The Massachusetts Department of Transportation will conduct a pilot program to determine the feasibility of opening up the South Boston Bypass Road, a throughway that easily connects South Boston proper to the Waterfront.
The road will provide a shortcut of sorts for commuters to the Innovation District, an area so in need of transportation upgrades that multiple agencies and organizations came together to make sweeping suggestions.
Beginning as early as this spring, MassDOT will allow for public use of the road in the northbound direction only between the hours of 6 a.m. and 10 a.m. on weekdays. Outside of those hours, the road will be strictly for commercial use only.
“Pending approval, we could begin a six-month pilot in March,” confirmed Mike Verseckes, spokesperson for MassDOT.
He noted further that the pilot will only take place during those hours in the northbound direction because “there is not enough existing highway capacity at Frontage Road southbound, and the merge onto I-93 South from the South Bay interchange is already at or over capacity.”
According to the Federal Highway Administration, which funded the road’s construction to help funnel traffic during the Big Dig, the driving restriction for everything except commercial vehicles was enacted to “mitigate noise and emissions by siphoning truck traffic from I-93 through an industrial edge of South Boston.”
Along with the aforementioned transportation plan, a number of steps have been taken to ease the traffic and accompanying road rage of drivers in the Innovation District.
In 2013, real-time drive-to-destination signs were installed at Sleeper Street, just before Seaport Boulevard driving from Northern Avenue; East Service Road, just before Seaport Boulevard driving from Congress Street; and Seaport Boulevard, inbound at Congress Street.
In November 2014, the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics tweaked maximum metered street parking space hours to keep certain areas from being backed by people scouring for spots.
When MassDOT closed the Callahan Tunnel in early 2014, they temporarily opened up the Bypass Road to regular traffic due to construction. When it was reopened, the Boston Globe reported that over a three day period MassDOT determined that “an average of about 6,100 vehicles used the road daily, almost triple the number when it was restricted to commercial vehicles.”
More specifically, “passenger cars made up 84.5 percent of the traffic, trucks 13.6 percent, and buses 1.9 percent” of traffic during that time.
