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Well, as expected, I've overheard this one called "the bacon building" about a dozen times now walking around the neighborhood. Which I think is perfectly fine as a nickname.

Union Square already has pretty bad cross-town commuter traffic at rush hour. It can be a 10 minute wait just to pull onto Washington from a side street. Getting to a Union Square parking structure from the highway would be pretty brutal. The streets are already essentially at max capacity even...

Any other forum and I would have assumed this was sarcasm .

The residential permits are too dang cheap though. The problem is, raising the cost is a VERY regressive tax, so you need some sort of means test, and right now the parking office doesn't have that capability. Plus it would be political suicide, I'm sure.

I have no way to corroborate this but I've been told (by a local journalist) that Broadway Brake Corp is looking to cash out on the location and sell to a developer as well. You're correct that it's not the nicest block currently, as it smells pretty much exactly like you would expect a truck...

It might be as simple as that crew needing parts for some other area of the job, and no wanting to bring a crew on site until they had parts in to do everything in one go. Just normal sequencing/scheduling stuff.

Oh lord a building that spans the track and fills in the whole Prospect/Newton/Webster triangle with a substation in the basement would be incredible. Clearing out the Newton/Emerson triangle for a megablock on the other hand wouldn't be easy. There is one abandoned home that could easily be...

I thought the Prospect St Bridge was a major electrical interconnect across the tracks, and that is why the substation was there? Wherever you move the substation too, wouldn't you have to run a heavy duty transfer line to as well? Not sure on this. E: This is related to the idea of moving it...

Yeah but... do we consider Somerville to have a desirable color pallet currently? There's a lot I love about my city, but the off-white of sun-bleached vinyl siding on a triple decker isn't one of them, and I feel like they're channeling that successfully with those whites there. (I actually...

Maybe they should have leaned into the brick theme even more? Instead of two tones of red and two tones of white, go like three tones of red? A little simpler, a little more clearly brick-inspired, and a little less contrasty? Obviously you are kind of stuck with the blue/some dark color if you...

I think so? I've always heard it matching the American standard pronunciation (ruh·thr·frd) rather than the british (ruh·thuh·fuhd). Google seems to think NJ also uses American standard pronunciation?

121 Washington was only zoned for 3 stories (the zoning down Washington street is a weird building-by-building mess, but before the big redo this was all zoned NR, so it could have been worse)

Would the T keep some of the old cars for work car conversions / other misc one-off uses do you think? Some of those specialty vehicles are incredibly ancient.

Isn't that actually the plan for the pizza place a few doors down? ~63-65 Union? I thought that was getting a rooftop beer garden. I can't find the post on it now though...

I mean, it's a cogen steam plant. As power plants go, that's already on the nicer/more modern end. You can certainly tell from the lack of soot on everything that it isn't coal or oil fired. It sounds like they'll still need the smokestacks though, since the gas burning part of the plant would...

Very good comment. Permanence in that sense is a solved technical problem, in that we CAN teach a computer how to make inferences based on semantic context, but it takes some processing oomph. For Siri, the extra server processing power would cost Apple too much, so they limit the functionality...

The actual critical difference between the two is where the heavy lifting occurs. Alexa doesn't do much more than detect the trigger phrase locally -all the processing happens on the server. (The processor in an Alexa is the same as a decent cellphone from 2014 or so, iirc) So they can make it...

Yeah, I've seen that called a "miniBRT", the bike-speed shuttle running on a path. Very popular idea with certain college campuses etc. Especially if the vehicle is all electric and light weight. The market might have spoken to some extent however- this was basically Optimus' strategy and they...

I ABSOLUTELY plan on riding on opening day :D 50/50 my kids will be there as well, depending on how vaccines go this month.

Some perspective from inside the industry (I work on autonomous cars): 1) Tesla has fundamentally build the wrong architecture to do real autonomy. They will never progress past lvl3 into true lvl4/5 with their current approach, the computer is roughly an order of magnitude (some professionals...