Boston Trip Part 7: These Boots Were Made for Walking

My original goal for the day in Manhattan was to try to leave by nightfall so I could be back to Richmond before midnight. But after looking at a map and making a list of all the places I wanted to see, it became obvious that my plan wasn't going to work out. Plus, when I found out that the MTA had discontinued the 24 Hour Unlimited transit pass I realized that I was going to have to do quite a bit of walking to make it all work out without paying more than I cared to on subway fare.

With nothing else to plan, I strapped on my boots and headed out the door of my uncle's walk-up studio apartment for another whirlwind tour of a major city in the style of my summer Europe trip.

Union Square

First, I had to pick up some cash. My trip to Nathan's the previous day had left me with $3, and that wasn't going to work. So I walked up to the nearest Wells Fargo branch, which happened to be a mile and a half away in Union Square. Fortunately for me, Union Square is far enough north that you can start to see some of the skyscrapers of Midtown, giving me a hint of what I'd find the rest of the day.

Grand Central! Grand Central! Grand Central!

I hopped on a number 5 express train, and before I knew it I was at a stop where I just had to get off. For a transit nerd like myself, Grand Central Station is like a great cathedral. The edifice is large and prominent, and because of its place standing in the middle of Park Avenue it is visible from blocks and blocks away.

The facade is so wide I had to make a panorama.

But that's part of the beauty of Grand Central - everything is enormous. It's all about the sense of scale, from the towering windows to the high, broad arched ceiling, everything is meant to bring a sense of openness to the traveler that frankly is lacking from modern transit facilities. Just look at what happened to Penn Station. However, unlike its cross town sister, Grand Central has handled the decline of intercity rail well, becoming a hub for subway traffic and commuter rail - and actually doing a pretty good job of it, too. Commuters crisscross the floor of the main hall at all hours of the day, and really it's just a fantastic place to sit back and watch the world go by.

But there was no time to loiter around - I started out on East 2nd Street, as I exited Grand Central I found myself only at 42nd. With plenty of traveling left to do, I set off west towards the center of the island. A long block later (Manhattan's blocks are rectangular, with the east-west direction about four times longer than the north-south one, at 1/5 mile versus 1/20 mile), I found myself crossing Fifth Avenue, and snapped this picture facing north. The road is perfectly straight and almost completely flat until it dumps into the East River at 143rd Street, 101 blocks to the north (that's 5 miles for those of you playing along at home), interrupted only by a couple of rotary intersections and a park with a swimming pool up in Harlem.

It really is a like being in an urban canyon.

The Avenue of the Americas

I continued east, eventually reaching Rockefeller Plaza. Just like with all good touristy attractions, everything there was tremendously expensive, so I passed on doing iconic things like visiting the skating rink or Top of the Rock. I did, however, get to see Lutz from 30 Rock standing around outside the front doors in a big cordoned-off area, so I'll have to keep an eye out to see if that scene pops up in a future show.

On my way out of Rockefeller Plaza, I swung by Radio City Music Hall before heading north down Sixth Avenue. Eventually, I reached 56th Street - Central Park South, complete with fancy hotels and things - and entered Central Park.

Central Park

Compared to the asphalt flatness of Manhattan, Central Park is quite a welcome shock. Trees abound, wildlife (albeit a limited selection) bounds around, and rock outcroppings rise up out of the earth as the many walking paths swoop around from ballfield to lake to meadow. As you get further into the park, traffic noise dwindles and a sense of tranquility envelops you, only broken by the occasional oddly echoy outdoor skating rink or the occasional sunken traverse roads that cross the park every ten blocks or so.

Not only is the view from this lake
awesome, it also brings the
number of places I've visited in
Where the Hell is Matt? up to six.

I continued north through the park passing several noteworthy landmarks with remarkably nondescript names, like The Mall and The Lake. The best part of being in the park is when you get to one of the many big open spaces and you get to look out over a serene pond or leafy trees... only to see an impressive line of tall buildings off in the distance. It's a truly fantastic effect to look at.

Eventually, I got up to the Central Park Reservoir, which continues the effect to an even greater degree because of the sheer expanse of the pond itself - it covers 106 acres and holds over a million gallons of water - and the resulting fact that you can see such a large area of Manhattan from its shores.

They don't even use the reservoir for drinking water anymore.

The Guggenheim

The parking situation and traffic lights
really aren't set up to let you
photograph the museum.

I finally reached my turn when I got to 90th Street in order to go and see the Guggenheim Museum. Even though I'd seen it countless times in books, I figured that as long as I'd traveled 90 streets north of my uncle's apartment, I might as well stop to see some of the Wright stuff.

Even though the museum is crazy expensive - like everything touristy - they have no restrictions about coming in and visiting the gift shop. Luckily enough for me, the gift shop is right off of the atrium... which was really all I'd wanted to see anyway.

By this point, I was beginning to realize just how silly my plan to see everything in Manhattan really was. It was practically noon, I'd agreed to meet my uncle for lunch, and I was about 65 blocks away from his work. So naturally I went to see the United Nations.

The UN

This required hopping on the subway again, riding back to Grand Central (Grand Central? Oh boy!) and then making my way 4 long blocks east to the appropriately-named East River. Unfortunately by this point it was really cloudy and the lighting conditions were bad and the building was too wide to photograph from the island side of the building and plus it was undergoing renovations anyway because apparently diplomats don't like windows that leak when it rains... so this is the only halfway decent picture I got.

And then by this point it was 12:45 and I hadn't even bothered to call my uncle yet. Oops. So after setting a plan (I'd meet him at his work on E 25th), I began consulting the bus and subway maps and timetables to pick the quickest mode to get there. The conclusion? Unless I really wanted to ride a bus (or to test out Bus Rapid Transit) it would just be quicker to walk the 20 blocks.

It was a pretty good decision, I think, except for the really frustrating signal timing. The light would turn green, you'd start heading south, and right before you got to the next cross street the light would turn red again. It just so happens that at 4 mph, it takes 45 seconds to walk 1/20 of a mile... and there was 40 seconds of green time in that direction.

Madison Square Park, Hold the Gardens

So slim! So sexy!

Anyway, for lunch we had some pretty fantastic Indian cuisine, but before long it was time to set off again on foot. My uncle's office is near Madison Square Park (which is really nowhere close to the present-day Madison Square Garden), which is bounded on one corner by the intersection of 23rd Street, Fifth Avenue, and Broadway - the home of one of my favorite structures, the Flatiron Building.

Built in 1902, the Flatiron was one of the tallest office buildings in the world when completed, and it was the first true skyscraper in New York to be constructed with a steel frame. However, the thing that does it for me is the shape. Set on a curious triangular block, the building's longest side is only 190', the offices at the point are only six feet wide. It's like a wedge driving northwards towards Midtown, carving Broadway out of Fifth Avenue.

Another neat thing about Broadway at Madison Square is that the city has decided to cut down on traffic on Broadway and improve pedestrian safety by entirely removing cars from several sections of Broadway. In fact, in the picture above, I'm actually standing in the middle of Broadway, except planters and tables have been added to severely cut down through traffic by decreasing capacity. Although this sounds like a bad thing, it actually improves flow by reducing the volume of traffic crossing Fifth and reducing conflict between vehicles and pedestrians. A few bike lanes still traverse this section of the square, but large swaths of roadway are now available for seating and recreation.

Miracle on 34th Street

After admiring the innovative traffic developments, I followed the lead of the Flatiron Building and headed north. A short hop on the N train put me squarely in the heart of Midtown in Herald Square at 34th Street and Sixth Avenue. This sight greeted me as I climbed out of the station:

That's something interesting to point out: you have to use stairs everywhere you go in Manhattan. For someone whose subway experiences are mostly limited to the Washington Metro, the lack of escalators in other cities' transit systems is most curious. However, it makes sense considering these older systems like New York, London, and Boston were built during a time period where the government could really tear up a street to put in a subway line using cut-and-cover methods. Subways built in this way are usually a lot shallower, and often it is only 30 or 40 steps to the surface. Nowadays, citizens are more involved in the construction of new transit systems through federally-mandated citizen comment periods, and so the Metro - designed during Johnson's Great Society programs of the late 1960s - was built deeper underground using submerged tunnel boring methods, hence the escalators.

However, the real reason why I stopped at 34th Street wasn't to visit the Empire State (I did that when I was six), it was to visit 34th's other famous occupant, Macy's.

You can see more of the pedestrian conversion in front of
Macy's - I'm standing in the middle of Broadway here.

I'm nerding out right here.

However, I wasn't here to shop - I was here to sightsee. I had just recently completed my master's thesis work on pedestrian flow on escalators, and I wanted to see something I had only ever read about: wooden escalators. All four escalators between the main floor and the basement inside of Macy's are the original wooden escalators that were installed in 1927.

Get With the Times Square

From Herald Square I continued north along Broadway. As the block numbers increased, so did the showiness of the storefronts and the audacity of the advertisements. This could mean only one thing: Times Square approaches.

Times Square was crazy busy. Even with the new street enhancements like wider sidewalks, bike lanes, and the extra space that resulted from closing Broadway for five blocks, pedestrians absolutely covered every inch of sidewalk. People piled up at cross streets waiting for traffic to clear, and when the light finally turned green two walls of people twenty wide would surge towards each other like a bizarre game of Red Rover.

As I passed through Times Square, I popped down a couple of sidestreets and into a couple of stores just to see what all the craziness was all about. I saw the front of that ill-fated Spider Man musical, and I even got a chance to pop into the flagship Toys-backwards-R-Us store. They had legos!

However, the real amazing thing about Times Square is the billboards. There are all kinds of spastic electronic displays, ranging from tasteful landscape scenes in car commercials with lifesize cars hanging from the sides of buildings to garish seizure-inducing flashing monstrosities. It really is absolutely mad what these people come up with. Perhaps my favorite one was the interactive billboard for some beauty product. The board was hooked up to a camera pointed at the square, and every few minutes something funny would happen to the people down on the street displayed in the live feed, like random people catching on "fire" or the street turning into a whirlpool and everybody getting sucked away or something. But the billboard has a more notable feature, and that because it is effectively a giant mirror it is the only picture of me that I took during the entire six day trip. You can see me in the red jacket (it was kind of cold) on the blue background of the street (blue means "pedestrian zone").

Watch out Peter! That giant digital lady is going to smush you!

It tries so hard!
It doesn't even know it's been replaced!

Another cool feature in Times Square was the visitor's center that opened last year an an old 20s-era theater. Granted, it's mostly an excuse to sell tickets to Broadway shows, but they do have a couple of cool exhibits like highlights from famous Broadway shows playing on a loop on a large screen in the old proscenium arch or historic (and g-rated) peep-show booths from the seedier days of Times Square. My favorite part was the big Waterford Crystal Ball from New Year's Eve 2007 (the 100th anniversary of the ball drop), which went through its usual color show and counted down to midnight every 15 minutes like it was still the star of the show.

North on Broadway

Continuing north, still by foot, I reached the Ed Sullivan Theater (where they film The Late Show with David Letterman), Columbus Circle (not that picture friendly), and finally Lincoln Center all the way up at 65th Street. The plays there were really expensive, but I was more visiting because of its featured role in films like The (original) Producers and Ghostbusters.

Did you see Black Swan? That was here.

Financial District

I then boarded a train again and dived back down south to catch a few more sights before the evening rush began. I stopped by the new construction on One World Trade Center, wound my way around the waterfront behind the World Financial Center, and checked out some of the winding streets that characterize the old-town feel of the financial district in general.

On my way back towards the center of the island after stopping along the Hudson, I couldn't resist poking my head into the WTC PATH Station ("Port Authority Trans-Hudson", the commuter rail that goes to New Jersey), mainly because it is home to one of the highest-capacity escalator banks in the world. During peak rush periods, six of the eight escalators in "PATH Hill" are switched to the same direction, allowing people to enter the station at the rate of 38,000 people per hour. Granted, there are only 40,000 people that use the station per day (and that counts both directions), but given how quickly the financial district in Richmond clears out I get the idea that most of that traffic happens in a pretty short window.

In fact, there's a 35-second scene in the fantastic documentary Koyaanisqatsi that features the pre-9/11 WTC PATH station and its escalators showing just how busy the escalator bank can be as traffic flow swells and ebbs as trains arrive.

Would you believe this is only a temporary station
until they finish the real one in 2014?

On my way out of the financial district I popped down Wall Street just as 5:00 struck, and all of the sudden it seemed like EVERY PERSON IN THE WORLD was rushing towards me. I retreated out of the way up some steps, and in what could only have been a couple of minutes the crowd completely vanished and the place became practically a dead zone. As I walked back out onto the street, I found out that the stairs that had offered me shelter were the iconic Federal Hall, which served as the first capitol building in the United States.

After a bit of searching, I found the New York Stock Exchange practically across the street. I hadn't noticed it there because I was expecting it to be sporting the oversized American flag it seems to have in most pictures these days instead of a large advertisement featuring Tyra Banks, which kind of ruined the stuffy capitalist atmosphere of the place.

Civic Center

Given the late hour, I started to make my way back towards my uncle's apartment. I walked north, eventually reaching the Civic Center, home to New York City Hall and the far more imposing Manhattan Municipal Building.

It's big, AND it was featured in Ghostbusters!

Right across the way is the base of the Brooklyn Bridge. Because of how high above the water it is, the base of the bridge is actually over 1/3 of a mile away from the river, which make for an interesting set of loopy roadways in order to connect the bridge to all the important streets it bypassed because of the elevation difference. In fact, from where I'm standing in the picture below I'd only have to walk one block to the other side of city hall before I'd be closer to the Hudson than the East River. Manhattan really is a remarkably compact place.

Foley Square is home to the New
York County Supreme Court...
from Law & Order!

I only had to go one block further north into Foley Square before I could catch one of the green line trains north to a station near my uncle's apartment. It was still about a mile of walking between that station and his place, but along the way I got to cross Bowery and Houston, and across the intersection there was a fantastic view of the Empire State Building some two miles to the north.

The End of the Tour... or is it?

And so as I climbed the four stories up to my uncle's apartment, it became pretty obvious that I was in no state to drive a further six hours to Richmond. And so as soon as he offered to let me stay another night, I readily accepted and we hatched a plan to go see a few more sights.

First, we hailed a cab (a cab!) on the corner outside his place and headed west down Houston towards Chelsea and the Meatpacking District to see a place I'd only ever read about, the High Line!

The High Line

Most cities these days have some kind of linear park - either a walking trail, or a bike path on a converted railroad bed, or something that can be used for exercise or recreation. However, a dense borough like Manhattan doesn't really have the kind of space to put in one of these... at least not ordinarily. However, a unique opportunity existed in this part of town. The historic meatpacking industry needed a lot of freight shipments to bring in raw meat and process it into usable products, and much of this was done by rail. As street traffic increased, the railroads eventually agreed to fund a tremendously expensive elevated rail trestle to bypass over 100 at-grade rail crossings and expedite shipping. Over the years, the decline of the meatpacking industry in Manhattan proper meant that rail shipments effectively ceased, and the trestle fell into disrepair and became overgrown with vegetation and graffiti. Generally, it was a nuisance and an eyesore, and property owners around the trestle lobbied for its demolition.

However, in the last five years, the city and private investors have scraped together funding to redevelop the trestle from its original function as the carrier of several rail tracks into a linear park. If you think about it, a linear park really is the perfect use for an old trestle - it's physically isolated from the street network so it is safer for its users while also providing a continuous ribbon of pathway. It's also quieter and because of the controlled access points at the occasional stairwell or elevator, it is easier to lock up at night to discourage misuse.

They selected vegetation to mimic what grew
naturally during its abandoned phase.

The High Line has become very popular in the neighborhood. It gives its users an escape from the harshness of their formerly industrial neighborhood, with tasteful landscaping and benches of varying architectural themes. In fact, many of the groups who called for its demolition only a few years ago are now enjoying higher property values as a result of having a park right outside their door. Heck, the trestle even cuts through buildings in a few places where the trains used to be able to unload, so it is great that they were able to keep those features.

There are also a few more quirky features, like this ampitheater-style seating area with glass windows that looks out north along Tenth Avenue (right). I could sit there and watch the traffic go by all day. It kind of makes me wonder what it would look like if Tenth Avenue were to freeze out.

The High Line isn't anywhere close to finished yet - only about 1/3 of it is open to the public - so after only 9 blocks (about half a mile) we descended down and went to dinner. Let me tell you, food is EXPENSIVE in Manhattan.

SoHo, Little Italy, and Chinatown

On the way back, we were again faced with a mode choice dilemma. My uncle insists that there is no good way to travel east-west across Manhattan (except for maybe buses, and we didn't have a bus schedule), so we decided to walk back to his place. Turned out to be a good choice because it allowed us to wander through some of Manhattan's older residential neighborhoods.

Unlike most of northern Manhattan, this region's streets are not at the standard 29 degree tilt, and in fact a few of them even have CURVES, what a crazy concept. We zigzagged our way southeast through NYU and eventually came upon Washington Square Park, home to the appropriately named Washington Square Arch, which has been featured in more moves than I care to name.

I snapped this photo of the arch and Fifth Avenue stretching out north beyond, and it was only after I got home to Richmond and was sorting through my photos that I realized that the Empire State Building had snuck into the background and photobombed me.

The Empire State is ALWAYS WATCHING YOU.

Gmap-Pedometer.com

It certainly felt like I'd walked a long way, but without a pedometer to track my steps I really couldn't be sure how far I'd traveled. Fortunately, there are many websites like the Gmap Pedometer to let you figure that kind of thing out in a much easier way than adding a bunch of destinations into Google Maps. Plus, it lets you use terrain data to create profile views of your route as well... although in Manhattan that view would be quite boring.

According to my calculations, all in all I walked 22.3 miles while in Manhattan. Ouch. 22 miles on dirt is uncomfortable, but pavement is much less forgiving. I was glad to be sitting down for most of the next day.

Anyway, I took the resulting maps and stitched them together into the large map below, and added in labels highlighting the various landmarks I visited on my travels. Walking is shown in the red lines, and other modes of transport are shown in dashed lines and labeled with the mode of travel or train number. My uncle's apartment is near the bottom in the center, and trips are numbered in order of when I took them. The numbers in the red bubbles are mileage for that particular leg of the trip.

I would not recommend this agenda to visitors. Click to enhance.

In our next (and hopefully final) installment of the Boston Trip, Peter drives the last six hours to Richmond. On the way, he gets carried away discussing quite a number of controversial transportation topics, but we'll cut that stuff out. That guy is a real windbag, as you've clearly just seen.

Boston Trip Part 6: Escape to New York

As Monday progressed, temperatures rose and the precipitation stopped just as I entered Westchester County in New York state. Since I was stying with my my uncle in Manhattan overnight and I had a few hours to spare before he finished up with his work commitments, I decided to see a few sights on my way in.

My first detour involved dipping south through Queens. My goal was to visit the 1964 World's Fair site at Flushing Meadows. Most of the pavilions have been removed from the site, and some of the land has been annexed to build structures like Shea Stadium (and now Citi Field) or Arthur Ashe Stadium and the rest of the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, but a few really cool structures remain that make up the core of what is now Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

It took a while to get there, most notably because I didn't know where the actual entrance of the park was located around the 1200-acre site. I wound up looping around for about twenty minutes between that and my lack of familiarity with the highway and surface street network. However, because of the fact that I had been driving for several hours, it is perhaps appropriate that the first stop I made once arriving at Flushing Meadows (and surprisingly finding free parking) was at a restroom, and it was even more coincidental that the toilet was located on the former "Avenue of Transportation."

The restroom was located near
the ballfields on the old World
Fair's Avenue of Transportation.

I walked past some baseball fields, across one of the highways that cuts through the park that I'd just driven on, and found my way to the park's most famous landmarks, the Unisphere and the New York Pavilion. Sure, it was cloudy, and sure, the Unisphere's fountain was drained for the winter, and sure, the New York Pavilion was closed for renovation - but man, those things were enormous and spectacular to see.

Check out that skateboarder just to the right of the
Unisphere's base for a sense of scale. That thing is HUGE.

After viewing the main attractions, I returned to my car and continued south towards Brooklyn. I questioned the GPS when it took me down some crazy yet impressive surface streets - driver behavior and aggressiveness when presented with 5 lanes of travel in each direction in addition to driveways and intersections for several miles is a sight to behold - but after consulting with my book map at a red light it really seemed to be the best choice. The road took me right along the shore of Jamaica Bay and down towards my next destination, Coney Island.

It was getting to be mid-afternoon, but since I'd skipped lunch I decided I needed to grab something to eat, and in my mind there was only one choice: Nathan's. I love hot dogs, and over the last few years I've grown all snobbish in that I almost exclusively eat all-beef hot dogs, and Nathan's brand are the cheapest ones I can find at my local store. Since I'm well aware that Nathan's started as a humble hot dog stand in Coney Island - they still host the world hot dog-eating competition there every July - I figured I'd make my way on down there.

At some point in my life I will come
back to Coney Island, if only to ride
The Cyclone.

The problem was that I had no idea where they were actually located. So I found my way down to Surf Avenue, the main drag right off the boardwalk, and drove until I found some amusement park relics from the heyday of the region. Right in between the old Parachute Jump and The Cyclone, perhaps the most famous roller coaster in the world. Since I love me some coasters, it's a shame that the park was closed for the season. And also that it cost $8 a ride, although considering that the ride is 84 years old and is still one of the fastest wooden coasters in the world, that's probably worth it. The ride's not that tall, but because it's so darn steep it still hits 60 mph in places. After snapping a few photos of the ride, I entered Nathan's and picked up a chili cheese dog.

Honestly? Packaged Nathan's hot dogs from my local grocery store are better.

As I digested the greasy monstrosity, I took a brief stroll down the boardwalk back to my car. The weather could have been better.

The Coney Island boardwalk during the offseason is
one of the most depressing things I've ever seen.

It's much easier to take a picture from
your car when traffic is at a standstill.

By this point, I'd wasted enough time that I was in danger of having to drive across three boroughs during rush hour, so I got in my car and cruised around the southern edge of Brooklyn to get into Manhattan. New York's parkways are somewhat unusual like that in that many of the roads travel close to bodies of water. This is because many of them were built on new land since there was simply no available space other than putting in some new ground. It's really quite scenic from your car but more than a bit problematic for the landscape and for people to enjoy the shore. Again, we can thank Robert Moses for his emphasis on the driving experience over all other land uses.

Traffic was heavy but moving as I drove under the Verrazano Bridge and towards the Battery Tunnel. I had several options to cross the East River, including the tunnel, the Manhattan Bridge, and a few others, but to me there was but one option:

Brooklyn Bridge all the way.

I crossed the river on the fantastically storied Brooklyn Bridge, taking time to admire its gothic stay towers and its iron stiffening trusses and its curious but effective combination of suspended and stayed cables.

If you want to hear me gushing on and on about how completely awesome all the sights I saw on my 52 mile drive through The Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, including trips under the Verrazano Bridge, over the Brooklyn Bridge, and around and around Flushing Meadows, the latest entry in my Tales from the Road is exactly what you're looking for:

Eventually, I made it to my uncle's apartment in the East Village. We caught up a bit on conversation, walked around through the local park (there are over 1700 parks in New York City!) which was very nice and tasteful in the relatively temperate weather, and finally went out to dinner at a fancy ramen noodle place. I didn't even know those existed.

The kitchen at Momofuku Noodle Bar from our seats.

In the morning, I decided I would attempt the most ridiculously thorough tour of Manhattan ever completed in under 8 hours in a style reminiscent of of the grand city tours I completed on my European adventure over the summer, so it was time to turn in for the night.

But that story will be contained in Boston Trip Part 7: How to See Manhattan When You've Only Got 8 Hours, in which I walk 22 miles through the urban jungle to see every famous site I could think of.

Boston Trip Part 5: The Biggest Dig

The big story from Monday was the drive I made from Elaine and Brad's in Boston to my uncle's house in Manhattan. The highlight of that leg of the trip was definitely my journey through the Big Dig in Boston. The Boston Central Artery/Tunnel Project, as it's properly known, is the largest and most expensive transportation construction project ever undertaken in the United States, costing over $14 billion - and that's before we account for interest from the construction financing (another $8bn) - for a 3.5 mile tunnel through downtown, an awesome cable-stayed bridge, a 1.6 mile tunnel under the river, and a whole lot of highway ramps.

Boston was originally served by a six-lane elevated roadway called the Central Artery, which served the purpose of adding freeway capacity without disturbing the surface roadways just fine for decades. Unfortunately, given its proximity to buildings while traveling through downtown, there simply wasn't any room to expand to handle additional traffic. Plus, it was dirty, noisy, and generally a drag on the downtown environment, so it was decided that they should just put the whole thing underground in a project that came to be known as The Big Dig.

It took 17 years and three times the original cost estimate, but they got it done. Even though they only added one lane in each direction, the added highway ramps and untangling of the east-west through route has really done a lot to tame congestion. Before the project, there would often be standstill traffic on the Central Artery all day long, whereas now delays are restricted to a more typical rush hour scenario.

And all it took was $136.6 million per lane-mile of roadway. Yes, that is quite a lot - by contrast, your average interstate through an urban area costs somewhere on the order of $2.5 million to $7 million per lane. Ouch. But hey, now instead of that green steel-and-concrete monstrosity, there's a fantastic (if narrow) park running through downtown, complete with gathering and performing arts spaces.

Anyway, the final product certainly is a sight to behold, as you can see in yet another update from the road:

After leaving Boston, the weather took a bit of a sour turn, especially in contrast with the fantastic weekend weather. Even though most still bodies of water were still covered in ice, it had been clear, sunny, and relatively warm over the last couple of days.

There were also many frozen ponds and a smattering of winter weather along the way.

But in spite of some funky weather, I still made it to the border with New York, and that's where we'll pick up in Part 6: Escape to New York, in which I visit Queens and Brooklyn on my way into Manhattan.

                                                                                 

A lot of people have been asking about the setup I use to do the in-car videos. Well, since I don't have fancy suction cup mounts like they do on legit car shows, I have to make do with what I have. Fortunately, with a small amount of time and a bit of equipment it really doesn't take that much to position a camera at a specific location and direction in space. So I borrowed a working tripod and found a piece of wood, and with a little bit of duct tape I was in business. This probably won't reflect well on my sanity, but I even named the two camera positions:

In the front is George, named for George Frideric

HANDEL. He's on a tripod taped to the floor.

And Malcolm is in the back seat, named for

Malcom McDOWELL. You can probably guess

what he's attached to.

Boston Trip Part 4: Red Line to Braintree

My actual time in Boston went far too quickly. Between hanging around the house with Brad and Elaine, messing up our shoulders playing fake baseball on their new Wii, and going to social functions hosted by various professors and colleagues of Brad's, our time for sightseeing pretty much consisted of a few hours on Saturday. And so after spending a few hours trying to come up with a plan for the day, we finally decided to get out and not squander any more time sitting around on our computers.

Like the other trips we made during my last visit over the summer, we took the subway from the Porter station just down the street from their house in towards downtown. In addition to being part of Boston's awesome public transportation network - they have all six major types of transit: heavy rail (subways), light rail (trams), commuter rail (trains), buses, bus rapid transit (BRT), and ferries - Porter Square is noteworthy because as far as I can tell, it has one of the ten longest escalator banks in North America, and probably the second longest outside of the Washington Metro. That's nothing to sneeze at, because WMATA should have long escalators since it has 588 of them - 1.96% of all the escalators in the United States.

As you can probably tell, I've done a fair amount of reading on the subject.

Porter Square's longer escalator bank, leading down from ticketing to the inbound platform.
I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that I forgot to take a picture of this, but this image is from Wikimedia Commons.

However, perhaps my favorite part of traveling into Boston from Somerville is that you have to take the Red Line, and the trains traveling in that direction along that line are all listed as traveling in the direction of a region south of town called "Braintree." It sounds like a delightful place, mostly because this is all I can think of when I see the name:

And that's saying nothing of other endpoints along the various T lines like Alewife (apparently a type of fish) and Wonderland.

Anyway, we got off at Central Square and walked towards MIT. We ate at a small, oddly shaped grill called Miracle of Science. The coolest thing about the place was that they didn't have actual menus, instead you had to check out a big chalkboard with all their menu items and prices that was set up like the periodic table.

From there, we headed towards town through the MIT campus, eventually turning right and heading south along Massachusetts Avenue, across the Harvard Bridge (past all the Smoot markings!), and into... umm... whatever you call the area immediately southwest of downtown Boston. Is that still Boston? Anyway, compared to the crazy, snowy weather they'd been having so far this year, I was told that I should count myself lucky to have blue skies and temperatures above fifty.

We walked down Boylston Street...

Eventually reaching the Boston Public Library's main branch.

Pretty much the sole purpose of this visit had been to see their main reading room, Bates Hall. The room is fantastic, most notably for its 218' long, 42' wide, 50' high barrel vaulted ceiling and 120 identical green desk lamps. However, it felt really weird to be taking a picture of the room given just how eerily quiet it was considering just how many people were studying inside of it. Even the sound of my shutter seemed to be too much, as you can tell by the fact that I didn't retake the photo in spite of a blurry Brad.

On the way out, we saw a group of people protesting Muammar Gaddafi's rule of Libya. I fully expected him to be out of power by the time I got around to posting this entry, but it's been ten days and there's been no change.

Oh, and we on the way back we stopped at a bar to watch the VT-Duke game in the ACC Tournament, but I won't go into that experience except to say that we had some truly epic loaded fries at the restaurant.

And that mostly covers the sightseeing in Boston. On Sunday we went to a fancy brunch and then dug out some beanbags and played cornhole in their driveway and just generally hung out before it was time for me to pack up and get ready to head south on the next leg of my journey.

Next up will be Boston Trip Part 5: The Biggest Dig, in which you learn more than you ever wanted to know about America's most expensive highway project. Or, more properly, you get to watch me be a big transportation fanboy and just gawk at the bridges and the tunnels and the overpasses and the weaving sections and the signage and the lane markings all the way through Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Boston Trip Part 3: The Journey to the Land of Potholes

I was originally going to call this post The Journey to the Land of Sports Teams of which I Am Not a Fan, but I decided that I didn't really have anything against the Giants, Nets, Bruins, or Mets, so that name would be unfair.

There had been a bit of concern over parking my car in South Philly overnight, but between the wind and the driving rain we figured that nobody was going to try to steal a car, much less the random cardboard boxes inside one. Still, I was relieved to find that it was still there in the morning for the 6-hour drive to Boston.

City Hall in Philadelphia

The first thing you notice about highway driving once you get past DC is that there are a whole lot of toll roads. Fortunately, the facilities themselves are generally well-maintained, even if the view isn't much to write home about.

"Visit scenic New Jersey!"

On the New Jersey Turnpike, things start out well enough, but as you approach New York City the exit tolls get higher and higher and the landscape turns much more barren and industrial. It's a bit like Delaware in that regard. However, you do get a pretty nice view of some of the fantastic bridges that the New York area is known for, and you pass within a few hundred yards of New Meadowlands. I was surprised to see that in addition to the stadium and a hotel, there was a large entertainment complex complete with one of those fancy indoor ski slopes. Seriously, people, this isn't Dubai - you're only 200 miles from Vermont ski country.

Before leaving the state, however, I took advantage of the uniformly low gas prices ($3.39 at all motorway service areas) and made a stop for lunch.

The Burger King at the rest stop was well stocked with the most important of condiments.

Mr. Lombardi would be proud.

After having just paid $6.95 (because that's an easy toll to collect) to exit the Turnpike, the Port Authority kindly asked me to fork over another $8 to cross the George Washington Bridge. I gladly paid it, however, because it's the only way to: 1) drive through the New Jersey Palisades, a really cool rock formation on the Hudson,

2) drive across the GW Bridge, which just looks cool

and 3) drive along the Trans-Manhattan and Cross-Bronx Expressways, which are both fantastic and terrible at the same time. (The explanation why comes after yet another report from the road...)

They're fantastic in that they're only 1.4 and 6.5 miles long, respectively, but they're some of the most heavily traveled miles of interstate in the whole country. And most of the time, they work pretty well. The really admirable thing, though, is the road maintenance. Since the roads are so busy at all hours of the day, it's next to impossible to shut down even a single lane to do pavement work. The result is tremendous strain on the asphalt, and although there are a lot of potholes it's amazing there aren't more considering the 145,000 vehicles that cross it every day. By comparison, although the Springfield Interchange near DC is even busier (430,000 cars per day), Springfield has 24 lanes at it's widest point, whereas the Cross-Bronx only has six.

Plus, if you like statistics alone, the most expensive mile of surface highway ever built was on the Cross-Bronx. It cost $40,000,000 to construct... in 1964. That's worth about $277 million today.

The downside to the project was that Robert Moses conceived of the two freeways without much if any concern for the residents of the areas in which the highway was inserted. Although he picked a very direct route through quite cheap land, the properties that were reclaimed to build the road were home to well-established communities which were subsequently ripped violently apart by a noisy, dirty traffic-drawing six-lane interstate.

In many ways, it was the Cross-Bronx that singlehandedly brought about changes to the way major highway projects are planned in this country. Through his handling of the project from conception to completion people came to see Moses as someone who was more concerned with his vision and his power than on the needs of the area. He did a lot of good things for New York in his time as an urban planner (although he was never elected, merely selected as the head of various highway/toll authorities), from developing riverside parks and helping fund construction projects through the Great Depression, but in hindsight his blind favoritism towards the automobile in an area as densely populated as New York City can be seen as a stubborn and ultimately unsustainable position.

Stay tuned for Part Four: Red Line to Braintree, in which I actually travel around in Boston.

Boston Trip Part 2: The First Step's a Doozy

On Thursday, I left for the Boston trip. Because of how things fell into place with regards to my job search, I wound up stopping over for a few hours in the DC area to interview with a transportation consulting firm. They do work with new developments and master plans for existing public complexes like universities and commercial developments. The interview went well, but getting to DC was a pain between the rain and the traffic. Congestion was quite bad - I passed a Nissan coupe that had flipped and was lying on its roof - but the people at the office were very understanding of traffic-related delays.

However, after the later parts of the interview (they had me visit two of their offices to meet more people), I still had several hundred miles to go before I could sleep for the night. Specifically, I had to make it the 47 miles to Elaine's family's house to pick up their wedding presents. As it turned out, that was the hard part. Over the course of the 27 miles I was on the Beltway, I averaged only 18 mph. It was unfortunate.

However, it gave me some time to talk more about my experiences in this, the first installment of my Tales from the Road.

Is it obvious that I've watched far too much Top Gear to want to put cameras in my car?

After dark, I continued to Philadelphia, with some detours due to high water near Elaine's house, continued slow traffic because of the rain, and a hair-raising trip across the Key Bridge in Baltimore due to the strong crosswinds (about 38 mph at the time I crossed).

"FSKM2" stands for "Francis Scott Key Bridge Marker #2", so that speed doesn't even account for the fact that the road is 190' in the air.

 It was a VERY exciting trip, but not terribly photogenic. This is a picture from flat, flat Delaware just after I was very surprised to find myself passing an enormous container ship about 400 yards to the right of my car.

Eventually, I reached the home of my cousin Vic, much later than I'd originally planned. After a brief bit of relaxation, I headed to bed in advance for the 6 hour trip across New England... coming up in Part 3: The Journey to the Land of Sports Teams for which I Do Not Care.

Boston Trip Part 1: Mission Impossible

In the few months since I last posted a blog entry, I've taken more classes, taught more students, started and finished my thesis, and gone on a couple of pretty epic expeditions including visiting Jeremy in Wisconsin and visiting Julia in France. However, since I don't yet have a job my days pretty much consist of a whole lot of nothing.

HOWEVER, I've recently decided to go visit my friend and former roommate Brad up in Boston. The complication is that I'll be making a stop in Maryland along the way. My mission is to bring them the rest of their wedding presents from back in January, which they had to leave behind because of the flight arrangements with their honeymoon. 

Anyway, here's how Brad charged me with this assignment... or at least how it went down in my mind.