Community meeting on Kensington Underpass renovations, June 20th, 6:30 pm

[mem_winterhill]

Via Reddit: https://redd.it/8qpk33

Join East Somerville Main Streets on Wednesday, June 20th, to view and contribute to plans for renovating the Kensington Underpass, made by ESMS in collaboration with Representative Michael Connolly, Alderman Matthew McLaughlin, and Head of Neighborways and Tufts faculty member Mark Chase.

 

The June 20th community meeting will be held at 6:30 pm at the Community Assembly Room, 50 Middlesex Ave., Somerville (behind the Style Cafe).

I know this isn't quite on the Hill, but it's close and might be of interest to some of the neighbors.

Comments

[kelkyag]

Indeed it does. Thank you!

[mem_winterhill]

So I went to this to see where it stands. And I don't walk through there often, so I took a look again at the site. What a crappy, awful place. Although one side now has a red light to cross, the other side (closer to Assembly) does not. It's just a flashing yellow and hope someone stops. Ugh.

Theresa of East Somerville Main Streets gave the long history of trying to get something done here. This story of long-term persistence of a community group is impressive and daunting. But they finally seem to be close to real funding and opportunity there.

A professor who does traffic engineering at Tufts spoke about his students who looked at this dreadful spot. They have some ideas to do simple "tactical design" I think it was called. This is using some simple things like paint and planters to impact the space and flow. They looked at the crossings and saw that they are crazy wide for the 2 lanes they need there. So you can narrow the lanes a lot and the pedestrians and cyclists have to spend less time in open street. This immediately impacts safety for the better.

Longer term you can put an island there for splitting the walk even more with a safe spot to break up the crossing. But this is infrastructure-change level and will take longer.

There is funding now for an actual red light to cross on that Assembly side. Waiting a bit of final Eversource work to finish up nearby, I think was the barrier according to Brad Rawson from the city.

The underpass area itself can get paint and murals and lighting. Again, it appears that some funding is looming for this, based on some adjacent developments at Assembly that are giving $$ to the city to help with improvements. So the community wants to influence this to reflect community history and composition, and have art to reflect that.

Matt McLaughlin also talked about some funding coming to investigate noise and pollution reducing panels and options.

People talked about being unsafe there (especially women) and Matt talked about also ensuring there is lighting, cameras perhaps, safety call boxes, and that sort of thing.

But the site should really not be used for people in any long-term things like workouts or skateboarding or whatever. The pollution there is legit dangerous and moving people through the space quickly is really the current goal. When we all drive EVs, maybe that will change. But for now, it's really just toxic.

Moving the stupid salt piles back some will also help. (This is DOT salt, so we can't decide on it). But the DOT has been helpful with some aspects of this, including one DOT guy at the meeting who is also one of our neighbors. So there is some support there.

So it appears that there will be both safety and aethetics changes here that will improve the crossing and personal safety, as well ask making it look less scary. Some will be short term things that can be implemented quickly, others will come a bit further out. But it did seem like actual progress on this.