For the second time in the past year, the Wu administration will sacrifice a bus lane that had delivered faster trips for thousands of transit riders through a congested downtown neighborhood under pressure from not-in-my-backyard lobbying from nearby residents and businesspeople.
On Wednesday, the Mayor announced that her administration would remove the dedicated bus lane on Boylston Street between the Boston Public Library and Berkeley Street, which benefits roughly 13,000 daily bus riders.
The busy protected bike lane that the city installed last summer on the other side of the street will remain, for now.
The city initially installed the Boylston Street bus lane to support shuttle service during during the Orange Line shutdown of 2022. The lane had been intended to benefit riders of the frequent-service 39 bus route between Forest Hills and Back Bay station, one of the T's highest-ridership bus routes.
The 39 loops around Copley Square on the final leg of its route to Back Bay station, and congestion on Boylston Street is a common source of delays.
Illegal parking vetoes faster bus rides, again
As pictured above, though, illegal parking in the Boylston Street bus lane frequently undermined the bus lane's purpose.
As with her decision to remove another bus lane on Summer Street last fall, the Mayor cited lawless behavior from motor vehicle operators as her chief reason for abandoning the bus lane, even though the city now has new, more effective enforcement options available.
"The dedicated bus lane has not functioned as intended to justify the space allocation," wrote Mayor Wu in a letter to Back Bay neighborhood organizations.
"In addition to buses often not having a clear path of travel, the bus lane is regularly used for driving and parking on parts of the street that are very
constrained serving area businesses, hotels, and the Boston Public Library."
Earlier this winter, the state legislature passed a new law that will allow the MBTA to automatically issue fines against illegally-parked vehicles in bus lanes and bus stops.
An MBTA spokesperson told StreetsblogMASS that the agency is "exploring in earnest" its options to utilize camera-based enforcement to keep bus lanes clear and bus stops accessible for riders.
MBTA conspicuously silent on changes
StreetsblogMASS reached out to the MBTA to ask for data on how the Boylston Street bus lane has benefitted Route 39 travel times and on-time performance. We also asked whether City Hall consulted with the T before announcing its decision to remove the Boylston Street bus lane on Wednesday.
A spokesperson for the T pointedly avoided answering both of those questions. Instead, they wrote in an email that "we value our partnership with the City of Boston on upgrades to public transit in the City."
The president of the Back Bay Association, which represents one of the wealthier neighborhoods in the city, was considerably more enthusiastic.
“We think it’s going to be a significant improvement for the functionality of Boylston Street,” Meg Mainzer-Cohen, president of the Back Bay Association, told the Boston Globe.
Additional changes to bus, bike lanes could be coming soon
In her three-page letter to Back Bay neighborhood groups, the Mayor also suggested that her administration will consider additional changes to other bus and bike lanes that the city has installed over the past decade:
Ultimately, Boston’s 850 miles of roadway must be comprehensively connected and maintained so all community members have safe, convenient, and reliable options to get where they need to go. Over the last fifteen years, City transportation planners a engineers have worked to envision and implement multimodal street design with the goal of moving more people on the same limited roadway space in our historic city...
As citywide bike infrastructure has been built out piece by piece across the last decade, our administration has had the responsibility to finish several critical links in the network to make them fully usable and safe. These last links are often the most difficult community conversations involving significant tradeoffs. I have heard from you and other community members that the process to evaluate these tradeoffs and the varying perspectives of local neighbors and citywide commuters has at times felt rushed and predetermined. On such a core city function as the streets, where we have the benefit of partners in every neighborhood with such a depth of localized knowledge and pride of ownership, we must get it right.Many of these projects have been implemented successfully, in close partnership with residents and neighborhoods, and have quickly blended into the fabric of our neighborhoods. But others have not. Some measures intended as temporary installations with quick-build flexposts and paint to immediately improve safety have been allowed to remain for too long without review or refinement, or resulted in unintended or unaddressed impacts on the local road network. Other areas have become eyesores when plastic flexposts are repeatedly crumpled. At this point in Boston’s evolution of roadway design it is time to review what has been installed over the last fifteen years, adjust or redesign what has not been functioning well, and transition successful temporary safety fixes into permanent, beautiful infrastructure that enhances quality of life and matches the character of our neighborhoods.
The letter goes on to state that Mayor Wu would direct the City’s Superintendent of Basic City Services, Michael Brohel, to conduct a "review of roadway changes implemented in recent years and engage with local stakeholders and our engineering teams to identify recommendations for adjustments, with the first set to be returned to me within 30 days."
The Mayor also wrote about her intention to form an advisory group "focused on the transition from temporary to permanent infrastructure that matches the form, function and history of our neighborhoods."
StreetsblogMASS will follow up on those efforts in the weeks to come.
