Rendering from the developers.

[Autoposted while I’m in France]

Way back in January 2006, I wrote about Westwood Station, a mixed-use TOD in Massachusetts. This project will use a former industrial park that’s right at Amtrak’s Route 128 station along the Northeast Corridor, a stop on the MBTA commuter rail, and right off Boston’s beltway, Route 128.

Of course, many residents of Westwood and neighboring Canton and Dedham object. They moved to their sleepy suburban towns and worry about the traffic and impact on schools of new stores and residents. (In Massachusetts, each town pays for its schools, which often leads to bad land-use decisions as they compete to attract taxpaying malls to the edges of their towns while pushing the negative traffic impacts onto the neighboring towns.)

My post ranked very high on Google for “Westwood Station” (and still is), generating floods of comments back before GGW existed and when my personal blog brought in much less traffic. (When I launched GGW, I switched all the urbanism-related posts over, which is why now it looks like a GGW post).

Westwood Station now has a flashy Flash site as well as the older community site.

(Full disclosure: Long after I wrote the original post, my sister-in-law was assigned to represent the town as one of the lawyers handling the project. She has nothing to do with this post or anything else I’ve written on the subject.)

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.