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NYT on Cell Phone Tower Controversy
prostoalex writes "The New York Times discusses the controversy of placing cell phone towers on top of hills, a practice to which many people object. According to the article, people frequently complain about the visual impediment and are afraid that property values will decline or some health damage will be done with radio waves. At the same time, people get quite irritated when proper phone service is not provided by the operators, and the calls keep dropping or coverage is poor outside of densely populated areas. Phone companies also lease the land to place the cell phone tower for $30,000-$50,000, which is attractive to many landowners, but some, like Sammy Barsa from NYT article, find themselves persona non grata in the community."
Wind farms are seen the same.
Its an expansion of the technological lifestyle, and a shift away from the purity of nature.
I'm all for people reusing industrial/hidden rundown areas for these eyesores, and prefer to keep the countryside views clear.
liqbase
Not In My Back Yard for...
Cell phone towers
Windmill farms
Nuclear power plants
People would love the benefits of all three, but only if they're nowhere to be seen, or in the case of the nuke plants, just far, far away.
I hope for karmic retribution for these people.
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Of course, what I find hilarious....is that while complaining about sparsely located hilltop towers, these people somehow managed to overlook the residential power lines, telephone lines and cable TV lines strung haphazardly from pole to pole every 100 feet at varying heights all throughout their countryside. I think I'd rather see a couple of towers than a mess of wires hanging every which way through my neighborhood.
The visual blight caused by regular phone poles and electrical poles is far worse than for cel towers. Why do people accept regular phone poles but make such a fuss over cel towers? Regular phone poles are much more dangerous as well - consider the number of people who are hurt or killed when they hit them with cars...
Yes and people strap magnets to every part of their body thinking it affects their "magnetic blood" (which it isn't) in some way. Lord help you if you put a 300 foot high cell tower ten miles away from them...they're gonna die!!
Meanwhile they get an MRI which is 50,000 times stronger than the entire Earth's magnetic field.
I can see how dictators do it, it's so easy.
As Apple has shown time and again, style is a key objective of engineering in creating a desireable product. Building an aesthetically pleasing cell tower would do an end-run around most (tho by no means all) of the objections.
A huge metal eyesore makes it harder for the product to be deployed. Disguising, blending or beautifying the towers to compliment their surroundings would make them easier to deploy. For example, in New England, many cell towers are hidden atop the towering smokestacks of 18th and 19th century mills (no longer used, but are pleasing brickwork architecture the building owners usually left in place.) They also lease space in tall church steeples... another commodity New England has in abundance.
Where no steeples or smokestacks are available, companies should design a nice cladding that compliments the surroundings.
Hire a real architecht with serious artistic chops to oversee the design and implementation of cell towers, and you spend a lot less money fighting hostile communities. Not hard to figure out.
SoupIsGood Food
What people don't like is change in the landscape. Once the change happens and they get used to it, nobody complains anymore. A perfect example of this is the giant Citgo sign on the Boston skyline. When it was first put up (1960s, I think), people complained that the skyline was being altered by some corporate monstrosity. Eventually people quit complaining and got used to it, and it was just another part of the city. Years later, Citgo decided they no longer needed the huge sign and announced it was going to be taken down. Once again, people complained. They said the sign had become part of the Boston skyline that everyone recognized and that taking it down would be causing the area to lose a landmark. Change is what people object to, not the objects themselves.