Stuck In A Feedback Loop: Wu Admin Delays Hyde Park Avenue Safety Improvements

After a driver struck and killed Glenn Inghram outside Forest Hills station this fall, dozens of Forest Hills residents organized to mourn and demand immediate safety improvements to Hyde Park Avenue, the four-lane highway that slices through their neighborhood.

On Wednesday evening, the City of Boston’s Transportation Department (BTD) invited them to an open house advertised as an unveiling of the city’s plans to redesign the street – a safety improvement project that neighbors have been waiting for since 2019.

“The City of Boston is ready to present some draft concept designs on the northern section of Hyde Park Ave (and Washington St), for a potential corridor redesign,” according to the city’s notice for the event.

Dozens of people braved an intense rainstorm Wednesday evening in hopes of learning how the city would make their street safer – only to find that the BTD wants to wait one more year before it publicly reveals any plans.

“We want to make sure we’re engaging everyone before we present a concept,” said Tyler Lew, a transit planner for the Boston Transportation Department. “We’re crossing our t’s and dotting our i’s.”

BTD has ideas, but doesn’t want to share them yet

Matthew Tschiegg, a neighborhood resident, told StreetsblogMASS that city staff had previously shown him some of its conceptual designs during an informal “office hours” meeting with BTD staff.

“There were 3 or 4 options,” Tschiegg recalled. “Nearly all of them had just one lane for motor vehicle traffic and some extent of protected bike infrastructure, with differences in how much space was set aside for on-street parking or dedicated bus lanes.”

According to the city’s website for the project, BTD staff in Mayor Marty Walsh’s administration had also developed a concept design for the street in 2019, but those plans were shelved during the Covid-19 pandemic.

None of those plans were anywhere to be found at Wednesday’s open house. Instead, BTD staff invited attendees to propose their own street designs, and mark up large-format maps of the street with post-it notes.

Stuck in a feedback loop

For the neighbors who have to risk their lives crossing Hyde Park Avenue every day, there was a sense that City Hall was prioritizing the interests of suburban car owners over the safety of their families.

“It’s politics,” said Tschiegg. “We have a lot of activism here, and the city has beautiful concepts for the street, but the people who drive here – they probably don’t even live in Boston – are going to get mad if they lose parking or a lane to drive in.”

Hyde Park Avenue today features four lanes for motor vehicles plus two lanes of on-street parking – a street layout that the City of Boston has acknowledged is unsafe, especially for pedestrians in crosswalks.

A mile-long segment of the street between Neponset Avenue and American Legion Highway has been designated part of Boston’s “high-crash network,” which means it ranks among the worst streets in the city for injury-causing crashes.

“It feels like you’re living next to several highways here. It’s extremely unsafe,” Forest Hills resident Karti Subramanian told StreetsblogMASS. “We took some kids to Forest Hills station on scooters and two of them nearly got mowed down by a guy in a pickup truck blowing through the light.”