I received a campaign email newsletter from Newton Councilor Emily Norton and was disappointed to read her misleading take on the Washington Street Vision plan. In her letter she references the second draft of the plan, writing:
The final version of the Vision Plan for Washington Street was presented to the City Council’s Zoning and Planning Committee on Monday, April 22. (See memo about it here) The plan has some elements I like including incentives for historic preservation, tree canopy and other environmental benefits, and setting aside space for art in new commercial buildings. I was dismayed however that the previous version of the plan called for allowing ten story buildings at the Newtonville Whole Foods site and in West Newton – I do not support that as I believe that is out of scale for our Newton’s village model.
Councilor Norton doesn’t seem to understand that a 10-story building could be built right now on the Whole Foods site, contingent on the approval of a special permit. This is also the case with the new plan. In the third draft of the vision plan, a building on the Whole Foods site, and along the Mass Pike in West Newton, could be up to 6 stories by right, two more than allowable by right currently. The only way to build as high as 10 stories would be through a special permit.
Importantly, the maximum height for a residential building would be 6 stories, with maximum of 9 for labs and 10 for offices. Anything over 6 feet would be subject to an additional layer of special permit review, where residents would have the opportunity to voice their opinions.
What she also fails to see is that less than a mile from the Whole Foods is the 12-story Crowne Plaza hotel and a 10-story office building. Saying that a potential ten story building at Washington and Crafts is out of scale with Newton’s village model is disingenuous and fails to take into account the reality of Newton’s built environment and potential for improved commercial space.
As the price of lab space in Kendall Square continues to soar, now on par with lease rates in parts of Manhattan, companies are looking for more affordable options for office space. Along a commuter rail line and served by express buses, the Whole Foods site and West Newton along the pike are well positioned for some more dense development. Commuters from the west or east could arrive in Newton via the commuter rail or express bus and take a short walk to work. Newton residents could bike or even walk to their jobs.
Plus, as part of a special permit approval, Newton could mandate that any new development above 6 stories on the site come with plans for enhancing the Newtonville and West Newton commuter rail stops. When New Balance moved into their new headquarters in Allston, they financed construction of a brand- new commuter rail stop that has spurred development in the area and provided amenities for residents and employees.
Councilor Norton also does not seem to understand the difference between a requirement and a limit. In her newsletter she also wrote:
I also am concerned that the Plan calls for limiting parking in new developments, while also eliminating the overnight winter parking ban; it seems to me new residents would simply store their cars on the street year round, so limiting parking in new developments would not achieve the goal of limiting car ownership and congestion.
While the vision plan does call for eliminating the winter overnight on-street parking ban, it does not limit the amount of parking that can be built. Currently, zoning regulations mandate how much parking must be built for new development. This increases the cost of new development and encourages people to drive. What the vision plan calls for is eliminating this requirement in the zoning. This would let developers decide how much parking they want to build.
Would some developers choose to not build any parking? Probably. But someone building an office tower or an apartment building would still likely include some parking.Developers would let market analysis dictate how much parking they should build, rather than city zoning code.
Councilor Norton should carefully read draft three of the plan and speak with her colleagues and planning staff to better understand its provisions. She should stop spreading misinformation meant to scare people into denying their support for a plan that has the potential to enhance Washington St. for the benefit of all who live and work in Newton.
@Brendan,
How is it a 10 story building could be built on or adjacent to the Whole Foods lot?
I checked it out and its zoned BU2 – Business Use 2.
It would appear the max is 4 stories, and and any residential units would be limited by the 1,200 sq ft lot area per unit restriction.
As for parking, are you suggesting it would be ok for a several hundred apartments be built and not supply adequate parking? Surely such a scenario would lead to an over spill into the adjacent neighborhoods. I guess the city could introduce parking permits to prevent that. But that would be a burden to that neighborhood who would have to pay for a permit.
Hello again to “Goodbye Washington Street”. See other post. No use shutting the barn door after the horse is out, my grandmother always said ;D
Correction: see other thread.
Brendan, your post is unhinged and unfair.
Not going to do a point-by-point, but just do one as an example. Whether a 10 story building was allowed by special permit already, is not really relevant. The vision for Washington St could have said nothing over six feet. It didn’t. Instead the vision specifically called out the site, already acquired by a developer, to be a possibility as a 10 story site. She has every right to both be disappointed with that result and highlight that disappointment with her constituents. Your put strawman criticisms in that assume intent and knowledge with no basis.
Feel free to disagree, but your post is dishonest in its portayal of Norton.
The majority of residents who live in the abutting neighborhoods
to Washington St. do not approve of the dense urbanization of this local Washington St. thoroughfare.
Emily speaks on our behalf. We agree with her message wholeheartedly.
Thank you Councilor Norton.
Simon – BU2 allows for more than 4 stories through special permit, take a look at page 4-2 of the code: http://www.newtonma.gov/civicax/filebank/documents/69436
Again, “the majority” doesn’t want dense development. Sounds like the same “majority” that doesn’t want recreational marijuana and who elected what is generally a pro-development city council.
I think a lot of residents fall somewhere in the middle of being pro and anti development. i.e. Washington Street needs a serious sprucing up and it would be fine to have new businesses and new neighbors, but perhaps not quite to the degree as being proposed.
We should allow as tall and dense development as a private developer can make work financially, and remove parking along Washington St to allow for permanent dedicated bus lanes. Also we should mandate no or very low parking in new developments. Building parking means bringing in more cars which quite literally is destroying the planet. It’s all well and good that we’re getting our electricity from more renewable sources and encouraging solar panels. That means nothing if everyone is driving around in a 3 row SUV. Can we please treat this with some sense of urgency?
The “10 story office building” is the red herring that keeps people from seeing some of the real benefits here. Eliminating parking minimums is a huge and beneficial change, especially when coupled with parking maximums and transportation investments.
I just got off the phone with a company looking for up to 60-thousand square feet of space in Newton, parking and transportation are key on their checkboxes. So is it likely a developer will build without parking? No, of course not.
Yesterday I listened to a panel made up of people whose job it is to build and rent lab space. They talked about what makes a community attractive to biotech and med device companies. Sure, tax incentives help, but the speakers all agreed that they’d rather see communities invest in infrastructure (transportation, roads, high-speed internet) as well as simplify both the zoning and political process. They want to know what they can build and don’t want to be subject to a long, drawn-out process of public hearings by a board of 24 city councilors who “listen” to a cacophony of voices screaming for their heads. Oh, and they said plainly: “density works.”
This doesn’t mean we hand a blank check to every business and developer to create whatever they want, but if we want commercial development in this city we need to stop relying on the special permit, we need to make it predictable and easy to build, and we need to invest in the infrastructure to create a good transportation infrastructure that goes beyond the single-occupancy car.
We will not get better transportation for a bunch of single-family homes. It’s just not viable. All this is tied together and the Washington Street vision plan takes that into account.
I cannot dismiss councilor Norton’s qualms out of hand, as others in this thread have. What seems obvious to advocates of housing density in Newton and of accelerated development of the Washington Street corridor is not so to many others, especially to those who live nearby.
Let’s set the issue of traffic and the lack of public transit along Washington Street aside ( I”d love to see electric vans or buses running from West Newton to Newton Corner). Many residents still imagine Newton to be a quiet suburb with few if any tall buildings overhanging its neighborhoods. To them (to me as well), Newton Corner’s “redevelopment” was a mistake on the order of City Hall Plaza in Boston…a traffic nightmare and an eye sore.
On the other hand, Newton certainly needs more affordable housing, especially for its elders who want to sell their homes but stay in the community. I also wish it were possible for our children to afford to live here (my daughter ended up in Lynnfield in a house half as costly as it would be in Newton). Why not build apartment houses or condominiums of more modest size and scope in places like Oak Street, Riverside, and Washington Street with a majority of its units dedicated to those with modest income?
I know, we live under the capitalist system, and profit must be made. But other municipalities, not to mention states and countries, help create housing, often in partnership with the private sector. The current arrangement means that most of those moving into these developments will resemble the new residents purchasing McMansions: wealthy, wealthy, wealthy.
Good for the tax base, I suppose, but not in line with Greg Reibman’s dream that Newton provide housing for those who might work in new businesses, white or blue collar, that might relocate here.
Once again, no obvious solution to these familiar dilemmas occurs to me.
I suspect a lot of people are going to be disappointed with this Vision. Since when was WholeFoods a Village Center? Does anybody know where to find the images of where people placed and wrote their post-it comments? It would be very interesting to take a look at what the plan looks like compared to what people said they would like.
These are not just high level Vision Documents. They get incorporated into the master plan, and that is used to facilitate zoning and special permit deliberations. The Needham St Vision was adopted just in time for the Northland Special Permit!
I’m sure many of the Councilors were disappointed that the Fiscal Impact of this vision is not available either. The Fiscal Impact that was presented a few months ago was a complete joke. It was all based on building to the max with special permits. Why bother having a vision when the real vision is to have major projects done with Special Permits – which often request and get granted rezoning requests anyhow.
In my opinion half a million bucks wasted, clear evidence that the city pays lip service to its residents, and a missed opportunity to bring together the local community.
Zoning Reform got postponed because it was clearly contentious. This may be even more so.
What Simon says 😉
Gosh, mansplain much, @Brendan Keegan?
I won’t repeat points other people have made, but here’s a couple other things that struck me:
Brendan says “Anything over 6 feet [cq – clearly meant stories] would be subject to an additional layer of special permit review, where residents would have the opportunity to voice their opinions.” ‘Opportunity to voice opinions’ is what we had with Hello/Goodbye Washington Street, and it hasn’t done much good. So why should ‘opportunity to voice opinions’ on a project by project basis be any comfort?
Commuters to Newton from the east will have to take the bus if they want to arrive in Newton any time betweer 5am and 10:30am, because the Commuter Rail isn’t stopping in Newton then. And you can’t count on everyone commuting east-west. There will be added north-south traffic, which I think many feel is already worse than east-west.
And sure the City Council ‘could’ require improvements to the CR stations as a condition of special permits. But did they for Washington Place or Austin Street? Not even an elevator, but something as low-tech as enclosing the stairs so snow can’t accumulate.
BTW, I Facebook-Lived the Q&A portion of the Draft #3 presentation the Monday night, and was pleasantly surprised this time to find the video saved to my phone, so I’ve uploaded to YouTube, so you don’t have to be on FB to watch it. The whole audio should be on newtonma.gov by now. https://youtu.be/Nhonxs3ikUw
If you are on FB, I recommend watching the Tuesday night presentation of the Riverside Committee at the Library, and its Q&A. (you can try link anyway, but not sure it’ll work if you’re not logged into FB) https://www.facebook.com/NewtonLowerFalls/videos/1168335353326518/
This is a slight fork off, but right now there is a thread on Nextdoor with these same themes running through. Same old arguments…
@Brendan,
The table you refer to and the row (4 stories or more) is misleading in this regard, and you should look at table on the following page 4.1.3(g). The second g! The first G is max height (note 48′) and the second is 4 Stories max
I must say, I find the frequent references in this post to Councilor Norton “not understanding” rather off-putting and a bit insulting. I’ve known her a long time, and while you may disagree with her, as I sometimes do, I assure you – she understands.
I want to echo the concerns about parking on Washington St. There seems to be this idyllic delusion that only people who live in Newtonville and walk to the train take the commuter rail. I live in Newton Highlands within walking distance of the green line but when I worked in Boston for seven years, I took the commuter rail or the express bus and parked along Washington St. because it cut my commute time in half. I recently had occasion to go downtown via commuter rail and long-term parking on a workday was slim pickings. I drive that way every day to work in Newton Corner and the spots are all full. All I can say is infrastructure first.
… not to mention the commuter rail is not exactly cheap. New york subway system is only $2.75 for anywhere on the subway map..
Once you pay for the rail and parking and the stupid schedule .. just driving into Boston(pay for downtown parking) with another person becomes tempting..
Why just 10 stories? Why not 15? Why not 20? Why 6? Seriously, on what basis do they make these decisions so precisely? Is it based on developers funding plans? Who put the “10” in there and why?
Hush! Don’t encourage them 😉
We have almost ONE BILLION DOLLARS of unfunded liabilities coming at us in short order and we’ve got city hall dithering around about what sort of high density forms of residential housing to build. This has driven me mad for years — residential housing barely pays for itself through property taxes — we should be focusing on attracting solely commercial developers (higher property tax rates; lower drain on city resources) to start to build the funds we will need to pay for these liabilities that will begin to hit in the not too distant future.
@Aaron Goldman,
At least with respect to the issue of parking requirements, if Councilor Norton actually does understand, as you contend, then she is deliberately misleading constituents. The plan calls for eliminating parking minimums—this is very different from “limiting parking in new developments” as she says. Is there another way to interpret her statement?
I agree with Chuck Tanowitz—eliminating parking minimums, along with various transportation investments, is a huge and necessary change towards helping reduce car dependence. I also view the focus on the 10 story office building along with the parking misinformation as a red herring. By framing the issue as “limiting parking” instead of what it actually is–developers deciding the proper amount of parking necessary for the specific development—residents start to become very concerned about an impending parking apocalypse in their neighborhood, which is completely unfounded.
Lastly, it seems very surprising that Councilor Norton seems happy about some “tree canopy and other environmental benefits” in the plan, yet fails to see the clear environmental benefits to reducing automobile use and subsidization.
I am so glad I got my tuchis out of Newtonville! Parking was already atrocious, and I was not going to waste a lot of my precious time waiting for a sporadic bus, or leave work just because it was bus time. I drove. And I was getting tickets because there was no more legal all-day parking. And I wasted a lot of time jockeying the car around the neighborhood dodging tickets.
Its just idiotic to think that making parking difficult will solve environmental problems. The housing stock built since WW II is almost all based around cars. Stores are now out on the highway. Jobs are often away from the old transit routes. So most people need cars to get to work and to shop and to school. You can’t unbreak the egg. The MBTA doesn’t have much money and does not hugely expand transit just because developers show up. And it’s even stupider to think that most people will switch to bikes, just because The Great Chuck rides one more than 99.9% of the public.
@Pat
Apparently they already have ideas. And that’s my point. Where does the 10 story limit come from? The planning department? Asking the developers how much they plan to build? Impact studies? SWAG?
Someone is playing god and I’d like to know who it is.
Also, the notify me of follow up comments checkbox on V14 is no longer working for me.
I agree with Fred. I don’t think you can discourage car ownership by making parking inconvenient. Cambridge and Boston have better public transit and bikability than Newton but plenty of people still own cars and park them on the street – maybe several blocks away.
The T in most of Newton is really only useful for people who work standard business hours in Boston. If you work atypical hours or if you work west or somewhere up and down 128 you are probably going to need to get in a car.
And I would actually love to get rid of my car, but there’s no way I can if I want to do things like work at my current job and take the kids to extracurriculars.
In regards to reducing cars for environmental reasons…
The slow adoption to electric cars will slowly meet this goal, we don’t need to force people to give up their car, we just need the electric car prices to come down..
imagine if “cash for clunkers” has stipulated only electric vehicles (and tesla, bolt, leaf were available back then).. what a total wasted opportunity
Tesla is also aiming for robot taxis at 18 cents mile (vs $2 a mile for today’s uber). If this comes true, then its $3 to get to Boston. why would anyone bother to own a car?
The point is, the high density housing in the name of “global warming” will be drop in the bucket compared to the advancement in electric car technology in the next 10-15 years.
Newton could start by providing rebates/property tax discounts to residents who own ZERO cars or an electric car priced under $35k (or some reasonable number).. for pollution, this would help much more than high density housing in the name of global warming…
Bugek, such techno-utopianism is as misguided as the 1964 Worlds Fair exhibits that would have had us in flying cars by now. Electric cars just move the combustion elsewhere; in many places they are effectively powered by coal. Here, it’s largely imported hydroelectric power from flooded aboriginal lands in Quebec, supplemented with pipeline natural gas, and the pipelines are pretty full and attempts to build a new one have been blocked by NIMBY. And the grid has little spare capacity, so it can’t handle the load of a lot of electric cars without major upgrades. And nobody wants that in their back yard either.
In terms of net carbon efficiency, electric cars are only a slight improvement over point-of-use combustion, i.e., ordinary motorcars. The main savings would come from having smaller, lighter cars with less mass to move. The main way to get there would be to have a higher fuel tax. But Mass. subsidizes giant SUVs with its lowest-in-the-northeast fuel tax. I wonder if Ernie Boch Jr. gives as much to Dems. in the GGC as he gives to Trump.
Plus those VASSLS along Washington St. won’t have enough parking, and apartment garages very rarely have charging stations. The whole EV thing is built around single-family homes with indoor or adjacent parking.
And don’t get me started on self-driving taxicabs. What do you have against cab drivers anyway? Most people want their own cars, not to hail a taxi, whether by hand or on a tele-fondleslab, every time they come and go. Do people really want to stand outside the grocery store with bags waiting for a lift? Already the cheaper, unlicensed taxis from Uber and Lyft have worsened street congestion and taken away business from mass transit in the urban cores where it is viable.
Once upon a time a TV station tried to meet its “educational” children’s programming requirement by showing The Jetsons. I don’t buy it.
Fred is right. EVs will help but not as much as reduced car use from increased walkable communities and mass transit. Personally, I think we focus as EVs as the solution to Climate Change because shopping is easy – buy a new car! But I think it will be about as helpful as Pres. Bush’s suggestion to go out and shop after 9/11.
“Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack said, respond to “the twin transportation challenges of the 21st century” — climate change and congestion.
“Whether today or in the future, we simply must move more people in fewer vehicles if we are serious about reducing congestion and greenhouse gas pollution from the transportation sector,” she said.
The commission’s first recommendation is to “prioritize investment in public transit.””
https://www.wbur.org/bostonomix/2018/12/14/future-of-transportation-emissions-report
Fred,
If autonomous taxis are 18c a mile, really why would ‘most’ people want to own a car? It would make no financial sense
As recent as 30 years ago, people used to still ‘write letters’. I definitely see this a shift in car ownership where people don’t have to live walking distance to village centers anymore. the “5 minute walk” will become the “5 minute taxi ride”
Sounds reasonable.
After reading these headlines, I will be donating some more money to Norton’s reelection campaign.
Bugek, if you believe that driverless taxis will be 18c/mile — here, then I have a deal for you. There’s this nice bridge I can sell you. Here’s the deed…
Now to normal folks, car ownership means more than short trips around town. It means trips out to stores like Home Depot, where you don’t want to carry the big stuff home on a bus. It means vacations. It means going to the mall (typically Natick) to buy clothes. It means taking your kid from school to a program and then picking him or her up for dinner. (Manhattan and Allston have a lot of car-free folk, but not a lot of schoolkids, per-capita.) It means going to work at a place that’s not the downtown area that the MBTA exists to bring workers to, and when driving there having your own choice of music. These add up. I don’t like car-dependent culture but we’re not going to solve it by imagining taxicabs “too cheap to meter” (remember that?).
Fred,
I guarantee we will see affordable autonomous taxi from a private company BEFORE the Mbta creates an affordable, frequent and accessible public transportation for Newtonville
I just quoted the 18cents from the Ceo of tesla.. who knows..
Bugek, I’d take that as a bet, so long as you define “affordable” as you have, at 18c/mile, using 2018 dollars adjusted for inflation. I’d win, because never is not BEFORE never. It’s the same time, so it should be an equality operator.
Elon Musk would be selling bridges today if he weren’t so rich from getting lucky with PayPal or whatever dotcom it was he sold on time. Tesla is almost as good an investment as Webvan. Musk’s mass transit investment is The Boring Company, which is clever but doesn’t really have much applicability to say Newton or its environs. Maybe if he could bore a North-South Rail Link in Boston I’d be impressed.
Bugek is right on the money. Reducing transportation related GHGs from high density development will produce (at best) a tiny, tiny fraction of emissions reduction compared to tightening federal fuel economy standards for new vehicles and getting a lot more electric vehicles on the road. The good news is that electric vehicles with a range of 500 miles on a single charge are now projected to cost less than gasoline and diesel fueled vehicles within the next three years. The path is now open for electric and some other alternative fuel vehicles to start playing a significant role in reducing GHGs from cars, buses and other transportation within the next decade.
The real downer is the Trump Administration’s decision to suspend the more stringent national fuel economy standards that had been designated to take place before 2050. The reason this is so problematic is quite basic. Over a decade or so, beefed up fuel economy standards would tighten emissions on most vehicles as the periodic turnover of vehicles progresses. The overwhelming majority of new cars (almost certainly in the 10s of millions) would ultimately fall under these new standards.
@Bob: But reducing vehicle emissions will do nothing to solve traffic congestion and gridlock. That can only happen by reducing the number of single occupancy vehicles on the road. Denser walkable, bikable, transit-oriented developments do that. Reducing suburban sprawl does that.
Over building parking and widening roads does just the opposite.
And, of course, Councilor Norton knows this too.
@Greg,
And we all know the MBTA has shown little appetite to do its part for Newton. In fact aren’t they reducing services due to low ridership?
As other people have commented, you can’t even get to these locations on the train at certain times. I suspect Councilor Norton would love to eliminate cars, but is realistic too. Something this the Washington Hallucination is not!
Actually Simon my family has been having trouble sleeping the past few weeks because the T is rebuilding the Green Line tracks that are behind our house. When done, we’ve been promised new larger and faster trains in conjunction with a new fair system designed to speed things up too. As for buses, we’re still waiting for the decisions about the Better Bus plan. Here’s hoping that plays in our favor too.
These things won’t be perfect, but it’s not fair to say the MBTA isn’t doing anything.
Greg,
The T improvements sound great, so great that all the high density housing should be built around there. No reason to hope for workable public transportation… its right there! We have it now!
Hopefully you will welcome the thousands of new high density units near your home..
@Bugek: I certainly will! It’s going to make for some great block parties.
@Simon: I was responding to your inaccurate statement about the T not doing anything in Newton.
Can we get rid of the winter parking ban?
@Greg
The MBTA Greenline is hardly relevant to what some people believe to be transit oriented development along Washington St.
As for bigger trains on the D line, your going to have wait a while. They can’t do these longer trains until they upgrade a bunch of train stations. Perhaps they will get around to that in the next 20 years?
Greg,
I look forward to you lobbying the city and developers to build several high density developments in your neighborhood. Please send us the links…
@Greg. I was only voicing my skepticism that high density and transit oriented development would contribute much if anything to reducing transportation related GHG emissions in the next two or three decades. I didn’t comment on other problems or benefits that might derive from these measures because I can’t quantify them and I suspect that nobody else can either.
I think a 2 to 3 decade time frame is a reasonable period of time for ensuring that we bring on line effective and quantifiable strategies to drastically lower GHG emissions. This certainly will include the still elusive “tipping point” that scientific experts tell us is almost to certain to happen within this time frame. The air quality benefits of what is certain to be an exploding growth in the number of of high mileage electric cars along with beefed up fuel economy standards can be measured and are seen as very effective over the next few decades.
I drafted my previous comment because I’ve read many comments on this blog and elsewhere which do, in fact, suggest that transit oriented high density development is a crucial and effective measure for reducing GHG emissions. I’ve researched a lot of material on line, but found nothing that showed a study from a specific location where such an analysis had been attempted or even tried to model these benefits in a hypothetical fashion.
Some parting shots.
1. One of our two household vehicles is an electric Smart Car. It’s maximum range is about 80 miles on a single charge in our garage. The increase in our electric bill has been minimal, less than 25% of what I project each year from air conditioning. If mileage was increased to around 500 miles per charge, both of our cars would be electric assuming the price for such car is as reasonable as the studies predict they will be. I have been impressed and somewhat heartened by how fast these technical improvements for motor vehicles have taken place. I also fully on board with just about every other measure that has been implemented or planned for reducing GHGs. I’m only skeptical of proposed measures that seem to promise far more than they can deliver.
2. I worked on two major studies that included analyses of the effectiveness of transit oriented and various land use measures to reduce motor vehicle emissions of carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides. These were parts of EPA mandated State Implementation Plans (SIP) to achieve air quality standards by certain statutory deadlines. The upshot was that all the aggressive transit measures (bus, train, carpooling, bicycle programs etc.) had only extremely small benefits. More than 95% of the reductions came from assembly line installation of pollution control devices and the annual emission inspection and maintenance of just about all gasoline powered motor vehicles.
3. We missed the boat for getting a lot of the sprawl, development and transportation mess we are now in during the 1970s when Congress failed to approve Senator Henry M. Jackson’s “National Land Use Planning Act”. It was heartbreaking for me because I had a pretty much assured assignment at EPA to help work on this.
Don’t fret about autonomous vehicles much less taxis. They will never exist.
The only people I know who agree with me are other software engineers with computer vision and AI experience.
Sure there’s lot of smart developers working on the problem. Everyone likes a fat paycheck. It’s a fun game. People and “smart” investors lost a lot of money in the dot com bubble. The autonomous car craze will be a bubble that’s already starting to burst.
It doesn’t work, and the primitive sensors and silicon and metal computers we currently have won’t do it. In 100 years, with a completely different kind of “thinking machine”? Maybe.
Count your stars that you weren’t in a 737 Max with its stall correcting software. No think about riding on storrow drive with some Python code with “AI” at the wheel.
@Bob – “I’ve researched a lot of material on line, but found nothing that showed a study from a specific location where such an analysis had been attempted or even tried to model these benefits in a hypothetical fashion.”
UC Berkeley’s Cool Map shows ‘Average Annual Household Carbon Footprint by Zip Code’
https://coolclimate.org/maps
Boston is Green 36.2 metric tons of CO2 emissions per average household; Dover is red 86 metric tons; Newton Center is 63.8 tons; Brookline is 50 tons
Lucia
If newton were really serious about global warming, we would ban all single use packaging
All the garbage and waste from regular consumer purchases is insane.
– a single piece of candy has its own wrapper
– the stupid weekly newton newspaper is wrapped in plastic
– plastic water bottles.. absolute disgrace
– ban all junk mail.
– tax on non locally sourced food when local alternatives are available
One would think NYC would be the greenest place on earth… far from it
I’m all for it! But according to the EPA transportation is a much larger green house gas source: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions
Though I was surprised to learn:
‘Even if all passenger transport and road freight were electrified, approximately half of the world’s consumption of oil would remain untouched. Some of this remaining oil use would fuel aviation and shipping, but nearly a third would feed the global petrochemicals sector. That sector is booming, churning out more plastics, fertilizers, tires, detergents, medical equipment and clothing than ever before. Petrochemicals are the third-largest industrial emitter of greenhouse gases.
The growth in petrochemicals is quietly poised to continue. Last autumn, the IEA released another report, this one offers a variety of scenarios, including its reference one, in which plastics become more central to oil demand growth than road passenger transport by 2050. Fatih Birol, the executive director of the agency, was blunt: “When we look at the years to come, the petrochemical sector is by far the largest driver of global oil demand growth, much higher than cars, much higher than trucks, aviation, and shipping.” As would follow, the report predicted that carbon emissions from the petrochemicals sector — led by growth in the production of plastics — would increase by 20 percent by 2030 and 30 percent by 2050.’
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-14/electric-vehicles-are-just-one-step-to-address-climate-change
Here’s your next autonomous vehicle
https://youtu.be/-AA5IiLbxuw
It’s electric as well.
@Lucia. Thanks for forwarding the UC Berkeley’s Household Carbon Footprint Map. I knew there would be stark differences between municipalities such as Dover and Boston, but it was nice to see them so graphically displayed. I regret, as much as you do, the fact that public programs motivated by powerful private interests have so favored cars over public transportation and other ways of getting people where they want to go. It’s created a dysfunctional and wasteful transportation monster with massive gridlock from cars and inadequate public transportation systems to balance things out.
But I have to go back to the original thrust of my argument. I’m a strong advocate of most measures to improve existing public transportation systems and create new ones where they are needed and I’m also not opposed to reasonable measures for getting commuters out of their cars and onto some form of public transportation or carpooling. . I’m also not opposed to high density housing and other development if it is done sensitively and with respect for adjacent older structures that remain. I simply do not feel that these should be presented as measures that are going to do much if anything to really put a dent in transportation sources of GHG emissions. That’s why I stressed the importance of beefed up national fuel economy standards and the introduction of more electric vehicles. It’s clear they will be effective because in one way or another, they are likely to collectively impact the turnover of most motor vehicles in the next decade and a half. I’m pretty certain that transit oriented high density development and related spot transportation control measures will impact at best a tiny fraction of what the two more promising measures will produce. I would like to see any evidence about why I’m wrong on this. Indeed, I’d welcome it.
You are also correct about the problems from the petrochemical industry and from coal operated power plants. It’s ironic and sad that the government is now moving to roll back both the enhanced fuel economy standards for new vehicles and proposed emission controls on power plants. These are the kinds of measures that will ultimately determine whether the climate change war is won or lost.
Simon – Thanks for pointing that out. In the section you reference, it does say that over 4 stories is “not allowed” but there is also a note next to 4.1.3.G that says “See also Sec. 4.1.2.B.3, which is the section I had referenced in my previous comment. I’m learning how to read the zoning code, and certainly not an expert, but this does seem confusing. I’m going to try and get a better understanding of what these two sections say.