“A major contributor to the development of such horrible attitudes of Boston area drivers: The roads themselves. We all know what a nonsensical jumble of side streets, swirling on and off ramps, congested tunnels and strangely located one way roads are offered by Boston. The screwy road system leads to a “kill or be killed” mentality. Even long time residents don’t fully understand it all–I pity new residents with cars.”

My response:

“Why so historically and architecturally insensitive? Not just because it’s already the 21st century and you think the world was created anew at the bicentennial when you were born, I hope. The streets may be a jumble, but it’s not “nonsensical” at all. Thinking so keeps you from appreciating the city as an organic creature and understanding the process by which the old does or does not give way to the new.

“If you find a map of the Shawmut peninsula, ca. 1634 when Boston was founded, you will see that it was shaped something like a tadpole with three quite tall hills at the center and northwest (Mt. Vernon, Beacon Hill and Cotton, or Pemberton, Hill), whence comes “Tremont.” The only connection to the mainland was a narrow isthmus following where Washington Street now lies and running approximately from the present Chinatown (the south end of the tadpole) through saltmarshes to what is now Roxbury where (if you drive along Blue Hill Avenue and the surrounding area, you will see)the marshes gave way to higher ground. Remember the painting of General Washington at the battle for Dorchester? He’s on the high ground overlooking those marshes.

“The roads (and, later, streets) that were built on the peninsula in the beginning took the settlers from important places as directly as possible to other important places, but they had to curve along the shoreline, or around those hills. Occasionally the most direct route lay across another route, perhaps at an acute angle.

“Now look at maps of the city at the end of the 18th c. and then during the 19th c. You will see the tadpole expanding in several directions. Mount Vernon was cut down to make way for Charles Street. The peak of Beacon Hill was cut off and used to fill the Mill Pond, which lay roughly between Hanover, Sudbury, and Causeway Streets (i.e., where the Big Dig is now pushing from Haymarket up to North Station) in the 1820s. Patrick Tracy Jackson, one of the founders of the textile mills in Lowell (and thus of the American Industrial Revolution) purchased much of Pemberton Hill. In 1835, using “126 oxen, 60 Yankees, and 199 Irishmen,” he carted the top sixty-five feet of Pemberton Hill to the Charles River north of Causeway Street at approximately the site of North Station, where it filled eight acres to a depth of fourteen feet. One reason why most of the streets on the northwest side of (current) Beacon Hill are more or less straight and intersect at right angles is because the new buildable land there was created more or less at once.

“Originally, everything west of what is now Charles Street was tidal marshes (the “Back Bay”). During the latter half of the 19th c., the Back Bay was completely filled in with fill brought in by railroad from what are now the western suburbs. Moreover, everything one now sees on either side of Washington Street and across to South Boston was filled slowly but surely. Long Wharf originally stretched way out into the harbor, but the land was filled in behind it, leaving only its name to suggest its former glory.

“All this filling was done by individuals and individual businesses, working with whatever small piece of the big picture they had been able to grab.

“As the former marshes and ocean were filled, the buildings were built — on the new land, as is where is. This was necessarily an opportunistic process: you build where the land is now, not where it isn’t yet. Where you build houses and businesses, roads follow, also opportunistically. To suggest that this should have been done with governmental authority and a master plan, (the logical extension of calling the present jumble
“nonsensical”) is pretty nonsensical.

“Once the city was filled in and built, well, there were the roads.

“Since then, there have been precious few opportunities for government to impose a master plan on urban development and to change the routes of roads that in some cases have been curvy for 300 years, or to make right angles of intersections that have been at acute angles for 300 years. (You will, I hope, note that there are more such intersections in downtown Boston than in the Back Bay, for example, which was laid out by powerful interests who owned larger tracts of land and were, thus, able to make their streets more regular.) When city government has attempted to reduce the jumble, it has often had unhappy results. (Ask any native older than 55 about the West End.) Or it has only gone so far. (The Central Artery was never designed to carry ALL the north-south traffic. It was only half of a master plan that also included a ring road cutting more or less through the Back Bay and South End. Any guesses why that wasn’t built? Politics, i.e., lots of humans pushing and shoving and protecting what they’ve got, basically.)

“So, my humble suggestion is that you may enjoy those frustrating times sitting in Boston traffic more if you look around you and visualize the process that led to what you actually see, and all the men and women who lived there and walked those same streets before you. Also, if you have a chance, read Walter Muir Whitehill’s “A Topographical History of Boston.”

I’ve had to explain to more than a few Texans (where I currently reside), who thought I had just missed my turn, the finer points of making a ‘jug-handle’ – turning left by making three rights.

Patrick: Oh sure, if you consider the reality of how people drive in Boston, the routes do become simpler…

There are some streets missing.

I think the green arrow is on somerville ave. eastbound, and then driving to Medford Ave (right by 28), going under the railroad tracks, turning right onto south st. westbound, then back up to prospect st. to cross over the tracks to end up across from the dunkin donuts (is that an autobody shop?)