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Boston hotel ranked among the 10 best in the country

Boston hotel ranked among the 10 best in the country

Yahoo30-04-2025

One Boston Hotel is being named one of the best in the country, according to Tripadvisor users.
The Travelers' Choice Awards 'Best of the Best' celebrates 'the highest level of excellence in travel,' according to the website. 'It's awarded to those who receive a high volume of above-and-beyond reviews and opinions from the Tripadvisor community over a 12-month period.'
On its list of 'Best of the Best' hotels, The Godfrey Hotel Boston ranked sixth overall.
Located at 505 Washington St. in Boston, Tripadvisor praised the hotel for its hospitality.
'The Godfrey Hotel Boston sits in a prime spot with easy access to transportation — and the city's top sights," Tripadvisor wrote. 'Stylish accommodations are full of modern amenities and charming decor, and there's a fitness center for guests to use when the workout bug hits. Grab a bite at the hotel's restaurant, where excellent service and complimentary snacks await.'
The website also noted that the hotel is pet friendly for its guests.
Guests on the website also praised the accommodations made for Boston Marathon runners staying at the hotel.
'There isn't one thing negative I can say about this hotel!' a review on Tripadvisor wrote. 'From the moment we checked in, the staff made it clear that marathoners were not just guests — we were VIPs. The hotel had complimentary runner goodie bags (which included energy gel, blister bandages, electrolyte tablets, and more)."
See the full list of the top hotels in the country by Tripadvisor here.
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In distracting times, rumble strips are saving lives — and money — on rural Maine roads
In distracting times, rumble strips are saving lives — and money — on rural Maine roads

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time17 hours ago

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In distracting times, rumble strips are saving lives — and money — on rural Maine roads

The honeymoon was almost over for Steven Lavrenz and Sandhya Madan. After sightseeing in Acadia National Park, the newlyweds from Michigan woke early and started a long drive back to Boston Logan International Airport on the gray morning of June 3, 2019. But they wouldn't get very far before their trip — and their lives — were nearly upended. Heading north on Route 102, Lavrenz noticed a red pickup truck on the other side of the thoroughfare veering toward his Subaru rental car. Growing up in Iowa, Lavrenz had always held his breath on these kinds of two-lane rural roads, keeping one eye on oncoming traffic to ensure passing cars stayed in their lane. So when the Nissan crossed the centerline, Lavrenz was quick to react, swerving away from the approaching vehicle. The maneuver may have saved his life: The truck crashed into the door just behind Lavrenz, totaling the car but leaving him physically unscathed. Madan and the truck's driver also escaped the incident without injury, which is fortunate after what transit experts call a 'lane-departure crash.' While representing just 30 percent of Maine's traffic collisions between 2010 and 2022, lane-departure crashes accounted for 73 percent of fatalities. These head-on and sideswipe collisions are especially deadly in Maine, where researchers say that extreme weather, an aging population and infrastructure and a preponderance of winding, two-lane rural roads contribute to the highest crash fatality rate of any state in New England. Though Lavrenz was physically unharmed, the crash rattled him for a different reason than most. As a transportation safety researcher, he'd spent years thinking about lane-departure crashes and trying to prevent them from happening. But it was the first time the Wayne State University professor had ever personally faced the life-or-death consequences of his profession. Lavrenz had once worked with the Federal Highway Administration to add rumble strips to rural roads. Transportation departments around the country have gradually installed these grooved lines to jolt drivers who are asleep or distracted, the most common causes of lane-departure crashes. The strips vibrate the vehicle when it passes over the centerline or into the shoulder. Yet there were no rumble strips on this stretch of Route 102 that could have stirred the distracted truck driver, Lavrenz observed after their destroyed Subaru sputtered to a stop next to a Maine Department of Transportation facility. The next morning, after they secured another rental car and caught their flight, he decided to tweet at the agency. 'Centerline rumble strips could've prevented this,' he wrote, linking to a dashcam video of his crash. Research from a bevy of states backed his assertion at the time. But a new study led by civil engineers at the University of Maine provides the most relevant data yet for the effectiveness — and cost-effectiveness — of centerline rumble strips on Maine's sprawling network of rural roads, many of which remain without these life-saving grooves. In a before-and-after analysis, the researchers found that installing centerline rumble strips on rural two-lane roads reduced head-on and opposite sideswipe collisions by anywhere from 28 to 48 percent. By limiting these dangerous crashes, the state saves not only lives but money, according to the authors, who estimated that 'the benefits of the rumble strip installations are at least 14 times the cost.' 'They're one of our most cost-effective safety countermeasures that we can deploy out there — and also one of the most effective,' said Bob Skehan, the director of MaineDOT's Office of Safety and Mobility. Jhan Kevin Gil-Marin, one of the study's co-authors, started working on the paper as a master's student in civil engineering at the University of Maine. With guidance from Ali Shirazi, who was then the principal investigator of the Maine Transport Lab based at the school, Gil-Marin used data from MaineDOT to compare crashes on similar roads with and without rumble strips. Unlike some past analyses in Maine and elsewhere, however, the study examined before-and-after crash data on roads specifically with centerline rumble strips. And it used these figures to model how many crashes would ensue if the grooves had never been installed on them, allowing the researchers to better determine the safety measure's true effectiveness. It also enabled them to perform a cost-benefit analysis, calculating this number based on MaineDOT's reported installation cost ($3,500 per mile, according to the study, though Skehan said it can now be higher) and the Federal Highway Administration's assigned costs for different types of crashes. Even using a very conservative service life for rumble strips of seven years, the study showed the strips pay for themselves and then some. 'I think rumble strips are a very good idea,' said Gil-Marin, who's now pursuing his PhD at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Before uprooting to Maine from Colombia to work with Shirazi, Gil-Marin had never seen rumble strips. On a quiet road, he guided his car over the grooves and felt the vibration for the first time. It wasn't long ago that many Mainers may have had the same experience. Getting ready to rumble When Per Gårder arrived in Maine in 1992, there were no rumble strips in the state. During the Swedish engineer's interview for a position at the University of Maine, however, he met John Alexander, a fellow engineer who'd taken a personal interest in the safety measure. A neighbor of Alexander's had died after driving off the interstate and hitting a tree. 'He started talking to me about installing rumble strips by driving a bulldozer down the highway and roughing up the shoulder so that people would wake up before they go off the road,' recalled Gårder, a professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering and co-author of the new study. Road safety was personal for Gårder, too. As a kid, he recalls one trip when his sleepy father ceded the wheel to his mother late at night. When Gårder woke up, they were in a ditch — his mother had dozed off. 'We didn't hurt ourselves, but that was probably the first time I started thinking there should be waking you up when you are drifting to sleep, and that it actually could happen to everybody,' Gårder said. After Gårder joined the faculty, he made shoulder rumble strips a focus of his research. There were few studying it at the time. In the U.S., 'singing shoulders' debuted on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey during the 1950s, but they were rarely seen elsewhere for decades. MaineDOT and the Maine Turnpike Association didn't start installing rumble strips along the edges of Interstate 95 in Maine until 1994. In his early years at the school, Gårder photocopied and analyzed police reports of fatal crashes on Maine's interstates between 1989 and 1993, which revealed that nearly half of them involved drivers falling asleep. Yet, after the installation of hundreds of miles of continuous shoulder rumble strips along Maine's interstates, driver drowsiness was no longer as deadly; an analysis co-authored by Gårder in 2006 showed that the safety measure had reduced sleep-induced 'run-off-road' crashes by 58 percent. That same year, MaineDOT began installing rumble strips on the centerline of state roads. While the addition of the safety measure to the shoulders of interstates had helped prevent drivers from veering off the interstate, implementing rumble strips in the middle of rural thoroughfares could reduce the often lethal head-on collisions between cars in opposite lanes. 'When you have two vehicles traveling at 50 miles an hour that hit head on, essentially, it's the same as being in a 100 mile an hour crash and hitting a fixed object, like a tree, if you went off the side of the road,' Skehan said. 'So they're definitely our biggest risk from a safety perspective.' Initially, the agency targeted corridors with a speed limit of at least 45 miles per hour and a traffic volume of more than 8,000 vehicles per day to add rumble strips. The pilot produced excellent results: the new rumble strips on these roads cut head-on crashes in half and eliminated fatal collisions entirely during an initial period, Skehan recalled. That level of effectiveness wouldn't quite hold up over the long term. And as MaineDOT installed more rumble strips in areas where head-on crashes were common, there were still some deadly collisions even after the safety measure was implemented. But time after time, the little grooves significantly reduced crashes and fatalities. 'It's still, by far, our biggest lifesaver with regards to two-lane, rural, head-on collisions,' Skehan said. He pointed to a 20-mile stretch of Route 202 between Lewiston and Manchester where head-on and sideswipe collisions dropped precipitously in the three years after the installation of centerline rumble strips about a decade ago. 'It was pretty remarkable,' he said. Still, part of what made rumble strips so effective also disturbed more than a few neighbors when they were first installed on rural roads. 'There were some noise concerns,' Skehan said. After MaineDOT added rumble strips to Route 302 in Bridgton, neighbor Bill Muir compared their clamor to a tractor trailer 'going down a steep grade and shifting into low gear.' 'I know from personal experience that it could be heard inside our home quite clearly even with all windows closed,' Muir wrote to The Bridgton News in February of 2017. The next year, MaineDOT began exclusively using sinusoidal rumble strips, colloquially known as 'mumble strips.' When they're driven over, the quieter, shallower alternatives to rectangular rumble strips create slightly less sound inside the car but drastically decrease the noise outside of the vehicle, according to Skehan. 'That has pretty much eliminated all noise calls that I've received.' Looking down the road Rumble strips now line the edges of all interstate highways in Maine. But centerline grooves remain absent from most roads in rural areas, particularly in the northern part of the state. MaineDOT aims to add about 100 miles of rumble strips to state roads every year, according to Skehan. The agency prioritizes areas with high traffic and fresh pavement to maximize the service life of the grooves. MaineDOT allocated about $750,000 for these projects annually, per Skehan, with about 90 percent of this funding coming from the federal Highway Safety Improvement Program funding, and the remainder from the state. Route 102 doesn't have rumble strips yet. It's a candidate to receive them, according to Skehan, but the area where a truck crashed into Lavrenz and Madan's rental car is less of a priority than other corridors. The state also doesn't manage town and city roads that thread through communities. Bar Harbor police chief David Kerns doesn't see much of a need for rumble strips on these generally lower-speed roads. 'Really, those in-town streets are so narrow anyway, people tend to go center of the road more to get away from parked cars and open doors,' Kerns said. Still, he's noticed a rise in collisions he attributes to the distraction of cell phones and displays in cars. The town of Bar Harbor received a federal grant to make its streets safer after five fatal and 17 incapacitating crashes between 2019 and 2023. Additional signage and collapsible line delineators are among the interventions under consideration. At the same time, Kerns recognizes that technology can also be part of the solution. Some cars are now built with sensors to detect when the vehicle has left its lane. And though Gårder doesn't advocate checking your phone while driving, he stresses glancing at displays every once in a while to stave off sleep, which is still a common cause of crashes. 'Like in an airplane, pilots are supposed to have certain tasks every now and then,' he said. 'They are not supposed to be completely inactive.' For Lavrenz, it's simple: 'Human drivers are always going to make a mistake.' And instead of waiting for crashes like his to happen, transportation departments can address the problem proactively by deploying low-cost safety measures like rumble strips across many miles. 'Let's go out and try to treat a broad swath of these two-lane rural roads because we know that they're a major risk factor,' he said, 'and hopefully prevent a lot of these crashes from happening in the first place.'

These Hawaiʻi beaches are among the best in the world: Tripadvisor
These Hawaiʻi beaches are among the best in the world: Tripadvisor

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timea day ago

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These Hawaiʻi beaches are among the best in the world: Tripadvisor

HONOLULU (KHON2) — With white sand, blue water and crashing waves, it's no secret that beaches in Hawaiʻi are popular among locals and tourists alike. But are they the best? According to Tripadvisor, the answer is yes. Report: Two Hawaii beaches among most polluted in the country The travel company has determined that at least two beaches in Hawaiʻi are among the world's best, with on Kauaʻi and on Maui both earning titles. Out of 25 beaches from around the world that made the list, Poʻipu Beach claimed the 14th spot with an average rating of 4.5/5 from more than 5,000 Tripadvisor reviews. Maui's Kaʻanapali Beach came in at number 22, with an average 4.6/5 rating from more than 9,000 reviews. highlight Poʻipu's clear waters, snorkeling opportunities and potential for seeing Hawaiian monk seals or turtles. For Kaʻanapali, and snorkeling conditions. The Hawaiʻi beaches were included on a list of 25 beaches from around the world, including Greece, Australia, Brazil, Iceland and more. Only one other beach in the United States claimed a spot on the list, with Florida's Siesta Beach taking fourth place overall. 'The Travelers' Choice Awards Best of the Best title celebrates the highest level of excellence in travel,' Tripadvisor explains. 'It's awarded to those who receive a high volume of above-and-beyond reviews and opinions from the Tripadvisor community over a 12-month period.' The travel company says less than 1% of its 8 million listings receive a travelers' choice award. To see the full list of the 'best of the best beaches' around the world, . Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Why Is TripAdvisor (TRIP) Down 5.4% Since Last Earnings Report?
Why Is TripAdvisor (TRIP) Down 5.4% Since Last Earnings Report?

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timea day ago

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Why Is TripAdvisor (TRIP) Down 5.4% Since Last Earnings Report?

It has been about a month since the last earnings report for TripAdvisor (TRIP). Shares have lost about 5.4% in that time frame, underperforming the S&P 500. Will the recent negative trend continue leading up to its next earnings release, or is TripAdvisor due for a breakout? Before we dive into how investors and analysts have reacted as of late, let's take a quick look at the most recent earnings report in order to get a better handle on the important catalysts. It turns out, fresh estimates have trended upward during the past month. The consensus estimate has shifted -6.35% due to these changes. At this time, TripAdvisor has a great Growth Score of A, a grade with the same score on the momentum front. Charting a somewhat similar path, the stock was allocated a grade of B on the value side, putting it in the top 40% for this investment strategy. Overall, the stock has an aggregate VGM Score of A. If you aren't focused on one strategy, this score is the one you should be interested in. Estimates have been broadly trending upward for the stock, and the magnitude of these revisions has been net zero. Notably, TripAdvisor has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). We expect an in-line return from the stock in the next few months. TripAdvisor is part of the Zacks Internet - Commerce industry. Over the past month, eBay (EBAY), a stock from the same industry, has gained 10.2%. The company reported its results for the quarter ended March 2025 more than a month ago. eBay reported revenues of $2.59 billion in the last reported quarter, representing a year-over-year change of +1.1%. EPS of $1.38 for the same period compares with $1.25 a year ago. For the current quarter, eBay is expected to post earnings of $1.30 per share, indicating a change of +10.2% from the year-ago quarter. The Zacks Consensus Estimate remained unchanged over the last 30 days. The overall direction and magnitude of estimate revisions translate into a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) for eBay. Also, the stock has a VGM Score of B. Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report TripAdvisor, Inc. (TRIP) : Free Stock Analysis Report eBay Inc. (EBAY) : Free Stock Analysis Report This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research ( Zacks Investment Research

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