Neighbors Applaud City Hall’s Last-Minute Design Changes For Hyde Park Ave.
Forest Hills residents are applauding the City of Boston’s last-minute decision to install additional traffic-calming measures, including a small road diet, as part of a repaving project this week on Hyde Park Avenue.
In plans released last Monday, City Hall revealed a new street design to improve visibility at crosswalks and reduce the threat of crashes in the congested roadway outside the Forest Hills Orange Line station.
And unlike other plans that the city has presented over the past 7 years, this one is actually poised to become a reality.
The city’s repaving plan calls for wider crosswalk markings, new cast-in-place concrete barriers to prevent illegal parking near crosswalks, and the removal of one motor vehicle lane on a short section of Hyde Park Avenue just east of the Ukraine Way intersection.
The paving project is already underway: as of last Thursday, workers had already milled the street’s surface in preparation for a new coat of asphalt (see the photo at the top of this article).
In an update to a city’s website for the long-delayed Hyde Park Avenue improvement project, officials also promised additional safety measures to come in the next two years, including upgrades in other segments of Hyde Park Avenue closer to Cleary Square, signal adjustments to deter late-night speeding, and ADA ramp improvements (which are already required citywide in a 2021 federal consent decree).
Neighborhood residents, who had been growing increasingly frustrated by the Wu administration’s track record of hosting public meetings without actually following through on any plans, are relieved that something is finally going to change.
“This is great. This is the beginning of rebuilding trust,” neighborhood resident Nathan Eckstrom told StreetsblogMASS in a phone conversation last week.
“But it’s also the bare minimum we can do to address safety, which should be table stakes,” he added. “We’re also asking them to address bus priority to help transit riders, in collaboration with the T.”
A long wait for small changes
Hyde Park Avenue is one of the city’s highest-ridership bus routes, and the blocks immediately south of Forest Hills station are frequently clogged with stopped traffic.
Its four-lane cross-section is a street layout that Mayor Wu and other City of Boston officials have acknowledged is unsafe, especially for pedestrians in crosswalks.
Under former Mayor Marty Walsh, the city had been planning new bus lanes and bike lanes through much of the three-mile stretch of Hyde Park Avenue between Forest Hills and Cleary Square.
But those plans stalled during the Covid-19 pandemic, and with the subsequent transition to Mayor Wu’s administration.
In 2024, after an MBTA bus driver struck and killed Forest Hills resident Glenn Inghram in a crosswalk outside of the Forest Hills MBTA station, neighborhood residents began organizing to demand action.
They formed the Boston Better Streets Coalition, which has emerged as a prominent critic of the Wu administration’s transportation policies in the past two years.
In early 2025, the Wu administration announced plans to repave Hyde Park Avenue in its existing configuration, without implementing any of the safety improvements that City Hall’s transportation staff had previously proposed.
As recently as August 31 – several weeks after a driver struck and killed city employee Louisa Gag and Mayor Wu told mourners that “we owe her our action” and “we have to do better,” the mayor’s staff were still moving ahead with that repaving project without any of the previously-planned safety improvements.
Eckstrom told StreetsblogMASS that he and his neighbors learned of the city’s updated plans at a meeting on Monday, October 5.
In an email to neighbors on Tuesday, Caterina Scaramelli, another Forest Hills resident and one of the organizers of the Better Streets Coalition, asked her neighbors to thank Mayor Wu, district City Councillors Enrique Pepén and Ben Weber, State Representative Montaño, and senior staff in Mayor Wu’s Streets Cabinet.
“In response to your advocacy, the City has significantly improved its plans for the repaving of Hyde Park Avenue,” she wrote. “We ask a lot of our elected officials and municipal staff. When they listen and make something better, we should say so.”
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