Eyes On the Street: Casting On Congress
The City of Boston’s plans to replace plastic flexible-post bollards with more durable materials along the city’s bike lanes is taking concrete form this week along Congress Street in downtown Boston.
Congress Street along Post Office Square is the home to one of the city’s oldest protected bike lanes. It’s only three blocks long, from Water Street in the north to High Street in the south.
Mayor Marty Walsh’s administration first installed plastic bollards along this bike lane in 2016, but in recent years, many of those bollards had been destroyed without replacement, and the “bike lane” had devolved into an illicit parking zone.
On Monday night, though, City of Boston work crews began installing more durable barriers between the bike lane and the adjacent motor vehicle lanes.
The city calls these “cast-in-place” barriers. City officials told StreetsblogMASS last September that these barriers would soon start replacing plastic bollards on several of the city’s protected bike lanes, including Boylston Street near the Boston Common (see rendering at right).
On Congress Street on Tuesday morning, the various stages of their installation process were on display.
Near Franklin Street, the bike lane was lined with wooden frames surrounding short rebar dowels that had been drilled into the asphalt:
Photographed on June 16, 2026.
One block further north, several of those wooden frames had been filled with concrete to form the new curbs:
At the southern end of the bike lane, near High Street, spray-painted markings in the buffer between the bike lane and the rest of the roadway indicate future locations for additional cast-in-place curbs:
Unfortunately, the new barriers still won’t actually connect the Congress Street bike lane to other parts of Boston’s protected bike lane network.
On the northern end, the bike lane begins at Water Street – leaving a one-block gap between this bikeway and the protected bike lane on State Street.
The southern end of this bike lane (pictured in the last photo above) ends one block away from the Rose Kennedy Greenway, and people on bikes who intend to proceed across the Greenway and into the Seaport must merge into four lanes of traffic with aggressive drivers who are jockeying to get onto Interstate 93.
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