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Spinning their wheels
Three years ago Boston had a new ‘bike czar,’ an advisory committee, an interagency task force, and a comprehensive plan for making this a cycle-friendly city. That’s all gone. So who’s planning Boston’s bicycling future?
BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN


IMAGINE BOSTON, sometime in the near future, as a bicycle city. With the expressway banished below ground, the neighborhoods have sprouted tendrils of pavement that connect them with unprecedented efficiency. Commuters flow in from the west on the Minuteman trail or from the south along the Emerald Necklace, and disperse seamlessly to their downtown destinations. Families ride happily on a trail from Ruggles to the waterfront. Tourists bike the Charles, the Harbor, and Fort Point Channel in an unbroken loop. Teens come up from the city to converge on the new Charles River skate park. Cyclists hum up and down Summer Street between Downtown Crossing and the new convention center.

It could happen. Or, Boston could do what it does so well and so often: ignore its potential as a cycling-friendly city. As it stands, the city is devoid of bike lanes. Its bike paths don’t connect with one another and, in many cases, are not designed to national standards. Roadways are an obstacle course of narrow streets, heavy traffic, potholes, and aggressive drivers. Bicycling magazine ranked Boston the absolute worst city for cycling in North America in 1999, the last time it included "worst" rankings along with its "best cities" list. Just last week, Boston was named among the 10 worst cities for automotive road conditions by the Road Information Program, a national motorist-advocacy group. If, as that study claims, 54 percent of Boston’s major roads are in poor condition for cars and trucks, imagine the cyclists’ experience.

Here is how software engineer Lew Lasher got to work the other morning, traveling roughly four miles from Harvard Square to Symphony Hall. He rode one block in a marked bicycle lane on Hawthorn Street, then a stretch on the multi-use side path along the Charles River, then across the Mass Ave bridge hugging the right curbside, and finally a mile or so between traffic and parked cars on Mass Ave through the Back Bay.

None of this was a cakewalk, mind you. On Hawthorn Street he had to circumvent a nervous cyclist who stopped in the bike lane at a green light. He was forced onto narrow, car-packed Memorial Drive for a quarter-mile where the pathway was under construction. The riding edge of the Mass Ave bridge was a treacherous mess of gravel and garbage. And Back Bay motorists are even more disdainful of bikes than they are of other cars.

But Lasher gets around. So do many others. Many more would if they could do so in relative ease and comfort, but all it takes is one gap in their route — a single stretch where they can’t or won’t ride — and the bike stays home. A good example of such a deterrent lies between the Emerald Necklace Greenway, which circles the Fenway, and the Charles River Bike Path. Commuting from, say, West Roxbury to Massachusetts General Hospital would be great if not for that quarter-mile of inconvenience, to put it politely.

AS THE BIG DIG goes into its final phase, Bostonians are at an important juncture: we can either continue to neglect cycling, or we can realize a new, more vibrant vision of the city’s relationship with the sport. The Central Artery will soon disappear, replaced by the Rose Kennedy Greenway stretching north-south through the city’s east side, creating new east-west connections that previously could not exist. "This greenway changes everything," says Bruce Berman, communications director of Save the Harbor Save the Bay, a Boston group that advocates for increased use of Boston Harbor. "Instead of Balkanized neighborhoods that are more divided than connected," he says, the city will see some of its neighborhoods flow into one another for the first time since the 1950s, when the Central Artery was completed.

Ken Greenberg, the Toronto-based architect and urban developer chosen to design the greenway, described it similarly in a presentation in early May, posted on the Boston Redevelopment Authority Web site (www.cityofboston.gov/bra). He sees the greenway as "a confluence not of automobiles and trucks but a confluence of people on foot and bikes."

Greenberg envisions six potential "crossroads" for cyclists. One would run from Post Office Square, across the Old Northern Avenue bridge, to Fort Point Channel. Another would connect Chinatown, the Leather District, and South Bay to the Theater District and South Station. And of course there is the greenway itself, which will take bicyclists directly from the Emerald Necklace to the Charles River Bike Path, which runs through the Esplanade, to the proposed location of a new skateboard park near the Museum of Science.

All that sounds great, but it’s a long way from conception to execution. So far, none of these crossroads has been designed. As for the greenway itself, current planning calls merely for making the right-side traffic lane on each side of the greenway — Atlantic Avenue northbound and Purchase Street southbound — an extra three feet wide to better accommodate bikes, according to Vineet Gupta, director of planning for the Boston Transportation Department. The right lanes will be 14 feet wide instead of 11.

Things may even be going in reverse. Far from expanding bicycle planning, the city appears to be dismantling the institutional support it established for two-wheeled travel just a few years ago. The Boston Transportation Department laid off its bicycle-program manager last July. The city’s official Boston Bicycle Advisory Committee, formed in 1999, lasted one more meeting after that, and was then disbanded. The Interagency Bicycle Task Force dissolved a year earlier.

Perhaps even more troubling is the squabbling among bicycle advocates themselves, who seem to spend much of their energy denouncing one another’s suggestions — bike lanes, multi-use paths, wider traffic lanes — not to mention clashing with advocates of pedestrian access and vehicle parking. And earlier this year, in February, the executive director of the Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition (MassBike), Tim Baldwin, resigned to enter law school, leaving the state’s most vocal bicycle-advocacy group in flux. Just Tuesday, it was announced that political consultant Dorie Clark, who last worked as New Hampshire communications director for the Howard Dean campaign, will be replacing Baldwin.

But advocates have to join forces to make sure that something like Ken Greenberg’s vision is realized, or else Boston’s post–Big Dig renaissance will, once again, benefit motorists only. No plan will meet every bike rider’s grand vision of cycle heaven, but there must be a compromise that will make all Boston cyclists at least a little bit happier.

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Issue Date: May 7 - 13, 2004
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