The wrong track
The idea that if you create more housing near public transportation the masses will give up their cars and flock to the infinitely superior public transit system is an unquestioned article of faith amongst our collectivist cognoscenti.
Do these “folks” know any actual Americans?
Proponents of the new, state-mandated MBTA Multi-family Zoning District think that if you just jam even more multi-family housing around the local train and bus stations, it will turn Wakefield into Amsterdam, with no automobile traffic and bike lanes leading only to and from the train station.
And for some reason, Wakefield’s central planners think that, if you expand this district even farther and include the downtown area, it will also be a huge boon to local business!
It makes for a really cool PowerPoint presentation with impressive graphs and charts and colorful maps with circles and arrows. But it misses an important fact.
The American love affair with the automobile goes back to Henry Ford’s Model-T and has only grown stronger in the century since. People are not going to give up their cars just because you crowd them into triple-deckers around the train station with no off-street parking. They’ll just park on the street or leave their cars wherever they think they can get away with it, like a nearby private or public lot.
Even the most committed cyclists, pedestrians and public transit fanatics still own cars. Because if they want to go grocery shopping, get to doctor’s appointments or visit Aunt Betty in the nursing home on Sunday, they need a way to get there. The reality is that most of the places that people want and need to get to aren’t on the train or bus line.
Seriously, nobody’s worried about “climate change” enough to give up their cars.
Kids don’t even ride the bus to school anymore. These future stewards of the planet are each ferried to and from school in individual Range Rovers. Try driving down Farm Street or North Avenue any weekday between 2 and 3 p.m. and count the idling SUV’s. You may even spot a Greenpeace bumper sticker or two.
And even if a few more people decide to walk to Farmland, they’re still not going to relinquish their cars or stop driving altogether, no matter what the social engineers try to tell you. More housing density just means more people and more cars. And that means even more traffic and worse gridlock than we have now. How does that help business?
At the Oct. 24 public forum held by the Planning Board, practically every speaker was against going any further with this multi-family housing scheme than absolutely required.
There will be two more public forums on Nov. 14 and Dec. 10. The central planners claim they want to hear from the public and will take that input into account in their finalized compliance plan to be presented for a vote at the spring Town Meeting.
They say they’re listening. How much they hear remains to be seen.
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[This column originally appeared in the November 9, 2023 Wakefield Daily Item.]
Filed under: Columns & Essays, Community, Humor, News, Politics, Wakefield | 3 Comments
Tags: 40A, Americans, automobiles, bicycles, bus, business, cars, central planning, Climate Change, collectivism, commuter rail, density, depot, district, downtown, education, Farmland, gridlock, Henry Ford, housing, Humor, Mark Sardella, Massachusetts, MBTA, Model-T, multifamily, Opinion, parking, Politics, public, public transit, Range Rover, school, shopping, station, SUV, traffic, train, transportation, triple decker, Wakefield Daily Item, Wakefield MA, Wakefield Planning Board, walking, zoning
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Mark Sardella 
Wakefield once had five train stations — the two it still does, along with a third at “the junction” (Railroad Avenue), a fourth by the cement plant (the building is still there) and a fifth somewhere in Montrose.
Melrose has three stations — why doesn’t Wakefield?!?
If the goal is to have downtown accessible by train, there is no reason why it can’t have a third stop at Broadway. That’s no closer to the existing Wakefield one than Melrose’s Cedar Park and Wyoming are to each other, actually I think those two are closer together.
And I love how they want to promote public transportation while service on the only bus that serves Wakefield is REDUCED!!! On Sundays, you now have to wait upwards of 90 minutes — an hour and a half for a bus — and all of which require you to take a circuitous route around the Dolbare School to get anywhere north of Farmland.
And as to Downtown, heaven forbid the bus actually stop in the middle of Downtown….
I challenge anyone to look at a circa 1910 map of streetcar service in Wakefield — in addition to the run along Main Street (that went all the way to Haverhill), there were east and west routes that went to Stoneham & Saugus — and beyond. Memory is that there were other routes as well.
Most of the streetcar service was lost during the Depression as the private street railway companies struggled to avoid bankruptcy — the only run that remained was the run down Main Street with the service converted to buses in the 1940s and the tracks removed in 1949. See: https://omeka-s.noblenet.org/s/wakefield/item/18085
But Wakefield was once a “streetcar suburb” and I fail to understand how the powers that be expect Wakefield to return to such a status, i.e. heavily reliant on public transportation without providing said public transportation…
One other thing — why aren’t we charging $5/day to park along Farm Street? When you look at what it costs to insure a driver under age 25, either they or their parents are already paying that much to be able to drive to school — and when you look at the shiny vehicles, you can tell they aren’t hurting for money.
This could help fund the new high school.
And if the town can charge $30 for what usually amounts to three trips to the Nahant Street Pit, why can’t it charge a $100 permit to drop off and pick up at either the Galvin or Memorial schools? Make it a portable windshield tag so that parents can take turns driving the carpool — and while hopefully we could consolidate these trips, this could also help pay for the new high school.
And whatever happened to bicycles? If we are supposed to use bicycles for everything, why can’t the children???
And just think of all the lethal carbon dioxide we would eliminate, hence helping to prevent global de jour. All of the polar bears (who actually *can* swim) will be ever so grateful….
But I’m serious about charging for parking along Farm Street. Maybe $20 for a monthly permit that the principal has to sign off on — and not sell to students who aren’t well behaved.
Ed, No one ever said that polar bears can’t swim. Climate change threatens them because ice floes are slowly disappearing, and it is on ice floes that polar bears hunt seals. Polar bears need the fat rich diet that seals provide for good health; female polar bears need it for fertility. Polar bears are moving to land and grubbing around in people’s trash. The trash isn’t nutritious and a lot of bears end up on the wrong end of a shot gun.