Electric Josh

So the massive near-closure of I-93 South turns out not to have been such a terrible thing for your narrator, as the bottleneck inside the tunnel nearly eliminates the much more serious bottleneck that had previously plagued the tunnel's exit. In other words, instead of a single mixing bowl in which six lanes of traffic merged into three—including a large fraction of the traffic entering the left-most lane needing to cross the other five lanes in order to exit on the right side—we now have a mixing bowl that sucks a little less because of the traffic crossing from the left to the right across four lanes, all preceded by one underground semi-merge from three lanes down to two. (I call it a semi-merge because the dropped lane flows on the surface just as fast as the other lanes underground). Astonishingly, this goes more quickly, which just goes to show how serious an error it was (and still continues to be) not to erect Jersey barriers to prevent the traffic entering left at the tunnel's exit from crossing all the way right to exit. They erected similar barriers just after opening the underground sections of I-93 North, so here's hoping that someone (finally!) figures out the importance of duplicating this trivial effort. At any rate, the traffic isn't noticeably worse than before (and is way less frustrating), so this space won't start taking the T again, probably, so you'll have to just imagine reading a guy who reads the New Yorker instead of a guy who sings ridiculously along to CD's and yells at other cars. So it goes.
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