How much delivery traffic does 500 housing units generate?

[Christopher Beland]

Short answer: At peak times, about 1 every 5 minutes (12 per hour).

Methodology: I spent an hour this evening during the dinner delivery peak (according to Door Dash and Uber) in the lobby of the Market Central Watermark tower. I observed:

• Deliveries: 6 (5 food, 1 Amazon)
• Pickups: 1 (sports gear)
• Residents in: 41 (many with their own meal bags or groceries)
• Residents out: 37
• Dogs being walked: 2

Scaling up from 285 units to 502, 7 deliveries and pickups per hour for Watermark is the equivalent of 12 per hour for Copper Mill.

I'd estimate most deliveries took 30-60 seconds - just long enough to enter, attempt to open the inner door, put the bag down, take a photo, and leave. Some went to the rear entrance, where there is a surface parking lot; some went to the front entrance and stopped with hazards on in the travel lane on Mass Ave. One delivery came via scooter, and the delivery person then picked up cookies at Crumbl next door and got back on their scooter to deliver that elsewhere.

Packages are held for residents in a locked room between the rear loading dock and the lobby, and fetched by a concierge. There is only a small table for food deliveries, though when the concierge is not present, they were left in the vestibule. I infer that large trucks with lots of packages (which tend to arrive during business hours, not dinner time) use the loading dock. The Market Central Link building has a separate loading dock which says a reservation is required. (There are also restaurants which need to get deliveries in both buildings.)

Upshot for Copper Mill:

There will be demand for quick delivery parking immediately next to the residential entrance on Grove Street. This could be accommodated by indenting a wide sidewalk to make a pull-off. Some single-parcel drivers might also be willing to pull their personal cars into the loading dock if it does not involve opening a door.

Grove Street is a 40-foot right-of-way, and is designated as a Neighborway by the Bike Network Plan - shared travel lane with cars, with traffic calming. On this type of road, 974 CMR 2.07 calls for 9-foot travel lanes and 1-foot shoulders. Given Grove Street is two-way, this leaves 10 feet on each side for sidewalks (and trees and driveway aprons) on each side. So to make a 9-foot-wide pull-off, either Grove Street would need to be made one-way, or the Copper Mill building couldn't go all the way up to the property line.

On page 56 of the 40B application, Copper Mill proposes putting the edge of the building at least 11 feet back from the property line, leaving enough room for on-street parking (or loading zone) for the entire frontage on Grove Street, except where the loading dock is. It looks like there's enough room there for 4 parallel parking spaces, each about 22 feet in length.

If I've done my Poisson distribution math right, assuming 12 randomly-distributed, 60-second deliveries per hour, the chances of getting through a peak hour without having more cars than spaces at the same time are:

• 1 space - 37%
• 2 spaces - 94%
• 3 spaces - 99.67%

So having 3 spaces would probably be fine except maybe once or twice a year, and most days the third space wouldn't be needed. Even during peak eats, all of the spaces would be empty 80% of the time. It's possible if they are not blocking a travel lane, drivers would linger a bit longer to figure out where to pick up next. From what I see, they do tend to double-park longer in front of restaurants, presumably because they actually need to wait for staff help, or sometimes for food to be ready.

When there are not simultaneous deliveries happening, loading zone spaces would be available for ridehailing passengers, though these could also be directed to a nearby passenger pickup/dropoff zone. (Quantifying demand for ridehailing would require more research - peak travel and eating times are different, I couldn't watch both curbs at the same time, and Watermark has underground parking.)

-B.

[hu...@comcast.net]

Hello Chris,

 

This is truly impressive work. However, it is a single sample, on a particular evening. Do you think it’s worth commissioning a professional analysis that would widen the scope to capture cases you may have overlooked?

 

For example, this was school vacation week. Does that affect the results?

 

Are Fridays typical of other days? Maybe people go out more Friday, order in more Tuesday. I don’t know.

 

What happens if it rains/snows? Maybe a significant portion of the 40 residents with meals or groceries would order in on those occasions.

 

What happens on moving day, supposing something like 15% yearly turnover? ~50 – 100 novices trying to navigate U-Hauls and overpacked cars, Ikea vans, etc.?

 

What you have shown is very much in the vein of what I believe the DSNC needs to understand to develop an informed opinion on the impact of the proposed tower, and what mitigations might be necessary. Do you agree it’s important to broaden your analysis to be confident of covering a comprehensive set of scenarios?

 

-Hume

 

(And, no, we don’t have to consider the case where parent’s weekend coincides with the World Series coming to Fenway Park, the Beanpot, and, I don’t know, the kickoff of the Boston Early Music Festival. Oh, and Honk!)

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[Mieke Citroen]

This is phenomenal. Thank you for doing that.

 Even though one sample hour is not enough data for big decisions, it absolutely shows that it could work and we should look at it. I'd be happy to do data gathering for an hour or two, just observing and recording.

--Mieke

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[jlau...@comcast.net]

Chris,

Your careful work prompted me to check the rents for a one-bedroom at Market Central Apartments.  Giving a March occupancy date I found that a rental is available from March 7 at $3296/month, including gas and trash but not other utilities.  Copper Mill, by contrast, is projecting $4250/month for its one-bedrooms not including utilities at around $5000/yr.

You might consider whether renters paying  $51K/yr plus utilities have a higher propensity to order food deliveries, taxis, cleaners, etc. and adjust accordingly.

Lee

PS  Yesterday's Wall Street Journal included a 144-page "premier issue" of "Coldwell 100" a glossy luxury-goods magazine featuring a real estate portfolio of multi-million-dollar properties in 17 states plus international locations.  Four properties were singled out for "Spotlight" treatment (pp 108-109)-- in Paris, France; Florida Keys; Oahu, Hawaii; and (sic!) Somerville, MA.  The Somerville penthouse property "floats above Davis Square like a modern treehouse.....a treasure of  a find amid the urban bustle below."     lee

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From: humev via Davis Square Neighborhood Council <daviss...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, February 21, 2026 11:25 AM
To: 'Christopher Beland' <bel...@alum.mit.edu>; daviss...@googlegroups.com <daviss...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: RE: [DSNC] How much delivery traffic does 500 housing units generate?

 

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[Ashish Shrestha]

The rents on these luxury units is highly flexible.  They change almost daily as a function of various proprietary algorithms, accounting for time of year, number of vacancies, etc.  I wouldn't be focused on a specific rental price so carefully.  For reference, my girlfriend was paying $3700 last year for a luxury unit closer to Kendall because she signed on short notice and on a summer lease cycle.  It's also worth remembering that Copper Mill's rental price is a projection for when they complete construction, so they've included probably 3-4 years of inflation into their rental price.  That 3300/mo will quickly become 4k+/mo by the time CM would finish their construction.

There's also pretty obviously a diminishing returns on wealth and services.  I doubt someone who pays 40k/yr in rent sees $20 in delivery very differently than someone who pays 50k/yr.

Chris, thank you for your research into this.  If people have more data they'd like to see, I encourage them to take the initiative like Chris has here and gather some data themselves.

[Jim Gallagher]

Hi Chris et al

The Instutute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) produces a report Trip Generation (it looks like their in at least their 11th ed) that used to be the industry standard used for most environmental and planning documents. I haven't looked at it since I retired a while ago, but they have studies for how many trips to/from many types of uses, for different times of day, and all around the country. I expect there would be numbers for situations comparable to here, and I would expect Cooper Mills to use them for any transportation analysis they provide.

Jim Gallagher

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[Michael Chiu]

Thanks Lee

Just for fun, here's a link to the Coldwell 100: https://issuu.com/cbgloballuxury/docs/coldwell_magazine_winter_2026/46?fr=sZDk2Yjg2NTcwNjU

Page 109 shows the Somerville property (Penthouse at the Pillow Factory/Blair Ditch Project)

Link to listing: https://ricardoboston.com/properties/50-howard-street-5-somerville-ma-us-02144-73469363

Surprisingly affordable at $1.55M. /s  Alas it is under agreement.

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