The Hub on Causeway (née TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

DigitalSciGuy said:
I take significant issue with this type of example because it fails to take into account the ways in which one's grocery consumption would change in the presence of a green grocer convenient to one's commute. Walk into any given Whole Foods in Manhattan and you'll see people doing small trips and likely they're doing it more frequently than the single, 12-bag haul for a month that traditionally gets thrown into the back of an SUV that has never seen a dirt road that befits suburban lifestyles.

Instead, these people will add more frequent trips to take advantage of newfound proximity and convenience to a supermarket that they may not have in Suburbsville, MA. They'll likely still do the hauls to Big Box Club Mart for the volume-priced bag of dog food, but that mix is subject to personal and family needs and preferences. It's just irritating when people paint this picture of absurdity that so often is offered in this case as if to say suburbanites would never shop at an urban grocery store on the way home from work... /rant
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Dig -- I'm talking the modern day plastic or paper grocery bags -- not some swabbies seabag -- an this isn't early 20th C before refrigerators and freezers

in Lexington were we live -- we don't have an SUV -- its a Honda Civic -- and we regularly purchase about 10 to 12 bags our weekly trek to the Market Basket for the basic consumables for our family of 2 adults, 1 terrier & some fish

And that still doesn't provide us with all of our food as it doesn't include the several hundred pounds of meat & fish sitting in the freezer which is delivered every 6 months. Nor does Market Basketing eliminate the small trips which we make to Wilson Farms several times a week in the growing season as well as to Trader Joe's and other local shops

I think you may be characterizing a life-style based mainly on ordering take-out, and doing a lot of dine-out which can be accommodated through occasionally purchasing a small bag or two and carrying them on the commuter train on your way home
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

Matthew said:
Before this degenerates....

So it might be correct to say that there is a zero-sum game between fast-moving, motor-powered transportation vs human-powered transportation. But beware of anyone trying to pit bikes against pedestrians -- they are usually trying to distract from the real problem, which actually stems from the desire to drive motorized vehicles at high speeds on city streets.
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Mathew -- you are enough of veteran of this discussion to know that you can't just make a statement like the above without the admission that today 90+% of all goods and people in a city spend some amount of time on roads in /on a motorized vehicle

Pedestrians and Bicyclists might not like it -- but the majority of the street infrastructure of signs and barriers in a city is there to protect the public from chaos and mayhem that would arise in their absence

There are immutable consequences -- known colloquially as Newtonian Physics -- when a mostly soft and shock-vulnerable light object meets a mostly hard and massive object -- the light vulnerable object suffers massively. So we tend to localize vehicles to streets and isolate pedestrians on sidewalks and grade separated paths -- except at the intersections and in Boston / Cambridge of course mid block as well.

Bicycles are somewhat of a worst case situation -- as they move fast enough to pretend to be motorized vehicles in a city street -- yet the rider suffers the consequences of an unprotected pedestrian when they interact with a car or truck
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

Again, I will reiterate, it all comes down to speed. Motor vehicles, traveling at speeds faster than possible under muscle power, are what require all the infrastructure and all the protections.
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

Matthew said:
Again, I will reiterate, it all comes down to speed. Motor vehicles, traveling at speeds faster than possible under muscle power, are what require all the infrastructure and all the protections.
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No -- its all about Momentum -- i.e. the product of speed and mass

Mechanical Energy [energy purely due to motion] is not conserved in typical vehicle and anything collisions or pedestrian and anything collisions -- but momentum is conserved

The consequence are:

  • if two pedestrians collide they both get back up and walk away
    if two bicyclists collide -- same mass as the pedestrians -- they may have a few broken bones but its rarely fatal
    Have a pedestrian or a bicyclist collide with a car or truck moving at the same speed as the pedestrian and the best you can hope for is that it will be like hitting a brick wall
    A motor vehicle in the class of 10X the mass of the pedestrian or more moving at the speed of a bicyclist is a potential lethal event
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

Oh, for a second here I thought something was happening with the development of the towers...
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

whighlander said:
No -- its all about Momentum -- i.e. the product of speed and mass

Mechanical Energy [energy purely due to motion] is not conserved in typical vehicle and anything collisions or pedestrian and anything collisions -- but momentum is conserved

The consequence are:

  • if two pedestrians collide they both get back up and walk away
    if two bicyclists collide -- same mass as the pedestrians -- they may have a few broken bones but its rarely fatal
    Have a pedestrian or a bicyclist collide with a car or truck moving at the same speed as the pedestrian and the best you can hope for is that it will be like hitting a brick wall
    A motor vehicle in the class of 10X the mass of the pedestrian or more moving at the speed of a bicyclist is a potential lethal event
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The Twilight Zone.

Psst.... Whighlander, you're better when you stay on subject. No one shives a git about the Cliff Claven act.
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

we regularly purchase about 10 to 12 bags our weekly trek to the Market Basket for the basic consumables for our family of 2 adults, 1 terrier & some fish
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Try putting more than two things in each bag.
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

davem said:
Oh, for a second here I thought something was happening with the development of the towers...
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Womp womp.

Do we have a more firm quote on groundbreaking for Q1 of 2015? I'm getting antsy with my new view and the crane for Avalon North Station/Nashua Street Residences hasn't materialised yet.

Regarding the architecture of the residential component, I had been trying to rack my brain to clarify what other building it felt reminiscent of. As it turns out, it was another building located directly adjacent an east coast train terminal...

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Am I stretching it a bit by drawing comparison to it as a modern nod to the International Styled PanAm/MetLife Building just as the facade of its podium is a nod to the design of the original North Station?

I kindof get what the architect is trying to do with the boring modern office tower box on top of what looks like an adaptive reuse of an old warehouse for its podium, but I can't help but feel like they painted themselves into a corner by holding themselves to use the design language of each segment's primary use.

Is it really that expensive to build more interesting buildings? We keep talking about how we want something better here; can anyone cite examples of designs they'd rather see here?
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

Also, reusable shopping bags hold a lot more than plastic disposable bags. I can put a whole week's worth of groceries for two people into two reusable bags.
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

Whig, people change their behavior. If a supermarket opened up across the street from you, you probably wouldn't feel the need to shop for 7 days worth of food. Similarly, if a supermarket opened in someone's office building or train station, they're less likely to feel the need to shop for 7 days worth of food. Some still will, but some won't.
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

Why the fuck are we talking about how to bag groceries?!
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

From this angle, the "Digital Cloud" building looks too much like the bland old boxy monstrosities of office towers that all appeared in the 70's (One Beacon, One Federal, 100 Federal, 28 State) This location is too prominent for just any old building, it needs something unique like the proposed congress st garage building



Lets just steal this one from Houston and plop it here
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

datadyne007 said:
Urban habits vs suburban habits.
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Or Reality versus Fantasy

See the recent article on Alewife from the Globe [to be posted in the Cambridge Thread]
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

underground said:
Try putting more than two things in each bag.
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Uground -- We don't do the bagging -- the little old ladies and gents at Market Basket do the bagging and thus determine the contents of each bag and how many bags we get to carry -- it is perhaps related to complaints of things breaking through and spilling out, etc.

Or perhaps its that as the population ages and there-by feminizes that the little old ladies can't carry as many cans of cat food as the more robust virile younger folks could carry larger cans of dog food in the Ozzie & Harriet days
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

I can't find that gif of the guy banging his head on the keyboard until it turns into a bloody pulp... but that.
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

lol. Nice that one is a classic
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

Or Reality versus Fantasy
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Four bags for me, my wife, and two cats for two weeks is pretty easy, but if you want to claim I live in some fantastical dream world then I'll take it.

We don't do the bagging -- the little old ladies and gents at Market Basket do the bagging and thus determine the contents of each bag and how many bags we get to carry -- it is perhaps related to complaints of things breaking through and spilling out, etc.
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Way to throw little old ladies under the bus. No one wants to take responsibility for their poor bagging skills anymore.
 
Re: The Boston Garden (TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

WOW...really opened a can of worms on that one? I should probably bear the bulk of the blame for engaging the quip about the 12-bag shopping run on the commute home...who'da thunk shopping habits was such a sensitive topic. Now that I think of it, I've had similar arguments with friends/acquaintances before about grocery shopping habits regarding frequency and convenience; I feel like it always ends the same way: I'm trying to paint a larger picture about how some peoples' habits may change while admitting some people's don't and occasionally there's one person defensively arguing for the multi-bag weekly run when no one's explicitly chiding them for doing that.

Maybe I haven't been here long enough to learn characters - Wig, just to clear the air, I've lived on Long Island for much of my formative years and I've experienced everything from New York City density and convenience in Flushing, Queens to small town, post-industrial boom America and served a lot of time in the space of post-WW2 suburbia in between. I grew up in a family of 5 - my parents and 2 other brothers; my mom learnt her lesson early not to take us grocery shopping with her, but she'd do a huge grocery run once a week or every two weeks and once a month do a run to BJ's. My quip about the luxury SUV that has never seen an unpaved road was largely at my parents and perhaps more generally to the large group of their generation that likes to write articles talking down about my generation being too 'obsessed with our iPhones' to care about the real things in life, fault us for not pursing them, and if student loans are factored into the equation, it's assumed that we'll eventually want these: car loan debt, home loan debt, the American Suburban Dream, etc.

I've seen my parents evolve from urban life to suburban life; in both cases we had a supermarket 5 minutes away from home - the former by walking and the latter by driving. I've seen their shopping habits change. I've also seen mine go in reverse. In college, I used to borrow a friend's car once a week to drive up the road to the supermarket to do my purchases in bulk. Then I moved to Boston, where I live with my boyfriend and he does the shopping on his way home from work once or twice a week depending on how far we can stretch a meal and our groceries.

I see the merits to both and I don't necessarily pass judgement on either. My original issue was that I've come across that very quip before that has incited arguments just like this. All I wanted to do was bring in balanced perspective in effectively agreeing that one simply wouldn't start doing a 12-bag shopping run on their way home from work, but also completing the thought: if they did start shopping on the way home they'd instead be making more frequent 1-, 2-, or at most 3-bag runs.

I think all we've been trying to get at is that people's shopping habits are flexible. Trying to re-rail the subject, this more generally ties back to these developments in the sense of trip generation projections that come out of a manual that isn't necessarily sensitive to urban density and transit accessibility. Many high-level planning decisions seem to be made with little understanding that people's habits are highly plastic in some respects. Building an urban supermarket means you can largely do away with on-site parking because people will primarily visit by foot (or bike), but if you're going by suburb-based trip generation rates, as some developers do, you end up justifying more parking and actually generating car trips because you're offering parking. I'm now shaking my fist at the Whole Foods and Stop and Shop in JP that we use that probably could've been larger if not for the often empty parking lot that sets them back from the street...

Speaking of which, we're not getting any new parking in this, right? The garage already exists under the towers' footprint and residential/office parking will be lumped in with/carved out of that?

hockey92 said:
From this angle, the "Digital Cloud" building looks too much like the bland old boxy monstrosities of office towers that all appeared in the 70's (One Beacon, One Federal, 100 Federal, 28 State) This location is too prominent for just any old building, it needs something unique like the proposed congress st garage building



Lets just steal this one from Houston and plop it here
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I think it'd be interesting to have a more elegantly simple building like this. If we just changed out the office tower with this, I think it would be a nicer-looking modern execution of modern office tower design that would be better-suited to stand next to the contemporary International Style-esqe residential tower.
 
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