Student Project Tackles Local Parking Problem

Parking facilities around Harvard Square can handle only less than half the cars that stop there, according to five research teams from the first-year class of the Graduate School of Design in a recent report.

The student project listed several solutions to the problem, including the extension of the Cambridge-Dorchester subway out Massachusetts Avenue. This would eliminate the car barns opposite Eliot House and allow the construction of a parking lot on that site.

One plan called for closing Massachusetts Avenue between Lamont and the Cambridge Common and building a road to circle the University grounds. Parking facilities would be located along the road in numerous small lots.

Required Project

The project is required of all first-year students in Design. It comes under the direction of Serge Chermayeff, professor of Architecture; Reginald R. Isaacs, Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Regional Planning and chairman of the department of City Planning and Landscape Architecture; Norman T. Newton, associate professor of Landscape Architecture; Perry L. Norton, instructor in City Planning; and Vincent J. Solamita, instructor in Architectural Design.

Officials in the Graduate School of Design are considering publishing the results of the study in the form of a primer in City Planning, and distributing it to the citizens of Cambridge.

Prior to commencing the actual drawing up of plans, students did lengthy individual reconnaissance on the problems of the Square. They found that approximately 54,000 motor vehicles passed through daily, but that 80 percent of this traffic was not bound for destinations within the University, the shopping area, or adjacent residential areas.

The principle behind most of the plans for parking, therefore, was to eliminate as much through traffic from the Square as possible by re-routing it elsewhere, and to set up parking facilities for shoppers, students, and faculty.

Another proposal called for termination of all streets now entering Harvard Square outside the commercial and University area. Cambridge Street, for example, would run only as far as Broadway, and Kirkland Street as far as Massachusetts Avenue. At the end of each street would be a large parking lot.