Following a vigil Thursday for city planner and safe streets advocate Luisa Gag, who was killed on her bicycle last week, fellow advocates say they’re watching carefully to see if Boston Mayor Michelle Wu follows through on promises to make the city’s streets safer.
Advocates have been critical of the mayor’s efforts toward making the city more bike-friendly in recent months. They say 17 transportation projects around the city that are intended to make streets safer have stalled, including one at the site where Gag was killed last week. A public letter to the mayor calling for those projects to move forward, among other demands, has been signed by 4,000 people. And some say that while the city used to meet with them regularly, those conversations have gone silent for the last year and a half.
But some advocates say they’re hopeful that’s now changing.
Wu became emotional at Thursday’s vigil as she spoke of Gag, a transportation planner for the city who was working to expand its public bike share program.
“We owe Luisa more than our grief. We owe her action,” Wu told the crowd that gathered in City Hall Plaza to remember Gag. “We have to do better.”
Wu promised more details on the city’s plans shortly, saying the city will conduct a full analysis of its street design, which she said would become a standard practice.
Caitlin Allen-Connelly, executive director of the transportation advocacy group TransitMatters, said she has empathy for the mayor’s situation.
“I feel deeply for Michelle Wu,” said Allen-Connelly. “It is a lot to shoulder. And when you’re responsible for the city, this type of tragedy is a personal tragedy, because in some ways it’s related to the policies that you made. And she is a mother, and this person worked inside of her City Hall and knew her very well. And so it’s a lot.”
At the same time, Allen-Connelly said that advocates want to see steps taken to make the city’s streets safer.
“I would say commitments are one thing, action is another,” she said. “And I think we’ll need to see, over the next days and weeks and months, the speed at which things are changed. And change doesn’t happen overnight.”
Advocates have been patiently calling for the 17 paused transportation projects to move forward, Allen-Connelly said.
“We have been calling for more transparency, for accountability,” she said. “And I think we need to build trust back. And when we have the trust back, I think that we will make a lot more progress. And so I hope to see in the next weeks to come that the words and the commitments that the mayor made are implemented and become reality.”
Allen-Connelly said the city’s fiscal challenges have slowed things down.
“There are definitely limited funds,” she said. “I think we’re living in a very unusual time — in a fiscal landscape at all levels that is incredibly constrained. And it also comes down to political will and priority.”
Allen-Connelly said she was glad to see a draft resolution from city councilors Enrique Pepen and Liz Breadon that would require an annual report on the status of street projects. The filing date on the resolution is next week.
Galen Mook, executive director of the group MassBike, says advocates have met with Mayor Wu twice since Gag’s death last week. That, he said, is a change.
“For the past 18 months, we haven’t been able to actually hear from her directly,” Mook said. “And at one point, the advocacy community had a very direct line with the mayor. She was meeting with us pretty much monthly, and her team was meeting with us monthly. But that has stopped. And part of the asks that we have on the city is to restart the conversations directly with us to rebuild the trust of transparency. And it has only been a week, and we feel that that trust is being rebuilt.”
Mook says Wu has already made staffing and support moves within the city’s Streets Cabinet that are encouraging.
“We’re hearing from Boston Transportation Department staffers that they have been getting a very strong message from new leadership saying that ‘we got your back,’ which is not something that they felt for the past six months,” Mook said.
Moving forward on those 17 stalled projects is crucial, Mook said. And he’s hopeful that message has gotten to the mayor.
“I think she acknowledges that her administration has not done what she would have hoped it would have done to progress, to move forward with a lot of these projects,” he said.
