A rapidly evolving segment of a historic Boston street recently got another facelift.
The city late last month cordoned off a roughly 600-foot stretch of bike lane along Arlington Street with dozens of short, oblong mounds. The change is among the latest experiments in city hall’s contested campaign to expand and protect bike infrastructure across Boston.
The “Zebra” barriers, creations of a company founded in Barcelona, take the rough shape of oversized footballs sliced in half and fastened to the street. Each mound is roughly 32 inches long and several inches high at its tallest point. Together, the barriers, spaced a few steps apart from one another, form beads on a string of lane striping.
“Staff will assess the Zebras for durability, safety, and the ability to maintain the lane with street sweeping and snow removal properly,” Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s press office told the Globe in an email last week, noting that the Zebras cost around $5,800 to purchase and install. “We will also review feedback from members of the community and their experience with the new materials. Our goal is to identify barriers that work better for all users of the street.”
Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Boston’s chief of streets, told the news site StreetsblogMASS that the city has been trying to “identify alternatives that can provide better protection, be more durable, and manage the flow of different roadway users while also providing some flexibility for emergency vehicles.”
The new barriers span from Arlington’s intersection with Boylston Street until its convergence with Stuart Street and Columbus Avenue, segregating bike traffic and streams of cars.
Other cities across the country have, at some stage, put the lumps to use, including New York City and Miami Beach.
The remaining strands of Arlington bike lanes are still fenced off by often battered and bruised flexible plastic bollards, often dubbed flexposts.
The city had removed bollards lining a section of the Arlington bike corridor earlier this year, to the surprise and concern of some cyclists.
Flexposts provide a visible barrier but can be porous and flimsy. They can also require routine maintenance.
Wu has called flexposts her “personal pet peeve,“ adding that while the barriers are “the fastest, cheapest way to create a bike lane” with some semblance of safety, they were never meant to be a permanent solution.
Speaking of the new lane protectors, Galen Mook, the executive director of statewide cycling advocacy group MassBike, said, “I think it’s a compromise, like all road infrastructure is.”
The Zebra barriers are, compared to their predecessors, easier to maintain and less likely to produce dangerous debris when trampled, Mook said.
An emergency vehicle or rule-flouting driver could still enter the protected bike lane with a bit of determination or deft maneuvering. But, Mook added, the barriers still offered some safety benefits for cyclists.
“I do think they will serve the purpose of letting drivers know that this is not a space they should be driving into,” he said.
The city seems intent on making flexposts a street feature of the past. Across Boston, the city is “replacing flexposts installed through past safety projects with more durable materials,” according to its website.
Preferred substitutes include “cast-in-place” concrete separators, poured and shaped on site. The concrete barriers, the city says, could be “designed and installed relatively quickly and with comparable costs to flexposts.”
Jaime Moore-Carrillo can be reached at jaime.moore-carrillo@globe.com.