Envisioning Needham Street

The traffic-challenged corridor of Needham Street could be shaped into a better managed commercial area, with more pedestrian-friendly business centers, a mix of residential, commercial, and even industrial spaces, and a network of connected open spaces.

Like all endeavors, all it will take is time and money.

And a plan.

Toward that end, a group of MIT graduate students is working this fall to draft planning recommendations for how Needham Street may be improved through future redevelopment.

Artist's rendering from the presentation.

In a preliminary presentation on Oct. 28, the group outlined four goals of this semester-long project:

1. Create a safe and comfortable environment for cars, bikes, and pedestrians.
2. Maintain existing industrial uses and promote fine-grain (e.g. smaller blocks) mixed use.
3. Create a more cohesive and attractive physical environment.
4. Create a recreational open space network.

Specific improvements being considered include:

• burying the power lines,
• creating a contiguous network of sidewalks and crosswalks, and
• dividing Needham Street traffic with a planted median, limiting turns to specified intersections and making the corridor less car-centric.

North and South

The MIT group is analyzing the corridor as two adjoining zones, separated by an old rail bed crossing at in the 190 block of Needham Street (near the Jiffy Lube).

The vision promoted for the northern zone consists of smaller blocks with multistory buildings housing smaller retail shops, with some office and residential space in floors above. Parking would be consolidated behind the buildings but with buffers to separate the parking from adjacent neighborhoods.

The southern zone would consist of larger blocks to house larger retail and some industrial uses. As the presenters pointed out, this is one of the few areas in our largely residential city where industrial uses (e.g. pharmaceutical firms) might be permitted.

Got Rail?

Residents attending the meeting spoke up about the limited capacity of the road and the importance of passenger rail connections along the Needham Street corridor, in Upper Falls, and southwest to other rail connections in Needham. (Read more on proposals for extending the Green line from Newton Highlands to Needham.)

Presenters agreed with the need for rail development and referenced the regional nature of this corridor’s redevelopment. The group’s recommendations would not be to reduce traffic capacity along Needham Street but to enable more multi-modal transportation and to encourage more local traffic and less cut-through traffic.

They referenced a “quantity vs. quality” view of automotive traffic. Local traffic is considered “higher quality” because it makes use of amenities in Newton. In contrast, cut-through traffic contributes nothing to the city’s economy.

The ratio of local to cut-through traffic on Needham Street — from I-95 to Route 9 — has not been documented, but it bears examination. Needham Street may be affected by the planned lane addition on I-95, scheduled for construction in 2012.

Download a PDF of the group’s presentation.

The MIT group will present its final recommendations in early December. If you have thoughts on the redevelopment of Needham Street, please add comments at the end of this post.

Newton Villages connection

The students’ work is being directed by Terry Szold, a professor whose former students have drafted similar planning recommendations for several of Newton’s village centers and other Massachusetts cities.

Over the summer, Newton Villages had a hand in bringing Szold and her students back to the city. We arranged a meeting with her, members of the city’s planning department, and esteemed planner and long-time Newton resident Phil Herr.

We had hoped Szold and her students could help us study one or more of our village centers and formulate some planning guidelines that might be applied more broadly. For example, if we want to encourage more pedestrian activity and foot traffic for village merchants, how should we plan the physical parameters of village sidewalks?

Szold has expressed an interest in doing one or more village studies in future semesters. We hope to continue those conversations soon.