep-bore tunnel in France.)

Take the Tunnel Tour to see a seqeunce of drawings that show how the tunnel is routed under the city and connected to various roadways via intersections.

You can close the tour at any time and you will be returned to this page.

Once again, the tour is optimized for viewing with MS Internet Explorer (version 5 or later) on PCs, though it should work acceptably on Macintosh too. (MSIE on PC is best. Mozilla uncertain.)

If you are interested in viewing details closely, try the high-resolution version of the Tunnel Tour. This version opens in a window that occupies the whole screen of your computer, and will probably only work on PCs with more recent versions of Internet Explorer. To activate this version, click here.

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