Business urged to avoid rush hour
Traffic problems grow with tunnel shut for weeks
Mayor Thomas M. Menino urged businesses yesterday to have deliveries made in the early morning and evening, outside rush hour, as officials confronted the reality that the Interstate 90 connector tunnel will be closed for at least several weeks and that broader safety inspections will force closings throughout the Big Dig tunnel system.
Menino, who huddled with state transportation officials yesterday to decide how to ease traffic woes, also asked the state to pay the city $65,000 a day for traffic control.
``We can't continue in the way we're doing it right now," Menino said. ``I can't have all the officers working all of these long hours."
Governor Mitt Romney said he expected that a ``stem to stern" safety audit of the Big Dig would result in lane closings and night inspections of the roadways. ``Unless we find something that suggests a public safety problem, there should not be an interference with traffic," Romney said at a State House press conference.
But traffic patterns have already changed for the worse since the death Monday night of a Jamaica Plain woman, who was crushed by a concrete ceiling panel in the connector tunnel.
Among those most affected by the tunnel's closing are limousine and taxi drivers who now must drive through the Callahan Tunnel to Logan International Airport. At 5:30 a.m. yesterday, traffic was bumper-to-bumper in the Callahan Tunnel, heading toward Logan. And at 6 p.m., traffic was heavier than normal in the Callahan and Sumner tunnels, which link Boston and Logan.
A trip from downtown to the airport has doubled in duration since Monday, from about 20 or 30 minutes to about an hour, taxi drivers said.
Some limousine drivers said they are turning away customers because they can't guarantee that they can get them to Logan on time to catch their flight.
``I know it's causing a hell of an impact on our industry, and everyone who has to get to the airport," said Larry Willwerth, a Somerville limousine driver and board member of the New England Livery Association, which represents about 300 private, for-hire drivers.
Some say traffic flow to Logan is as bad as it was before the I-90 connector opened in January 2003.
``It's improvise, adapt, and overcome," said Michael Pazzaneze, a Marlborough limousine driver and the association's president. ``It hit us so fast. Everybody in the business has mostly enacted a Plan B for how to get their drivers in and around the city.
``It's going back to the old days when we had one tunnel," he said.
Jeff Larson -- general manager of SmartRoute Systems in Cambridge, which monitors traffic in the Boston area -- said the tie-ups have been heaviest in the evening . The Callahan has been backing up, as well as Interstate 93 and secondary roads that feed the highways, such as Storrow and Memorial drives.
``The thing I'm comparing it to is the Democratic National Convention, when they essentially shut down 93 for a long period of time," Larson said. ``The difference here is we don't have six to nine months of planning in advance about what the road closures are going to be and where people should go. And with the DNC, the whole city took a vacation that week, and there were no traffic problems."
Outside the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center in South Boston, the ramps leading to I-93 north and south were shut for inspections without notice Thursday afternoon, just as 12,000
``I had 5,000 people who were intending to get to the airport at that time, so the front of the building was jammed," Rooney said. For those expecting a typical 20- or 30-minute ride to the airport, ``a taxi trip was at least an hour, and we can see the airport from the front of the building, so that's pretty dramatic," Rooney said.
The next convention, with 3,000 members from the American Federation of Teachers, is scheduled to start Thursday, he said. The authority is scrambling to make bus arrangements.
``We're telling our customers to please order your cabs well in advance; rush hours are killers," said Larry Meister, vice president of the Independent Taxi Operators Association.
``We will do our best to transport people as quickly as possible, but we can only go within the limits of the law and the rules of the road."
The city has set up an emergency traffic control center on the seventh floor of City Hall, where a half-dozen traffic engineers huddled yesterday around a wall of television screens that showed the vehicle flow at various spots across the city.
The live video is piped in from 60 cameras, and the engineers can adjust the camera angles to view traffic from various directions.
New trouble areas and special events, such as last night's Red Sox game, are scrawled onto a board in the corner of the room.
``This is a pretty extreme traffic situation that hopefully we'll never see again in our lifetime," said city employee Paul Murphy.
At the emergency center, officials from seven city and state agencies -- the Police Department, Fire Department, Boston EMS, and state Department of Conservation and Recreation among them -- monitor traffic during rush hours and discuss strategies to improve the flow.
They can adjust the timing on some traffic signals to get more cars through certain intersections.
A police captain in the room can also radio messages to officers who are directing traffic at the biggest trouble spots, telling them which lanes to give more time. The worst areas have been Atlantic Avenue and Kneeland, Essex, and North Washington streets.
Police Superintendent Robert Dunford gave some advice to the motoring public: ``Plan your trip in advance, look for alternate routes, give yourself extra time, and exercise patience."
Scott Helman and Matt Viser of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Michael Levenson can be reached at mlevenson@globe.com, and Donovan Slack can be reached at dslack@globe.com. 