That, for the next half century, ended the days of the urban park land visionaries. While the MDC improved the Basin's parks here and there, unintended consequences always arose. It would be another decade before bicycle paths were completed. Former MDC commissioner John Sears, an iminence grise in Boston's public life who lives a brief walk from the Esplanade at the foot of Beacon Hill, recalls the best of intentions gone awry. As soon as I built the bike paths, I was rewarded by collisions between cyclists and pedestrians.
Unintended consequences rule public planning.
It is used and abused. But the river already has several such groups, and it could prove dicey trying to get the existing groups to ease Renata von Tscharner's Charles River Conservancy into the mix. As in all of Massachusetts public life, there is turf to defend. But we are also intimately concerned with recreation and accessibility. The Charles River Watershed Association boasts an impressive track record.