Sunday, May 26, 2013
As our armed forces come home from the Middle East, the local Veterans Affairs benefits office is being stretched.
Returning veterans are now facing a new enemy at home—long wait times for their disability claims. The waiting times started increasing in 2010 when U.S. troops were withdrawn from Iraq causing a dramatic uptick in first-time filers, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting. The data found that in most regional VA offices, not only did waiting times increase, but they vary dramatically with location: about 508 days in Baltimore, Maryland and 134 days in Fargo, North Dakota. The national average now stands at about 11 months, which is dramatically higher than in 2009 when it was 116 days. Claims sent to the VA's Boston office take on average 411.6 days to process a disability claim. That's more than 13 months before the average …
Friday, May 24, 2013
From Memorial Day parades to holiday fender benders, this live map shows delays and diversions on Boston area roads right now.
If you're on a mobile device, click here to view the map. When you're done getting gas and packing the car, check out the live results from MapQuest above to see what's standing between you and the start of your three-day weekend. Mapquest scans for parade routes, ongoing construction, block parties and traffic jams. If your route is green, your good. If it's red, you may be headed into a line of rubbernecking fools. Good luck!
You can use this gas price widget to always find the lowest price of the moment. Pro tip: Gas up early this week to save money.
Click here for a full-screen view of the gas price map. If you don't see a map of our local area, click the magnifying glass in the upper right to enter your address. Nationwide, gas prices were predicted to be lower this summer compared to the last three years, but that won't translate into savings at the pump this Memorial Day weekend, experts said. "Motorists this year are facing rising gas prices heading into the Memorial Day holiday," said Michael Green, a AAA spokesman, adding that Memorial Day 2013 would probably be the most expensive since 2011. In past years, prices have declined heading into early summer as oil refineries produced more gasoline to meet expected summer driving demand. This year, though, Midwest refineries haven'…
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
The cost of colonoscopies, MRIs, CT scans and mammograms can shift a lot from place to place.
It costs more than $1,000 extra to get a CT Scan in neighboring Suffolk County than in Norfolk County. That's according to data from New Choice Health, a private company that encourages people to become smarter healthcare consumers. With Boston's premiere hospitals and large health care organizations, the higher price tag on four common procedures is not entirely surprising. But Norfolk County's prices fall below the state average, making a short trip north and west of the city a potential money saver. These big regional differences have been in the news lately: As the Washington Post wrote on Wednesday, "One hospital charges $8,000 - another $38,000." Using the same data as the Post, The New York Times listed out the prices of a series …
Monday, April 15, 2013
Brookline voted for Elizabeth Warren and owns more hybrid cards than the state average.
Brookline is blue and green: That’s what we found when we compared data from the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles to the vote in the 2012 U.S. Senate race. You can see the results in the map above: Large circles suggest towns with more hybrid ownership per capita, and the red/blue color suggests which way those towns voted last year. In Brookline, 40.3 of every 1,000 vehicles is a hybrid, compared to the state average of 18. Patch’s research suggests the state has a good number of what might be called “green Republican” communities. More than 40 percent of the communities where Republican Scott Brown carried the vote have an above average numbers of hybrids. The data is a nice rebuttal to the national trends of hybrid/GOP …
Friday, February 8, 2013
Thanks to Winter Storm Nemo, Brookline is expecting up to two feet of snow this weekend! See how many inches have fallen in your area with the LIVE map below.
The map above, provided by the National Weather Service, shows snowfall in the past 24 hours. It is updated every 6 hours. This is not a map showing overall snow depth: It only tracks the amount of snow that has fallen in the past day.
