Watertown Infill and Small Developments

fsshhhaah....AguaTown can think about smart growth as much as it likes but it's a pipe dream for this crappy suburban town.
 
Unfortunately the Irving Street development doesn't preserve the right of way. Neither does an adjacent project by another developer.

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I like the development but not the loss of the ROW. That is Watertown just being lazy and short sighted.
 
vanshnookenraggen said:
I like the development but not the loss of the ROW. That is Watertown just being lazy and short sighted.
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Agree, so annoying.

But I'd still be a lot less bothered if it looked like they were even preserving a cycle track along arsenal, which supposedly had been the original plan. Doesn't look like it, though, in the render there.
 
Boston Screwed... Not incorporated far enough outward...

The future is a challenge that will have Boston 75 years out looking like something out of the Upper West Side of New York standing next to Princeton Township, NJ.
 
Art Brush Photoshop filter?
 
no just IPhone, the zoom made it look like a water color
 
Can't claim to know much about these developments, but looking at the pictures, the one thing that really annoys me is the fact that they didn't put the electrical underground. This topic has been brought up in threads about Malden and the like, and given that the distances to downtown Boston are somewhat similar, deserves at least a mention. These towns need to stipulate the relocation of electrical to underground as part of the permitting process for these types of developements.
 
East Boston has lots of overhead wires and it's even closer to downtown. But I agree overhead wires in cities are the ugliest thing.
 
Cortes said:
Can't claim to know much about these developments, but looking at the pictures, the one thing that really annoys me is the fact that they didn't put the electrical underground. This topic has been brought up in threads about Malden and the like, and given that the distances to downtown Boston are somewhat similar, deserves at least a mention. These towns need to stipulate the relocation of electrical to underground as part of the permitting process for these types of developements.
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Cortes -- go get a quote for digging up the neighborhood to bury the wires [telephone and electrical distribution]

and then come along some few decades later to dig up the neighborhood again to install coaxial cable for two or three companies and still later come along a put local fiber optics in the ground

Poles with wires and cables and fibers may be ugly -- but they are economically justified in all but the highest density districts -- and of course -- you still do need poles even in the most urban of all areas for the lights and now cameras and gunshot detection microphones and air samplers and of course Wifi -- so that means more digging as those services are installed

PS: if you really want ugly -- take a look at the apparently newly mandated -- [by whom] -- Hurricane Katrina & Mega Quake proof Traffic Light poles with their massive horizontal beams needed to support all manner of lights, cameras, motion detection, gunshot tracking, antennas, etc.
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By the way -- one good hit by a loaded semi and all the engineering design seems to be irrelevant
 
Do you guys have numbers to show the number of units we've built this year, + the last few yeasr in the non-incorporated, outer urban core + Greater Boston??

And do we have a thread for that?
 
whighlander said:
Cortes -- go get a quote for digging up the neighborhood to bury the wires [telephone and electrical distribution]

and then come along some few decades later to dig up the neighborhood again to install coaxial cable for two or three companies and still later come along a put local fiber optics in the ground

Poles with wires and cables and fibers may be ugly -- but they are economically justified in all but the highest density districts -- and of course -- you still do need poles even in the most urban of all areas for the lights and now cameras and gunshot detection microphones and air samplers and of course Wifi -- so that means more digging as those services are installed

By the way -- one good hit by a loaded semi and all the engineering design seems to be irrelevant
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Gosh those pictures are hideous, and the regulations that determine these kinds of things are a nightmare. But I might maintain that these districts will become some of the more dense areas of the city(s), and that an early investment in infrastructure will cost less in the long term than waiting. These buildings will be there for a lot longer than 20 years.

I might just change screen name to "Split the Pole". Because apparently you aren't supposed to do that.
 
whighlander said:
Cortes -- go get a quote for digging up the neighborhood to bury the wires [telephone and electrical distribution]

and then come along some few decades later to dig up the neighborhood again to install coaxial cable for two or three companies and still later come along a put local fiber optics in the ground
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We've had technology for a long time that doesn't require you to dig every time you want to add wires. At the beginning of this century, I watched fiber optic regularly being run in my parents' neighborhood by people popping a couple covers and spooling it through. No digging up the roads or sidewalks, no repaving the next day. (Why so much fiber optic installation? Well, it was Northern Virginia, which had a combination of government and private companies constantly running their own fiber in the late 90's and early 00's.)
 
dwash59 said:
We've had technology for a long time that doesn't require you to dig every time you want to add wires. At the beginning of this century, I watched fiber optic regularly being run in my parents' neighborhood by people popping a couple covers and spooling it through. No digging up the roads or sidewalks, no repaving the next day. (Why so much fiber optic installation? Well, it was Northern Virginia, which had a combination of government and private companies constantly running their own fiber in the late 90's and early 00's.)
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Dwash -- Yea -- that was a common occurrence when everyone thought that there needed to be Terrabytes everywhere

Back about the same time as you mention I walked from MIT to the Hynes for a trade show and after crossing the Bridge I came upon a crew digging a 4 foot wide trench up Mass Ave toward Commonwealth. In the trench were 36 {I counted and its vivid} distinctively colored conduits. I asked the foreman about the project and he said Mayah Tommy had said dig up the street once and put every GD fiber companies conduit in that you can imagine -- so that's what they were doing.

I did a quick calc based on oceanic fiber capacity of Tbit/s per fiber and about 15 to 20 fibers comfortably in a conduit -- well when you do the math -- the capacity of that trench is approaching a Peta bit per second --enough to shuffle the Library of Congress up and down Mass Ave a few times per second

Needless to say most of the conduits never got any fiber and even a lot of the fiber that was pulled is still "Dark" as the myriad of Fiber owners went bankrupt -- something about the connection to the customer [the so called last 100 feet]
 
This is nice but these buildings are all looking the same from Malden ,Somerville to Dot now Watertown,I bet the Watertown mall gets a facelift with this across the street and the new hotel on one side and the office park behind it
 
Where's the transit? This isn't smart growth, it's denser suburbia.
 
vanshnookenraggen said:
Where's the transit? This isn't smart growth, it's denser suburbia.
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Exactly. When does H20-town get the transit to match the development along this corridor? (Note: This criticism applies to all development from the urban core to 128)
 
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