How a City Works

Electricity powers water and sewage plants, traffic signals and subway trains, so a power failure reaches all of them; Eversource restores water and sewage plants right after life-threatening calls and blocked roads. Firefighting depends on water pressure in the mains, and almost every utility shares the same street, which is why Massachusetts requires notice to Dig Safe before anyone digs.

Under a downtown street sit layers of pavement on crushed rock, then electric, telecom and fire alarm cables, gas and steam mains, water mains and sewers, and in some places a subway tunnel. In Boston, the Boston Water and Sewer Commission alone runs about 1,015 miles of water main and 1,435 miles of sewer and storm drain.

It depends on the intersection and the time of day. In busy downtowns such as Boston's, many signals give the walk signal automatically every cycle, so the button has no effect on timing; the Boston Globe reported in 2017 that most downtown buttons there do nothing by design. Outside downtown, and at some downtown signals overnight, buttons generally do call the walk signal.

No. Signals existed in London in 1868 and electric ones in Salt Lake City and Cleveland by 1912 and 1914, and William Potts' three-color light dates from 1920. Morgan patented a hand-cranked three-position signal with an all-stop position in 1923 and sold the rights to General Electric for $40,000.

Every signal cabinet has an independent safety device, a conflict monitor or malfunction management unit, that watches the controller. If it detects conflicting greens or bad voltages, it overrides the controller and puts the intersection into flash. Some cities, including Boston, also set many signals to flash overnight on purpose.

New York's original gravity water system could lift water only to about the sixth story, so taller buildings pumped water to rooftop tanks that feed the floors below by gravity. The city required tanks on buildings over six stories, and wooden cedar tanks are still built by a few family firms.

No. MWRA is one of five large US systems, with New York, Seattle, Portland (Oregon) and San Francisco, that operate without filtration because their watersheds are protected. A federal court accepted MWRA's ozone-based treatment instead of filtration in 2000, and the First Circuit affirmed in 2001; the Carroll plant now disinfects with ozone and UV, then adds chloramine.

It is the release of untreated sewage and stormwater into a river or harbor when rain overloads a sewer that carries both. EPA counts about 700 US communities with combined sewers as of its 2023 inventory.

Legacy 911 looks up the caller's number and address in ANI/ALI databases, and for mobile phones Phase II adds estimated coordinates; as of February 2021 data, at least some Phase II location was available at 99.2 percent of US call centers. The FCC proposed in 2025 to add floor-level vertical location for calls from tall buildings.

911 is for emergencies. 311, first launched in Baltimore in 1996 and reserved nationwide by the FCC in 1997, is for non-emergency police and city services such as reporting potholes.

Yes. As of April 2026 Boston has about 1,250 street fire alarm boxes and about 1,200 master boxes connected to buildings, maintained by a team of 13. During a June 2024 911 outage, the police commissioner told residents to use them.

Some LED fixtures made by Acuity Brands' American Electric Lighting brand around 2017 to 2019 had a phosphor coating that degraded, letting the LED's blue-violet light through. Reports began in early 2021 and came from at least 30 US states by 2022.

It comes from district steam pipes under the street. Groundwater touching hot pipes, or small leaks, makes vapor, which Con Edison vents through 10-foot orange-and-white stacks to keep it above people and traffic. Con Ed's system has about 105 miles of mains.

Most manhole events come from underground electrical cable whose insulation has broken down. In 2014 Con Edison recorded 3,369 manhole events, 32 of them explosions, and 68% of events came in January and February, when road salt goes down.

Natural gas has no smell of its own. Utilities add mercaptan, a sulfur compound, so leaks are easy to notice. If you smell gas, leave and call from a safe place.

Agencies publish their schedules in an open format called GTFS and live data, including vehicle positions and delays, in a companion feed called GTFS-Realtime. Apps read both and compare a vehicle's live position with its scheduled trip to predict arrivals. GTFS began with Portland's TriMet and Google in 2005, and the MBTA helped develop the real-time extension.

In 1949 GM and four other companies were convicted of conspiring to monopolize sales of buses and supplies to transit companies controlled by National City Lines, and acquitted of conspiring to monopolize ownership of those companies. Most scholars say streetcars declined for many reasons, including fixed fares during inflation, the Depression, sprawl, highway policy and preference for cars.

Boston's residential trash is collected by contractor Capitol Waste Services and taken to waste-to-energy plants run by Reworld and WIN Waste Innovations. Recycling goes to Casella's materials recovery facility, and curbside food scraps go to Save That Stuff or Garbage to Garden.

A national study by The Recycling Partnership, reported in 2024, estimated that only 21% of US residential recyclables are captured. Most of the loss happens before collection: only 73% of households have access and 59% of those participate.

It is mostly a modern myth. The famous Times quote predicting nine feet of manure on London streets has never been found, and the story traces to a 2004 article. Manure was a real problem: New York's horses left an estimated 2.5 million pounds a day in the 1890s.

Water seeps through cracks into the layers under the pavement, freezes into ice lenses that lift the surface, and leaves voids when it thaws. Traffic then breaks the unsupported surface, so potholes peak during the spring thaw.

It depends on what is counted. FHWA puts the construction cost at $14.8 billion, $7 billion of it federal. Other accounts give $14.6 billion at completion in December 2007, and about $21.9 billion once interest is counted.

Boston's Tremont Street Subway, which opened on September 1, 1897, running from Park Street to Boylston. More than 100,000 people rode it on the first day, and it came in early and under its $5 million budget.

Boston allows space savers only during a declared snow emergency, and they must be removed within 48 hours after the emergency ends. They are banned at all times in the South End and Bay Village. They are a tolerated custom, not a legal claim to the spot.

Eversource handles life-threatening calls and blocked roads with electrical hazards first, then critical facilities such as hospitals and water plants. Next come transmission lines, substations and main feeders, then repairs that restore the most customers at once, with single-customer fixes near the end.