Recent Streetsblog MASS posts about COVID-19

Proposed "shared streets" and expanded curbside pedestrian areas, part of the city's COVID-19 mobility plan. Courtesy of the City of Somerville.

Check Out Somerville’s Citywide ‘COVID-19 Mobility Strategy’

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The City of Somerville has announced a citywide mobility strategy to provide safer walking and biking routes with more room for physical distancing as “stay at home” orders ease this spring and summer. Roughly a quarter of Somerville’s households are car-free. The city’s COVID-19 mobility plan therefore focuses on creating safer routes between residential neighborhoods […]
Rush-hour bike traffic takes the lane on Boylston Street, a heavily-used bike route with no dedicated bike facilities, on the morning of Friday, May 3, 2019.

Portents of a Post-Pandemic Walking and Cycling Boom

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As Governor Baker’s administration prepares its phased reopening plan, ongoing physical distancing requirements present a stark choice for the region’s political leaders: will people returning to work physically distance themselves in massive traffic jams, or will cities and towns give them they space they need to travel safely with widened sidewalks, protected bike routes, and […]
The Town of Brookline has deactivated beg buttons at 55 traffic signals across the town in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mixed Signals: ‘Beg Buttons’ and the Pandemic

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In the past month, several municipalities in the region, including Brookline, Cambridge, Arlington and Providence, RI, have acknowledged the uselessness of push-to-walk buttons at crosswalks, and have reprogrammed traffic lights to make walk signals automatic. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, those “beg buttons” were merely one of the hundreds of inconveniences that engineers forced upon pedestrians […]