Eyes On the Street: Downtown Boston’s New Cambridge Street Protected Bike Lane
11:48 AM EDT on October 21, 2022
Boston Transportation Department workers install new flexible-post bollards along Cambridge Street near the West End branch of the Boston Public Library. The Bluebikes dock in the foreground is slated to be relocated to make room for the new protected bike lane.
As of Friday morning, it's still a work in progress – crews were installing new bollards near Blossom Street and working their way west towards the Charles River, and some pavement markings remain to be painted.
So it's no surprise that, even before the new lane has been fully installed this week, dozens of bicycle users were already using the new facility on Thursday afternoon.
The new flexpost-protected bike lane on Cambridge Street along City Hall Plaza. This lane connects directly to the Court Street protected bike lane, which was installed in 2020.
The newly-installed Cambridge Street bike lane just west of Sudbury Street in Bowdoin Square.
A bicycle user rides through the intersection of New Chardon Street on downtown Boston's new Cambridge Street bike lane. The City of Boston has also installed flexible-post bollards in intersections near crosswalks to force turning vehicles to slow down and watch for bikes and pedestrians.
For various technical and political reasons, the City of Boston has no immediate plans to install a protected bike lane on the other side of Cambridge Street, from the Longfellow Bridge to City Hall Plaza.
Bike safety advocates are hopeful that the city could fill that eastbound gap in the downtown bike network with a new protected bike lane on Charles Street, which isn’t a parallel route, but could provide an attractive route from the Longfellow Bridge to downtown Boston via the new bikeways around the Boston Common and Public Garden.
57 percent of the poll's respondents said that making the T free to ride would make them more likely to use transit; 37 percent said that fare-free service would make them "much more likely" to ride.