The beautiful results of a road closure
In a time of worrying news, there are things to be grateful for
The closure of the Lake Mansfield road (above lower right) to cars was not without challenges, and it did not happen without being challenged. But perseverance over the years has paid off. The new Lake Mansfield Beach Area and New Lakeside Trail opened on Monday, right on time. One shrewd tactic was to reduce car traffic to one-way for a couple of years. This cut the number of people using the road along the lake, and got us used to driving home via downtown Great Barrington. You can see how it worked in this photo by illustrator Elwood Smith:
The one-way closure also meant that GPS and Google stopped routing cars through the neighborhood and along the lake. When the full closure came, there were no protests, just a few gentle sighs about its not being so convenient.
The result is protection of the lake itself and the plant and animal life in the area, but it also means that a remarkable recreation area - with walking and bike path along the lake - is just a few minutes’ walk away. The aerial view from the Great Barrington Land Conservancy website is remarkable because our neighborhood, TheHillGB, is only just out of sight, below the bottom margin.
The new design doesn’t eliminate cars. There is an expanded parking lot, in fact - but there’s only one way to get to it. This is a great model for making improvements that will also encourage people to move around by other means. (Kayaking, anyone?) I should note that Lake Mansfield is very small, only 29 acres (less than 12 hectares), and officially a pond rather than a lake.
At the same time, it’s good to see more rational thinking about EVs. I cringed some months ago at the headline “230 Million EVs by 2030.” That is 90% of the number of cars on the road and would mean an increase in total number as well as a vast number of secondhand gas-burning cars, many of which would be exported to other countries. Now even the chief executive of Ford Motor Company is talking about limits (though only to size, not number):
In a wide-ranging interview at the Aspen Ideas festival, Jim Farley [the chief executive of Ford] said the auto industry needs to focus on smaller EVs and commercial vehicles. He acknowledged that American consumers are in “love with these monster vehicles” but said they need to “get back in love” with small cars.
Read the whole article in the Guardian.
Here a gift link to a glorious article in the New York Times about the Housatonic River, which runs through the Berkshires and the heart of Great Barrington. This is W E B Du Bois’s “golden river,” and the unfortunately subject of an ongoing legal battle with GE over the removal, by truck or by train, of the PCBs dumped here when GE Plastics was active. But I met someone the other day who’s been swimming in the Housatonic and Olympic athletes will be swimming in the Seine. A better world is possible.
