MassDOT Construction Project Blocks Busy Allston Bike Route Across I-90

11:14 AM EST on January 15, 2026

A bike lane on a wide city street in winter is blocked by a highway crash barrier that extends from the lower left corner of the image to the curb in the middle distance. — A rider’s-eye view of the crash barrier that has blocked access to the Cambridge Street bike lane in Allston. Courtesy of Emily Jacobsen.

Bicycle commuters in Boston's Allston neighborhood got a rude surprise this week when construction workers erected barriers and blocked the Cambridge Street bike lane at the southern entrance of the Franklin Street footbridge over I-90, forcing considerable volumes of bike and pedestrian traffic to share a narrow, broken sidewalk.

A map of the Allston neighborhood highlighting the triangular area between Cambridge St., Commonwealth Ave., and the Charles River as the Allston Multimodal Project area. A red dot at the far left edge of that triangle marks the location of the Cambridge St. overpass over I-90 — The Cambridge Street overpass and the Allston Multimodal Project area in Allston.

Emily Jacobsen, a Brookline resident who regularly uses the Franklin Street footbridge on her bike commute, told StreetsblogMASS that workers on the Cambridge Street bridge erected the barriers that block the bridge's southbound bike lane sometime during the day on Monday.

Those barriers now block bike traffic coming off of the Franklin Street footbridge from using the on-street bike lane to continue south, and they also prevent northbound bike traffic from turning left from Cambridge Street to the footbridge.

Two people on bikes ride down a narrow sidewalk with large bumps and mature trees next to a chain-link fence next to a wide street filled with traffic. — People on bikes ride down the bumpy Cambridge Street sidewalk to detour around a large construction barrier that blocked the southbound Cambridge Street bike lane in Allston earlier this week. Photo courtesy of Emily Jacobsen.

"You have a huge flow of bike traffic down a busy sidewalk and a horrendous highway-side bike lane on the Cambridge St. bridge," warned Brookline resident Emily Jacobsen in an email to City of Boston officials and the district's state representative, Rep. Kevin Honan, on Wednesday morning. "Bridge renovations often take years. Please do not let this situation languish," she added.

The Cambridge Street Bridge is under the control of MassDOT.

StreetsblogMASS reached out to the agency on Wednesday to find out whether the barricade was intentional, and what were the agency's plans for accommodating bike traffic detours, but the agency's spokesperson has not yet responded as of Thursday morning.

Meanwhile, Jacobsen told StreetsblogMASS that the bike lane was still blocked on her morning commute Thursday. She's started an online petition to ask MassDOT "to provide a safe protected bike lane, with jersey barriers between bikes and vehicular traffic along Cambridge St."

She also plans to raise the issue at this evening's meeting of the Allston I-90 project task force.

A bottleneck for bikes and pedestrians

The Franklin Street footbridge and the Cambridge Street bridge that it connects to are a major bike and pedestrian connection in Allston.

They are two of only five north-to-south crossings of I-90 in the Allston neighborhood in a 2-mile stretch between Market Street and the B.U. Bridge., and the nearest alternative routes across the Turnpike require long, inconvenient detours.

In bike traffic counts from June 2025, the City of Boston recorded 613 and 570 bike riders on two consecutive weekdays on Franklin Street near Alcott Street, near the northern entrance to the footbridge. That represented more than a quarter of the street's total vehicular traffic on both days.