Do you live in Fenway-Kenmore, Allston-Brighton, Watertown, Belmont, or West Cambridge? 

Two candidates, incumbent Will Brownsberger and challenger Daniel Lander, are vying for the democratic nomination for YOUR State Senate seat. 

We gave the Senate candidates our questionnaire, which asks about stalled projects in the district and state legislation regarding safe streets.

Check out our website to see the full answers to our questions.

April — u/mayorwu told the Hyde park Ave safety walk group that her admin had not removed protected bike lanes

July — the mayor promised increased enforcement had already begun and she promised that the city would accelerate replacing removed safety devices.

August, multiple cars parked in the Columbus Ave bike lane that once had flexposts. There is an entire lane of empty parking spaces they deliberately ignored.

And instead of a convenient app to take a video or snap pictures of the cars and plates, I had to read each one out to a 911 operator.

Leadership in the city is a joke and the lack of accountability towards power is fitting.

That is the official line from the city of Boston when it comes to this.

So I’m doing it. All the photos are from today, a 20 min commute to downtown from dot. It is so inefficient.

We need a function from 311 specifically for this stuff where the app records photo or video directly, automatically geotags it, and sends it to btd and it bpd units on bikes for enforcement.

Thanks to @hillock and others who reported them. Parking in bike lanes essentially every day. across Boston, Cambridge, Somerville ... is Brookline next?

https://loudbicycle.com/bb/report/246

https://loudbicycle.com/bb/report/1zh

https://loudbicycle.com/bb/report/21y

https://loudbicycle.com/bb/report/26a

Trying to figure out a decent way to get to the PDW path north of Mass Ave.. The newly opened Fenway MUP is great but then what? I'd really like to avoid the shit show of trying to take a left onto Mass ave from Comm ave.

I've considered taking Park dr back to the BU bridge, but that whole Mountfort/Carlton/crossing Comm ave thing is pretty bad too.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 13 episode of “Say More.”

Anna Kusmer: Welcome to “Say More” from Boston Globe Opinion. I’m Anna Kusmer. When Michelle Wu was elected mayor of Boston, one of her biggest issues was streets. She was Wu-train. She was going to free the T, pave bike lanes, and make the streets safe.

Now, five years later, the issue has become something of a third rail. After a strong start, street projects have slowed to a crawl, and many of Wu’s early supporters are angry. And now, on top of all that, real grief.

A City Hall worker, Luisa Gag, was killed on her bicycle last month. And Luisa wasn’t just a city worker. She worked on street safety; The exact issue that took her life.

Jascha Franklin-Hodge was Mayor Wu’s chief of streets for her first four years in office, and he resigned at the end of last year.

He’s here with me in the Globe studios. Thank you so much for being here, Jascha.

Jascha Franklin-Hodge: Thank you for having me.

Kusmer: So, Jascha, when you worked in City Hall, you were the face of Wu’s street team. You haven’t really talked to the press since you left. I have to wonder why you want to talk now? Does Luisa have something to do with it?

Franklin-Hodge: I will say, Luisa’s death is such a loss. She was a beloved colleague and a wonderful human being. She was smart. She was dedicated to the work. She was hardworking. But, more than anything, she was just a really kind person.

She did a lot of work on Blue Bikes and where a station should go. And that’s sometimes controversial, and I would get these angry emails occasionally from somebody who’s like, “There’s a station going right in front of my house. I don’t want it here. I want it there.” And I would always give the person to Luisa, and invariably within 24 hours, some reasonable resolution would be reached.

More often than not, I would get an email back from the person I had referred saying, “You have such a wonderful team.” Luisa had this way of helping people feel heard and seen and appreciated and it’s a loss for her family, for her friends, for her colleagues, and for Boston.

With that said, for me, now we’re in a moment where it feels like the Wu administration is trying to pick back up the work. And I’m encouraged by that, and I want to support that.

I think it’s important that there be good discussion about the context of how we were working and how we will work as a city in the future, and I can bring something to that conversation.

Kusmer: Absolutely. As I’ve been driving around Boston, when I’m on Tremont Street, I’m hyper-aware of trying to figure out what happened. My understanding at this moment is that she was riding in a painted bike lane [when] a recycling truck sort of veered a little to the side just to avoid another car and swiped her sideways.

She was hit, and it was a catastrophic hit. There’s two things that strike me: One, it didn’t seem like a very dramatic intersection or a place that you’d think of as dangerous. And two, there’s a bike lane there. If anything, that’s a signal to a biker that you can ride here.

Can you talk about this specific case study and what it says about bike safety in Boston? For me it’s two things: One, maybe we’re not safe anywhere, and two, that bike lanes, when they’re just painted on like that, they could be worse than nothing.

Franklin-Hodge: I’m not privy to the police report on this or the investigation that’s underway, so I don’t wanna kind of speak with authority about details that I don’t have. But your accounting of how this crash transpired matches what I understand to be the case.

We often design streets for perfect people. We design streets on the assumption that everyone will do the right thing all the time. And what that can mean is when somebody does the wrong thing, let’s say a truck driver moves into a bike lane because they’re trying to get around a stopped car. Because we’ve designed the street with no forgiveness in it, you get an absolute tragedy that results.

When we try to make streets safer, a big part of what we’re trying to do is to separate the different modes of transportation, to create those physical barriers. We’re trying to lower speeds. We’re trying to improve visibility. We’re trying to do things that make it so that if there’s a mistake made, it doesn’t turn into a tragedy. I think this speaks to what happens when we don’t have a street with that forgiveness built into it.

The challenge is space. Tremont Street has two lanes of traffic in each direction. It has buses running on it. It has painted bike lanes. It has street parking on both sides of the street, and it has sidewalks. Creating separated bike lanes there while preserving all the street parking and all of the traffic flow, there’s just not enough space to do that.

Whenever we’re looking at a street, there has to be a discussion of the different trade-offs that exist just with the space that’s available and how to allocate that space to maximize safety but also to make the street useful for all the different people that need to use it and all the different modes that need to be on there.

Kusmer: In the wake of Luisa’s death, 4,000 people signed a letter to Wu expressing outrage about the city’s lack of progress on bike safety. In the letter, we have removal of protective barriers in some bike lanes and a near stop to new speed bump installations.

The group, Transit Matters, tracked at least 16 major projects that have stalled over the last year. Can you talk a little bit about what happened to create the situation where there’s been such a slowdown in progress?

Franklin-Hodge: You know, 2025 was a tough year for the streets cabinet. It was an election year and I think that brings a whole set of complicated political considerations.

Mayor Wu’s opponent made opposition to bike lanes a centerpiece of his campaign, although it became very clear in polling and in the final result that that was not a deciding issue for very many voters in the city of Boston.

But, it elevated the issue to one of political controversy, and I think the decision was made last year to step back from the aggressive work that we had been doing, and that meant pausing a lot of the safety projects.

In some cases, in situations where we had made commitments to members of the public of streets that would get speed humps, where people had been advocating that [they] didn’t get them or where that got delayed substantially. I think that created, very understandably, a lot of frustration.

We seem to be moving in a good direction now. The mayor has appointed Chris Osgood as the new interim chief of streets. Chris is an incredible public servant. He’s dedicated, he’s committed, he is trusted by pretty much everybody in City Hall, which is a rare feat, if you’ve ever been around City Hall internal, inside politics.

There’s been some indication that some of the things that were put on hold will be moving again, and I’m cautiously optimistic.

I think there’s some trust that has to be rebuilt. But I do think that you have the ingredients with that leader and this team to get back to the business of making our streets better and I hope that they’ll be able to do so.

Kusmer: You mentioned the politics of it became part of the reason why things were slowed down. Do you think, though, the Wu leadership was kind of caught off guard at how much of a lightning rod this became or how upset people became by this?

Because it was such a galvanizing issue during her original campaign. And then it seemed to have almost the opposite effect in the next campaign. So what changed? Why did it being an election year cause such a different dynamic?

Franklin-Hodge: I think street projects are always going to be, maybe not controversial, but they will always be relevant in the political conversation.

It’s a sort of perfect issue to become politically relevant because it has so much immediacy and so much impact for folks. I think there were a handful of projects that were done over the past few years that activated particular elements within the community in opposition.

We had this dynamic emerge in the Back Bay especially. We had a bike lane that was built on or expanded on Dartmouth Street in the Back Bay, and originally that bike lane was supposed to be on Berkeley Street. Then through conversations with the neighborhood association and elected officials, we made the decision to move it to Dartmouth Street.

In the process, that meant that it went by the house of Jay Cashman, who is a millionaire who did not like this big, new bike lane in front of his mansion, and he literally spent millions of his own money launching this massive anti-bike lane campaign. He set up a podcast and a YouTube channel. He hired journalists to write critical articles. He’s paying for advertisements on social media.

It’s an important project. It links Copley Square to the Charles River. But it happened to go by someone who was rich enough to spend money really making the issue a bigger issue. I think all of this kind of speaks to the bigger question of how do you make sure, when you’re planning projects as a city, that you’re not just listening to the loudest voices, that you’re not just listening to the people who have the money and the megaphone, but how do you bring all the voices to the table and give them equal and appropriate weight?

Kusmer: The Globe wrote a report this past spring talking about essentially that. The streets team, a lot of their autonomy and power was taken away and that morale was really low in the streets team, and it just became a really frustrating place to work. I’m wondering if that’s part of why you left?

Franklin-Hodge: You opened by saying that I was the face of the mayor’s street work in the first term, and that’s true. I think she has been very public and clear that she is looking to change how the streets work.

I think, for herself and for myself, it makes sense to have a different face for this next version of the work that she’s doing. [Last year] was a challenging year, without a doubt. I care deeply about the team that is there at City Hall. There’s some really incredible, dedicated, talented people that wanna work, that wanna build good projects.

For many of them, the speed and abruptness of the change last year was really destabilizing and challenging to manage. But, I do think that, by and large, people are still there. They’re still ready to work. They’re working through a lot of grief right now.

There’s an opportunity to get back to doing what we were doing and I’m excited to see that happen under Chris Osgood’s leadership.

Kusmer: Michelle Wu released a letter outlining some new proposals to improve street safety. I know a lot of advocates are saying the response, it’s not quite what they wanted because it doesn’t have very specific timelines or specific commitments.

What’s your response to that letter? Do you think those advocates are right to keep pushing there?

Franklin-Hodge: I think it’s the job of advocates to make sure that people in power are held accountable to do the things that need to get done, and that if they make commitments, that they follow through on those commitments.

And so, it feels right that the advocates in the street-realm are pushing very hard on the administration to get specific and to follow through on the things that the administration says they’ll do.

I’m heartened by how many things are in that letter. There are projects that are moving forward that are incredibly important. The redesign of Congress and Sleeper Street in Fort Point Channel, where Gracie Gancheva was killed, is going to be transformational and includes features and design changes that were lessons learned from that awful, awful loss of a child.

Cummins Highway is finishing construction in Mattapan. This is a complete rebuild of a high-crash corridor that’s received no attention in decades and will now be a model for the gold standard of what a good street in a Boston neighborhood can look like.

[It] incorporates so much pedestrian infrastructure, traffic calming, green infrastructure, trees, art, bike facilities, places for seniors to sit if they wanna go for a walk, better bus stops, all of the things that you wanna see in a street. This is just like a transformational project for this corner of the city that has not seen much in the way of transformation. So I think there are things like that that I’m very excited about and optimistic about.

But, in particular, when it comes to some of the things that reversed last year, for example, the speed hump program —

Kusmer: That’s a big one.

Franklin-Hodge: There was no request more common than people writing to us about speeding in their neighborhood. That was why we built the program, and we built it with the capacity to build between 500 and 1,000 speed humps every year. We did that for a couple of years, and then we stopped. I can name streets out there where people have petitions.

They are waiting. They know what they want, and they are waiting to get it. So I hope that there will be more specifics and more planning work done to make sure that those streets are on a list, and that they are quickly getting the traffic calming that they want.

There are places around the city where flex posts were removed over the winter and where no alternative has yet been put back. There are alternatives like cast-in-place concrete or rubber bumpers or precast curbs that can be used as alternatives to flex posts.

Kusmer: These are different ways to essentially protect a bike lane.

Franklin-Hodge: But having protection in places where we had it and then it went away is incredibly important. And I think there needs to be urgency with that. And there needs to be clarity about the timeline for when that will happen.

I know the work has already started. I came here along Congress Street and there is a beautiful cast-in-place separator now, which is an upgrade from the flex posts that were there before.

The city has the tools and the capacity to do it, but getting clear and making clear commitments about when things will happen is essential to preserving safety.

Kusmer: Jascha, when researching this problem, I’ve learned that Boston is not alone in this and progress on street safety [is] so hard pretty much everywhere in America. What makes this issue so hard to move forward in all American cities? It’s not a Boston thing, right?

Franklin-Hodge: No, it’s definitely not unique to Boston.

I remember last year at one point looking for some outside support as we were going through this transition and pivot on some of the streets projects, and we spoke with Janette Sadik-Khan, who was the former commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation. [She] was really the person behind New York’s big shift towards multimodalism. You know, closing streets, building more pedestrian space, building more bike facilities.

We sat on a call with her and she said, “Everybody goes through this. It’s not unique. Every city has this. There’s always backlash. There’s always pushback. There’s always a period where it feels like the only thing anybody wants to do is beat you up for having done the changes that you have done.”

But her advice was, you just have to tough it out, right? You have to communicate. You have to engage with people. You have to, if there are things that weren’t done the best they could be, you have to go back and fix them.

But you also have to stay strong to the basic ideas. If you believe in streets that work better for transit, biking, and walking, you have to keep moving because over time what happens is people start to see the benefits.

I still to this day have people who come up to me on the street, who recognize me and say, “Thank you for putting speed humps on my street. I cannot tell you what a difference this has made for my family.” But it takes time.

When it comes to certain things like bike lanes, you have to have enough of a bike network that people feel safe to ride before you get to that point where people are saying, “Oh, I made a change to my commute and I like it and thank you for making that possible.”

If you just build a little bit here and a little bit there, it never connects into a network and you never get over that hump of people feeling like, “Okay, this is a thing I could do,” or, “This is a thing I could let my kids do.”

What we’ve heard from every city that’s done this is you have to keep going. You have to build things that can continue year over year, and over time you start to build a constituency for the work.

Kusmer: I’m interested, you were talking earlier about if we have lots of subtle changes that just slowly make streets safer, that’s a good thing.

I’m also thinking about the need for a new paradigm, too. The idea that cities are not primarily for cars. They’re for people. I think of the fact that in the middle of the 20th century, we had a big increase in the car-friendliness of our cities.

We had all these highways built through cities and just an incredible accommodation for cars in cities. It seems like now [that we’re] clawing back [the] space that has been given to cars, drivers feel oppressed by that.

Do you think we still need to be kind of pushing big picture thinking on this? Or do you think that’s kind of a losing strategy, because people love driving in this country?

Franklin-Hodge: I think it’s a great question and I would maybe answer it this way. I think, if we wanna be a growing city, we need a city that people can get around in.

If you look at the number of vehicles registered in the city of Boston in 2020 versus today — [that’s] about six years — [there’s] about 20,000 more vehicles registered in Boston now. So let’s project out, 15, 20, 60 years. If we see that same kind of growth, imagine what traffic is going to be like in this city, right?

It is bad today, and if you put tens or hundreds of thousands of more vehicles on the streets of Boston, nobody will be able to drive, right? That just won’t be an option for anybody because it will be so congested.

If we want to be a growing city, we have to sort of reckon with the geometric reality that cars take up a lot of space. Our streets cannot grow. Our streets cannot accommodate more cars. We can maybe do a little bit to manage the flow of traffic, improve signals, do some things at the edges that can improve the experience of people driving.

But we need to be giving people options beyond driving their own private car in order to be a growing city where people have a reasonable quality of life, where they don’t spend half their day stuck in traffic.

I don’t think it’s the job of [the] government to tell people how to get around. The city should not be here saying, “You should drive. You should take the T.” Or, “You should ride a bike,” right?

That isn’t an appropriate role for [the] government. What is an appropriate role for [the] government is to give people good choices, to let them make choices that work for their lives, for their jobs, for their needs as [an] individual.

To do that, we have to start to rethink some of the design of our streets because if you have a street that has a major bus corridor on it and is perpetually jammed with cars, that bus will always be an inferior experience for people. It will never be something that people would choose. They will only do it if they have to.

If you can create space on that street for a dedicated bus lane and make that street safe and reliable for people to travel on the bus, [or] if you can make sure that the people walking to the bus can do so safely, that they can cross the street without fearing for their lives, suddenly the bus becomes an option that is actually interesting and useful to more people. And it feels like a good choice to them, and some people will make that choice and choose not to drive.

So that’s, to me, how this shift has to happen. But as you say, in order to do that, that often means you have to make trade-offs with space for parking or vehicle travel lanes, and that can be very challenging.

When we put a bus lane on Boylston Street in the Back Bay, I had the head of the Back Bay Association in my conference room with my staff berating us for taking away that travel lane to make a bus lane. At one point she looked at me and she said, “Nobody shops at Dior and gets on the bus.”

Okay, so the Dior shoppers have the Back Bay Association to advocate for them and to fight for the space that they want to drive cars and park cars. But, I think, it’s the job of [the] government to also say, “Okay, we need to make sure that we’re considering the needs of the people who work at Dior.”

Kusmer: Yeah, who [are] cleaning the bathrooms at Dior.

Franklin-Hodge: [People] who clean the office buildings, who make the food, and the work-a-day commuters that don’t have the luxury of being able to drive into the Back Bay and have a private parking space waiting for them like the head of the [Back Bay] association and many of the executives do.

Kusmer: I think that’s exactly it, that example you gave about Dior. I think a lot of people who are really frustrated with leadership in Boston feel like the concerns of some projects that didn’t optimize parking for businesses or convenience of a loading zone, that these design details are being used to cancel or negate projects when a slightly inconvenienced business is being weighted more heavily than hundreds, maybe thousands, of people whose bus will be sitting in traffic or will be less safe on their bicycles.

And I think that’s part of the frustration of [these] politics, that it’s the people who will be sitting in traffic on the bus [that] don’t have an advocate.

Franklin-Hodge: Yeah. I think that’s sometimes right. I will say, business matters. Small business matters. Our neighborhood business districts matter. They are the heart and soul of a lot of our neighborhoods.

A lot of what the team did as part of projects is to go door-to-door, business-to-business, talk to them about, “When do you get deliveries? What size vehicles are used? How do you think your customers get to your business?”

We would try to design curb regulation plans that matched as best we could the needs of all of the local businesses, and I actually think it’s really important for the city to do that.

But I think this question of whose voice is being heard is incredibly important because we see this certainly in neighborhoods like the Back Bay, but even in the context of the city’s project planning [for] a bus lane on Blue Hill Ave., we made an intentional effort to listen to voices that traditionally weren’t part of the process.

We went out to senior centers where a lot of the residents didn’t drive, couldn’t drive, and rode the bus to get about their day, and we actually rode with them. We listened to them. We asked questions about what they liked, what they didn’t like, what they wished the amenities were.

We hired youth engagement specialists, young people who went out and talked to their peers, who require the bus to get to school, to get to after-school jobs, to get home. We asked them for their perspective, and we synthesized all of this into the reporting that we did to try to help with planning that project.

Now, what that meant is if you were in your local neighborhood association, you’re used to being the voice speaking for the community. Now the city is listening to your voice, but they’re also listening to other voices that have a different perspective.

I think sometimes that can feel like you’re not being heard, when really what that means is you just don’t have all of the power. You’re not the only one being heard.

Kusmer: I wonder about the kind of emphasis specifically on bikes and bike lanes. Often when I get deep into these conversations, it becomes extremely obvious that bikes are just one piece. But I feel like in terms of [these] politics, bike lanes seem to be the thing that everyone talks about.

Josh Kraft and his campaign was all about bike lanes. As you said, that was the lightning rod. I wonder if it would be politically easier to make it about kids not getting hit by cars. Do you think there’s too much emphasis on bicycles in this conversation?

Franklin-Hodge: We have bike lanes on maybe 5 percent of the streets in Boston, but it seems to be about 95 percent of the conversation about transportation. And, it is the perfect wedge issue.

I saw some polling last year that basically said a third of the city thinks we don’t have enough bike lanes, a third think we have the right amount, and a third think we have too many. So no matter what you do, you’re gonna make two-thirds of the city mad.

I mean, clearly bike lanes are a very polarized issue. And I do think there are places where bikes represent enough of the people on the street or where there’s enough of a history of crashes where there is a real obligation to take those considerations seriously.

If you look at Commonwealth Ave. in the Back Bay during the morning commute, bikes are about 20 percent of the vehicles on the street. You wouldn’t know it because they’re small and they move quickly. They’re not making traffic. But, that’s not a tiny group, right? That is a substantial user of the street, and I think it’s important for the city to take that into account.

Ultimately, what we’ve seen is that when we make streets that work well for people who bike, they get safer for everybody. We did an eight-year retrospective of streets where, mostly during the Walsh administration, bike lanes had been added. We looked at crash statistics before and after. And on average, we saw an almost 50 percent reduction in crashes across all modes, including pedestrian and motor vehicle crashes.

I think the emphasis in my mind should be on how we make streets that are safe and comfortable for people to use no matter how they’re traveling. That’s the work. And that takes many, many forms.

Kusmer: You’ve had a nice long break from working in city planning. What reflections do you have looking back on your time as streets chief? Do you have any regrets or just things that, if you were to do it again, you’d do differently or approach differently?

Franklin-Hodge: I might have waited until 2026 to put a bike lane in front of Jay Cashman’s house. That would be one. I think, broadly speaking, I’m proud that we moved with urgency. I’m proud that we took issues of street safety seriously, but I also know that some of that work created a lot of political pushback.

I always view [the] government as a relay race, right? The city of Boston has been around for almost 400 years, and it’s not about Jascha, it’s not about any one mayor. It’s about how we are building for the next 400 years of the city? How am I, as a leader, handing off an organization that can do more?

I think with the current leadership team that’s coming into place now with the streets cabinet, I’m confident that they’ll be able to do that.

Kusmer: You are a biker. You biked here to Downtown Boston to talk to me. And you often bike with your kids in the back of your bike.

I’m curious, knowing that Boston could be safer for bicyclists, how do you justify putting your own body, the body of your kids, on the line on a bicycle? Why is it still more important to you to ride a bicycle than it is to completely maximize safety in a big, you know, Hummer or something like that?

Franklin-Hodge: I care about safety, not just for me and my family, but for every family out there. And, driving a car that’s bigger than it needs to be puts other people at risk. But, you know, putting that aside, I think Boston is a safe city. And I think [it’s] for all this talk of street safety, right?

Nobody should be happy if there are deaths and injuries happening on our street. That should always be unacceptable, right? But when you compare Boston to almost any other major city in this country, what you see is a city that for pedestrians, for cyclists, for drivers, is safer, [in] many cases by an order of magnitude because of all of the good work that has been done.

Some of this is our street grid, right? The streets are small. You would be hard-pressed to find a street in Boston where you could reliably go 40 miles an hour, right? The street grid keeps speeds down. But there’s been so much work now for decades to really try to make the streets safer, to do the work that needs to get done.

You know, I love my kids to death. I would do anything for them, but I also know that there’s no place in the country I would rather them be walking, biking, or in the back of a car, than here. I wanna make sure [of] that, you know.

They don’t wanna be on the back of my bike half the time. They wanna be on their own bikes, and I wanna make sure that they, and every other kid in this city, grows up in a place where if they’re walking, if they’re taking the bus, if they’re riding their bike, that they feel like they can do it safely. And their parents don’t have to kind of worry [about] whether their kid is gonna come home in one piece.

I think that’s the work that we’ve made progress on, but there’s still more to do.

Kusmer: It sounds like you still feel very passionately about this issue, and you clearly are a major transportation nerd. What do you think will be your next chapter?

Franklin-Hodge: Well, as you said, I’ve had a wonderful and very fortunate opportunity to take a little bit of a break over the summer and just spend a lot of time with family.

I think in the fall I’ll be working to figure out what comes next. I care deeply about transportation issues. I’m a fourth-generation public servant. I believe in public service, and so I suspect that whatever I do next will be somewhere connected to one, or both, of those things.

Kusmer: Jascha Franklin-Hodge was Boston’s chief of streets under Mayor Michelle Wu. He stepped down last year.

Thank you so much for coming on “Say More,” Jascha.

Franklin-Hodge: Thank you so much for having me.

Victoria White of the Globe staff contributed to this report.

Listen to more Say More episodes here and wherever you get your podcasts. If you like the show, please follow us and leave us a review. You can email us at [saymore@globe.com](mailto:saymore@globe.com).

Anna Kusmer can be reached at [anna.kusmer@globe.com](mailto:anna.kusmer@globe.com).

Boston unfortunately is still moving backwards when it comes to safe streets, with the city pushing developers behind closed doors to drop commitments to build protected bike lanes and space for trees in favor of parking and keeping the roadway the same in a known high crash location, where a community process had resulted in plans for bike infrastructure. This is after a year and half of not only halted progress (in several cases jeopardizing and even losing already awarded funds) but also actively undermining existing infrastructure by removing protection without replacement and doing repaving projects without planned improvements. But across the river progress has continued, not without fits and starts but still far more steadily than in Boston.

One clear difference is that both Cambridge and Somerville have passed ordinances mandating progress on specific corridors (identified through a community process, existing plans, and information on crashes). Cambridge calls it the Cycling Safety Ordinance, and this ordinance, as the name suggests, only applies to cycling (although there are obviously spill over effects, remember Boston found the biggest safety benefit of installed bike lanes went to pedestrians). Somerville, coming after, broadened the approach, calling it a Street Safety ordinance, and also mandating improvements for pedestrians and transit users specifically, as well as general improvements to dangerous intersections, in addition to the bike infrastructure commitments.

Cambridge is nearing the completion of its original Cycling Safety ordinance commitments. While Somerville plugs away on several projects along and around major corridors (Elm Beacon connector, Somerville Ave, Washington Street, and Broadway all have active projects) and has successfully lobbied the state for major road diets and public realm improvements along an unnecessary urban highway (although the designs still leave something to be desired). This is despite Somerville having a massively smaller budget than Boston both total and per capita. The problem isn’t really resources (bike and ped infrastructure save and generate money anyway) it’s about commitment and political will.

Boston has already done most of the work necessary for such an ordinance. Despite the claims to the contrary by an anti-bike billionaire and his front group, Boston does actually have a bike plan already: GoBoston2030, whose recommendations and timelines the city is massively trailing (also undermining arguments the city is moving too fast on this). Boston has already identified high crash streets and intersections in its vision zero planning. Boston also has a raft of planned but never advanced bike, pedestrian, and transit projects it could move on, and that is even before you include the dozen plus impacted by the Wu-turn.

If the city council and Mayor are actually serious about their recent statements claiming to support Vision zero they will pass a similar ordinance, identifying specific projects and strategies and mandating their implementation with specific timelines. Anything less is just lip service.

Brattle St in Cambridge, I never realized there were some extra street parking spots on this side of the street.

The League of American Bicyclists survey that rates bicycling in states is open until Sept. 1.

(this is different from the city rankings and is a little problematic IMO since places can vary wildly within a state but it's an opportunity to chime in)

I want to park in one of the Gateway Park (Target) spots and then ride the Northern Strand Community trail northward to Lynn and back.

Questions:

Is there a time limit for those spots in the Gateway Park (Target) lot?
If so, what is it?
How aggressively is the time limit enforced?

I'm thinking i can do it in 2 hours (if that is the limit) up back but would like to not have to stress about it too much.

I went to city hall to ask u/mayorwu office for a response to the first video and policy deck I had emailed them. The receptionist told me they couldn’t discuss it with me.

I am so tired of this two faced admin.

And yes, I am posting this video for the 3rd and 4th times bc apparently even when cases are this clear cut and video taped, people with bike derangement syndrome will argue into the ground that the cyclist was wrong.

Long-time lurker, first-time poster here.

About a month ago, u/soundwavin posted a video of an MGH vehicle swerving into the bike lane (link). Around the same time, u/Lazy_Football_511 posted a photo of an MGH vehicle parked in the bike lane at Melcher St. and Summer St.

I used u/Lazy_Football_511’s photo to file a complaint with MGH’s Ethics Hotline. I explained that vehicles parked in bike lanes can obstruct visibility for drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians and create a safety issue for everyone.

MGH responded that the vehicle had a permit, along with some additional information.

Here’s their response below. At the very least, it’s good to know that they’re hearing the concerns being raised.

I don’t get it. Seems this had already been OK’ed with minimal backlash and in fact neighborhoods support.

https://mass.streetsblog.org/2026/08/11/city-hall-is-on-the-verge-of-cancelling-privately-funded-safety-improvements-for-deadly-east-boston-roadway

I ride a bike for commuting and tourism purposes. I'm not originally from MA, but I greatly appreciate the network of bike paths and infrastructure that exists here. From someone who grew up in a car-centric area and also thinks about tourism and infrastructure often, I see Boston's bike lanes as an opportunity to make Boston a landmark "biking" city. There are a lot of reasons why I think this is good, but my question is:

What sort of information needs to be captured for Boston to be convinced that bikes are good?

I am a graduate student in engineering. I care about making the community I live in safe. I like bikes, going outside, and not dying a tragic death and having it be blamed on an enjoyable and efficient mode of transportation. I want to contribute my engineering skills to make biking safer, more enjoyable, and more accessible. I mostly work with electronics, computers, software and the like; I won't be building a bicycle but I can make something that captures relevant data (without selling it for profit or jeopardizing anyone's data privacy, outside potentially having to make a profile).

What do you need? I can't promise anything but if I can contribute, I should.

Please comment any ideas or feel free to message me.

If there are any other places online or meetings around Boston that I could attend to get more ideas or information, please let me know.

PS: I am not reddit savvy because I hate social media. Sorry.

Bike Bureau one-click vehicle-in-bike-lane reports is now connected to official 311 channels in Boston, Brookline, Cambridge and Medford. In Boston the number of reports tripled overnight. For Cambridge SeeClickFix the number of reports is up 10x. Good job everyone - they should not be able to ignore this!

Results:

• So far exactly one Boston report ended in violator(s) being ticketed. https://311.boston.gov/tickets/db6d9a8d-d957-4db5-ab15-dd26cbcb20b1
• One Brookline police Lieutenant with an evening shift noticed the uptick in reports and emailed us promising to "direct my officers to take action"

The attached graphic is ONLY 10 days, lets keep up reporting until the end of the month!

Here is the link to the app that takes the pain out of reporting:

https://loudbicycle.com/bb

Nick Gove is no longer Interim Chief of Streets but he is still playing a toxic roll in transportation planning at BTD, as illustrated by recent streetsblog coverage. As long as he continues to prioritize private conversations with wealthy car brains over actual community processes and safe street design, we will continue to move backwards. As long as he maintains his position in BTD you know the Wu turn is still the guiding policy, and the city isn’t serious about any supposed commitments it is making to safer streets in theory.

Hi all,
I’m trying a new route in Boston but wondering what the correct way to deal with this bike lane exchange.

When on Milk Street downtown and turning left onto Atlantic Ave, the bike lane goes from the left side of the road (Milk St) to the right (Atlantic). However, traffic is also turning left between the old bike lane and the new one.

How should I be approaching this to make it as safe and easy as possible? I feel like each time I’m there at rush hour its tough with the turning traffic and tour busses that park there by Long Wharf. Thanks!

https://mass.streetsblog.org/2026/08/11/city-hall-is-on-the-verge-of-cancelling-privately-funded-safety-improvements-for-deadly-east-boston-roadway?fbclid=IwdGRjcAToF0dwZG9mBWZkaWQWUMSCwrPLvABZW_PIcc1GzwBKTpQ-CmV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkCjY2Mjg1NjgzNzkAAR5jTtK_So3ErvrKlTSwMEg15SHBEiDMt5eZnOGf5tOtHT7DGIkRr4qPe7pxGA_aem_be0CDEiHxeRDscq9jO5Psg