Editor’s note: Advocates for safer streets in the Boston neighborhood of Hyde Park delivered the following letter to Boston City Hall on Friday. In addition to the 7 co-authors in the byline, 709 Boston residents added their names to the letter, and hundreds of them offered their own personalized notes about safety hazards they’d experienced on Hyde Park Avenue. StreetsblogMASS is republishing the letter with the authors’ permission.
Mayor Wu & Chief Franklin-Hodge:
On behalf of more than 700 co-signatories, we write to request that the City take immediate action to implement safety and transit improvements on the northern section of Hyde Park Avenue.
Having begun community outreach in 2019, the City’s latest stated approach is to spend another year running redundant—and, according to the City’s Planning Department’s own research, inequitable and unrepresentative—public meetings, only to arrive at a concept for a design for a project for which neither federal nor state funding currently exists.
This seems highly likely to perpetuate the corridor’s status quo for the foreseeable future.
Many of us, users of this section of Hyde Park Avenue, organized childcare and took time out to attend the City’s “Community Open House” on December 11, 2024.
We expected to see a design for a project that’s been in the works for 5 years and that had previously achieved 30 percent design. Instead, bafflingly, we were told that:
- On the one hand, this corridor is extremely unsafe for pedestrians and other vulnerable road users; is a key link to the City’s bike network but is unusable by bike riders, for the same safety reasons; generates hundreds of passenger-delay hours for thousands of Route 32 riders daily; and that parking occupancy never reaches the City’s target of 85 percent.
- On the other, the City’s plan is to ask us to attend more public meetings, to reiterate all of the above, again and again, before taking any action.
We don’t have the time, energy, or patience for more public meetings. We don’t want a perfect plan. We especially don’t want a plan so perfect that, at a time of skyrocketing construction costs and new federal funding priorities, it’s more likely to sit on a shelf than be implemented.
Our neighbor, Glenn Inghram, died on this corridor just a few months ago. One of the signatories' two children were almost killed by a pickup truck driver blowing through a red light two weeks ago.
We risk our lives in the hazardous traffic on Hyde Park Avenue, walking, biking, and even driving; we sit in overcrowded buses stuck in traffic around Forest Hills, missing train after train while single occupancy vehicles snarl up intersections.
We want safety—safer and more accessible crosswalks, slower vehicular speeds, protected bike lanes—and faster travel times for bus riders.
And we want those things now. Not in 2027 or 2030.
We know that the City has no shortage of tools for lower-cost, tactical, quick-build options to improve safety and address bus delay.
During the MBTA’s year-long Track Improvement Program in 2024, the City demonstrated a truly remarkable agility in designing and implementing quick-build bus priority infrastructure – the kind of infrastructure that will soon be much more effective, as the MBTA develops the ability to enforce bus lane violations automatically.
We urge you to consider all of these options for this section of the corridor—and to start implementation now, in 2025, before the construction window closes in November, while a more perfect, longer-term design takes shape.
We have extensive support across several, abutting neighborhoods, as the packed auditorium on December 11 demonstrated.
We will support you in the face of predictable opposition by the small number of people who think that they are entitled to City-subsidized free parking, and that the needs of literally everyone else should be subsumed by this entitlement. We will support you—maybe by pointing to the incredible, early successes of the congestion pricing program in New York City—in making the case that incentivizing some people not to drive can make the experience much better for those who don’t have a choice but to drive (many of us are use this corridor as drivers, too).
And we will support you when, after years of planning, research, and public outreach, you are criticized for not holding yet another public meeting (after which you will be asked to hold another still, ad infinitum).
We ask that you please prioritize outcomes—actual safety and bus improvements—over process—interminable, inequitable public meetings—and change course on this project immediately.
With appreciation for all that you do,
Ben Siegel
Caterina Scaramelli
Keegan Dougherty
Matt Schuman
Nathan Eckstrom
Alexandra Markiewicz
Karti Subramanian
And more than 700 other co-signing Boston residents
