How does one get from Lechmere to the Somerville Target on a bike? The shortest route is to ride down the hill past the Cambridge Antique Market on the wide Kermit-colored bike lane, past the Marriott. But when you reach the giant pit of water, the bike lane ends and riders are greeted with cones and Jersey barriers, followed by a ride on a narrow, broken sidewalk up the McGrath Highway overpass. Want to make a left turn toward the McDonald’s? The paint invites you to wait on the right shoulder of the road, making the left turn into a straight crossing of the highway. Because the giant pit of water never became a lab, though, no car will ever exit its parking lot, and that light will never turn green. And because the highway will be knocked down sometime between now and 50 years from it, no money will be allotted to fix the road.
This isn’t a world-stopping problem. In a couple of years, Cambridge Street will have a bike lane and is still a safer way to access Brickbottom and points east than playing cowboy on the highway. The eventual McGrath Boulevard project will have a bike lane as well. But today there’s a problem, and these are the kinds of gaps planners don’t know about. They don’t have your commute, so they don’t know about the malfunctioning traffic lights, the storm drain that’s just a bit too far uphill to drain water or the half-mile of missing bike lane. We suffer these things quietly, knowing it’s out of our control.
But what if, when we had problems like this, we could let the planners know?
The Boston Region Metropolitan Planning Organization selects transportation projects for funding and produces plans that guide how the funds are allocated. For the next month, you can respond to its survey to report gaps in walking, biking and rolling infrastructure. If the organization likes what you have to say, it might award money and planning support to fix the problem. I asked its communications coordinator about sharing the survey, and she agreed. Here is her (lightly edited) statement:
The MPO is beginning a process of developing a regional active transportation plan to work toward a future with a safe, comfortable and extensive bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure network. The first phase of this work is a regional needs and gaps analysis to evaluate the current network and collect information on people’s experiences walking, biking and rolling in the region, which will help identify and prioritize gaps.
As an initial step in developing the plan, we’ve created this survey to pinpoint gaps in our region’s walking and biking infrastructure and to understand how they affect people’s daily lives. The survey will be open until July 30, and we expect to share a summary this year of the data collected.
If you have five minutes, take the survey. If you care enough to write about it, think of all the other people who see the same problem but say nothing. You’ll be doing them a favor, too.
Nicholas Marchuk is a local author and engineer. His work is available at major retailers and on his website, nicholasmarchuk.com. Comments and questions can be directed to his contact form and may be responded to in this publication.
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