This year, StreetsblogMASS attained a notable milestone: since January, readers have visited our homepage and article webpages over one million times – a 15 percent increase over last year's website traffic.
Reaching a growing audience is great news – but it's not our ultimate goal. We report on the news so that Massachusetts residents and policymakers will be have better information, and make better decisions, about transportation in Massachusetts.
And I think we're succeeding.
When I look back our first list of most-read stories, from December 2019, I'm struck by how much has changed, both on the ground, and in the conversations decisionmakers have about these topics.
One of our earliest articles covered an MIT experiment that concluded that discounted fare cards could increase transit ridership.
Six years and a pandemic later, most of Massachusetts has fare-free buses, and the T has a new discounted fare card for low-income riders.
In 2019, there were a handful of disconnected rail trails that dead-ended at town lines in the suburbs west of Boston. In 2025, most of the 30-mile Mass. Central Rail Trail between downtown Boston and Hudson is complete, along with a continuous 20-mile connection to Lowell via the Bruce Freeman Rail Trail.
There are also some stories – like the Allston I-90 project, or the T's plans to electrify its regional rail system – where there's been a frustrating lack of tangible progress.
But the politics around those initiatives have changed considerably.
MassDOT is facing increasing pressure to take responsibility for the air pollution that comes from its transportation infrastructure, and there's an increasing consensus that the agency can not afford – financially or morally – to rebuild the aging highways that blighted so many neighborhoods in the 1960s and 1970s.
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And if you can't contribute financially, please share our stories with your friends and family so that we can continue to reach new readers.
Thanks for reading us this year!
One of our biggest scoops of the year was our February report on a secretive "30-day review" of new bike and bus lanes from Mayor Wu. But more readers were interested in this story from April, when the mayor admitted she'd made a "mistake" in ripping out bollards along numerous downtown bike lanes without any communication with her constituents.
Subways breaking down is what people in the news business call a "dog bites man" story. But for some reason, this one took off, with lots of traffic from Google's news recommendations. I also love a good headline pun.
We published this story right before one of the first big nor'easters of the season, and it ended up getting a lot of traffic from people searching for information on coastal flooding on Cape Cod.
In June 2023 we published a story headlined "Car-Free Mystic River Bridge Will Begin Construction In 2024," so we'll see if this one holds up better in hindsight.
