Dozens of frustrated residents blasted Mayor Michelle Wu in a hearing Wednesday over stalled transportation projects they say would make public streets safer.
The Boston City Council’s Committee on Planning, Development and Transportation, chaired by District 8 Councilor Sharon Durkan, held an oversight hearing focused on projects that have paused for more than a year and without updates on their progress.
“A year of paused bike lane projects and silence is unacceptable,” said Matthias Iris Remillard, who identified himself as a former Wu campaign volunteer who voted for the mayor twice, then moved to Somerville.
“She wanted people to be able to get around safely on bikes, and that’s something I’m really about,” said Remillard. “And now I feel profoundly foolish and angry that I voted for Mayor Wu in the last election. I might as well have voted for Josh Kraft because she’s implementing his anti-bike lane agenda now anyway.”
The hours-long hearing comes more than a month after the Boston Globe reported that Mayor Michelle Wu last year began requiring most transit and road safety projects to get her personal approval before proceeding. Anonymous past and present city employees told the Globe that had stunted multiple plans and put hundreds of millions of funding dollars at risk.
“The consequences of this pause are measured in crashes, not quarterly reports,” said Elijah Evans, CEO of the transportation equity nonprofit Bikes Not Bombs.
The city crash-tracking dashboard shows there were 3,407 crashes, nine of them fatal, since Jan. 1, 2025. The dashboard does not show any for the year 2026.
Evans and about 50 others shared stories of narrowly avoided accidents, and called on the administration to provide status reports about each paused project.
“Every day of inaction is a day that federal and state dollars slip through our fingers, or get transferred to another project. It’s a day a cyclist is endangered, a day of disabled residents is stranded,” said Tiffany Cogell, executive director of the Boston Cyclists Union.
“We are calling on the city to stop treating transparency as optional and start treating mobility justice as the urgent obligation that it is.”
Last year, while facing criticism over bike and bus lanes from Josh Kraft during the early half of her reelection campaign, Wu implemented a 30-day review of all infrastructure changes. In Wednesday’s hearing, many expressed frustration that the decision evolved into the current standstill on much-needed safety projects.
Some said they felt misled by Wu, who had made multimodal transportation one of her signature political issues.
“Like others have said, I also feel betrayed by voting for Mayor Wu,” said Ben Crowther, a resident along the Roslindale-West Roxbury line and member of the Longfellow Area Neighborhood Association Board. “The lack of meaningful progress since March of 2025 on safe streets is incredibly problematic, especially without any clear explanation for the lack of updates.”
John Saylor, a father of an 11-month-old and resident of Jamaica Plain’s Boynton Street, agreed.
“I think this is maybe the unprecedented situation for an administration to win a landslide election like this and immediately adopt the policies of their opponent,” said Saylor to chuckles across the chamber. “It was, frankly, quite surprising.”
Nick Gove, the city’s interim streets chief, testified for nearly an hour before the hearing opened to public testimony. Prompted by a question from Council President Liz Breadon, Gove vowed to produce a comprehensive list of all the city’s street safety projects featuring state and federal money. Mohammed Missouri, executive director of the Office of Neighborhood Services, also testified.
Hours before the hearing, Wu published a press release describing seven “significant safety and reconstruction projects” set to kick off the year’s construction season.
District 6 Councilor Ben Weber and others said they were disappointed that they could not be more forthcoming with constituents about the status of other projects within their districts.
“I feel like we’ve had a year to plan, where everything has been stopped from my perspective, and now is the time to come out with the plan,” said Weber. “It’s up to us to pick that up and make our constituents’ voices heard, but right now, it’s like that arena doesn’t even exist,” he continued. “And, I thank you for coming here and for presenting that, I think it’s a really show of good faith, but I was hoping for something a little more,” he said to Gove and Missouri.
Durkan, who is considered one of the mayor’s council allies, emphasized data in her remarks.
“I feel very mixed about this because the conversation about process is one that is complicated,” said Durkan, describing a need for data to drive which projects are prioritized “so it’s not simply about one person [having] an inkling that on their street, they need safety.”
“I’m looking around and I so appreciate the individual residents who want action on their specific street, but I also think that it’s important that we look at the data because we’ve proven that community engagement brings certain voices to the table,” she said. “But there are also people that deeply need their roads to be slowed down that aren’t going to have time to be here and aren’t going to have time to be in City Hall.”
