Your Annual Update That DCR’s Arborway Redesign Still Isn’t Happening

DCR and their longtime design consultants, Howard Stein Hudson, still haven't produced a safer design for the roadway after six years of working together.

By Christian MilNeil

6:50 AM EST on November 14, 2025

A long line of cars waits in two lanes of stopped traffic on the right, while on the left, a single car drives down a roadway next to a wide bike lane. A concrete median divides the two sides of the road, and on the edges of the photo are large, mature leafy trees. — One more lane won’t fix it: the Arborway in Jamaica Plain, looking north toward the Centre Street traffic circle, during the morning rush hour on Oct. 3, 2023.

The Department of Conservation and Recreation's plans to redesign the Arborway, the traffic-clogged lump of coal in Boston's Emerald Necklace, remains stalled in its design phase, as it's been for the past five years.

Since 2019, the Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) has been drawing up plans to reconfigure and shrink the footprint of its dangerous multi-lane highways and rotaries that pave over public parklands in Jamaica Plain.

Throughout the multi-year design process, DCR has acknowledged that the current roadways are unsafe.

At its most recent public meeting for the project in January of this year, the agency revealed that its two traffic circles on the Arborway, at its intersections with Centre Street and Pond Street, had seen over 200 side-swipe crashes in the five-year period since January 2020.

An illustration of a wide multi-lane intersection surrounded by strips of parkland and dense residential neighborhoods. — The DCR's most recent plan to redesign Murray Circle, presented during a January 2025 public hearing for the Arborway Improvements Project, would have converted the rotary into a large multi-lane signalized intersection with separated bike paths.

At that same January meeting, DCR officials said they hoped to host another public hearing to present a more refined "75 percent" design plan sometime this fall, with the aim of beginning construction on a new, safer roadway design by the end of 2026.

Now that fall is almost over, StreetsblogMASS reached out to the DCR to find out what's been going on.

More engagement and more crashes

"DCR has continued to engage with stakeholders on the project, including soliciting feedback from neighborhood groups, local developers, and legislators," a DCR press official told StreetsblogMASS on Thursday.

"The project team is using this feedback to complete the 25 percent design, which we are targeting to complete in early 2026," the official added. "Once the 25 percent design is completed, DCR will hold a public meeting."

While DCR and their longtime design consultants, Howard Stein Hudson, continue to "engage with stakeholders," the Arborway's drivers have continued engaging with each other in violent crashes.

MassDOT's crash database indicates that there have been at least 40 crashes on this section of the Arborway in 2025 so far. Five of those crashes have resulted in an injury to at least one victim.

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