Ball Sq Pathways

July 20th, 2024
glx, transit
With the Red Line shut down north of Kendall for repairs I've been walking to the Green Line at Ball Sq. It's definitely a slower commute, but it's not bad. Except for 150 painful feet.

Here's how I walk to the station (240ft):

And here's what I want to do (90ft):

They've put up enough of a fence to keep a desire path from forming, but it still bugs me.

Looking at the plans from 2019 you can see how it ended up this way:

Without the crosswalks marked it's much less obvious that you're making a bunch of people walk around three sides of a square. And this crosswalk didn't even exist before the station:

This does actually affect a good number of people. Here's my estimate for the houses where this adds 150ft when walking to the platform:

Unfortunately I don't think the cost of adding a second, slightly shorter, path would be worth it now that we've already built it out differently, but this is something to keep in mind for grouping with future renovations.

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