Who are you going to believe? Mayor Michelle Wu, or your own eyes?
According to the mayor, there’s nothing to see here in her administration’s apparent retreat from bike lanes, speed humps, and other streetscape changes. She told the Globe editorial board recently that street safety remained a “constant focus.”
But that’s sure not the way things look to many of the readers who responded to an editorial about the mayor’s backtracking last week and last week’s edition of this newsletter.
Across the whole Greater Jamaica Plain area, they’re reporting that promised speed humps have not been installed, projects have been put on hold, and communication from City Hall has been scant or non-existent.
Caterina Scaramelli wrote in a letter to the editor published in the Globe Saturday that after years of community demands to do something about speeding on Wachusett Street in Jamaica Plain, “residents finally were told the speed humps would be constructed alongside a scheduled repaving, only to see no action.”
The mayor’s insistence that she was just making sure the city collected more input rang hollow to some readers.
“We haven’t heard a word since the election, even after repeated attempts to get a response,” wrote Benjamin Siegel of Jamaica Plain, who has been involved with efforts to upgrade Hyde Park Avenue. “The administration has stopped listening to the process it created.”
The mayor’s shift doesn’t trouble some residents, though, who faulted Wu for having steamrolled bike lanes in her first term. “Her approach to bike lanes was dictatorial,” said Janice Rogovin of Jamaica Plain.
Those are the kind of criticisms that led Wu to change her approach to bike lanes last year. With an opponent seeking to paint her as an out-of-touch bike zealot, Wu launched a 30-day review and promised a more consensus-driven approach to street changes. But on the ground, that slower process appears to have resulted in a near-halt to work.
Thomas Thuene of Roslindale said he was undecided on whether Wu was moving too slowly, but expressed some understanding for why she might be cautious. “The advancement to a more bicycle (or rather micro-mobility) friendly city has always been too slow,” he wrote, “but one has to take political reality into account.”
Still, he wrote, “Bicycle infrastructure is cheap. Except for some very loud people, the acceptance after a few months of existence is typically quite high.”
I also heard from many cyclists outside of Boston.
“My opinion is that Mayor Wu and the city in general have not gone far enough in favor of bike lanes,” wrote one Cantabrigian.
A reader in Arlington said he didn’t ride in Boston often enough to have an opinion on the city’s programs but expressed a general unhappiness with the us-vs-then narratives that often dominate discussions of bike lanes.
“It frustrates me that in these bike lane battles, people generally overlook the safety benefits to pedestrians, probably because those benefits do not suit their culture-war narratives,” he wrote. “Pedestrians stand to benefit from bike lanes as much as cyclists do, though in different ways. Bike lanes also improve things for motorists, if in limited ways.”
The politics of this aren’t going to get any easier for Wu: she’s facing growing calls to abandon the planned bus lane on Blue Hill Avenue. In her first term, she was willing to spend political capital making such projects happen even over opposition. But there’s no sign — yet — of that kind of determination in her second.
This is an excerpt from Are we there yet?, a Globe Opinion newsletter about the future of transportation in the region. Sign up to get it in your inbox early.
Alan Wirzbicki is Globe deputy editor for editorials. He can be reached at alan.wirzbicki@globe.com.