After Christmas morning festivities, I went out for a run and found my favorite gift of the day: The new Linden Street Bridge is open. The bridge carries walkers, runners, and cyclists over Route 60, completing an off-road connection from the Beaver Brook in Waltham near Belmont and Watertown through almost to Route 95. The state Department of Conservation and Recreation had completed the Linden Street Bridge earlier this year, but could not open it for lack of a custom-fabricated safety fence along the bridge. For months, a barrier had allowed a longing glance across the bridge but blocked walkers, runners, and cyclists. DCR finally received and installed the safety fence and the bridge is now open. Great to find this gift on Christmas day.
From the end of the Waltham path, near Route 95, people must traverse a short on-road stretch along Route 117 over Route 95 to Jones Road. From Jones Road, people can then access another recently completed bridge, which connects to an off-road path running all the way to Russell’s Garden in Wayland. From Russell’s it gets a little trickier to traverse the 2 or 3 miles to the recently-completed path segment that continues to Hudson, but that connection can already be made mostly on lightly traveled roads (Pelham Island and Landham) and a proper trail is planned for completion over the next two to three years. See the Mass Trail Tracker for more graphics.
The City of Waltham deserves huge credit for supporting and funding this new connection which is a link in the larger Massachusetts Central Rail Trail Project. The MCRT will ultimately connect Boston to Northampton. The Belmont Community Path is another link in the MCRT. The MCRT will ultimately be a regional commuting and recreational asset of huge value.
It’s great to see these improvements, Senator. Thank you for the updates and cheers to the DCR for their work — and for those sharp looking markers that go up.
It’s a bummer that when the Beaver Brook bridge/culvert at Beaver St washed out a few years ago that the pedestrian bridge there was never replaced. There used to be a wooden pedestrian bridge over the brook next to the road bridge.
The road bridge there doesn’t have shoulders wide enough for pedestrians, on both sides nor any nearby way to cross Beaver Street (despite there being a curb cut and ADA bumps to nowhere:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/QrF9tFcz3dDB2XW3A
here’s the street view of the old pedestrian bridge:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/aoDbrRDNjQ7yxEce6
It’s also a shame that the new footbridge in Watertown (Joseph Thompson Pedestrian Bridge) over the Charles was not built on a human scale. People used to enjoy one of the nicest things in life- stopping on a bridge and looking down on a flowing river. Maybe slowing for recreating pedestrians was too much of a negative for those power voters who bike.
Glad they kept the commuter rail system intact and in-service during construction. Mass central RR was a redundant. Hope they kept the tracks for a circumferential streetcar line (128 median strip) for cross-town line.
Is there car parking near the end of the trail nearest Belmont?
That is great news. Seems like the trail will be complete WELL before the audit of the legislature, which 72% of MA voters want. That will get done…never, as MA politicians give a big F U to the voters.
Excellent news, and thanks for the update, Will. I tried riding that path some time ago, and the bridge closure caught me by surprise. I’ve been waiting for it to open.
Thanks for the update, and the info about navigating the unbuilt segments. To Hudson or Bust!
I am so excited to utilize this resource. I think I will buy a new bike with drop handlebars and a start to break in a proper leather Brooks saddle.
(Follow up to Kenneth from Antisemitism post:
Nexus
These white boomers and other protesters aren’t there for their illegal, alien brown “neighbors,” they are there for themselves.
These anti ICE protesters are part of a corrupt, subversive and antidemocratic nexus along with the DNC, No Kings, 50501, Democrats Abroad, Move On, Party for Socialism and Liberation, Third Act, and many more in order to enrich themselves and disenfranchise half of the country in perpetuity, often using our tax dollars.
They are there primarily as part of an organized campaign to nullify the election and the will of the people.
The gender hysterics and their enablers who profit financially and politically off them are there to promote an ideology that will give them God’s power on Earth: the ability to master reality and compel speech; to say black is white, white is black; man is woman and woman is man; to gain dominion over the First Amendment and thereby the Bill of Rights.
And, our enemies are there, a through line embedded in all of it and gaining from all of it.
The boomers are living in the past. They are of the dead hand of corrupt Democratic machine politics that erected a welfare state that re-enslaved emancipated blacks who were moving up and overcoming the worst assaults of the KKK and Jim Crow, setting their own course and building incrementally and by their own hands talents and virtues only to for the avaricious, arrogant, patronizing Democrats to take all credit for their accomplishments.
They are there because the Supreme Court corrected bad precedent. I suspect RBG hung on because she saw the corruption and degenerate populism of the DNC and the bankrupt beliefs of the masses they pander to and knew history would note her role in preventing an usurpation the constitutional republic for a parliamentary government.
They are there because the borders were opened to game the US census for the Democrats to pack the court and (re)establish a one party state and with the deportations this dream fades.
?They are there to control the echo chamber. You control the echo chamber, you control the outcome of the “election,” selection. ??To the Democrats and their allies I say you are not fighting tyranny, you’re helping to establish one. Your aim is to establish a one party state. You’re not servants of the truth, you are a servants to a corrupt Party and a socialist coup.
After thirty years of being a Democrat I never thought I would be saying that Trump and proper conservative Republicans are right. Not only right but Mount Rushmore right. Historically right. Politically right. To say that the Democrats are behaving despicably and without honor is putting it mildly. I can only hope the Democrats would put America, their sacred honor and The People above their petty, earthly profits from the mid terms and lift up and lead and teach their constituents in those things where the conservatives are right instead of perverting and demonizing.
In opposing Trump and the Republicans who understand just how deeply in concert with Americanism and the West he is, the Democrats cut off our nose to spite our face and every utterance become the words our enemies would have them say.)
As always I thank Senator Brownsberger for his commitment to the public sphere with this site’s open comments. He may serve a limited district but his role in the Senate affects us all.
I applaud this especially in light of The Outfit’s AFT capo Weingarten’s (probably a test balloon for the DNC’s hardening of battlelines) withdrawal from the open, public forum of X, where the world is, and into the ideologically exclusive propaganda enclave of Bluesky.
From ‘92 to ‘24 I was a Democrat and that Party is extinct. Better to realize it later than not at all.
Socialism is a symptom, not a cure. The Republican Party is the baseline and recognize the illness and respond with deepening morality.
Socialism is a symptom, not a cure. The Republican Party is the ground state of American and Western values.
We need to listen and be responsive to the symptom of progressivism and socialism raising its awful head and realize market forces don’t exist in a vacuum apart from morality. Republicans mustn’t forget god and man in the market.
The Democrats are in the final throes of their corruption. Just as the Democrats’ welfare state destroyed and demeaned black families it has claimed the Democratic Party.
There is no ejection button for the Democrats. There is no rip cord. No course correction. In their avarice and corrupt nihilism they brought the socialists under the tent, in the house and they claimed squatters rights. They’ve seized the means of Democrats’ illicit corruption. The Democratic/socialist coup is inexorable and will only be stopped when the free and brave oppose this evil and unnatural and ungodly will to power.