City Hall Is On the Verge of Cancelling Privately-Funded Safety Improvements For Deadly East Boston Roadway
A planned safety upgrade for Bennington Street near Day Square – one of the neighborhood’s most dangerous streets – is on the verge of cancellation by Mayor Wu’s streets commissioners.
A new 170-home mixed-use development that’s currently under construction on the southern edge of Day Square had been planning to build, with private funding, significant safety improvements to a 500-foot segment of Bennington Street between Day Square and Neptune Road.
But in a hearing last week at Boston’s Public Improvements Commission – a panel of city transportation a public works officials that reviews infrastructure changes to the city’s public streets – an agent of the project’s developer revealed a new plan that would scrap the safety improvements in favor of creating more more publicly-subsidized private vehicle storage.
The commission will hear testimony and potentially vote on the proposal at its next public hearing, on Thursday, August 20.
Bloody Bennington
Bennington Street currently has a four- to five-lane cross-section that bottlenecks abruptly into a much narrower 2-lane street in Day Square.
The city’s official neighborhood planning document, Plan: East Boston, acknowledges that Bennington Street, in its current form, is too wide, and a major liability to neighborhood safety.
“Its four-lane configuration encourages regional use, higher travel speeds, and unsafe weaving behavior,” the Plan: East Boston report warns. “These conditions result in more conflicts, poor visibility between all users, and, ultimately, more crashes, including three fatalities between 2015 and 2019.”
In their negotiations for the 355 Bennington Street development, which the city’s Planning Department approved in 2022, Boston’s transportation planners had collaborated with the building’s developers to design significant new traffic-calming safety improvements along the new building’s Bennington Street frontage between Bremen Street and Neptune Road (see the sketch plan below from a 2021 neighborhood presentation).
The city-approved plans would have made Bennington Street narrower to calm motor vehicle traffic.
The developers’ plan would have also created space for more than a dozen new street trees to mitigate the neighborhood’s notorious heat island problems. And it would have made room for widened sidewalks with a raised, curb-protected bike lane lane on the southern side of Bennington Street.
The new bikeway would have connected to a new path connection from the Mary Ellen Welch East Boston Greenway, which runs underneath the Interstate 90 highway viaduct nearby.
The commission reconsiders
The city’s Public Improvement Commission had previously approved the Bennington Street street improvements – with protected bike lanes and sidewalk widenings on Bennington and Bremen – at a meeting on December 7, 2023.
But the project unexpectedly came back to the commission last week, at its August 6 hearing (the discussion begins around 1:35:35 in the recording below).
Molly Kennedy, representing the new building’s developers, presented a new plan that would eliminate many of the traffic-calming safety improvements that the city had approved in 2023.
“We have learned that there have been changes to the Plan: East Boston vision for Day Square, which included the changes to bike lane configurations and locations throughout the square itself,” Kennedy told the Commission. “We had originally proposed and gotten approved through PIC bike lanes along Bennington and Bremen Street along the project frontage. In connection with BTD (Boston Transportation Dept.), BPDA (Boston Planning and Development Agency), Planning and Transportation staff, we have designed a new layout… It replaces the former bike lanes with parallel parking, and minimal curb realignment.”
It’s unclear what changes to the Plan: East Boston document Kennedy was referencing (she declined to respond to multiple inquiries from StreetsblogMASS).
The official Plan: East Boston document, which the city adopted in 2024, includes this map of planned bicycle routes that specifically highlights plans for protected bike lanes along Bennington Street from Day Square to the Revere city line:
Under the developers’ new plan, the developers would generally keep Bennington Street’s layout in its existing configuration, in spite of its well-documented safety problems, in order to provide an extra lane for on-street parking.
Apocryphal neighborhood approval
“Adding additional parking was well received with neighbors,” Kennedy told the Commission. “It also does not preclude the city from implementing bike lanes and intermodal transportation in the future.”
It’s not clear which neighbors Kennedy was speaking about. There are no records of any public meetings about the proposed changes.
In fact, several East Boston residents that StreetsblogMASS spoke with on Monday refuted Kennedy’s claim that the elimination of planned safety improvements would be “well received” in the neighborhood.
“It’s a dangerous road,” East Boston resident Joey Carlesimo told StreetsblogMASS. “I’m definitely for the bike lane, and I’d be disappointed if the project moves forward without the improvement. It would help with safety, especially pedestrian safety crossing the road near Day Square.”
“I’m sure there are a lot of people asking for more parking,” said Daniel Schenk, the farm manager at Eastie Farm. “But (Bennington Street) is one of my least favorite parts of my commute. It feels like I’m taking my life into my hands most days. I bike it, and for work I have to drive on it in a pickup truck as well, and it feels like I have to have my head on a constant 360-degree swivel, just on high alert whether I’m driving or on a bike through that stretch.”
“If there’s any place in the city that would benefit from a protected bike lane, that would be it,” Schenk added.
Public hearing scheduled for August 20
Boston’s Public Improvements Commission is typically chaired by the city’s Chief of Streets.
The August 6 hearing was being chaired by Deputy Chief of Streets Nick Gove, even though he had recently been demoted by Mayor Wu for his role in delaying major safety improvements in other parts of the city and fumbling millions of dollars’ worth in federal grant funding during his brief tenure in charge of the city’s streets cabinet.
The city of Boston’s press office did not respond to our inquiries about Gove’s current role at the commission, or why the commission is entertaining a new proposal for Bennington Street that contradicts the neighborhood’s official plans.
The updated 355 Bennington Street proposal is tentatively scheduled to come up for a second hearing and a vote at the Public Improvement Commission’s next public meeting, on August 20.
Commission meetings are conducted virtually, and members of the public who wish to testify on an agenda item should contact PIC@boston.gov in advance for a link to join.
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