A potential five-year delay on installing bike lanes on Outer Huron Avenue – a move meant to address concerns about the loss of parking – was reduced to a proposed one-year delay in a motion by city councillors Monday, then defeated entirely.
Passed in its place was a motion urging city staff to keep looking for ways to get people out of their cars and strategize about what parking stays.
“The removal of the parking is not going to take place until late spring or early summer of next year anyway, which allows them time,” said councillor Marc McGovern, who proposed the substitute motion that passed 6-3.
Opposing the substitute motion was councillor Cathie Zusy. Last week she proposed the five-year freeze on changes in the Strawberry Hill neighborhood south of Fresh Pond by the Belmont town line, then used her “charter right” to delay discussion by one meeting and present her revised plan. “The reason for waiting a year is so that the city can implement its anticar-storage policies this fall to demonstrate its success,” Suzy said.
Joining her in opposition were councillors Tim Flaherty and E. Denise Simmons. (The three voted in favor of Zusy’s plan with vice mayor Burhan Azeem, but it failed 4-5.)
In adding quick-build separated bike lanes over the current, less-safe paint-only versions, the plan replaces 79 mostly unregulated on-street spaces with 35 overnight-permit, daytime-unregulated spaces, a net loss of 37 to 44 where people scramble and squeeze in parking for the city-owned Fresh Pond Golf Course, Glacken Field, the Russell Youth Center, Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 8818 and the 251-apartment Parkside Place.
That loss of parking and concerns about traffic and the tightness of lanes drove 1,510 people to sign a petition to suspend the project, but public comment over two meetings balanced the opposition by bringing out people who wanted the lanes to go forward.
“When I first moved here, I biked everywhere for several years and I had multiple accidents,” resident Neheet Trivedi said. “Over the last few years, the city is much safer. I bike everywhere now, as much as I can, with my children as well – including in North Cambridge where I live and West Cambridge where we’re talking about. And I periodically go to the Russell Youth Center.”
In plans back to 2015
There’s been a roughly yearlong planning process on the 1,200-foot project, which completes an east-west network link identified in a 2015 Cambridge Bicycle Plan, McGovern’s order noted. The stretch is included in as part of the cycling safety ordinance, a 2020 city law requiring installation of approximately 25 miles of separated bike lanes within seven years.
In seeking support for his substitute motion, McGovern was able to point to ways the city’s Department of Transportation had begun working with the residents and users of area amenities to make the plan work for everyone:
“The original plan was originally to remove somewhere around 81 spaces. [We’re] almost cutting the amount of removed parking spaces in half based on public input. That seems to me to be listening to the public. The city heard concerns about the lack of parking for disabled residents, so they put handicapped spaces into the plan. Handicap spaces that don’t exist today seems to be listening to the community. They heard concerns about the removal of the loading zone in front of the community center. They put the loading zone back in. The city did listen to many people in the community and did make changes to this plan, and it may not be everything that everyone wants, but those are pretty significant.”
Because the city continues to look for parking solutions with several months to go before there are physical changes, McGovern said he didn’t see the value in a year’s delay. “We’ll probably end up very much in the same spot,” he said,
Zusy, though, said she opposed McGovern’s substitute because “it doesn’t do anything – it doesn’t mitigate the impacts of these lanes on so many people … it just says everything is wonderful.” She has been working with transportation staff since December on seeking solutions:
“Thirty percent of the 500 residents at Parkside Place apartments are low-income, and a lot of them are parking on the street because it’s too expensive to park at Parkside. We will be disabling the VFW Hall from having events, the Youth Center from attracting elders and from their being able to engage disabled youth in their programs. We’ll be making it hard for the West Cambridge baseball players and their families to attend events. It’ll impact the golf course. There are tennis courts. There are basketball courts. There’s a tot lot. There are just so many impacts, and there is not documented need for this lane at this time.”
Search is on
In the week between orders, the city got bad news in its search for parking solutions: Managers at Parkside Place said no to renting unused parking to the city, transportation commissioner Brooke McKenna said. A study has suggested that up to 40 percent of its tenants don’t have cars.
The city continues to look at how the remaining parking will be regulated and discouraging drivers who realize it’s one of the few places in Cambridge where they can park long-term without a sticker. The city is looking at keeping unrestricted parking during the day to address the needs of golfers and other visitors to the recreational centers, McKenna said, while having enforced resident-only parking overnight to “ensure that those spaces are available for residents when the demand is highest.”
More enforcement would be done at the golf course to keep its parking lot restricted – users would be given placards for their dashboards, and cars without them would be ticketed – and the city can keep looking for off-street spaces, McKenna said. Even at Parkside, “we can continue to speak with them.”
In the meantime, McGovern’s order asked the city to “encourage nonresidents to carpool, walk, bike or take transit where feasible so that there are sufficient numbers of spaces for residents,”; to look at daytime meters with time limits suited to golf and community programming; and if the golf course could add storage and a drop-off area to enable carpooling.
