Last week, StreetsblogMASS joined WalkMassachusetts along with several Brockton residents, planners, and municipal officials for a "walk audit" of the Montello neighborhood, located about a mile north of the city's downtown.
Walk audits bring groups of neighbors, planners, and highway engineers together to discuss and identify hazards to foot traffic in a specific street of neighborhood.
That work is particularly urgent in Brockton, which ranks among the Commonwealth's more dangerous cities for traffic violence. Drivers have caused at least 38 fatal crashes in Brockton since 2020, according to MassDOT's IMPACT crash database, and nearly half of those crashes killed people who were walking.
By way of comparison, there have been only around 10 fatal crashes in the City of Cambridge, a slightly more populous city, in the same time period.
Brockton, unlike most other cities of its size, managed to avoid widespread destruction from 20th-century highway building. The city's lone expressway, Route 24, traverses the relatively sparsely-populated suburbs along the city's western border.
As a result, most of the city's fatal crashes occur on busy two-lane local streets, like Main Street and Pleasant Street.
"We want to make streets safer for everyone," audit participant Jed Hresko told StreetsblogMASS.
"I got involved in road safety last year," continued Hresko, who is also running for a seat on the Brockton City Council. "We held a protest march last fall, and the day after, a teen girl got hit by a driver while she was getting off the school bus."
Hresko noted that Brockton is a working-class city with limited financial resources, so the city often lacks the resources to maintain its sidewalks and build safety improvements.
Many of the problems that the walk audit identified in Montello were a result of neglectful maintenance.
At the entrance to the MBTA station, for instance, an orange cone marks the spot where a crosswalk sign and flashing-beacon warning signal had stood as recently as 2023 (see photo at the top of this post).
That crosswalk leads to Wilmington Street. It's the most direct connection between the train station and the small businesses along Brockton's Main Street, but its sidewalks look like this:
On Main Street, sidewalks were generally in much better condition, thanks to a recent repaving.
But neighborhood residents say that the project was a missed opportunity to install new traffic-calming features.
Lisa and Greg Belcher, who own a funeral home on Main Street and are also involved in the Montello Business Association, said that they were attending the walk audit in out of a desire to help Main Street's small businesses.
"We have concerns with, people want to shop, people want to walk around here. But the cars here, it's like a highway," said Greg Belcher.
"We're talking public safety. We're talking fatalities," added Lisa Belcher. "House hits, building hits."
As the group looped back onto North Montello Street to walk back to the train station, several participants remarked an odd characteristic of the street's crosswalks: they were all set back several yards from each street corner (see image at right).
Able-bodied pedestrians are able to walk straight across, but anyone who needed to use the curb ramp – whether because they were using a stroller or a wheelchair – has to detour several yards out of their way at each crossing.
The odd design also encourages drivers to drive past stop signs and into the crosswalk while they wait to make turns from side streets, as seen in the photo below:
Arriving back at the train station, participants discussed their immediate impressions from the walk.
Several people noted that they'd seen a high rate of speeding vehicles on both Main Street and Montello Street.
Iolando Spinola, a Brockton resident and program manager for WalkMassachusetts who helped organize the walk audit, observed that relatively small changes to the streets' layouts, like narrowing intersections with curb extensions, could help slow down traffic.
"The street is communicating how we should be driving. And it's not safe for pedestrians, or for anyone," said Spinola.
Spinola says that WalkMassachusetts is planning additional walk audits for other neighborhoods in Brockton. To learn more about those events, join the WalkMassachusetts e-mail list.
