This Sunday: ‘Ride For Your Life’ Event Brings Safety Demands to Beacon Hill
This Sunday, the Massachusetts chapter of Families for Safe Streets and various other transportation advocacy groups are bringing hundreds of people to Beacon Hill for Boston’s fourth “Ride for Your Life” event.
The day will feature a slow-paced, 6-mile bike ride, a one-mile walk, and a rally at the State House to call on lawmakers to take action on stalled public safety legislation.
This year’s event will also honor City of Boston transportation planner Louisa Gag, who was killed by a driver this summer on her way to work, and the thousands of other victims who have been killed on Massachusetts roadways.
“The technology that could have saved their lives not only exists, but is readily available and affordable,” says Eric Olson, a co-founder of Families for Safe Street Massachusetts.
Olson lost his daughter Sidney in 2023, when she was 5 years old, when the driver of a tractor-trailer truck killed her in front of her family in the middle of a crosswalk on Main Street in her hometown of Andover.
Families for Safe Streets Massachusetts is asking legislators to enact three policies at the statewide level:
- A “Stop Super Speeders” bill, which would require the Commonwealth’s most dangerous repeat offenders to install GPS-based speed limiting controls in their vehicles. Six other states passed similar laws in 2026 with broad bipartisan support, but no lawmakers have yet introduced similar legislation in the Massachusetts State House.
- A bill to allow speed cameras in school zones, safety zones and construction zones.
- A bill to encourage trucking companies to install life-saving side guards and backup camera technology, by establishing a rebuttable presumption that a truck driver is responsible in a fatal crash involving a cyclist or pedestrian if the truck lacks those safety features.
The latter two measures, regarding speed cameras and truck safety equipment, have been included in the Senate version of this year’s omnibus economic development bill. But that legislation has been stalled out in the House, which has not yet signed off on the Senate’s draft.
Families for Safe Streets is also planning to hold Mayor Wu’s administration accountable to her promises to “do better” in delivering street safety improvements in the wake of Louisa Gag’s killing this summer. Although the city has started installing small safety improvements at a limited number of locations in the past month, dozens of more comprehensive planned improvements remain stalled, and several have been cancelled altogether.
Sunday’s event will begin at noon in the Boston Common for the ride and the walk. A rally with speakers will follow in the Common at 1 p.m., followed by a reception at the Harpoon Brewery beer garden at the corner of Tremont and Boylston.
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