NYT on Cell Phone Tower Controversy 481
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."
Why not make them really thin (Score:3, Insightful)
Not just cell towers (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
A Little Creativity Please ... (Score:1, Insightful)
Cannot most of these towers be esthetically disguised as, say, eagle-nesting platforms, power-generating windmills, or some sort of tall, carbon-based, sunlight-absorbing life-form?
NIMBY is what's going to screw us... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's actually a pretty sweet deal (Score:5, Insightful)
IMO Cel towers better than phone poles (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:business model (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Make them less ugly (Score:5, Insightful)
Tell that to the first guy to fly into the tower because he COULDN"T SEE THE TOWER. There is a reason the toweres I see are neon orange with red blinking lights. Make them hard to see and you are asking for a helicopter/plain pilot to fly into one. Although, I wonder how you can camoflage a 2,000 foot tower. Making it look like a tree is a joke. Making it dark makes it harder to see, and a danger to pilots.
As for you TV reception, try tuning to that channel. It could be the multipath interference, or maybe you just aren't tuning to that channel.
Re:Sweet Deal (Score:2, Insightful)
Closer is actualy better. (Score:4, Insightful)
Now an eye-sore, it still can be.
Re:It's actually a pretty sweet deal (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Damage via cell phone rad (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Damage via cell phone rad (Score:0, Insightful)
You mean false science, such as claiming outright labrats "would have jack" if a cell phone was held an inch from their heads, without ANY shreds of scientific scrutiny, calculations, citations, or even useful links?
It's amusing how you criticize the media and others and yet you do the exact same thing yourself!
Re:NIMBY is what's going to screw us... (Score:5, Insightful)
Farming, I think, does have more reasons for some controls. There should be some control as to the waste output of farms. I've seen to many that just dump their sewage into the local water system without any treatment or anything.
My experience with living in rural areas is that you always live next to a junkyard. You always have some enighbor who thinks it's a good idea to have 50 scrap cars, a few refridgerators, etc spread across their property. Again it is none of my business as long as they aren't imposing a safety risk to the community.
If you're not creating a danger to others and you're on your own land then you should be left alone. I hate community nitpicking. Home Owner's groups are the worst. Noooo you can't build your kids a tree house.. that might look tacky and lower land values. Doh. Then you have endless hassles over installing solar or wind power because neighbors don't like the way it looks. Who cares if it's better for the enviroment.
Re:It is great to see in America (Score:3, Insightful)
I can sue companies for poluting my land right now. So the absence of this ability is clearly not why we need the EPA. Why we do shall be left as an exercise for the student.
Re:Church steeples are a good spot (Score:2, Insightful)
One activity impedes religious activity, the other aids it. So unless the tabernacles in Jesus's time were getting kickbacks from the merchants, and the people at the church are being forced to use that cell provider, you're talking about two completely different things.
(Granted, they'll get much better indoor reception with that provider at that church. But who needs to use a cell phone in a church?)
Re:It is great to see in America (Score:1, Insightful)
Have you ever been to a place that comes close to your libertarian fantasy? They're usually armpits. Certain parts of Texas fit this bill: Urban areas with billboards every 75 feet and 20-mile long stretches of roadway lined with solid strip-malls. Rural areas with multiple junked cars and washing machines in front of most every house. To avoid this fate, homeowners huddle into subdivisions and "voluntarily" sign away far more rights than the government ever dared to take, submitting themselves to private little deed-restriction nazis who send individual nastygrams for every single dandelion spotted in your yard. No thanks.
If you had proper property rights for land you own you wouldn't need the EPA becuase you could sue those big companies that polute your land and get the proper restitution for them destroying your land.
So you'd take power away from federal bureaucrats and hand it over to the one form of life that's actually several notches lower: shiny-suited lawyers. Good call.
It's an Engineering Issue. (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Suggestion (Score:3, Insightful)
Heck, maybe somone is already doing it.
Re:Damage via cell phone rad (Score:4, Insightful)
Since it's impractical to simply expose animal subjects to continuous low-level radiation and check back on them 20 years later (by that time, it'll be too late for the results to be useful), controlled experiments are used to mimic the effects of long-term exposure. Common adjustments include increasing the radiation dose, as well as engineering the lab animals to be more susceptible to cancer development. This way, the duration of the experiments is shortened enough so that we get the results quickly enough for them to be useful.
The flip side is that the conditions obviously aren't exactly the same as the ones that humans are being exposed to anymore, which is why the arguments about whether cell phone radiation is harmful or not remains inconclusive. (For example, how similar are the new engineered animals to regular ones?) But to dismiss the results out of hand just because you don't understand the methodology is poor reasoning.
Re:It's actually a pretty sweet deal (Score:4, Insightful)
A palm tree is fairly symetrical to begin with. And if it is well taken care of, it just looks like a bunch of fronds on a big pole.
Here is a decent example. [engadget.com]
Re:It's actually a pretty sweet deal (Score:5, Insightful)
Same with airports (Score:5, Insightful)
Phone Customer: The reception in my area is poor
Phone support: Yes, that is because we have no transmitters in your area.
Phone Customer: Why not? I deserve to have good reception, I pay my bills
Phone support: We had planned to build one last year at the request of people in your area, but people in your area protested and the plan was scrapped. So, what do you want?
Phone Customer: I want perfect reception in the middle of nowhere, with not a tower to be seen.
Phone support: have a nice day.
I think that about sums it up.
Re:Make them less ugly (Score:2, Insightful)
Helicopter ambulance. Firefighting tanker plane.
I don't know the particulars of your area, but there are reasons for flying at low altitude. Reasons that often involve heavy distractions that would cause one to miss seeing a tower painted to blend in with the sky.
Re:Damage via cell phone rad (Score:5, Insightful)
In effect, they're saying "We're going to test if soaking for an hour in warm water is bad for you, by immersing you in boiling water for 60 seconds. Sure, it's hotter, but it's for a lesser period so it works out the same."
Obviously, anyone will see that's a ridiculous statement, but that's because they have experience with warm water. Radiation is too abstract a concept without even starting in on it's lack of physical evidence until well after the fact.
Re:Not just cell towers (Score:3, Insightful)
I have seen farms in South America. Long lines of power lines and road destroying the pristinene pastures. Not to mention the coal mining and brick making operations covering everything in soot.
We had a farm about an hour out of town in Texas. Again, power lines, telephone lines, roads, railroads, even large a power distribtution network about a mile away, and a good 20 miles from any large town. It was a rural area, but already stripped of it's purity. And this was long before everyone had to have a cell phone. And of course windmills everywhere because if you don't have running water windmills, if you are in the right area, is the best, most natural way, to pump water.
I would think that people who lived in rural areas would like cell towers and localized windmills so they would not have to destroy thier wonderful area with all those poles, not to mention all the trees that have to be cut down for the right of way.
Re:NIMBY is what's going to screw us... (Score:3, Insightful)
I for one don't think it matters all that much, unless you're looking for something stupid to bash someone about. The U.K. and many other countres drive on the other side of the road. Yay for them. Europe uses the Metric system and the U.S. continues to say "fuck that". But the U.S. had "metric" money before the U.K. did.
Everybody should just get the hell over themselves.
Re:It is great to see in America (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:NIMBY is what's going to screw us... (Score:3, Insightful)
And what the hell is wrong with that?
I like the benefits from sewage treatment plants too, but I don't want it located downtown, next to my favorite restaurant. There are proper places for everything.
Windmill farms make a lot of noise if you're near them, so putting it near a residental neighborhood is a bad idea. Nuclear power plants are potentially a danger, so it's reasonable to put them at least 10 miles away from any densely populated areas, and perfectly feasable to do so. The only reason they don't do so, is to save 0.001% of the electricity from line losses over the additional distance. Their attempt to maximize profit at the expense of public safety is exactly why Americans have been completely unwilling to allow any new nuclear power plants in the past 30 years.
Cell-phone towers are the only thing in your list that has a legitimate reason to be an eyesore. The technology is not that wonderful, so it needs to have line-of-sight to as large an area as possible, and be as near to poplulated centers as possible. Never the less, they should be able to disguise them, use more powerful transmitters and better technology so they don't need as many, and they should be reasonably sensative about the environment that they put them in. I don't care at all if they put windmills, or cell towers on the top of the many mountains around here, but I'd be very pissed-off if they found some reason to plow a green area near a river or lake, and ruin the area, and the view there...
Re:business model (Score:3, Insightful)
Learn some physics, lemming (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no such bullshit threshold where above X watt it's ionizing, under X watt it's not ionizing. If a single photon can cause a transition in an atom or mollecule, it will. That's the only either-or condition.
Pumping more watts, i.e., more of those photons per second, doesn't change that. There is no such thing as needing 100 photons to cause a transition. Either _one_ causes it, or any amount doesn't.
I.e., if something happens at 100W, it happens just as well at 1 milli-Watt or even 1 micro-Watt. You just have more or less of those ionized atoms, depending on the power. That's all.
I.e., those tests _are_ fair, and they're done by people who actually understand what's happening there.
"False science makes me angry."
Well, then do us all a favour and stop spouting bullshit about stuff you don't have any clue about. Actually read a physics book instead of making your own pseudo-science bullshit.
And no, just because you're the latest nerd in a CS university does _not_ make you an expert in everything on Earth. For starters, as you just proved, it doesn't mean jack squat about knowing any physics.
NIMBY Database (Score:2, Insightful)
Then when they try to get cellular service, they are DENIED flat out. "Sorry, your a NIMBY, we don't offer service to NIMBY's!"
If they have servce now it should be terminated with one of those curt legal letters they send out. Should specifically outline you a NIMBY jerk and your service has been terminated. Don't bother with the other carriers, we told them too! They don't want you either! Go AWAY!
Just like the article states they want ALL the services but don't want to support it. Too bad.
Cellular services need towers. Done.
You haven't been in some small communities, then (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone thinking that large numbers of people can act like sheep, haven't seen what _small_ numbers of people can do. Your social acceptance or becoming the public enemy can depend on conforming to the local "fashions" in every step you make, every breath you take.
If it's fashionable to hate Mr John Doe for _anything_ whatsoever, people _will_ do it, just to conform to the "community".
E.g., if it's because Mr John Doe built a big mast, and supposedly shaved a couple of cents of someone's property value in the process, even those who _haven't_ lost anything in the process will turn against Mr John Doe. Heck, even people who _gained_ something in the process will do it, just to be on the fashionable and socially acceptable side of the debate.
Re:Radiation (Score:4, Insightful)
What does the length of a mouse have to do with the effects of non-ionizing radiation on it? Are you supposing that the mouse forms some kind of resonant dielectric cavity or something? This is quite preposterous given that a mouse is far from homogeneous, and even farther from resonant. The Q of a mouse is so incredibly low that it is unlikely in the extreme that there would be any resonance to speak of.
This is something that the medical community doesn't even understand. RF is non-ionizing, so it does not cause damage at the molecular or cellular level. The only effect of non-ionizing incident radiation is heat. That's it. Heat does not cause cancer.
Pine needles? You've got to be kidding me. Reception is poor in forests because of absorption and scattering, not because pine needles are somehow resonant.
Why would you advise someone not to hug a cell phone tower? The tower itself is not the radiating element, at least it had better not be.
Are you REALLY an RF engineer?
Re:You haven't been in some small communities, the (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm also a ham radio enthusiast. It used to be that neighbors didn't care if you put a TV antenna on your roof. It used to be that neighbors didn't care that you had a few wire antennas strung out in your back yard.
Now all that's changed. Thanks to the ignorance of a few empowered art school students who know nothing about either radio, economics, or even public safety (yes, these idiots even balk at the need for police radio antennas), putting up an antenna is nearly impossible. However, should I have wanted to erect a pole of the same size for a flag or even an anemometer --they wouldn't care. I think this has to do with unfortunate choice of words we electrical engineers use to describe antenna performance: Radiation. It scares the art students.
This is the victory of foolish romantics over common sense. I wish these self appointed aesthetics police could learn the true depth of their arrogant stupidity --but they're too far gone for that to happen.
Re:Leave it to the NYT (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Much as I hate to... (Score:5, Insightful)
There's an old English case about a 19th century train that runs next to a farmer's flax field. The train emits sparks which could set the field on fire. Do you give the farmer to right to tell the train not to run, or do you allow the train to tell the farmer not to plant? In theory, it doesn't matter: If you give the right to the farmer and the train running has more value than the farmer's crop, then the train company will just pay the farmer for the right to emit sparks, and vice-versa.
The problem comes when there are 1000 different farmers: at this point, it does matter who gets the right, since it's much too difficult to deal with that many farmers. In this case, the government somehow has to figure out which option has the highest value, because the market is too convoluted to do it.
To me, that appears to be exactly what's going on with cell towers -- the value of nationwide cell-phone coverage is worth more than the drop in value of property around the towers.