Almost 60 Mass Cities and Towns Restrict Checkout Bags by Terese Hammerle Our environment is swimming in plastic waste. The Sierra Club and others commonly assert that Americans use 100 billion plastic bags a year, or about 360 bags per year for every man, woman, and child in the United States. Massachusetts residents go through about 2 billion bags annually. These are 2010 estimates, when Washington, DC, became the first major US city to impose a fee on disposable paper and plastic bags. (“Disposable” indicates single-use; “reusable” means a heavier quality for multiple use.) Currently, about 60 Massachusetts cities and [READ MORE]

Connections to the Belmont Community Path by John Dieckmann The community path in Belmont connects or will connect to several existing and future shared use paths in our immediate region. To the east, there is the Fitchburg Cutoff Path running from Brighton Street to Alewife Station, the Linear Park from Alewife Station to Davis Square, and the Somerville community path from Davis Square to North Point Park in Cambridge. In Weston and Wayland . . . Eversource is constructing a maintenance access road along the right-of-way, which will double as the bike trail. These three path segments are part of [READ MORE]

Letter to the Editor In our July-August issue, author Sumner Brown proposed a congestion pricing scheme (a sort of toll for cutting through town) to cut down on traffic. A reader responds. Dear Editor, The recent article, “A Cure for Belmont Traffic Congestion,” certainly highlights a problem that I see every day, since I live on Pleasant Street, right near Belmont Center. Out-of-town drivers turn the street into a veritable parking lot during rush hour. But the problem isn’t a market failure in commuter pricing, and a metered pricing solution would be expensive and politically unrealistic anyway. We need to [READ MORE]