The traffic study for the Walmart depot proposed at 121 Webster Avenue reached the Chelsea Zoning Board of Appeals on the day of its September 8 hearing. The board heard the applicant’s summary of it, took an hour of presentation and public comment, and continued the case without a vote. It comes back on October 13.
The summary is now part of the public record, and it is the most specific account yet of what the building would do. Below is what the applicant told the board, what the board pushed back on, and what it asked for before October. All of the traffic figures are the applicant’s own. The board had not reviewed the study when it heard them, and neither have we.
A supermarket in name only
The petition, filed by Walmart Real Estate Business Trust as case 2026-14, asks for a special permit for a “supermarket.” The chair explained the label in opening the case: Chelsea’s zoning has no category for what Walmart calls a depot, and supermarket was the closest fit. The applicant’s representative said later that the term was settled on with the city and the building inspector.
No member of the public would shop there. Orders placed on walmart.com would be picked and bagged inside and carried out by delivery drivers. When the building’s owner described it as working “just like any regular store,” a board member cut in: at a real supermarket, “you have 20 cars coming every minute,” and “I’m not going to be able to drive up, walk in there and go pick up my frozen peas and go home.” The owner agreed.
Another member said the applicant’s letters kept printing “not a distribution center” in bold, and rejected the label. “If you receive products, if you store inventory, if you ship to customers and all of that, that’s a distribution center,” the member said, and asked the applicant to call it what it is. The applicant’s representative answered, “We will do better.”
The numbers the applicant put on the record
- Hours: 6 a.m. to 11 p.m.
- Daily trips: about 350 vehicle trips in and out. The applicant compared that with 1,351 trips a day, the standard industry estimate for 26,576 square feet of ordinary retail in a small plaza.
- Busiest hour: 46 trips, at 1 p.m. The earlier projection had been 66.
- Commuting hours: 18 trips at the morning peak and 22 at the evening peak.
- Drivers: the heaviest driver activity comes between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., with a projected peak of 18 driver trips in and out. A driver typically carries about three orders per pickup, which the engineer gave as part of the reason for the gap with ordinary retail.
- Trucks: five box trucks a day, scheduled outside peak hours and routed in and out from Route 16 through the Parkway Plaza lots, not through the neighborhood. No tractor-trailers, although the building’s loading dock can take them.
- Jobs: about 20 on site, plus delivery drivers working through Walmart’s app.
- The building: vacant since 2019, according to the applicant. The current owner bought it in 2022.
Three limits on those figures came out at the hearing itself. The applicant’s engineer said that 18 driver trips might mean 18 orders or 50, depending on how orders are batched. The comparison data comes from a Walmart depot on Harrison Avenue in Boston that, by the applicant’s account, had been open only a few weeks. And the truck route binds the box trucks only: the engineer said the delivery drivers cannot be restricted to any route, because their job is to drive into the neighborhoods.
The chair’s one firm instruction was about those trucks. It is Walmart’s responsibility, the chair said, to see that delivery trucks keep to the plaza access “and do not go into, through the residential” streets, box trucks included.
Who spoke, and on which side
The Planning Board recommended denial on a 4 to 3 vote, city staff told the board, finding that the traffic impacts and the fit with the zoning district and the neighborhood outweighed the benefits.
Five letters of support were read into the record: from Councillors Kelly Garcia, Manuel Teshe and Norieliz DeJesus, from State Representative Jeffrey Rosario Turco, and from the owner of an abutting property, who wrote that the Registry of Motor Vehicles office in the same building had not brought any meaningful increase in traffic to that street. The board noted that the councillors’ letters followed the same template. Turco’s added a point the applicant also pressed: the depot takes EBT, which the representative said none of the other delivery services tried in a side-by-side test would accept. We have not tested that claim.
Councillor-at-Large Leo Robinson spoke against it, as at the Planning Board. “We can do better,” Robinson said. “I just disagree with the assumptions of the traffic.” The councillor said people in the neighborhood oppose the project.
Four residents spoke. A resident who said they had driven professionally for more than ten years opposed it, arguing that the jobs would be few, that app-timed delivery work pushes drivers too hard, and that Instacart and Uber already deliver groceries. A resident who commutes by bus supported it, describing the problem of getting cases of water and a cart on and off a full bus in winter. A resident from just over the Everett line supported it as open to every kind of customer and a use for an empty building. A former city official argued for it on tax grounds, saying a long-term Walmart lease would raise the property’s assessed value and bring personal property tax, and that the real traffic problem is the Route 16 and Route 1 intersection, which the state needs to fix.
What the board wants by October 13
- Time with the traffic study. The chair said the board would not close the hearing until it had read it.
- What will not be stocked. A member asked about appliances, tires and other bulky goods, which would change what kind of vehicle shows up. The engineer said large items such as five-gallon water jugs would probably not be kept at the depot and would come from larger stores farther away, taking longer to arrive.
- The delivery area. The applicant described the target by time, about 30 minutes, not by map. A board member suggested it would mean Chelsea, Everett, Revere, Winthrop and probably East Boston. The applicant’s representative said Malden, Medford and Melrose would likely be served from Walmart’s Saugus store, called that a personal opinion, and promised a firmer answer.
The Zoning Board of Appeals decides the special permit; the Planning Board’s vote was only a recommendation. The Planning Board has its own site plan review of the project scheduled for October 27, the night it also votes on the master plan. Our earlier coverage of the case, including the council’s involvement, is here.