As noted by councillors during the city council meeting last night, this really is not a big price tag for something that presents so much benefit to the entire city

Oh, there was a major sabotage attempt of USPS: https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis-and-how-to-fix-it/

Look around the Kendall square and Harvard Square neighborhoods. Both are very walkable, have access to the T (metro), are within your commute requirement, and most importantly have lots of college/grad students who might be subletting for the summer. In general Kendall is more modern with tall glass buildings while Harvard is much older in a brick and ivy sort of way. Regardless, sublets are your best bet for furnished apartments in the summer

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If you're working at MIT, look in the kendall square area. Lots of new buildings around, very walkable and access to the subway.

There was a note on the website that stated you could only renew online up until 3/1/23. After 3/1/23 you have to go in person to renew. So it isn't that you have outstanding tickets, you just missed the deadline for online renewal.

Yes exactly, short term rentals and furnished, which is why I’m aiming for a sublet. But I’m unsure about the location as I’ve never been to Boston/Cambridge before… I really like walkable area and I’ll working around the MIT.

I don’t have a fixed budget as I am privileging comfort of living. I really like walkable areas and accessible coffee shops/grocery places. I will be working on the MIT area and I would be okay with commuting 15/20 minutes.

One big thing I wish were addressed: what if my landlord isn't cooperative? Generally, fiber-to-the-home is done by putting an ONT/ONU (optical network terminal/unit that handles the fiber signal) in the basement and running ethernet into the unit. You can use MoCA (multimedia over coax) to get from the basement to the unit, but a lot of places just have the coax punch through the side of the building rather than coming up from the basement (I'm sure back in the 80s a lot of landlords didn't care about what was cheap property back then). Will Cambridge make an ordinance that landlords have to allow tenants to hook up municipal fiber? In a city where most people rent, this is a big concern. If Cambridge gets municipal fiber and I can't get it because my landlord isn't cooperative, that's a big problem - and will severely impact the take rate. This has stymied Verizon's Fios a lot in New York City. Verizon will have Fios available, but can't get it into your unit. Sometimes they're able to use coax wiring in the building already. Sometimes landlords just shut them out - and sometimes the cable company will pay the landlord for exclusivity (though I think the city is moving against that).

I guess I'm left wondering how the service will get from the street to my unit with a landlord that might not care. The presentation had so many tiny details on how they were getting it around the city and such, but didn't talk about getting it into the units. I know that some large buildings in Somerville are Comcast-only because of this (one of my friends hates it about his building). If my cable connection is just something that was drilled through the third-floor exterior wall back in the 80s, but now the landlord doesn't want new punctures in their property that's now worth millions, what will happen? Am I just out of luck? I'm sure many landlords will accommodate and might see it as a selling point to their property, but it seems like it could be a bit logistically difficult in many situations. A 30 unit building isn't going to want 30 punctures in their building. MoCA is an option, but then everyone is sharing a theoretical 2.5Gbps (depending on how good the wiring is) and not really getting the full fiber experience (and MoCA can bring some security concerns since most people don't enable encryption on it and additional latency). I'm guessing that most large buildings will end up being MoCA which isn't ideal and I'd have to assume that a lot of small buildings probably just have a bunch of exterior penetrations for coax rather than wiring down to the basement.

Does anyone have details on how renters will get service in different scenarios? Is this a solved problem that's so boring they didn't put it in the presentation? I guess it just feels like it's missing because they talk about all sorts of random details like the trenching, hubs, maps of the backbone, primary, and secondary distribution, taps, drop access handholds, and fiber distribution cabinets. Again, maybe this is something that is solved, but it doesn't seem to be given what people in other cities seem to complain about. Maybe this was already discussed in other documents?

didja pay your outstanding tickets?

I’m actually subletting my furnished place this summer because we’re moving to LA for the summer! DM me if interested!

What's your budget? If you want to live alone, you should figure at least $2000/mo for a typical 1BR.

But that's for a normal year long lease. Sounds like you're only looking for a short term rental, which I assume also needs to be furnished?

Need more info to give you any advice… budget? Location of work? Interests? Etc

In general, there’s nowhere really bad to live in Cambridge but there are trade offs for every neighborhood

if you can, go in person. there is no way the mailers are going to show up on time. I paid for mine the start of feb, I called earlier this week and they told me they have not started processing them yet

That's a super idea! Heck, they could take 'payment in kind' for their initial investment.

BTW, loving that my initial post is being downvoted while the parent is being upvoted :-) I guess we found the Comcast fans!

One way Harvard/MIT/other-institutions-companies can actually help is guarantee a certain number of customers to the system. If they reimburse staff for home internet, make sure there are incentives to use municipal broadband. With guaranteed customers, the uncertainty around financial risk is minimized, making financing easier and deals with private partners less necessary.

>Of late the libertarians in this country have decided even that shouldn't be, although the Constitution limits most acts of sabotage against it.

Yah, conservatives have done their best to try and destroy it for the past two decades, and thank god their options for interference are somewhat limited. In any event, when you cut through the bullshit, the USPS basically costs almost nothing (on a net operating basis), and still provides all the valuable services that the framers intended (and several more).

I would suggest you give them a call.

The USPS is required by the Constitution and avails itself from longstanding cultural understanding that the founding fathers thought it important and that a well run postal service is a matter of national pride.

Of late the libertarians in this country have decided even that shouldn't be, although the Constitution limits most acts of sabotage against it.

I don’t! I went to check thinking I did but I didn’t find anything :(

Do you have outstanding tickets?

>o one questions whether roads are making enough money because it's understood that they enable productivity in the areas they serve. Meanwhile we expect the T to pay for itself rather than act as a utility

I'll get slammed for saying this, but a big part of the problem with a non-competitive public service like the MBTA is that, in the long run, the unions and the contractors will extract all of the benefits from the system until it's too expensive to maintain. Thus, it becomes a never ending money pit.

But then again I don't really have any good answers to solve it.

In the end, I think we treat these agencies (public transit, mail, etc) too much like businesses and not like public services.

No one questions whether roads are making enough money because it's understood that they enable productivity in the areas they serve. Meanwhile we expect the T to pay for itself rather than act as a utility.

You’re not wrong, but that’s a broader definition of competition than what economists typically use. To offer up an absurd example to illustrate this point, suppose I prevent you from all other means besides hovercraft of commuting to work, then I suppose you would take a hovercraft to work (if you HAD to get work), and therefore conclude a hovercraft must be competition with the MBTA (generally). Thus, we must first consider the closeness/substitutability of alternatives before deeming them as sufficiently competitive to be considered proper competition.

The USPS doesn’t have as much competition as you think. Other shippers don’t really send letters, and some types of letters are legally required to go though the post