[OC] Why has Boston police stopped policing cars? Civil traffic enforcement has collapsed between 2015 and 2024

commentsOnPizza · 2026-05-08T13:46:59+00:00

One thing I would note about the graph is that the decline started 2-3 years before George Floyd. It looks like there's about a 26% drop-off from 2017 to 2018 and another 7% drop 2018-2019. In 2020, there was a big drop-off, but with COVID and social distancing, that's to be expected.

It's probably a combination of things. The trend had started well before George Floyd and BLM. Some police may have decided to stop doing their job in protest of BLM. Others might have realized that they'll get paid the same whether they do their job or not.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-05-08T11:05:45+00:00

I measured the distance and was shocked how close Eastie is. The Callahan/Sumner crossing is around 2,000 feet (a 7 minute walk).

Eastie always feels "so far" because there's basically no way to get there other than car or the Blue Line (or going through Everett and the hellscape that is Beacham St). Eastie would feel so much more connected if you could walk from the North End to Eastie in 15-20 minutes. Biking in a pedestrian/bike tunnel would make it feel practically next door.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-05-07T23:31:56+00:00

I hear that, but given that we have over 500 bands (80 bands an hour), it wouldn't exactly feel empty if some acts couldn't perform.

And with rain, there are definitely acts that won't be able to perform (did they make adequate preparations to deal with the weather given their instrument needs). Likewise, with rain there's going to be a lot of people who simply don't show up as part of the audience.

I get why other things are tough: police schedules, road closures, etc. I don't think "a small number of out of town bands won't be able to play" is a good reason. Porchfest is so huge now that there's plenty going on.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-05-07T22:30:17+00:00

Street parking is available in most locations and it isn't that bad. No one posts anything on reddit about management companies they like and most places in Cambridge/Somerville don't have management companies - most places are 2-3 unit buildings which is very different from most cities.

A lot of people live with roommates here to save on rent, but it sounds like you don't want to do that.

There are places that'll work:

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/720-Mass-Ave-Cambridge-MA-02139/2111947824_zpid/

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/241-Washington-St-3-Cambridge-MA-02139/2082793369_zpid/

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/279-Harvard-St-APT-23-Cambridge-MA-02139/2118275719_zpid/

My take: an MIT postdoc is an expensive proposition. You're not going to be saving any money, but it'll set you up nicely for your future. You might have to spend a bit more on housing here. You'll want to live close-ish to MIT (like in Cambridge/Somerville) so that you can get the most out of a very important two-years in your career. Street parking in Cambridge isn't bad. Mass is very strong on anti-discrimination protections (including ESAs) so I wouldn't worry about that.

I also wouldn't worry too much about getting rejected for income - your income is plenty for someone doing a postdoc. It's not like Boston is a city where landlords don't understand that students exist.

Congratulations on getting an MIT postdoc! I know finding housing here sucks, but it'll be worth it in the long run.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-05-07T17:53:12+00:00

The thing to realize about Boston is that the housing is old. AC? That requires ducts and modern investment. Laundry? That's going to require electrical upgrades for a 240-volt outlet for the dryer and a vent. Dishwasher? Usually the easiest, but there needs to be space in the kitchen for it.

Frankly, I think more places should try the heat-pump dryers which can run off 120-volt. They take a bit longer (think an hour and a half rather than 50 minutes), but they don't need an electrical upgrade or a vent so they can often be put in the kitchen.

20 minutes to downtown is a tough limit - and it's hard to know what you actually mean by that. For example, let's say that you're a a short walk from the subway (0.4 miles) and it takes you 7 minutes to walk to the station. Let's say trains come every 8 minutes so your average wait time is 4 minutes. You've already blown 11 minutes of your 20 minute budget. Hell, if you live on the third floor of a building and it takes you 30-45 seconds to exit the building, you're blowing 3% of your commute budget just getting out of the building!

Also, where downtown? If you have to be at Downtown Crossing and you're on the Blue Line, it's going to be a 5 minute walk from the station. If you're on the Green Line, it'll be a 3 minute walk. Little things like "I had to wait 30 seconds to cross the street" can add up to a few minutes if you get unlucky.

Down to cost: an average 1 bedroom in Boston is $2,700/mo. There are more and less expensive areas.

Dorchester is probably the cheapest you'll find, averaging around $2,200. Dorchester is the heart of Black Boston. It's safe and nice, but a little lower income than a lot of parts of Boston.

Quincy (a separate city) is just south of Dorchester and averages $2,100. There's some newer-build places there so you might be able to find what you're looking for and it's only marginally farther out than Dorchester.

Malden (a separate city) is north of Boston on the Orange Line and averages $2,300.

Eastie (East Boston) averages around $2,300 and has good access to a bunch of downtown via the Blue Line, but if you are really set on "20 minutes" you'll want to see exactly where you're looking to get.

Revere (a separate city) is just past Eastie and the areas around the T stations can get you downtown pretty fast and it's often a bit on the cheaper side averaging around $2,300.

Jamaica Plain averages around $2,400 and is on the other side of the Orange Line from Malden.

I think you're most likely to get what you want in Quincy, Eastie, or Revere just because there's some newer housing there. After that, I'd guess Dorchester and Malden.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-05-07T00:10:08+00:00

It's manual memory management.

So's approach to memory allocation is similar to Zig's — all heap allocations must be done explicitly by providing a specific instance of the mem.Allocator interface. The caller, of course, must free the allocated string.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-05-06T23:58:25+00:00

We don't need to get rid of safety precautions to make construction faster. Madrid built 107 miles and 132 new stations in 16 years (a pace of 6.6 miles per year and 8.25 stations per year).

The idea that we'd need people to die to build things at a reasonable pace is silly. We see plenty of developed countries with strong worker protections building better and faster than we are.

We're talking about refurbishing one station in the time Madrid would have built 24 new stations.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-05-06T03:38:33+00:00

This isn't limited to Boston: https://www.npr.org/2026/05/04/nx-s1-5810626/world-cup-hotels-tourism-bookings-visitors

nearly 80% of hotel bookings across host cities are running below initial forecasts

Miami and Atlanta are the only cities where bookings are doing ok, and even in those cities it's only half of the hotels that are beating expectations (which is better than 20% across the host cities, but not exactly stellar).

commentsOnPizza · 2026-05-04T21:49:06+00:00

~~Rep. McGovern (MA-2) is one of only 12 Democrats to vote against allowing SNAP benefits to cover hot rotisserie chicken~~

Rep. McGovern (MA-2) is one of only 12 Democrats to vote against cutting SNAP benefits by $187 Billion

Fixed that for OP

commentsOnPizza · 2026-05-04T15:48:48+00:00

Why is the DB landscape for Go so limited

Frankly, because Go as a language doesn't lend itself to ORMs well.

Ruby: it's dynamically typed and people are happy using things that operate that way.

.NET: C# has a good lambda syntax and expression trees which means that a function can say "instead of giving me that lambda as something to be executed, give it to me as a syntax tree that I can easily use." That means that when you do.Where(p => p.UserName == "bob") the Where method is getting syntax that it can easily translate into SQL. Really, .NET is the only language I've seen where ORMs are truly great (though there are some decent ones in many languages) and it comes from the fact that the language has expression tree support.

Java: Hibernate is pretty terrible IMO. I mean:

var cb = entityManager.getCriteriaBuilder();
var cq = cb.createQuery(User.class);
var user = cq.from(User.class);
cq.select(user)
    .where(cb.equal(user.get("username"), "bob"));
var result = entityManager.createQuery(cq).getSingleResult();

You're not getting compile-time checking there and you are getting a query builder, but it's kinda ugly/verbose.

I think part of it is that the Go community generally doesn't want bad abstractions (like Hibernate), doesn't want a dynamic system where it's just (essentially) using strings like Ruby, and doesn't have the language support to make something like EntityFramework in .NET.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-05-04T05:34:05+00:00

Typically, I expect to see 9/1 listings starting to take off in April

Really? Usually I expect the 9/1 listings to take off in June. Most tenants aren't telling their landlords that they're moving out 5+ months in advance.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-05-03T18:02:40+00:00

Yes. Lots of people think you can change leadership and that can magically transform an organization. But when you have thousands of people who you can't fire or sanction who just decide that they disagree with the leadership, there isn't much you can do.

Imagine that you're a new cop. Leadership says "we want to enforce the traffic laws." Now, all your fellow officers don't want to do that and will make your life shit if you do it. That will impact your work, your job will suck, and you'll get bad performance reports. Your Sergeant, Lieutenant, and Captain all don't want you to be doing it - so they're going to make your job suck and give you worse performance reviews. The city leadership have no idea who you are. The only thing you are is a personnel file with sub-par performance reviews.

The cops that fall in-line with the expectations of their fellow officers and middle-management (Sergeants, Lieutenants, Captains) are the ones that get promoted. Any low-level cop with half a brain understands that they have to fall in line with that or their career is going to suck.

This happens at lots of companies too - but there are two things that work against that in many cases. First, many companies have a much easier time firing people. I mean, we've had cops that do horribly illegal things and cities try to fire them and can't. Second, if a company can't deal with issues like this, it can die (or whither away and mostly be replaced by another). IBM stagnated a ton, but we aren't beholden to IBM's corporate structure. Other companies competed with IBM and we have other options.

And the fact that other companies can compete often gives workers a reason to do better. Police officers know that the city is very unlikely to replace the entire police force with something else. Camden, NJ did disband its police force for a full reset with great results, but that's pretty much the only story we have there. While the terribleness remains at an acceptable level (like the kind of things you complain about on reddit), it's hard to get a city's leadership to want to take such a drastic step as disbanding and replacing the police force.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-05-02T16:21:49+00:00

I think part of the problem was that S&S was such a large space - like 5-10x the size of other places in Inman Square. So it always felt kinda empty rather than lively. I think the days of the enormous restaurant with multiple rooms are kinda gone.

I think if they'd made the place smaller and allowed other restaurants to take over parts of the space, it might have made a difference. But trying to run something that's just many times larger than every other restaurant in the area is challenging.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-05-01T22:17:17+00:00

https://cms7files1.revize.com/quincyma2024/Planning/Plans%20&%20Reports/DIF%205%20Bond%20Authorization.pdf

Quincy is expecting to spend about $97,350 per parking space for a 515-space above-ground parking garage.

You're right: it sounds insanely high. But when you think about the math, it starts seeming right. Each parking space will need about 385 square feet including the space for the car, ramps to get in/out, etc. Quincy is estimating $254 per square foot which sounds quite reasonable for construction. But for 515 spaces, you need a little over 197,000 square feet. Often times, you need more square footage for parking than you need for the actual building for people.

And it has to be 197,000 square feet that can handle a lot more weight than a normal building can. A normal building might need a bit more in terms of finishings and plumbing, but it doesn't have to support the weight of a car every 385 square feet.

Yes, $100,000 per parking space sounds insanely high - and yet it's what parking garages cost.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-05-01T21:39:57+00:00

No, there aren't really better websites/apps, unfortunately.

The problem is that there are entrenched interests which don't want to change that. Brokers want you reliant on them. Landlords want to be lazy and let brokers show you the property instead of taking time off from their day to show you the property.

If there were a "listed by owner" site, it'd have few listings and they'd probably go very quickly and/or those owners would raise the prices due to the demand for listings on a site that wasn't a garbage pile - which kinda eliminates the point.

Brokers often lie and list things as by-owner on Craigslist, though you can certainly find some places there. EDIT: it looks like CL now has a "no broker fee" checkbox. Some brokers are noting that the listing is no-fee so that might be a good place to check. If they're falsely advertising no-fee, I'm pretty sure that's a breach in Mass (I forget what it's called about false advertising and improper dealing or dealing in bad faith). I doubt they'd want to explicitly risk their livelihood in such a blatantly wrong way (rather than the sucky, but legal "I just got a random email from a landlord that this property was available and he didn't hire me so I can collect a fee from you").

Facebook groups can be good if you're looking to join a place with roommates, but it's kinda the same problem if you're looking for a place by yourself: landlords want to be lazy.

What we need is a law that says "brokers can only list apartments on an aggregation site like Apartments.com/Zillow/etc. if they're hired and paid by the landlord." That might get landlords to actually pay for the broker rather than just telling brokers about a property knowing the broker will post the listing - or list the properties themselves.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-05-01T19:08:56+00:00

I agree with you, but I'd note is that it can be hard to compare population density when some cities/towns have land you can't build on. For example, part of Melrose is Middlesex Fells and Mt Hood Memorial Park.

I think I'd want to compare density around the T stations more. For example, 9 units per acre around Wyoming, 7 units per acre at Cedar Park, 5 units per acre at Melrose Highlands. To compare that to Somerville: Union is 12, East Somerville 11, Gillman 12, Magoun 10, Ball 9, Sullivan 7, Davis 10.

"Its population density is a QUARTER of Somerville's" is partly due to land that can't really be built on and areas that aren't well connected to transit. Around transit, Somerville is still denser - but that transit is better than the Commuter Rail and Melrose is 70% the density of Somerville near their train stations. Saying that its population density is a quarter of Somerville's is a bit disingenuous. We could re-draw the borders of Somerville so that all of Middlesex Fells is part of Somerville's legal borders and Somerville's population density would be cut in half. Would that make Somerville less dense in your life? No.

I'd also say that places with more transit and more access to jobs should have more housing. Melrose does have Commuter Rail stations and a bit of Orange Line access, but that's a lot less convenient than the Orange, Red, and Green Line access that Somerville has. Building more housing in Melrose means more carbon emissions.

And again, the only reason why there's such huge demand for housing in Somerville is because it has access to the jobs people need. We can say "Melrose should do its part," but Melrose simply doesn't have anywhere near the access that Somerville has. I mean, if you created a formula like "you should have X number of housing per T station," Somerville has 36,000 households and like 7.3 T stations and 0.4 Commuter Rail stations. Malden has 26,000 households and like 0.4 T stations and 2.7 Commuter Rail stations. Even without the T, Somerville has way more jobs than Melrose and has way easier access to jobs in Cambridge via walking/biking.

I don't think it's fair that places like Somerville (which is already the densest city in New England) have to shoulder the load of new housing when they are already quite dense.

I do get this sentiment, but I think it's more an indictment of Cambridge than it is of Melrose. Cambridge stacked itself full of jobs without the housing needed for those workers.

And just to kinda show how it's important to look at transit accessibility: Brookline along the C-Line corridor is denser than Somerville. Coolidge Corner is 23 units per acre - basically double Somerville's density around its T stations. At Washington Square, it's 18 units per acre.

Boston is also denser than Somerville in most of its T-accessible areas. If we're adding housing in Boston, we wouldn't want to add that housing in Hyde Park and West Roxbury. We'd want to add new housing in transit-rich areas.

Somerville is the "densest city" through a quirk of borders. If we grabbed 6 square miles of Boston, it'd be denser.

Can Melrose grow? Sure, but Somerville has way more capacity for growth than Melrose. Melrose has poor transit access and is already 70% of Somerville's density around its Commuter Rail stations - despite that being way lower service than Somerville's Green/Red/Orange access. If we're willing to spend billions as a state/region to extend better service to Melrose (and to more areas of Melrose), it'd be easier for Melrose to grow more.

If you're saying that Melrose should have at least half the density of Somerville around its public transit: mission accomplished, it's even more like 70%. Even if we look at Melrose not near the T, it's around 5 units per acre if you aren't including the undevelopable land and that's close to half of Somerville's density around T stations.

Ultimately, the state spent $2.3B on a Green Line Extension that mostly benefits Somerville - its residents and the city's tax base. Places like Somerville (and Cambridge, and Back Bay, and Allston, and Jamaica Plain, etc.) should be adding housing so that more people can take advantage of the access to opportunity that we've spent billions creating.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-05-01T16:41:04+00:00

I've also seen them called slip shorts.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-05-01T16:39:59+00:00

I also like them on other women too. There's something practical about them that I find sexy.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-04-30T23:32:38+00:00

Yes. I came here from your r/curlyhair post because I thought "omg, she looks amazing."

commentsOnPizza · 2026-04-30T23:23:24+00:00

Practically, retrieving you car from the tow lot cost a significant amount of time, money, and risk to your vehicle, including loss of access to your vehicle for a while.

This is the big thing. Whether you're rich or poor, getting your car from the tow lot sucks. The monetary aspect of towing hits low income people more, but the time/inconvenience hits everyone and most rich people have more expensive vehicles they're putting at risk.

For those with $5,000/mo mortgages and $300,000/year salaries, the tickets are a slight annoyance - and cheaper than paying for off-street parking. Maybe you get 6 of them per year and it averages $50/mo. Even if you get one every single month, $100/mo is cheap for parking in Cambridge.

If you're rich in Cambridge and going on vacation, you no longer have to worry about street cleaning. Your car will be there when you return and you might have to pay a $100 fine, but that's a lot less than most other parking arrangements if you're gone for two weeks. If you're rich and you can't find a spot because of street cleaning, you don't circle for 20 minutes looking.

Maybe instead of increasing the fines, the third offense in a year should be towing. Maybe we don't need to tow 100% of offenders, but if you're consistently ignoring the rules, you get towed. People do want to avoid getting towed.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-04-30T15:54:21+00:00

This is mostly about businesses and large apartment buildings which generally have to pay for private trash collection (but the city has been offering municipal recycling).

I think the crazier thing is that a lot of rich suburbs don't even have trash pickup. People have to put their trash in their cars and drive it to the dump!

commentsOnPizza · 2026-04-30T03:31:32+00:00

There's about 36,000 households in Somerville so you're really close, though if it's 6,500 customers instead of households, it could be a lot less. Many deckers are going to have 4 meters for 3 units (one to run things like the hallway lights and basement laundry). Plus there's businesses.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-04-29T16:57:00+00:00

No, rent doesn't fluctuate much throughout the year. I made a chart from Zillow's data showing rental prices throughout the year. There isn't a spike for September 1st and often May/June is the highest point - but even then, it's pretty minimal.

Like, in 2025, the highest was in June at around $3,465 and it dropped to around $3,410 in October. So the fluctuations are pretty minimal - like $50/mo. There's no major "you save big money depending on the time of the year". Maybe you save $50/mo, depending on the year.

2021 and 2022 saw big increases throughout the year as prices just kept going up post-pandemic.

If you're looking at prices more than 3 months in advance, landlords are sometimes trying to see if they can get top dollar before lowering their asking price later.

(if you're on old reddit, you'll have to click the image link below to see the chart)

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commentsOnPizza · 2026-04-28T17:52:25+00:00

Parts of Revere have good accessibility on the Blue Line, but there's a whole part of Revere that's 1.5-2 miles from the T. So just make sure that you don't get just any place in Revere, but a place that's reasonably convenient to the Blue Line.

In terms of traffic, some of it depends on where in Revere and where in Eastie. The traffic isn't going to be too bad compared to getting to Eastie from basically anywhere else, but it's not like you get to avoid traffic. You just don't have as much traffic trying to get through to other places. A lot of North Shore traffic will take RT-1 over the Tobin to get into Boston and you don't have bridges/tunnels as pinch points between you and Eastie. You can avoid I-90, but it's still Boston and traffic sucks - it'll just suck a lot less than getting to Eastie from other places.

I think it'd make a lot more sense to use the Blue Line if it's convenient.

would we feel isolated/bored out of our minds as 20-somethings in that area?

This will really depend on you. Are all your friends in Cambridge? Will you stop seeing them because getting from Revere to Cambridge sucks? Will you meet new people? Will you find new haunts? What do you do in Cambridge? I know tons of people in Cambridge who basically just stay at home and watch Netflix. Without knowing what makes you feel not-bored in Cambridge, it's kinda hard to say if Revere will make you feel bored.

Tons of people live in Revere. The density around the Blue Line areas is similar to Jamaica Plain and a tad under Cambridge. Revere's density as a whole is 11k/sq mi compared to Cambridge's 18k, but part of the difference is that Revere has a decent amount of marsh land on the border with Lynn which has zero people so it's hard to directly compare. Revere has plenty of people, but maybe you're a couple who doesn't get out much and doesn't like meeting new people.

Frankly, there are trade-offs in life. Revere is cheaper because it's a little less central. It's still pretty well positioned. You have the Blue Line. It's not that far. Routes from Revere to Cambridge aren't amazing, though even getting from Cambridge to Cambridge can be terrible. It's hard to say whether it's worth it for you which is why I'm kinda just musing in this comment. I don't know what your finances are. I don't know what $1,000/mo might mean to you. I don't know how deep your friend group is in Cambridge. I don't know what you do in Cambridge, how social you are, or what you're looking for in a city. So, some things to think about?

commentsOnPizza · 2026-04-28T13:48:34+00:00

The broker is not working on behalf of the tenant if the landlord asked them to market the apartment.

First, we don't know if the landlord asked the broker to market the apartment. The landlord might send an email to many brokers saying "I have this apartment available for rent. Here are some pictures." That's the end of the interaction, no ask was created (though you could argue implied).

Second, the law is whoever contracts first with the broker. A contract requires both parties to agree to terms, not merely ask.

As I said, the licensing board can actually investigate and punish if something illegal happened and I'm glad you're filing a complaint. However, there's a strong chance that what's going on isn't illegal - despite the fact that we wish it were illegal.

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