Several blocks of Garden Street will stay one-way for car traffic toward Harvard Square, city councillors in Cambridge decided Monday in a 5-4 vote. That undid a vote in December 2024 to study bringing back a two-way configuration, which was taken by a previous set of councillors and never acted upon by city staff.
The council took a final vote Monday to make sure there was no “reconsideration” of their Garden Street decision – offering some feeling of certainty on an issue that has seen plenty of starts, stops and reversals since bike lanes were installed in late 2022.
Complicating the back-and-forth has been the lack of public consensus, with winners and losers no matter what changes are made, officials said, and arguments over whether the motion voted Monday was trying to undo a decision just because some people didn’t like it … or whether that better described the order from 2024.
“I want to acknowledge the frustration that people have felt,” mayor Sumbul Siddiqui said. “Sometimes we’re going to have different opinions on what’s in front of us and we’re going to look at the same set of facts and come to different conclusions.”
The expected cost of going back to two-way traffic was around $250,000, staff said, and was taken up with budget season fresh in councillors’ minds: Staff had shortly before presented a $1 billion budget for the next fiscal year that will be discussed in May and voted in June. It holds year-over-year growth to an austere 4.1 percent after tasking each department with finding 2.1 percent in cost savings.
“We have a choice tonight to spend a quarter of a million dollars ripping up the street and putting in a bunch of new construction, or we can say, you know what, our budget is really tight,” councillor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler said.
Need for speed
It was the preference of the city Transportation Department to keep the current Garden Street configuration, as it “operates best and offers the best kind of environment,” but either is considered safe, chief Brooke McKenna has said.
If there were to be work done to Garden Street this summer, “we definitely need to start moving quickly,” McKenna said, noting utility work has left the roadway in poor shape. “It’s not great to postpone doing anything, regardless of which way we end up going.”
An attempt to table the motion and send it to the Transportation Committee, proposed by councillor E. Denise Simmons, failed 6-3. An amendment to have city staff gather more data, proposed by councillor Cathie Zusy, failed 5-4, and staff said they were committed to using data to do more traffic calming on side streets no matter what.
“There are different ways of looking at this that are landing people in different places,” city manager Yi-An Huang said. “I don’t know that the data will change people’s opinions or their votes.”
Road divider
Most public comment Monday and at recent council meetings have been from fans of the one-way version of Garden who feel it is safer.
Those traffic changes affect a network of side streets where residents say they have been newly inundated with traffic and speeding cars.
Over two weeks of knocking on residents’ doors on those streets, councillor Tim Flaherty said he reached 258 people of which more than three-quarters wanted a return to two-way traffic; in an online survey from flyers left in the neighborhood, the figure was 90 percent. Zusy referred to a petition last year with more than 700 signatures of people who wanted the road to go back to two-way traffic.
If there was such a petition – there was one of that number to keep the one-way – it didn’t impress councillor Marc McGovern. “Most of us have gone out there, if not all of us, and talked to people. I too am listening to neighbors,” he said. “There was a petition of over 700 people who said to keep it one-way. I don’t know why a petition of 700 people who say make it two-way is somehow more valuable than a petition that says keep it one-way.”
“Yes, there’s more traffic on side streets,” vice mayor Burhan Azeem said, but his perception of undoing a change was that “we’re really just shifting traffic around.”
Bumpy path
The bidirectional bike lanes installed in October 2022 would have made the roadway a tight, dangerous squeeze if two-way car traffic and parking were all kept – so the blocks from Huron Avenue down to Concord Avenue saw a change to one-way car traffic. After much unhappiness, including from residents on side streets who were suddenly seeing more traffic, councillors agreed unanimously in December 2024 to ask that staff study restoring Garden Street’s two-way car traffic while keeping the two-way protected bike lanes and as much parking as possible. An April 2025 vote enacted a return.
Sixteen months later, with that reversal not implemented, councillors Ayah Al-Zubi and Sobrinho-Wheeler asked in a policy order that any work toward undoing the Garden Street changes stop, because staff analysis continues to suggest the changes would cause new problems.
Flaherty used his “charter right” on April 13 to stop debate, bringing a delay that bridged the Patriots’ Day holiday. He argued that Al-Zubi and Sobrinho-Wheeler were trying to halt a voted action simply because they disagreed, which was “disruptive to the legislative process.”
This argument also wasn’t persuasive to McGovern, who observed “this is kind of what happens in politics.” He hoped that if Democrats took back power in national midterm elections, they would “revisit a hell of a lot of policies that have been passed recently, and not say, oh, well, Republicans passed it. We can’t go back.”
The final vote saw Al-Zubi, Azeem, McGovern, Sobrinho-Wheeler and Siddiqui in the majority and Flaherty, Nolan, Simmons and Zusy in the minority.
“A lot of trust has been really shredded for me tonight,” Nolan said.
Asked to clarify, Nolan said she’d “explicitly discussed the Garden Street question with the mayor last fall, and I expected her to vote accordingly – that she would not vote to keep Garden Street one-way.”
This post was updated April 28, 2026, to clarify questions about whether there was a petition with 700 signatures in favor of returning to a two-way Garden Street; and to correct the nature of City Council votes toward that outcome in December 2024 and April 2025.
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