The “Park”ways We Need
Guest Blog by Ellery Klein | April 5, 2022
“To protect, promote and enhance our common wealth of natural, cultural and
recreational resources for the well-being of all.” – DCR Mission Statement
In 1968, the Cheonggye Creek in Seoul, Korea met its end. It was covered by an elevated freeway and its destruction labeled as “progress,” a sacrifice to the relentless pressure from the automobile industry.
But by the late ‘90’s, noise and particulate pollution was sky-high in the area surrounding the freeway’s speeding cars. Frustrated residents asked a radical question: does this highway even need to be here? In 2001, voters elected Mayor Lee Myung-bak to take it down. By 2005, the highway was dismantled. A nine-kilometer-long artificial creek now runs through the city. Quality of life is immensely better for residents. More than a half-million tourists visit the creek each year. Temperatures are 3.3 degrees lower in the summer. Rainwater that could flood streets instead flows out safely via the stream. The city of Seoul has removed fifteen more freeways. In MA, Boston took down the elevated Central Artery and created new public open space. Other American cities like Rochester, NY and Detroit, MI are also looking into removing the highways that left massive scars dividing their communities.
Here in our Commonwealth, a unique network of roads known as the DCR Parkway System crisscrosses eastern Massachusetts. Between 1893 and 1956, these parkways were designed by the Metropolitan Parks Commission to be “carriage roads.” These leisurely, attractive paths linked a crowded city with the verdant green spaces beyond it. By the 1920s, the automobile had already begun to exert pressure on this system. Initially, the automobile was viewed by many as a dangerous intruder. Once-relaxed Sunday walks and children’s play became fraught with danger. Speeding cars wreaked destruction on the same verdant spaces their drivers hoped to enjoy. In 1929, New Jersey writer Alfred Payson Terhune* wrote,
“pitiful little wayside corpses mark the tearing passage of the twentieth-century juggernaut….Where once there were miles of flowery dogwood and mountain laurel and field blossoms bordering the road, there are now desolation and the stumps of wrenched-off branches and uprooted sod.”
It’s easy to be inured to the systems we have inherited. Terhune’s words should remind us what we’ve lost by ceding almost every inch of space to the automobile industry.
In the present day, DCR parkways often connect vehicles to other communities and towns- but divide these same communities from within, at the expense of the most vulnerable road users. The larger parks, trails and quiet spaces the parkways once linked to the city to are often accessible only to owners of automobiles.
In the past, a vast network of streetcars brought people to the parks outside Boston. Nowadays, public transit is lacking. Walking and cycling is unenjoyable and often highly dangerous along these roads. Seas of green space in and around Boston that could be oases of life in the city, are instead empty spaces crisscrossed by speeding cars and an ever-present sense of danger. School children, bus commuters, walkers and cyclists who need to cross a parkway by their homes often risk their lives, or are forced to wait after pressing a “beg button”. DCR Parkways, far from being routes that restore, are busy streets that offer daily fear and stress to those that need to use or cross them.
In 2007, the DCR Historic Parkway Preservation Treatment Guidelines asserted:
“A parkway is not a road, but a park with a road in it. Parkways are first and foremost recreational resources enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of users daily. The earliest parkways were developed to create “ribbons of green” to connect open space and to provide recreational travel ways within the parks and reservation system.”
When I mentioned this to a parent walking leader for the Safe Routes to School program, she laughed as vehicles sped by at deadly speeds of over 45 mph on Fellsway West. “Park? Where is the park?”
Writer Bill Bryson, in his 1998 book “A Walk in the Woods,” observed, “In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or proposition – either you ruthlessly subjugate it…or you deify it…Seldom would it occur to anyone on either side that people and nature could coexist to their mutual benefit.”
What if we decided that nature and restorative spaces should be part and parcel of where we live, work – and travel?
We don’t need to remove DCR parkways. We only need to transform them.
The DCR Master Plan, released last year, was a good start. We must push our legislators to fully support and fund it – and, most importantly, to push the DCR to reach further than these auto-centric plans. What if we asked: “How do we prioritize human-centered use of and travel through these spaces, and only then, accommodate vehicles?” Life in greater Boston could be transformed with a network of green spaces that are safe and welcoming – and in a changing climate, heat-reducing and water-absorbing.
The only things lacking to achieve the changes we need are imagination, and political will. The auto and fossil fuel industries fight hard to keep auto dominance the paradigm that rules our cities. Decades of underfunding has hampered the ability of the DCR to keep up with maintenance and accessibility for all. But the money is there, more than $10 billion in federal pandemic relief and infrastructure funds have been allocated for Massachusetts. A mile of federal highway costs between $8-$11 million dollars. We must say “no” to more and bigger highways, and press our leaders to spend this money instead on infrastructure that centers human beings.
While major road overhauls can take years and cost a lot, many changes can be made quickly and temporarily. Jersey barriers and bollards can be used for road diets and expanded bus, bike and pedestrian space. We also need to ensure DCR is funded properly to ensure routine winter maintenance that prioritizes, rather than neglects, transit, walking and biking options. As routes often crisscross jurisdictions, it’s also essential that we enable an ecosystem where state agencies work together, so that routes or snow plowing don’t just end inconveniently.
We must also commit to racial and class equity, and ensure that this isn’t just another wealth-oriented plan for gentrification and displacement. We must increase access to peace, safety and easy mobility for the 35 percent of Boston residents who don’t own automobiles.
In March 2020, the pandemic brought home the need for strong communities and outdoor spaces to gather. It also made us realize that together we can change systems we thought were unchangeable, sometimes overnight. The first step is to imagine what could be, dream of how it could be done, and advocate for the changes that will give us a Commonwealth that truly works “for the well-being of all.” The second is to demand leaders that share that vision, have the bravery to carry it out, and allow our DCR Parkways to make Boston and Massachusetts the leader in progressive, human-centered spaces and travel that it can -and should- be.
Ellery Klein is an activist advocating for better, safer parkways for pedestrians and bikers with Walk Medford and Bike to the Sea