Brighton-Allston Meeting on November 1: New Deli Coming to Cleveland Circle

Posted on October 31, 2012 by admin

The monthly meeting of BAIA (Brighton-Allston Improvement Association) is scheduled for Thursday, November 1 starting at 7:00PM at the Elks Club in Brighton Center.  New restaurants are featured on the agenda, including an introduction to the Real Deal Deli, which is in line to take over the vacant Presto Pizza on 1936 Beacon Street in Cleveland Circle.

All BAIA meetings are open to the public.  The full agenda for November 1 is as follows:

Presentations:

  • Police Report
  • New Balance Gym introduction

Agenda Items:

  • 433 Washington Street (formerly Naked Pizza): applicant Sweet Frog Frozen Yogurt introduction and request for CV license.
  • 388 Washington Street: Proposed pharmacy at location
  • 1610 Commonwealth: applicant seeks liquor license
  • 1418 Commonwealth Avenue (formerly Petit Robert): applicant seeks transfer of CV and liquor licenses for Sushi Restaurant at location.
  • 23 Aberdeen: applicant seeks to convert from three units to four units.
  • McDonald’s on Soldier’s Field Road requesting 24hrs inside dining (currently open 24 hrs for drive through).
  • 1936 Beacon Street (former Presto Pizza): Real Deal Deli, introduction and request for CV license.

Location: Elks Lodge
326 Washington St
Brighton, MA 02135

(Parking available behind building accessed from Winship St.)

About the BAIA:

The Brighton Allston Improvement Association (BAIA) is a civic group which was formed in 1981, and is dedicated to the betterment of the Brighton Allston neighborhood. It was established to address issues of importance to the stability and progress of the Brighton and Allston community. The goal is to obtain a greater degree of control for the residents of Brighton and Allston in the improvement and development of the community. BAIA meets the first Thursday of the month, and meetings are open to all community members wishing to attend and participate.

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BDG Parking Models vs. Cleveland Circle Traffic

Posted on October 18, 2012 by admin

At the Brookline DAT on October 10, representatives of BDG’s traffic consultant, Howard/Stein-Hudson, revealed more details about the inner courtyard plans that have raised so much concern.  The consultants wanted to assure DAT members and other meeting attendees that there was no chance of gridlock, or even a lack of parking in the courtyard at any time.  As one DAT member observed at the meeting, this optimistic assertion seemed to be based on a perfect world in which all drivers behave exactly as the software model predicts rather than on the reality we encounter driving in Boston.  This posting analyzes the projections presented by Howard/Stein-Hudson using a probability model to test the likelihood of a perfect courtyard traffic outcome.

As the BDG plan illustrates, there are seven curbside parking places in the courtyard.   These spaces are all that is available for short-term use by the residential units, the restaurant, the retail stores and the medical offices as well as the hotel.  There are an additional nine parking spaces (plus two handicapped spaces) just outside the courtyard, next to the hotel.  There are presumably for hotel guests or visitors.  There are also three loading docks.

Figure 1: BDG’s Configuration of Short-Term Parking in the Inner Courtyard

Parking In a Less Than Perfect World

There are three kinds of vehicles that will enter the project’s courtyard in search of a place to stop and park for a short time:

  1. Cars and cabs including pick up, drop off and service/delivery vehicles; e.g. pizza delivery, florist and dry cleaning delivery servicing the residents or hotel guests; medical/lab couriers servicing the medical offices and sales reps visiting the offices, restaurant and retail stores
  2. Small delivery and other vans servicing all the project components once or many times every day; e.g. Post Office vehicle, FedEx and UPS step-vans, airport vans, contractor repair vans, restaurant food and liquor deliveries, etc.
  3. Large trucks; e.g. trash trucks, moving vans, charter busses dropping off visiting sports teams and tourists at the hotel

The heavy trucks will use the loading-docks so let’s set those aside for the moment.  Let’s also set aside the two handicapped spaces.   Large busses will make a regular appearance, especially if the hotel becomes the place where visiting teams stay when they are playing at Boston College, but they probably won’t be a daily occurrence so let’s set them aside too.

At the Brookline meeting Howard/Stein-Hudson estimated 27 cars seeking short-term courtyard parking per hour.  They also allocated these 27 cars to each of the five project components.

Let’s say that hotel cars except taxi cabs always use the short-term places at the side of the hotel.   Combining Howard/Stein-Hudson cars with our estimates of delivery truck traffic discussed in a previous posting we get the hourly competition for the seven curbside spaces in the courtyard that looks like this:

 However, while the Howard/Stein-Hudson model seems to assume that the 20 cars that on average arrive every hour will turn into the courtyard precisely every three minutes, we need to confront the reality of a less than perfect world.  This means using a model that can deal with these 20 cars arriving randomly over the hour-long period.  We’re going to use the Poisson distribution to describe the random arrival of both cars and trucks.

Here are the parameters of the Poisson for the arrival of the two kinds of vehicles:

 

How Long Do They Stay?

The next calculation that we have to think about is how long each of these vehicles will remain in the curb-side parking place they occupy.

BDG’s traffic consultant numbers are given in the table below.  Community members were skeptical about these precise numbers, based on personal experience with, for example, the protracted amount of time it may take to get an elderly or disabled patient using crutches out of the car for doctor’s visit.  In reality most of the parked vehicles may spend longer at the curb than the projected “dwell time” for reasons you can easily imagine.  Let’s go with BDG’s number anyway.

 As with the arrival of cars and trucks, the waiting time for a car at the hotel, for example, isn’t exactly 15 minutes.  It varies from car to car so that the average over all the cars waiting at the hotel is 15 minutes.  Furthermore, in our situation we’re going to assume that the minimum waiting time for both cars and delivery trucks is 1 minute. Even the pizza delivery guy can’t drop off the pizza and get back in his car faster than that.

We’re going to use the Erlang distribution to describe the random waiting time of cars and trucks at the various businesses in the development complex.  Here are the parameters:

 

Distribution

Parameters

Average
Hotel

Erlang

k=14, λ=1

15 min.
Residential

Erlang

k=9, λ=1

10 min.
Medical Offices

Erlang

k=2, λ=1

3 min.
Restaurant

Erlang

k=2, λ=1

3 min.
Retail Stores

Erlang

k=2, λ=1

3 min.

Table 4: Car Waiting Time Parameters for Cars

Distribution

Parameters

Average
Hotel

Erlang

k=4, λ=1

5 min.
Residential

Erlang

k=4, λ=1

5 min.
Medical Offices

Erlang

k=9, λ=1

10 min.
Restaurant

Erlang

k=14, λ=1

15 min.
Retail Stores

Erlang

k=4, λ=1

5 min.

Table 5: Delivery Truck Waiting Time Parameters for Trucks


So, Will There Always Be a Place to Park?  Sorry, Take a Number

Whew!  We’re finally ready for some computations.  What we’re interested in is how often does a car or a delivery truck turn into the inner courtyard and find that all the short-term parking slots are filled.  Here’s a picture of rolling all the above numbers together.

                       Figure 2: Simulated Demand for Inner Courtyard Short-Term Parking

If the taxi spaces are used only for taxis, then we have an overflow situation if more than 5 spaces are needed to handle the incoming traffic.

If we look at the dots the right of the vertical line between 5 and 6, our computation says that that in a typical 8-hour day there will be 36 minutes that 6 spaces are needed, 17 minutes that 7 spaces will be needed, 6 minutes that 8 spaces will be needed and 6 minutes that 9 spaces will be needed to handle the incoming traffic.

Conclusion

That’s a total of 65 minutes in an 8-hour day that we have overflow in the courtyard corral.  There are 480 minutes in an 8-hour day so roughly 13% of the time the courtyard is full. Said another way, 1 out of every 7 vehicles arriving in the courtyard will not find a place to park.

Is this satisfactory traffic management?  It doesn’t seem that way to me.

Keep in mind that we have been just talking about cars and delivery trucks that want to use short-term parking in the inner courtyard.  We haven’t taken account of hotel guests registering, or any of the cars coming and going from the allocated parking spaces or the heavy trucks and busses that will be routinely backing out of the loading docks back into the heart of courtyard traffic circulation.  This additional traffic will make parking all the more challenging at regular intervals throughout the day.

There are lots of parameters to work with here and, of course, every setting of the parameters creates a different result.  You might be of the opinion that medical couriers or pizza deliveries will take 15 minutes rather than 10 minutes or that a medical patient really is going to need more than 3 minutes to get out of the car.

Furthermore, each run of the program uses random numbers generated by the Poisson and Erlang distributions so that if you run it again even with the same parameters you’ll give a slightly different result.

I’m happy to send along the program I built that simulates cars and trucks coming and going from the inner courtyard so that you can run the program and decide for yourself.

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Brookline Sends BDG Design for Cleveland Circle Back to the Drawing Board

Posted on October 11, 2012 by admin

The latest design review in Brookline is shaking up BDG’s project plans and it may require a complete re-thinking by the developer.  As expected, BDG’s architect, ADD, Inc. presented a more traditional building design concept to the Brookline Design Advisory Team (DAT) meeting on October 10.  BDG also brought forward a now-familiar rationale for its insistence on the Y-shaped all-in-one megaplex construction with an interior courtyard hotel entrance.

John Meunier of BDG opened the meeting by reminding the DAT and members of Brookline’s planning committee that compliance with the very specific requirements of 2011 Brookline upzoning had eliminated many design options.  Meunier noted that BDG’s proposal was crafted explicitly to fit Brookline zoning  saying, “This project was not designed in a vacuum.  We got advice from Town Meeting members about how to meet the Brookline zoning test.” The special zoning for Brookline’s small portion of the Cinema site includes a mandate for 40 hotel rooms in Brookline, a single Chestnut Hill Ave entrance/exit on Brookline land, a 60-90 space hotel parking lot in the rear of the site on Boston land with mandated use of the Waterworks driveway for exiting hotel traffic, plus retail and medical offices sandwiched in to comply with high Brookline density demands (between 2.3 and 2.5 FAR compared to the earlier 0.5 FAR on the Cinema parcel).

In response to an updated presentation by Howard/Stein-Hudson, the BDG traffic consultant, DAT members raised more questions about capacity and traffic circulation of the interior courtyard which were reinforced by attendee comments.  The medical office component was singled out for criticism since this component generates a disproportionate percentage of project traffic relative to its square footage.  Many people suggested that BDG should consider eliminating the medical offices from its plan.

After listening to all the reasons BDG wants to build its current Y-shaped site plan, DAT members pushed the developer to come up with more creative alternatives.  Among those alternatives, members noted the advantages of opening up the courtyard, breaking apart the monolithic building structure into a hotel and a separate residential building (possibly connected with a sky bridge to facilitate shared use of pool and exercise room), and facing the hotel lobby toward Cleveland Circle and the entrance to the apartments set back to the location now slated for the hotel entrance.  This would buffer the residential component from Chestnut Hill Ave and give new residents an open view and sunny exposure over the tracks towards Clinton Road on the southern side and toward Cassidy Playground and the water on the northern side. One DAT member suggested, “Take this plan apart and make two buildings out of it.”

BDG will take these dramatic redesign recommendations under advisement and their architects will go back to the drawing board.  Next steps include a joint meeting of the Brookline DAT and Boston Civic Design Commission sometime in the next month.

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BDG Tries Again to Win Brookline Design Approval for Cleveland Circle Project: New Architectural Look Unveiled at BAIA Meeting

Posted on October 9, 2012 by admin

The Brookline Design Advisory Team (DAT) has scheduled a follow up meeting with BDG on Wednesday, Oct. 10th, 2012.  At the last meeting, members of the DAT expressed a number of concerns and criticisms, questioning the developer’s site plan and courtyard design as well as the project’s overall architecture and interface with Cleveland Circle.

According to the DAT agenda, BDG will present a slideshow documenting various alternative plans that they considered and rejected in coming up with the current Y-shaped design with a hotel entrance deep inside the courtyard.  It is likely that there will be further questions and recommendations from the DAT in response to this presentation.

It is likely that BDG will also present some new design ideas to the Brookline group.  ADD, Inc. the current project architect, unveiled a new sketch with a dramatically different architectural style at last week’s BAIA meeting in Brighton.  ADD has abandoned the sharp angles and metal cladding in their earlier rendering of the proposed apartment building.  As illustrated below, the latest thinking features a more traditional look with smaller windows and more masonry.

These change, however, are literally only skin deep since BDG is sticking to the core project components, size and Y-shaped site design at this point.  If any substantive changes are announced at the Brookline meeting, we will write about them in a follow up article.

The public is welcome to attend the October 10 DAT meeting.  It will start at 7:30PM in Room 111, first floor, Brookline Town Hall on 333 Washington Street.  Parking is available behind the town hall and on nearby streets.

 

 

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BDG Needs to Clear the Air About Emissions Impacts for Its Cleveland Circle Project

Posted on October 4, 2012 by admin

Many community members have expressed concerns about the site plan, traffic circulation problems, and very high density of BDG’s proposed Cleveland Circle mega-complex.  Research into the very low truck delivery estimates provided by Howard/Stein-Hudson in BDG’s PNF revealed significant errors in those projections, meaning that there will be dozens more trucks making deliveries to the project every day.  This reality will further clog the already overloaded interior courtyard.  All good reasons to worry that Cleveland Circle will suffer from traffic gridlock if BDG’s project is approved by the BRA in its current form.

In the midst of these valid issues, the project’s impact on air quality has not received much attention.  But it stands to reason that concentrating the emissions from delivery and trash trucks, taxi cabs, service vehicles and all the cars driven by hotel guests, apartment visitors and cars waiting to pick up or drop off medical patients inside a small interior courtyard surrounded by 5 story buildings will make the air in the courtyard less than healthy.  Won’t those exhaust fumes take a toll on the pedestrians and patients who have to walk around inside the courtyard to get to the hotel and medical offices and the people who live in apartments facing the courtyard?   Will those same emissions reach the ball players and kids using Cassidy Playground just a few feet away from the project?

BDG does have a discussion about air quality in its proposal.  However, just as in the discussions of traffic and design, BDG presents a heap of technical jargon and tables to justify their project plan and leaves it to the reader to figure out if any critical information is missing (or if there are any calculation errors, outdated standards or inaccurate data.)  Here, for example, is BDG’s conclusion about the Cleveland Circle project’s air quality impact:

The highest eight-hour traffic-related concentration predicted in the area of the Project for the modeled conditions (2.1 ppm) plus background (1.5 ppm), is 3.6 ppm, for the same case. Both concentrations are well below the one-hour NAAQS of 35 ppm and the eighthourNAAQS of 9 ppm.  (BDG PNF 3.5.3 Microscale Analysis Results)

Does that sentence give you a lot of confidence about what BDG has studied and measured to ensure that its project won’t be polluting the air that Cleveland Circle neighbors and project users have to breathe every day?  No?  Well read on to find out what might be missing from the current BDG analysis of air quality.

Where Did BDG Go to Measure Project Air Quality Impact?

Here are the locations that BDG chose to consider in their air quality analysis:

  1. Commonwealth Avenue and Chestnut Hill Avenue
  2. Beacon Street and Chestnut Hill Avenue (aka Cleveland Circle)
  3. Dean Road and Chestnut Hill Avenue
  4. Boylston Street (aka Route 9) and Chestnut Hill Avenue

Do you notice any missing locations on this list?  How about the inner courtyard of the project itself? You know, where all those trucks will be idling every day side by side with cabs and cars?  Where exhaust fumes will be trapped inside a bowl of five story building walls?

If a developer really cared about understanding (and disclosing) the real impact of its project on Cleveland Circle air quality, you might think that such a developer would go out of its way to use the best and most current emissions models to study the emissions “hot spot” that its project design is creating inside the courtyard.  However, BDG ignores the courtyard in its study, citing the letter of the law in the selection of the “nearby intersections” it chose to study as follows:

The Proponent is required to analyze local effects of the potential increase in traffic on ambient air quality near specific intersections. This microscale analysis is required for the Project at intersections where 1) Project traffic would impact intersections or roadway links currently operating at Level of Service (LOS) D, E, or F or would cause LOS to decline to D, E, or F; 2) Project traffic would increase traffic volumes on nearby roadways by 10% or more (unless the increase in traffic volume is less than 100 vehicles per hour); or, 3) the Project will generate 3,000 or more new average daily trips on roadways providing access to a single location.

Interestingly, even this justification fails to excuse BDG’s lack of study of emissions impacts on the actual project site.  The proposed main entrance/exit to the project on Chestnut Hill Avenue is on the site of a current road cut, and according to Howard/Stein-Hudson’s own study, that entrance/exit intersection would be congested enough to immediately be rated as “F” when it starts operating.  So why isn’t BDG required to study the impact of new emissions in this location?

Good news! BDG’s Cleveland Circle Project Won’t Pollute the Air on Route 9

 

What Tools Does BDG Use for Air Quality Measurement?

BDG uses the MOBILE 6.2 software to do their air quality analysis.  Is that the best available tool? The EPA web site says:

MOBILE6 has been replaced by MOVES as EPA’s official model for estimating emissions from cars, trucks and motorcycles.

BDG is using an outdated model and deprecated software for their analysis. The current recommended software is the MOVES program which has been available since 2010.  Since the Massachusetts and Boston authorities still accept the older program, BDG isn’t required to change to MOVES, despite the many documented problems with MOBILE6.2.  It doesn’t even have to disclose those shortcomings, even though this disclosure has become standard practice for many developers who want to be forthcoming with the community about their air quality study methodology.

So all we can hope is that BDG is accurately applying MOBILE 6.2, warts and all, to measure the traffic and air quality situation it is proposing to create in Cleveland Circle.

Types of Vehicles

MOBILE 6.2 considers 28 vehicle classifications. Roughly half of these are vehicles that could visit the inner courtyard (Passenger Cars, Motorcycles, Light-Duty Trucks).  Others one hopes never would (Heavy-Duty Diesel Vehicles (>60,000 lbs. GVWR), Diesel Transit and Urban Busses).  In commenting on the vehicle classifications, the MOBILE 6.2 user’s manual warns:

These class divisions are not likely those used in local vehicle registration systems or in reporting VMT data to the Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA) Highway Performance Monitoring System (HPMS), so care must be taken when relating vehicle types across these data sources.

What vehicle classifications did BDG use?  Who knows?

Idling

The claim by BDG in its PNF that “The current version of MOBILE 6.2 does not explicitly calculate idle emissions.’’ is strange. On page 69 of the user MOBILE 6.2 guide we find the command IDLE PM EMISSIONS with the description:

The term ‘Idle’ in this context refers to the mode of vehicle operation commonly referred to as ‘idling’ or ‘idle mode’.

And again on page 108 we find the command SPEED VMT with the description:

The 14 average speed fractions (0.0000 through 1.0000) must add up to 1. The first of the 14 preset speeds is “idle,” and the other 13 average speeds range from 5 mph to 65 mph in 5 mph increments.

Setting the first number to 1.0 and the rest to 0.0 in this set of parameters would model idling in the inner courtyard. There are model input values for other aspects of idling in EPA-420-F-98-014 of April 1998: Idling Vehicle Emissions.

BDG’s assertion that the lowest speed in MOBILE 6.2 is 2.5 mph is true for the AVERAGE SPEED command but it is not true as we can see for MOBILE 6.2 overall. Why BDG decided to ignore the idling capabilities of the model is anybody’s guess.

But let’s press on.

Documentation – Old Standards

As with estimating counts of the number of delivery trucks, BDG cites old documentation for their air quality estimates.  On page 3.25 of the PNF we find:

Year Document
1992 U.S. EPA Guideline   for Modeling Carbon Monoxide from Roadway Intersections
1992 U.S. EPA Screening   Procedures for Estimating the Air Quality of Stationary Sources

Table 1: Documents used for Air Quality Estimates

Not only are these documents 10 years out of date, but they completely ignore the work that has been done by the Department of Environmental Protection of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.   For example, we call to attention Massachusetts 2012 Air Monitoring Network Plan of September 6, 2012.

As another example, if BDG had been using MOVES, the currently recommended air quality analysis software, it would have found EPA-420-B-10-041 of December 2010: Using MOVES in Project-Level Carbon Monoxide Analyses.

Conclusion

For any readers still awake, you now have more information to make your own conclusion about the accuracy and the credibility of BDG’s Air Quality impact assurances.  If the project is built as proposed, the truth will be out there, in the air around the new hotel, medical offices and apartment building.  Just don’t breathe too deeply in case it comes with a heavy dose of CO and other pollutants.

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