The Image of Worcester: Connecting to/from Route 9 in Shrewsbury, Worcester's Eastern Gateway:

"[T]here seems to be a unique opportunity to construct a 1.7 mile connector highway between I-290 and Route 9 along an existing power line right-of-way (ROW)."

An interesting concept, to be sure. Eric also has a well-thought out public transit system upgrade for Worcester that I like the sounds of.

3 months later, and it appears they're back at it.

The merge between I-190 (southbound) and I-290 (westbound) is getting repainted. Again. It looks like the two lanes coming in from 190 are merging into each other, and the three 290 lanes remain unmolested - which I think is the way it was last time when it worked. Or not, I could be wrong.

Slow spot:

" The area [of I-290] near the I-190 onramp is also confusing and the study recommends re-striping in that area."

Engineers: Rt. 13 improvements would ease chronic congestion:

"[M]ajor improvements for the state-owned section of Route 13, a chronically congested area near the Route 2 interchange, were presented to residents and officials at City Hall last night. "

"The Boston Region Metropolitan Planning Organization officially eliminated the Interstate 495/290 reconstruction project from its regional transportation plan Thursday."

And now it's dead. For now. They say they;ll try to get it back on the plan next year; I'm sure it'll get done at some point. Hopefully I won't have to go through it very often by then.

I-495/290 reconstruction project officially scrapped from wickedlocal.com

I drive through this interchange twice a day at least. It sucks (there isn't a nice way to put it, sorry). From 290, there's often a backup onto 495 south, which in turn gets backed up because of the proximity of the onramps from 85 & 290, on an uphill grade, followed shortly by the exit to US 20 west.

Northbound on 495 is no better - too many people who decide at the last minute to suddenly cross 2 lanes of traffic to get onto 290, because they didn't want to wait in the line of slow moving cars on the right.

Improvements to Interstate 495/290 are sidelined - Framingham, MA - The MetroWest Daily News

In perusing the site stats, it looks like a lot of you are looking for information on speed limits and tolls.

However, I don't have it. At least, not anything usable. I had a piece on the CT speed limits when they went to 65MPH but that's 10 years old now and woefully out of date. As for tolls, well, nothing there either. Sorry. I only use toll roads when I have to or when someone else is paying the tolls.

And for the person searching for tolls and speed limits on I-90 to Vermont, I've got some bad news for you...

Just a heads up; I've noticed when viewing the pages with a particular tag such as this one, the links within the pages don't work.

I'll have to go through and fix them all manually. For now, the simple solution is to navigate through to the page before clicking on the internal links.

Update 2009-03-24: I've fixed it for the US Routes. Continuing to work through the other pages over the next few days/weeks.

Update 2009-04-18: This should all be fixed now. Please let me know if you find any I missed.

Vermonters unearth roads of yore to update maps of public land - The Boston Globe: "Paul Gillies, a Montpelier attorney, traveled a slow and circuitous route on an unpaved mountain track until he reached a hairpin bend in the route. Nearby, where fresh snow resembled a dazzling white comforter, a gap between the pine trees appeared to expose remnants of an old, unused road."

Well, it's not exactly the kind of road history I'm into - I really only get interested once the routes have numbers - but I still think it's a fascinating topic. It also plays into my interest (indirectly) of the towns that were abandoned for the Quabbin. Times change and the roads we needed then aren't so necessary now. Who knows what current highways will still be in use in 200 years?

If you stopped by in the past 24 hours or so, youm ight have noticed htings looked a little weird... seems that if you update Drupal (the site software I'm using) via your webhost's control panel instead of via the instructions in the upgrade package, Bad Things Happen, like your site theme gets blown away.

Lesson learned.