The Globe took an interesting angle on their coverage of the most recent design for the BU bridge:

"BU bridge plans could spur road rage"

Subtitle: "Some fear closing lane will choke traffic"

Really?  Hold on.  When I bike to campus I use the BU Bridge to cross the Charles, often during the morning or evening rush hour.  How often is traffic backed up just to get on the bridge?  Almost all the time, especially from Comm Ave.  And how many times have I had to contest with slow moving, bumper to bumper traffic on the bridge?  Zero.  Zero times.  Even with two lanes closed for construction, traffic absolutely flies over that thing.  Which is really what makes it frightening experience from a cyclist's perspective -- you're taking up a lane with fast moving trucks bearing down on your rear wheel.

And they're worried about the threat of road rage if they don't designate even more bridge lanes to motorists than they do during construction?  As DCR commish Sullivan says, "It's really the entrance points that are the constraining points that are keeping traffic from flowing." If it's auto commute time you're worried about, fix those and your cars and trucks will move just fine.  In the meantime, it would be nice if you gave the rest of us a little room to breathe.

I'm stealing this from Gabe's blog, TransitMiami.  It's too good.  Maybe you've seen it before, but I hadn't.

Reminds me of Sheller & Urry's "The City and the Car"¹:

Automobility is a complex amalgam of interlocking machines, social practices and ways of dwelling, not in a stationary home, but in a mobile, semi-privatized and hugely dangerous capsule. [...] As people dwell in and socially interact through their cars, they become hyphenated car-drivers: at home in movement, transcending distance to complete series of activities within fragmented moments of time. The car is thus not simply an extension of each individual; automobility is not simply an act of consumption since it reconfigures the modes of especially urban sociality. [...] Most importantly, there is an implicit underlying threat that is barely addressed by theorists of civil society: that the very freedom of mobility necessary to publicity somehow also holds the potential to disrupt public space, to interfere with the more stable associational life and to undermine proper politics. Mobility is the enemy of civility.

_{1. Sheller & Urry, 2000.  International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Vol. 24.4: 737-757.}