Environment

airplane noise, carbon and climate, cell towers, flooding, land use issues, parks and recreation, waste/hazards, water issues

• • Post (comment count)
  • Author
  • Date
• • Clean Energy Future Act Passed By Senate (27)
  • Will Brownsberger
  • June 15th, 2018
  After a long day of debate, the Senate passed the Barrett-Pacheco omnibus energy bill last night — significant legislation to continue movement in Massachusetts towards a cleaner energy future.
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• • Charles Reservation Connections between Routes 30 and 16 (4)
  • Will Brownsberger
  • June 10th, 2018
  For a pedestrian headed upstream and trying to stay close to the Charles, the going gets tough at Route 30.  There have been some recent improvements and more are planned, but for now, it is a badly connected stretch of river.
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• • Climate Change and our Transportation System (23)
  • Will Brownsberger
  • May 16th, 2018
  Very encouraging forum on climate change impact on transportation infrastructure -- the right people are thinking about the issue.
  Read More »
• • Link: Progress on Airplane Noise Reduction (32)
  • Will Brownsberger
  • March 8th, 2018
  The Wall Street Journal describes an idea coming out of our local efforts to reduce airplane noise. National recognition for the contributions of Belmont's Myron Kassaraba and a broad collaboration including Massport, Adriana Poole and the Boston West Fair Skies group, the 33L Municipal Working Group, local legislators and, importantly, Congresswoman Katherine Clark. In case the Wall Street Journal article appears behind a paywall for you, here are a couple of key excerpts:

  Urban airports like Boston’s Logan thought they had silenced noise issues with quieter planes. Now complaints pour in from suburbs 10 to 15 miles away because new navigation routes have created relentless noise for some homeowners. It turns out engines aren’t the major culprit anymore. New airplanes are much quieter. It’s the “whoosh” that big airplanes make racing through the air. Computer models suggest slowing departures by 30 knots—about 35 miles an hour—would reduce noise on the ground significantly. Your flight will last a few seconds longer, and airlines will burn a few more gallons of fuel. But “hundreds of thousands of people would get some reduction and for tens of thousands, it would go from problematic to not problematic,” says John Hansman, an aeronautics professor and director of the International Center for Air Transportation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

  “Everyone was looking at the wrong problem,” says Thomas Glynn, chief executive of Massport. “It’s a concentration problem. It’s a frequency problem. It’s not really a noise problem.” Mr. Glynn says he realized how serious this problem was when Myron Kassaraba, the Belmont, Mass., representative on the Massport Community Advisory Committee, showed him a map software engineer Kent Johnson put together with flight-track data. The flights before the navigation change were spread out all over with thin green lines. The flights after were bunched in a thick red line. “The change before and after became apparent both visually and numerically,” says Mr. Kassaraba, a financial consultant. Belmont, just over 10 miles west of Logan, had never had a noise issue. Suddenly airplane noise was distracting conversations, work and backyard relaxing. He calls the speed modification “a step in the right direction.”

  For much more background on this issue, please see this thread.
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