Boston Transportation Planning Review

[
Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge over the Charles River, in early phases of construction.]

Boston Transportation Planning Review (BTPR) is a transportation planning program for metropolitan Boston, United States which was responsible for analyzing and re-designing the entire area-wide transit and highway system in the 1970s. The major contractors involved were Alan M. Voorhees Company (Virginia), project manager; Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (New York), architect; ESL Incorporated (California), air quality and acoustics. The program had close guidance from the national Transportation Research Board (TRB), a division of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences [Toby Pearlstein, "Transportation planning in the Boston metropolitan area, 1930-1982", Chicago, Ill. : CPL Bibliographies, 1983.53 p. CPL bibliography ; no. 128] . The first director of the program reporting to the Governor was Alan Altshuler; the project manager was Walter Hansen.

Comprehensive re-evaluation of areawide transportation plans was a major theme in the last quarter of the twentieth century for large U.S. cities. The U.S. Department of Transportation has said "the prototype for these reevaluations was the Boston Transportation Planning Review" [http://tmip.fhwa.dot.gov/clearinghouse/docs/utp/ch6.stm] . Scope of the BTPR studies included evaluation and upgrading of all four MBTA mass transit rail lines and examination of every major highway and arterial project in the region.

Major elements

The following exemplify some of the principal study elements of the Boston Transportation Planning Review:
* Conceptual design of the Orange Line, mass transit rail service to the south and west.
* Expansion plans for the Red Line Braintree and Northwest extensions.
* Moratorium on expressway construction inside of Route 128 for the decade.
* First concept of depressing the Central Artery [Boston Transportation Planning Review with Alan M. Voorhees & Assoc., "Central Artery", Prepared for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, EOTC, DPW, and MBTA, November 1972] [Boston Redevelopment Authority, "Central Artery Depression: A Preliminary Feasibility Study, Final Draft", 1975] , leading to the Big Dig [Alan Altshuler and David Luberoff, Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2003). ISBN 0-8157-0129-2] .
* Upgrading of Route 1A from Boston to Salem.

Technologies applied

The following major technologies were utilized in the BTPR:
*Critical path work element diagrams to assist project management (Voorhees)
*Citywide traffic flow analysis including intersection level of service (Voorhees)
*Urban design of all physical structures and highway geometrics including neighborhood visual impacts (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill)
*Hydrology Impact Analysis to surface waters and groundwater affected by transit and roadway construction.
*Air quality and noise contour maps for all transportation alternatives [C.Michael Hogan, Richard Venti, Leda Patmore and Harry Seidman, "Air quality and community noise contour maps for metropolitan Boston", ESL Inc. prepared for BTPR, (1973)] (ESL)
*Wildlife and vegetation impact analysis for all alternatives [Gackenheimer, R., "Transportation Planning as Response to Controversey: The Boston Case", Cambridge: MIT Press (1976)] .

References

ee also

*Megaproject
*Public transport
*http://www.theurbanring.com/

External links

* [http://pubsindex.trb.org/document/view/default.asp?lbid=132921 BTPR Mission Statement]
* [http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/people/faculty/altshuler/cv.html Profile of first BTPR dierector]