Whats left to build on?

DigitalSciGuy said:
The way MassDOT defines resiliency isn't just taking into account average sea level rise from climate change. It's also about anticipating the effect of increasingly strong and harsh storms and the extreme storm surge that comes with it.

They know full well that we'd have been in just as shitty a situation as New York if Superstorm Sandy had decided to make landfall on us, which I believe was the original forecast. It's projected that this will be an increasing occurrence and is a good reason to build system-wide redundancy/increased capacity for resilience. This is what they're trying to plan for - this on top of economic growth and viability that they don't want constrained by putting all our eggs in a single large airport in Eastern MA.
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This all assumes that economic/population growth is sustainable... which it isn't. We can't afford to replace or make redundant infrastructure for every contingency. If a storm hits the airport it is more efficient to be closed for a few days here and there than to build another airport. If Boston doubled in size, then yes we need a couple more airports.
 
DigitalSciGuy said:
Having trouble finding the specific report/capital plan, but resilience in the face of rising sea levels is something that pervades a lot of MassDOT long-range planning these days and is in Massport's best interest to anticipate. I think it may have been Rich Davey when he was at MassDOT (also Massport board member/chair) who mentioned the need to consider other regional airports in the event of catastrophic flooding at Logan and needing to make more robust those regional airports as a long-range plan.

If/when I find it, I'll post in thread or update this post. Massport's site is down - it's possible the report I read was an environmental resiliency report they published and not MassDOT.
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Regional airports, yes. Absolutely not Hanscom. The supporting airports for Boston are in Providence and Manchester, as identified in the NERASP report 10 years ago. It doesn't make sense to pump money into building an all-new reliever for Logan when those fields have facilities and capacity and aren't horribly inconvenient from large segments of the metro region.

Every dollar Massport spends "raising the airport" would be better spent building a flood barrier for the Harbor in general.
 
The first maps I made were originally in the what if thread but I figured id throw some new ones in here to get some reactions. I made them originally just to see what it would have looked like if way back when they were filling everything in sight if they had gone even further.
 
There is no shortage of land for the Boston area to grow. There is only a shortage of transit accessible land as the MBTA refuses to expand to keep up with regional growth.
 
tysmith95 said:
There is no shortage of land for the Boston area to grow. There is only a shortage of transit accessible land as the MBTA refuses to expand to keep up with regional growth.
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There's enough revenue to expand or maintain. You can't do both. The Governor (not the MBTA) has placed a moratorium on expansion to pay for maintenance.
 
Equilibria said:
There's enough revenue to expand or maintain. You can't do both. The Governor (not the MBTA) has placed a moratorium on expansion to pay for maintenance.
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Just replace "MBTA's refusal to expand" with "the state's refusal to plan for the long-term economic viability of Boston by ignoring transportation infrastructure issues."
 
Yeah i want to point out that the premise that expansion and maintenance need to be funded entirely by revenue is false. It can be helpful to draw a line temporarily in order to force better operational and managerial discipline (and I think thats appropriate at the moment). But the idea that the MBTA expansion in particular should be funded by revenue is just ... false.
 
CSTH said:
Yeah i want to point out that the premise that expansion and maintenance need to be funded entirely by revenue is false. It can be helpful to draw a line temporarily in order to force better operational and managerial discipline (and I think thats appropriate at the moment). But the idea that the MBTA expansion in particular should be funded by revenue is just ... false.
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Agreed. Roads are paid for using tax dollars (the gas tax no longer pays enough). Public Transportation is something that helps property values and the environment, it should be subsidized even more than roads are. People are uninformed when they complain about the T loosing money, it should lose money.
 
Expand the MBTA at all costs. Focus developments in the core of the city were the transit already exists.

Logic only applies to private sector at this point.
 
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TheRifleman said:
Expand the MBTA at all costs. Focus developments in the core of the city were the transit already exists.

Logic only applies to private sector at this point.
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The shortcoming with this approach is that the value of transit access is already reflected in the value of land in the core of the city - even if the land is under-developed. (Also, system congestion). This means that a disproprtianate share of the region's prosperity accrues to incumbent property owners in the core transit-accessible areas.

Expanding transit, by contrast, creates a permanent increase in the value of non-core land, which public entities can more easily recapture through smart development and tax policies.

In other words, it's an investment in expanding the tax base. It's established practice to fund investment by issuing debt (and in some cases by diluting equity as well). You'll agree, by way of illustration, that businesses that fund their growth only from organic revenue almost always underperform - in many cases they destroy the potential value of their assets by leaving good growth opportunities on the table. (I'm generally skeptical of analogies between government and business, but in this case I think it's apt - the scope of the public 'enterprises' being the general prosperity of the region as a whole, not just the narrow operating economics of the transit agency)

You may eventually recognize that appeals to 'logic' and 'common sense' are reliable indicators that you yourself misunderstand the problem.
 
DigitalSciGuy said:
MassDOT and Massport are already looking at their options for scaling up airports across the Commonwealth in anticipation of rising sea levels that put Logan in jeopardy. Hanscomm being turned into one of Boston's new primary international airports isn't too far off the mark.

I'll echo what others have said here, basically that we have plenty of land near transit on high ground without needing harbour infill, which would almost definitely not pass EPA approval.

MAPC and Boston MPO are really trying to get 'Gateway' cities to focus development in the pattern tangent brings up, but as we're seeing, many towns are still obstructionist to more dense development where the transport network could otherwise handle it while (re)building active 'main streets' near transit hubs.
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Logan in jeopardy? HUH? Almost all of Boston at one time was water. All you do is take some clean dirt. When the life of the existing runways has run its course, raise the land elevation by 4-5 feet which buys you another 100 years or so until time to redo the runway again. I am planning to jack up my house at some point but I'm smart enough to know that I'm going to add 3-4 feet of earth to the property as well. Just means more stairs in front the house but I'll avoid the flooding when it hits all the other sheep.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BostonNeck.jpg
 
Seeing the dot ave/andrew swuare rezoning makes me think....isnt this the exact place we could dump a huge amount of affordable housing. Especially the northern Dorchester parcels. It has to go somewhere, why not knock out a big chunk here? Kill 2 birds with one stone, lots of ground floor retail to make them nicer areas to walk, and build a lot of 15-20 story cheap towers that people can afford to live in that are transit oriented. The merano/downtown in general isnt really the spot imo, these are the spots. Dont even build garages here.
 
I'll agree with a lot of that except this:

The merano/downtown in general isnt really the spot imo
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Downtown is exactly where affordable and workforce housing should be. You talk about 'cheap towers that people can afford to live in that are transit oriented'. What's more transit-oriented than living next to North Station? We need to secure income diversity downtown especially because of how much market rate renters are shifting that skyward.

Also, I'm absolutely opposed to just more 'cheap towers' of affordable housing. We DID that. And then we found out that it's terrible. You need income diversity otherwise you end up with segregated pockets of low income. This is precisely what we're trying to re-balance at Jackson Square.

Yes, build 10-20 story mixed income, non-luxury apartment towers on and around T stations. Yes, restrict any of these buildings from having parking and instead have them pay into a TDM (transport demand management) program that BRA and BTD must put together in concert with MBTA, Hubway, and include car sharing provisions. Enforce a parking maximum of 0 within a 500m radius around every T head house and along all of the 15 Key Bus Routes.
 
I sketched up something quick to see what a new tallest at the dalton st garage would look like.


 
^ Looks fantastic. We really should be going tall in back bay. Anything to continue taking focus off the Sheraton is a win in my book.

Since the is the "what's left to build on thread," let me ask:
has anyone ever discussed building over the surface parking lot at the harvard club (just off of Mass Ave + newbury extension). I realize that parcel is nowhere near ready to accept a large building at this point, but, since it's in the FAA height zone, I've always wondered whether we could do something with that Pike ramp and do a real build-out of the Newbury extension and/or make a plaza over there...it's an awful waste to have a surface lot here.
 
I made it so the crown is clear and the tower is blue. I dont know why developers arent doing things like that you can create a crown with setbacks that separates itself from the rest of the tower just by using different color glass.
 
bigpicture7 said:
^ Looks fantastic. We really should be going tall in back bay. Anything to continue taking focus off the Sheraton is a win in my book.

Since the is the "what's left to build on thread," let me ask:
has anyone ever discussed building over the surface parking lot at the harvard club (just off of Mass Ave + newbury extension). I realize that parcel is nowhere near ready to accept a large building at this point, but, since it's in the FAA height zone, I've always wondered whether we could do something with that Pike ramp and do a real build-out of the Newbury extension and/or make a plaza over there...it's an awful waste to have a surface lot here.
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They just built the hotel commonwealth there, that lot is gone. You can see it when you drive by on the pike.
 
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