Eyes On the Street: Nubian Square’s New Bike Path

Work is wrapping up this fall on a construction project in Nubian Square that created a short protected bike path around the newly-renovated Roxbury Branch of the Boston Public Library, from Washington Street to Warren Street.

The project also considerably reduced the length of crosswalks and expanded sidewalk space at the intersection of Warren and Dudley Street by removing two right-turn slip lanes and adding new curb extensions.

The new bike path is short: it starts at the parking lot entrance of the Roxbury Municipal Court on Warren Street, curves around the library, and ends one block to the west at the intersection of Washington, Dudley, and Malcolm X Boulevard.

But the Boston Transportation Department (BTD) is contemplating other projects for Warren Street and Malcolm X Boulevard that could extend the bike path and also create dedicated bus lanes for some of the city’s busiest bus routes.

“In partnership with the MBTA, BTD will begin a community process in 2022 to investigate the potential for bus priority and bike connections on Malcolm X Boulevard,” a BTD official told StreetsblogMASS on Wednesday. “The goal of this process is to provide a more reliable connection for the 28,000 bus riders who use this road daily, and a safe bike connection from Nubian Square to the Southwest Corridor.”

BTD also plans to reboot a planning process for potential bus-priority improvements on Warren Street between Nubian Square and Grove Hall, a corridor that sees similarly high levels of bus ridership.

In a pre-pandemic public meeting held in late 2019, BTD shared two potential design concepts (pictured above), one of which would have replaced one of its on-street parking lanes with a physically separated, two-way bikeway, much like the newly-built bike path near the library.