Where boring is better
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
For a few years, states have been using quirky messaging on highway signs to grab drivers’ eyeballs. Consider: Massachusetts’s “Use Yah Blinkah” and a sign on Boston’s flood-prone Morrissey Boulevard, “Wicked High Tide.”
Very cute? Maybe. But what about those people from outside the region who might not understand local word uses and pronunciations, which in the Boston area are particularly bizarre (and to me often unpleasant). Sorry to be a bore, but highway signs, meant to promote safety and smooth traffic, don’t strike me as a good place for whimsy.
The Federal Highway Administration puts it well :
“Messages with obscure or secondary meanings, such as those with popular culture references, unconventional sign legend syntax, or that are intended to be humorous, should not be used as they might be misunderstood or understood only by a limited segment of road users and require greater time to process and understand. Similarly, slogan-type messages and the display of statistical information should not be used.”
Hit this link:
https://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/kno_11th_Edition.htm
The future of work and Greater Boston's 'meds and eds'
Downtown Boston: Who will fill those now mostly vacant offices?
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Last November, Bill Gates predicted that half of business travel and 30 percent of “days in the office” would disappear forever. Meanwhile, the McKinsey Global Institute says that a mere 20 percent of business travel won’t return and about 20 percent of workers might be working from home indefinitely. Whomever you believe, all this means far fewer jobs at hotels, restaurants and downtown shops, even as the pandemic has speeded the automation of (i.e., killing of) many office jobs (including home office jobs) and more factory jobs.
So what can government do to train people for new, post-pandemic jobs, assuming that there will be many? How can vocational and other schools be brought into this project? The trades – electricians, plumbers, carpenters, roofers, plasterers, etc., will probably have the most secure, and generally well compensated, jobs going forward, along with physicians, dentists and nurses as well as engineers of all sorts and computer-software and other techies.
Another part of the jobs package should be a WPA-style program to rebuild America’s infrastructure, which the drive for lower taxes and higher short-term profits has dangerously eroded. (See Texas again.) This has undermined the nation’s long-term economic health. Such a program could also serve to train many people in new, post-pandemic skills that would be useful even as automation accelerates.
Of course there will always be jobs available for very low-paid personal-help people, such as home health-care workers. Indeed, the aging of the population means that we’ll need a lot more of them
Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, made addressing the looming threat of automation-caused job losses a key part of his campaign, which he suspended before the pandemic. He has proposed giving Americans a $12,000-a-year “basic income’’ to help get them through the developing employment implosion. It may come to that….
Meanwhile, “meds and eds’’ – Greater Boston’s (of which Rhode Island is on the edge) dense medical, technological and higher-education complexes – will help save it at least from the worst of the long-term economic disruption caused by the pandemic. Much research must be done by teams in labs; technological breakthroughs require a lot of in-person collaboration, and most college students will continue to want and need in-person teaching. Further, Greater Boston is an international venture-capital and company start-up center. These high-risk activities also require a lot of in-person, look-‘em-in-the-eye work.
On the other hand, Boston’s banks and its famed retirement-investment companies, such as Fidelity, will never have as many employees working in its offices as before COVID-19; nor will its innumerable law firms. Many offices in high rises in downtown Boston (and Providence) will remain empty for a long time while architects, engineers and interior designers try to figure o
Inconvenient state lines
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Within states and regions, such as New England, that population profiles don’t follow state lines makes coherent and effective policies difficult to put together, especially in matters such as public health, for which the states have primary responsibility. While states may impose various (mostly unenforceable) rules to try to control the spread of COVID-19, those rules may have little relationship with where and how people live.
Consider that western Massachusetts is far less economically and travel-wise connected with Greater Boston than are Rhode Island and southeastern New Hampshire, with their many commuters in and out of “The Hub.’’ And yet Massachusetts policymakers can’t impose rules that fully address that.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has gone further than any other governor in facing the fact that diseases don’t obey state borders by trying to collaborate closely with New Jersey and Connecticut in testing, quarantine and travel rules. He’s accepting the obvious: Southern New York State and much of the Garden and Constitution states are all in the same dense Greater New York City region.
Light blue represents the area known as Greater Boston, dark blue represents the Metro-Boston area and red represents the City of Boston proper.
Fidelity seeks to hire 500 new employees in N.H.
From The New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com)
“Fidelity Investments has announced plans to hire 500 new employees for its Merrimack campus. The hiring is part of a company-wide initiative to add 4,000 new employees across the country.
“Fidelity has experienced a 24 percent increase in planning engagement activity as new investors open accounts, driving the need for more personnel at the company. Fidelity also plans to accept 1,000 college and university students into its 2021 internship program, as well as 500 graduates to participate in post-grad job training opportunities. Fidelity currently employs 5,300 in New Hampshire.
“‘We’re looking for financial advisers, licensed representatives, software engineers and customer service representatives to fill thousands of roles across the country over the next six months,’ said Kathleen Murphy, president of personal investing at Fidelity.’’
Read more from the New Hampshire Union Leader.
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English colonists starting settling in Merrimack, named for a Native-American term for sturgeon, a once-plentiful fish in the area’s rivers, in the late 17th Century. For decades, the land was in dispute between the Province of New Hampshire and the Massachusetts Bay Colony. (Of course, both had seized the land from the Indians.)
The town had many farms into the 20th Century but has since become a place, with office parks, including for big corporations, and a bedroom community for commuters to Greater Boston and cities in southeastern New Hampshire.
The Souhegan River in Merrimack, also the name of the region’s biggest river.
The First Church of Christ in Merrimack.
UMass Memorial plans Worcester field hospital for COVID-19 patients
The DCU Center (originally Centrum) is an indoor arena and convention center complex in downtown Worcester.
Here’s The New England Council’s (newenglandcouncil.com) latest roundup of COVID-19 news in our region:
* ‘‘UMass Memorial Health Care has laid plans for a field hospital in the DCU Center in Worcester. (DCU stands for Digital Federal Credit Union.) The field hospital was decommissioned last spring; however, UMass Memorial has since been preparing to open the site once again in anticipation of another surge in COVID-19 related hospitalizations. Read more here.’’
* ‘‘ Mass General Brigham and Beth Israel Lahey Health are reporting that their hospitals are better prepared for a second COVID-19 wave. Hospital officials are in communication to balance COVID-19 patients across multiple sites in the Greater Boston area if the need arises. Read more here. ‘‘
* ”The American Hospital Association has produced a podcast providing useful information on patient wellness, preventing chronic diseases, and prioritizing quality and patient safety during the COVID-19 pandemic. Read more here. ‘‘
* ’’ (Boston-based) Harbor Health Services has partnered with instaED Paramedics to provide elders who participate in their Elder Service Plan (ESP) with at-home urgent care. The program will allow participants to receive treatments normally provided in the emergency room while safe at home. Read more here.’’
How to tell COVID-19 symptoms
A new guide from Harvard University helps providers differentiate common COVID-19 symptoms—such as shortness of breath and fever—from other symptoms to help health-care workers avoid false negatives.
This could be very useful indeed!
Hit this link to read The Boston Globe’s story.
As with medical matters in general, New England is a world center of research and treatment of COVID-19. Of course, Greater Boston and Connecticut are among the hardest hit by the disease.
The Harvard Medical School quadrangle, in the Longwood Medical Area, in Boston.
Photo by SBAmin
When Gov. Sargent said no to more ‘expressways’
Southwest Corridor Park in Boston as seen looking south from Ruggles Street. This is along the route of the cancelled Southwest Expressway.
— Photo by Grk1011
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
A lot of people owe thanks to the late Massachusetts Gov. Frank Sargent, who on Feb. 11, 1970 declared a halt to the seemingly endless and destructive highway construction that was tearing up neighborhoods and making traffic worse (by drawing in more cars) in Boston. The same thing was happening in many other cities.
On that date, he was one of the first major political leaders in the country to call for a thorough reappraisal of our addiction to car culture as he cancelled the Southwest Expressway and Inner Belt highways. His action became a model for the country. Someone called him “anti-highway’’ but maybe a more accurate term would be “pro-city.’’
As he said at the time:
“Four years ago, I was the commissioner of the Department of Public Works – our road building agency. Then, nearly everyone was sure highways were the only answer to transportation problems for years to come. We were wrong. . . . Are we really meeting our transportation needs by spending most of our money building roads? The answer is no.”
Thus began attempts to rebalance transportation priorities, particularly by allocating a higher percentage of taxpayer funds to mass transit. As awful as is traffic in Greater Boston now (partly a product of its great prosperity for much of the past quarter century), think of how much worse it would be without the changes set in motion by Frank Sargent, an MIT-trained engineer. By stopping the destructive projects above and turning more attention to public transit, he helped protect and then raise the city’s quality of life as expressed in its vibrant neighborhoods and lovely parks and by eventually making it easier for many more people to move through Boston’s dense urban core, with its famously narrow, curving streets, without a car. This has been a boon for individuals and businesses.
This in turn helped make “The Hub” the prosperous world city it is today. Frank Sargent understood that the urgent need was to move more people, not more cars, and that only a much improved public transit system could do that. He also knew that relentlessly paving over green space for roads and parking lots was, to put it mildly, bad for the environment, as was the intensifying air pollution from vehicular traffic at the time.
Still, as former Massachusetts Transportation Secretary James Aloisi recently told Commonwealth Magazine: “We remain adrift on a sea of ideological resistance to raising the revenue we need to do the job, still fully in the grip of a stubborn auto-centric mentality that would prefer to see us all stuck in the worst traffic congestion in the nation rather than invest in a modern electrified regional rail system… that would entice many commuters to take commuter rail,’’ including from Providence, of course.
I covered Governor Sargent back then as a reporter for the Boston Herald Traveler, and fondly remember his high intelligence, his directness and his political courage, along with his humor, charm and ability to swear like a stevedore.
To read Mr. Aloisi’s piece, please hit this link.
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Trump wants to slash funding for Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor service, on which traffic has been booming, to $325 million from $700 million. (To stick it to Blue States?) He’d also cut funding for the quasi-public railroad’s long-distance routes to $611 million from $1.3 billion. Those long-distance trains tend to be underpatronized. So he may have a point there. But it’s unlikely that these cuts will take place: To address crippling car congestion, an expansion, not a contraction, of Northeast Corridor train service, is needed. And reminder: Northeast Corridor trains are very heavily used for business travel. As for those long-distance trains: They serve many Red State communities whence cometh some powerful members of Congress….
'Major center of graphic arts'
“Squibble A’’ (aquatint and etching), by Joe Moore, in the show “Selections From Mixit Print Studio,’’ at Brickbottom Artists Association, Somerville, Mass., Dec. 5-Jan. 11.
The gallery says:
“Over time Mixit Print Studio {in Somerville} has made its mark on the Greater Boston scene, and sponsored artists from other regions of the US, and abroad.” Sinclair Hitchings, former keeper of prints at the Boston Public Library, wrote in the catalog for our 25th anniversary exhibition: “The world at large does not know—but many American graphic artists do know—that Greater Boston is a major center of graphic arts production. It is this level of skill and sophistication which artists bring to Mixit Print Studio. Thousands of prints by hundreds of area artists have rolled through the presses of Mixit Print Studio.”
Abandon all hope ye who enter here
Route 128 in Canton, Mass.
Take cover! As part of a bridge project, Route 128 will be closed from the night of Nov. 4 through Nov. 6 in Needham, with trafficto be rerouted through local roads. Even though this will be on a weekend and with plenty of official warning, expect chaos! With all the whining about the MBTA, thank God that Greater Boston, unlike many U.S. metro areas, at least has a fairly dense mass-transit system to take pressure off the roads. If only it were denser.
-- Robert Whitcomb