On a scorching morning in late June, Josh Kraft gathered his supporters and the press on a sidewalk in West Roxbury to talk about a hot issue in Boston’s mayoral race: bike lanes.
Mayor Michelle Wu’s chief challenger spoke a few feet away from bustling Centre Street, a thoroughfare the city narrowed from four lanes to two for about a mile stretch in 2023. The overhaul was meant to slow traffic; a pedestrian was fatally hit by a car in the area a few years earlier. And, like in many Boston neighborhoods, bike lanes were installed as part of broader street-safety projects.
Kraft, the son of billionaire New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, called Wu’s street safety measures a “mess of flex posts, speed bumps, raised crosswalks, traffic lanes that abruptly shift to become turn-only and confusing pointed arrows.”
He’s seizing on a topic that’s pitted drivers and business owners against cyclists and pedestrians across the city’s neighborhoods.
The debate in West Roxbury mirrors the battle lines on this issue across the city.
Kanessa Alexander, owner of the Perfect 10 salon, said Centre Street has been more congested since the redesign and drivers move more aggressively as a result. She said the changes failed to include delivery zones and feels the area is less safe now.
“It’s chaos when delivery trucks need to deliver to the businesses,” Alexander said. “It’s chaos when you’re trying to get out of your car, literally into traffic — I don’t know who did the measurements, but it’s chaos.”
On the flip side, there’s local resident Mary Tenenbaum. She said it was hard to cross Centre Street when it had four lanes of busy traffic.
“One car would stop, and in the second lane, the other car wouldn’t, and they would speed around and they would almost hit you,” she recalled. She said that doesn’t happen anymore “and it is so much safer to cross the street.”
Back in 2022, the Wu administration committed to create “safe streets for all modes of transportation,” unveiling a plan to expand bike lanes in the city by 9.4 miles and install thousands of speed humps and raised crosswalks to slow cars down and reduce crashes. As of this year, 15 miles of bike lanes have been installed, according to the city.
Biking advocates are all for it, of course; Boston has been a notoriously dangerous city for those traveling on two wheels. Many feel there should be more bike lanes, with safer features, that connect seamlessly throughout the city.
Cycling 7 miles through Boston with two bike enthusiasts, it’s clear that not all bike lanes are made equal.
Mandy Wilkens with the Boston Cyclist Union, bike advocate Peter Cheung and I started on the bike path through the Southwest Corridor in Roxbury. It runs mostly through a park and feels very safe. The only interaction with vehicles happens at intersections.
In the South End, on Tremont Street, we encountered a road where parked cars are separated from the bike lane by thin concrete barriers.
Wilkens declares this is, “as far as urban, on-street bike infrastructure … just one level down from perfect,” with concrete barriers and parked cars reducing the risk of bikers getting hit.
This portion of road used to carry four lanes of car traffic, and was flagged for a redesign in 2018 after two pedestrians were struck by cars. It was completed by the city last year.
Wilkens said that in many cases, bike lanes were a happy, if secondary, result of traffic-calming efforts, like reducing driving lanes.
“When you remove a lane, you have a lot more street area, right? For any kind of use. And so it makes sense to add a bike lane,” Wilkens said.
Drivers tend to hate these lane losses, which can lead to traffic congestion. And in the South End, for instance, the redesign has changed the look and feel of a historic, and now high-end, neighborhood.
In other areas, bike lanes are designated just by painted lines on the road — sometimes those lines are so faded, they are barely visible. While riding from Boston to Cambridge, we also encountered bike lanes designated by flexible white poles; some stretches had nothing at all.
One reason bike lanes are inconsistent is because historically they’ve been added to streets as an afterthought, said Peter Furth, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northeastern University.
Up until a couple of years ago, he said, Boston’s bike network was nonexistent and bike lanes looked scattered on a map — as if someone had dropped toothpicks onto a coffee table.
“You got a little piece of bike lane, oh, a piece of bike lane here, a piece of bike lane here,” but barely any of it was connected in a thoughtful way, he said.
Boston has seen a bike lane boom over the last five years — too much so, according to critics, and not nearly enough according to cyclists. To do more, Furth said, will mean losing more driving lanes and parking spaces.
“You actually have to give something to get something,” he said.
All this makes for a tough balancing act for the current mayor, who doesn’t want to irritate residents in an election year, but also has championed bike lanes.
During a WBUR appearance in May, Wu said her administration has “built out the networks now that were envisioned and designed” during former Mayor Thomas Menino’s era over a decade ago.
Bike lanes might seem like a low-stakes issue to get worked up about in a mayoral campaign, but Erin O’Brien, a professor of political science at University of Massachusetts Boston, said the topic speaks to voters’ quality of life.
It’s about “who’s being served and who’s not being served by the existing transportation infrastructure,” she said. And it’s just the latest twist in Boston’s longtime battles over transportation and support for getting around the city, via T, bus, car, bike or on foot.
After facing criticism from Kraft, Wu earlier this year ordered a 30-day review of her administration’s road safety measures. In May, she addressed the review, saying it was important to her administration to “see” what bike lanes features were working and decide if changes are necessary.
“At some point we have to decide, is it working or not?” Wu said.
There is evidence that bike lanes are making people safer. An analysis of 10 bike lanes installed by the city examined portions of Beacon, Arlington, Boylston and State streets, among others, and was released in February. It found that during the study period, from 2021 to 2023, the selected areas saw a 68% decrease in crashes involving pedestrians and a 57% drop in cyclists crashes. Car crashes also declined by about 30%.
Wu has said she’ll consider changes to bike lanes in the future to improve the experience for all road users. That’s if re-elected in November.
Kraft, meanwhile, said he’d pause bike lane projects altogether if elected, and do a new analysis.
This fall, it will be up to voters to decide which candidate they believe will pave the best way forward.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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