General Road and Highway Discussion

[Joedelay Highhoe]

You're not going to see many/any multi story factories performing the type of manufacturing that occurs in this region. Machines need to be installed on thick concrete slabs if you want to hold any reasonably tight tolerance (such as auto, aerospace, nuclear and medical manufacturing industries). I'm sure it's possible, but it's much cheaper to move somewhere where the factory can sprawl.

It is always cheaper to sprawl because most of the costs of sprawl are borne not by the developer, but instead by the occupants and society at large. This is true for factories, housing, everything.

As for tight tolerance manufacturing, UW Nanotech centre has a nanometer scale silicon chip fabrication facility on some floor (not the ground floor) of the building. The main obstacle for the facility was not the location in the building or even the high number of people in the building, but simply the vehicle traffic on Ring Rd causing vibrations.

That is pretty interesting. I can't speak much about semiconductor manufacturing, but I imagine the machines at UW produce a low volume of chips, and the machines themselves wouldn't be the source of vibrations.

That's a different can of worms than the industries you see in this region. Something like this would never be on the second story of a building (Centra Industries in Cambridge). I remember they had to dig down about 10 feet to pour a floating foundation for their waterjet cutter.