Mayor Wu’s Latest Budget Plan Eliminates Funding for Over a Dozen Street Safety Projects: See the List

Mayor Wu’s recently-published budget proposal appears to eliminate dozens of capital projects from the city’s five-year capital plan, according to a comparison of this year’s fiscal year 2027 proposal with the current fiscal year 2026 enacted budget.

In a few cases, projects have been removed from the city’s capital plan because they’ve been built or completed: that’s the case with the city’s $223 million Bill Russell Bridge project, which opened last year, and the Walsh-era “Neighborhood Slow Streets” program, which Mayor Wu has supplanted with the more comprehensive “safety surge” initiative.

But the vast majority of budget changes are going to affect projects that were still in the planning and design stages.

The following is a sampling of unbuilt projects that were still in the city’s capital plan last year, but are either de-listed or receiving less funding in the mayor’s latest proposal:

• Roxbury Resilient Transportation Corridors:
  $32.5 million in enacted FY26 budget;
  $0 in FY27 proposal
  As we reported last fall, the Trump administration cancelled a $20 million grant intended for rebuilding three major streets in Roxbury (Melnea Cass Boulevard, Malcolm X Boulevard, and a 1.3-mile segment of Warren Street), in part because the City of Boston never secured a formal grant agreement in the three-year period since the Biden administration pledged the funds in 2022. The federal funding would have been matched with $12.5 million in City of Boston capital funds.
• Dedicated Bus Lanes
  $13.5 million in enacted FY26 budget;
  $0 in FY27 proposal
  The FY26 budget proposal described this project as funding “the construction of dedicated bus lanes on Summer Street, Boylston Street and St. James Street, and Clarendon Street.” As we’ve reported, the Wu administration has actually eliminated the Summer Street and Boylston Street bus lanes.
• Commonwealth Avenue Phase 3, 3B, and 4
  $13.5 million in enacted FY26 budget;
  $0 in FY27 proposal
  These projects would have redesigned Commonwealth Ave. from Packard’s Corner to and Warren/Kelton Streets, extending the 2019 streetscape and safety improvements that the city and MassDOT implemented on the segment of Comm. Ave. between Packard’s and the B.U. Bridge. A city website for these projects has not been updated since at least 2019.
• East Boston Safe Multimodal Corridors
  $3.5 million in enacted FY26 budget;
  $0 in FY27 proposal
  Another result of cancelled federal funding; this project would have improved “safety and accessibility along key north-south (Meridian/Border Streets) and east-west (Bennington/Saratoga Streets) corridors through quick-build pilot interventions,” according to a project description in the city’s FY26 budget.
• Safety surge speed hump installation
  $15 million in enacted FY26 budget;
  $13 million in FY27 proposal
  Besides the reduction in overall funding, the FY27 budget document reveals that Boston’s Streets Cabinet spent only $450,000 on speed humps in the past year – less than 10 percent of what the FY26 budget had proposed.
• Jamaica Plain Centre/South Transportation Action Plan
  $1 million in enacted FY26 budget;
  $0 in FY27 proposal
  A project that would have redesigned parts of Centre Street and South Street in Jamaica Plain “using a Complete Streets approach.” A city website for the project says that “in Spring 2026, we’ll start having conversations with the community about your experiences and ideas.”
• Seaport Summer Street Phase 2
  $600K in enacted FY26 budget;
  $0 in FY27 proposal
  Described as a continuation of the two-block Summer Street sidewalk improvement and protected bike lane project that was finished in 2019, this phase of the project would have redesigned the street “from BCEC towards South Boston.”
• Charles Street North in Beacon Hill
  $750K in enacted FY26 budget;
  $0 in FY27 proposal
  Described in last year’s budget a “a reconstructed Charles Street between Beacon Street and Cambridge Street, including bike lanes and widened sidewalks.” Proposals to improve safety on this part of Charles Street have suffered from intense opposition from a small handful of neighborhood business owners and power brokers.

Thanks to StreetsblogMASS reader and TransitMatters volunteer Christopher Friend, we were able to obtain a line-by-line comparison of capital budget plans from 2026 and 2027 – view the spreadsheet here.

Note that we’ve cross-checked these spreadsheets with the city’s more detailed PDF budget books, and we’ve noted in annotations where an apparent elimination of funding is actually a change to a project’s name or description.