Eyes On the Street: DCR Tames Traffic Next to Boston’s Arnold Arboretum
This autumn, workers are putting the finishing touches on a major reconfiguration of Walter Street and Centre Street in West Roxbury, at the western edge of the Arnold Arboretum.
The project is shrinking the intersection of the two streets and significantly expanding sidewalks in a bid to calm traffic and improve pedestrian safety at the intersection of the two streets.
The new design also includes short segments of sidewalk-level protected bike lanes that extend about 100 meters out from each of the intersection’s three legs on Centre and Walter Street.
The state’s Department of Conservation and Recreation is managing the project. Centre Street between the Arborway and VFW Parkway is technically a “parkway” under the jurisdiction of the state’s parks agency, even though the parkland is paved under asphalt.
Before construction began, Walter Street met Centre Street in a wide, Y-shaped junction – one that was designed to facilitate high-speed turns from one street to the other. The intersection didn’t have any crosswalks, and there was no sidewalk at all on the southern edge of the intersection.
Under the intersection’s new configuration, the wide, Y-shaped junction is being replaced with a tighter T-shaped intersection under a new traffic signal. The project will also replace a considerable amount of asphalt with new publicly-accessible parkland at the western edge of the Arnold Arboretum:
With its new sidewalks, crosswalks, and protected bike lanes, the project fills in what had been a significant gap in the neighborhood’s biking and pedestrian network. The intersection had previously lacked any crosswalks; now, bikes and pedestrians will be able to cross the four lanes of Centre Street – a hazardous roadway where drivers frequently ignore the 25 mph speed limit – under the protection of a new traffic signal:
According to MassDOT’s IMPACT crash database, this intersection was the site of 10 to 13 crashes each year from 2021 until 2025, and about a third of those crashes inflicted at least one non-fatal injury.
But for 2026 to date, while this project has been under heavy construction, the number of crashes has declined dramatically. As of October 26th, there have only been four crashes recorded at this intersection in 2026, and only one of those crashes caused an injury.
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