City Councilors Andrea Downs and Jake Auchincloss have drawn a line at the Northland Development: 1,050 spaces, not 1,450, as is currently planned. In a letter to the developer (full text below), they argue persuasively for the lower number.
The City Council’s Parking Caucus (for now just Downs and Auchincloss) have it exactly right. If we want less private automobile traffic generated by the Northland site, the most effective throttle is parking. As Downs and Auchincloss put it, “If you build more parking, we will all get more driving.” Like night follows day.
There is a curious tension between the level of parking and the work being down on both sides to ensure proper levels of private automobile use. I’ve been in a few meetings discussing what the developer’s obligation should be — private shuttles, with loops to residents’ final destinations or to village center T stops; payments to the MBTA to increase route coverage on Needham St.; multi-million dollar payments to study the feasibility of the Green Line extension, &c. — and how city staff will monitor automobile volume to and from the site and sanction the developer for failure to hit targets. At 1,450 spaces, the city is basically granting Northland a traffic-generating monster and then saying, let’s figure out together how to restrain it.
Everybody says that traffic is a or the top concern about the Northland (or, really, any) development, but City Councilors (except Downs and Auchincloss) don’t want to take the obvious steps required to actually prevent too much traffic. It’s crazy.
The current plan, whatever the Traffic Demand Management (TDM) mechanisms are, is destined to fail. Either the work to measure and monitor traffic and negotiate strategies to adjust to inevitable non-compliance will consume city staff or the city will quietly take the path of least resistance and let things slide.
Better, as the Parking Caucus puts it, “if [Northland] finance[s], market[s], and operate[s] in a parking-constrained format, the city can be assured that we have a partner committed to other modalities, including the shuttle service.” At 1,050 spaces, Northland’s interests and the city’s are aligned. To be successful, Northland needs people to live in the housing, to work in the offices, to shop in the stores. If 1,050 spaces is not enough parking to generate the demand Northland needs, it’s up to them to figure out how to get people to and from the site by means other than private automobile.
Maybe, Northland will have to get really creative to market to and find the 800 households in the Greater Boston area who want to live car-free or car-lite on Needham St. Or, they will have to provide a super robust car-sharing program to meet resident demand for occasional trips. Certainly, they will have an incentive to maintain an effective shuttle service or figure out another, more efficient system to get residents to work and office and retail workers to the site. At 1,050 spaces, the city will not need to invest as much in “measure, monitor, and enforce.”
We desperately need more housing in Newton, for economic, social, and environmental justice reasons. And, we need to make sure that we’re not adding proportionally more carbon-emitting traffic to our streets. We need to stop thinking that it’s not possible to live car-free or car-lite in Newton. It’s not what most of us are used to, but we need to make it possible and Needham St. isn’t a bad place to start. There are lots of people, especially Millennials, who would rather have walking- or biking-centered lifestyle.
Downs and Auchincloss talk about how “Northland has three critical stages to go: financing, leasing, and then operating.” Sustainable parking numbers have to be built into each of those three stages, to ensure the right path-dependency. Downs and Auchincloss conclude:
Northland and the city must bake into this project, during its very conception, the economic incentive to plan & develop away from the car.
Ideally, the Parking Caucus represents swing votes that will be able to set a sustainable parking limit, to plan and develop away from the car.
Big question to those City Councilors not yet in the Parking Caucus: why not?
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Text of the Downs/Auchincloss letter:
City Council
2018-2019 City of Newton
31 May 2019
Larry Gottesdiener
Chairman and CEO
Northland Investment Corporation
2150 Washington Street
Newton, MA 02462
Mr. Gottesdiener:
This letter is in regards to petitions #425-18 and #426-18, your proposal to develop 14 buildings varying in height from 3 to 8 stories with a total of 800 housing units (123 of which will be affordable), 180,000 square feet of office space and 115,000 square feet of commercial space on a 22.6 acre site at Needham and Oak Streets.
Much about the project is to be commended. The lot is under-developed; Newton needs the housing; and the site design is well-considered. Additionally, Northland is proposing an ambitious program of transportation demand management, the keystone of which is a privately funded, publicly available shuttle service.
However, Northland’s parking allotment undermines its commitment to its own transportation demand management program. Northland has proposed 1,450 parking spots, with additional capacity to flex up during holiday season. This breaks down to 800 parking spots for the residential units, a 1:1 ratio, and 650 parking spots for the commercial tenants. We recommend 1,050 parking spots, retaining the 650 parking spots for the commercial tenants and lowering the residential ratio to 0.5, or in another configuration that you propose. You could retain the holiday flex parking capacity at your discretion. We also recommend closing the Oak Street entry/exit to all vehicles but shuttles and emergency vehicles.
Reducing the parking-spot allocation, in tandem with the planning department’s ‘measure, monitor, and enforce’ initiative to cap car-trips, is the city’s best assurance that you are committed to traffic mitigation in the long term. Traffic is the neighborhood’s most severe concern and deserves special consideration. Traffic is also a regional vexation that is getting worse. We must plan and develop away from the car.
Northland has three critical stages to go: financing, leasing, and then operating. At each stage, your incentive is to internalize the benefits of more parking while externalizing the costs of more traffic. By the time the city starts measuring and monitoring, Northland will have signed covenants with your creditors, marketed to your tenants, and established standard operating procedures with your managers. All these activities are path-dependent on your parking allotment. If you build more parking, we will all get more driving. In contrast, if you finance, market, and operate in a parking-constrained format, the city can be assured that we have a partner committed to other modalities, including the shuttle service.
Northland and the city must bake into this project, during its very conception, the economic incentive to plan & develop away from the car.
Jake Auchincloss
Andreae Downs
1000 Commonwealth Avenue ▪ Newton, MA 02459
617-796-1210 www.newtonma.gov
This puts the smoke show of a transit plan puts the test. Well done, Councilors.
It seems like the dream is to have housing be like college dormitories. You walk/ bike to work ( class ) , you walk to the laundromat, you walk to a communal eating area, all your daily needs are within easy reach by foot. A BaBar like utopia where the recreation area is conveniently located next to the library. Really a planned community.
Before we get all excited about walkabilty, maybe, you know fix the crosswalk lights that have never worked at the Needham St. 7-11 crosswalk? The idea that Needham St. is a transit-oriented development is a pipe dream at present. Give me Riverside, but Northland is simply ridiculous.
Local traffic isn’t the problem on Needham Street. The road has been gridlocked at peak hours since the days of Good Vibrations, St. Regis Paper, Callahan’s, and Honeywell because it’s always been the primary route of cars headed to and from Needham and points southwest – and that’s your problem. Tonight on my walk over to Stop & Shop I saw a sign advertising office space on Highland Ave. claiming that 35,000 cars pass by each day, which sounds about right. So this entire development would lead to maybe a 2 or 3% increase in traffic if 75% of all residents were to take to the road at rush hour. Big deal. And who’s to say that those commuters don’t already drive down the length of Needham St. every day, on their way to points southwest or using it as a cut-through to 128?
Please please please develop better, safer, and more reliable infrastructure for transit users and people like me who basically risk their lives walking and cycling down Needham Street every day. But don’t limit development based on this phony complaint of how it’s going to impact traffic.
The opposition to development on Needham Street seems to be comprised, in large part, of people who within the last few years bought teardown 2-bedroom capes in a neighborhood abutting a sheet metal factory prone to explosions and then proceeded to construct 5- and 6-bedroom McMansions. The message from these folks seems to be that we need to make it easier for them to drive to their homes by reducing traffic volume. But anyone who complains about traffic on Needham Street is, by definition, part of the problem. Because you can bet your bottom dollar that they would never be caught dead on the 59 bus, or walking a mile to the Green Line. If they did, then they wouldn’t be complaining about the traffic.
A note of context: Needham St. is set to be completely rebuilt in the next couple of years. There will be grade-separated cycle tracks — that is, bike lanes that are separate from both the sidewalk and the car-travel lanes, at the same level as the sidewalk. Walkability and bike-ability should be substantially improved. The Needham St./Winchester St. intersection will be completely redesigned, with better traffic signals.
The harder we try to control outcomes the worse the unintended consequences become. For example, reading V14 the only housing that should be built should be transit oriented. By limiting cars, yes traffic will be slightly lower but it also controls who will love there by controlling where people will work, shop and spend leisure time and that is going to be where the T takes them. Yes the new super chic street taco place inside the building will be busy but how many nights/week can a Millennial eat tacos? [Just an example, I have no official word of a street taco place opening anytime soon ;-) ] They’re going to stay in town. OR they are going to want more vibrant late night activities. In effect we could become the Allston/Brighton of late 30-somethings. Now we just filled the neighborhood with people who have no interest in the neighborhood itself and are only worried about where to take selfies.
People on here are trying so hard to turn us into something we’re not. We keep forgetting what makes Newton so special. It is close enough to Boston to get there relatively easy for work or play, but far enough away that it is our sleepy suburb that shuts down at 9:30 pm. If you want to live in Cambridge so bad, move!
This sounds like a great idea. If Northland can’t find enough tenants who want to live/work car-free and find ways to provide transportation for them, then they’ll have to lower their ambitions.
This only works, of course, if the city puts parking restrictions on neighboring streets so that Northland residents/customers don’t appropriate the other 400 spaces off-site for free.
I commend the Councilors for thinking carefully about this issue. In their letter, they propose a reduction in residential parking, but leave the commercial parking at the same level.
I wonder if this is a missed opportunity. We would like to reduce trips, for a whole bunch of reasons. Understanding the traffic patterns of the planned commercial and residential entities on an hour-by-hour or 15-minute basis would tell us what best to limit.
If we have high-parking turnover commercial use, then we have more trips all through the day, and that’s bad beyond congestion. Those trips are amenable to congestion pricing, but it would be great to not have them at all. We might want to discourage those uses unless they cater to local needs and can be reached without driving.
If we have 9-5 office commercial, then we have trips at a bad time of day, but such uses are most amenable to transportation management or other alternatives because of scale issues.
Residential car ownership, on the other hand, requires parking independent of frequency of use. We want more people who don’t own a car, but transitioning from a mostly car-free household to 100% car free is a big step for people living at the edge of the transit system. Think of the things that Newton provides other people they couldn’t easily get access to today: the library, recreational facilities, City Hall, businesses beyond the Needham St corridor, schools and related activities. I wish it were better, but it isn’t.
It is important to understand exactly how many people are willing to be car-free at this location, and what we need to do at a civic level to improve that (as well as make things better for their existing neighbors on Needham St).
I would personally be pretty happy to have a large percentage of the residences that get built to go to people who don’t need to drive to work or school, even if they own a car for occasional use. That’s already an ambitious goal. But it also means that if we want to limit car trips, we need to look at commercial uses and their impact as well, possibly first.
Perhaps instead of charging just for residential parking (unbundled the parking from the units), you could also charge for “in-and-out” access, since that corresponds to trips.
Finally, I should say we shouldn’t build a surplus of parking. That benefits nobody.
I live in Newton Centre and a lot of recent condos have been built with only one parking spot, or a single car garage, and everyone just parks on the street. Who is making sure that cars are truly being limited, and not just being parked elsewhere? This seems important for all of these car-free initiatives to work.
In Boston, the compact living units with limited parking are being deed restricted to prohibit City parking permits. We should do the same unless we intend the residences to simply park on the street.
see, https://www.boston.gov/sites/default/files/compact_living_guidelines_181012.pdf
I live in a part of Newton where many of us have insufficient parking. We park on the street and shuffle our cars around all winter during the parking ban. Would I love to go car-free? Sure. But our jobs and kids extracurriculars wouldn’t allow it right now with the public transit in our neighborhood.
You can see this disaster coming. The developer has used shuttle buses to successfully distract from the impact of this project on Newton schools. The percentage of affordable housing associated with this proposal is preposterously low. Now a couple of misguided City Councilors are fixated on parking restrictions that will create a traffic nightmare. The lack of leadership amongst our elected officials in this city is astounding.
It doesn’t work that way. Needham Street, like almost every other major thoroughfare in Newton, is primarily a commuter path for drivers from other communities.
The gap in traffic that Cllrs. Downs and Auchincloss evidently hope to free up by targeting condo dwellers and apartment renters will not go unnoticed by Google Maps and Waze, and will inevitably be filled by a Back Bay-Needham or Longwood-Westwood commuter who currently sits through the Route 9 backup at Eliot Street on his way out to 128 because Needham Street isn’t moving.
Cllrs. Downs and Auchincloss, the fine denizens of Needham and points southwest applaud your efforts to free up space on their favorite cut-through route.
Also, by improving the driving commute from points southwest, you’re making it that much more attractive for Needhamites to avoid the unreliable, infrequent, and expensive ($6.75 each way + $4 parking) commuter rail trip. It will now be so much easier for Needhamites to cruise into Boston.
My point being that when it comes to traffic and transport, we need holistic regional solutions and not this smallminded approach that’s simply a fake excuse for trying to downsize the Northland development.
Although if the councillors wanted to limit car ownership across Newton to one car per household (starting with their own) they’d have my support. Of course it’s easier to target the people living in new developments.
Sean notes;
“Needham St. is set to be completely rebuilt in the next couple of years. There will be grade-separated cycle tracks — that is, bike lanes that are separate from both the sidewalk and the car-travel lanes, at the same level as the sidewalk. Walkability and bike-ability should be substantially improved. The Needham St./Winchester St. intersection will be completely redesigned, with better traffic signals.”
The Upper Falls Greenway runs along the West/Northwest edge of the proposed develoment. In addition to the updates to Needham Street Sean references, the D Line tracks are a bit over 3000 feet from property line along the Greenway. A creative idea would be to find a way to connect that link with the Eliot Station. A more radical approach would be finding a way to move the Eliot Station south of Rt. 9.
Of course, fewer cars from Northland residents doesn’t necessarily mean less traffic. Many car-free people depend on Uber to get around. There were nearly 100,000 rides per day initiated in the Boston area last year with ride-hailing services (see below). I’m not sure how that will be managed with this plan.
https://www3.bostonglobe.com/business/2018/05/01/there-were-nearly-uber-and-lyft-rides-day-boston-streets-last-year/yzOWJ9PdVg8KKQMQSKSF2K/story.html?arc404=true
How’s that plan to add a new T stop on Needham Street going? Isn’t the rule of thumb that people should be within a half mile of a T stop if they are going to use it?