Bumpy ride
Once rated the least bike-friendly city in America, Boston promised it would change. But five years later, bicyclists find it's still a . . .
In 1999, Bicycling Magazine labeled Boston the least bicycle friendly city in the country.
That same year, Mayor Thomas Menino made a public commitment to improve life for Boston cyclists. He appointed a Bicycle Advisory Committee, and it came up with a plan, which included extending bike paths and making Boston's notoriously perilous streets more welcoming to cyclists.
Then the city hired a bike czar to help get it all done.
Five years later, the bike committee is history, the bike czar was axed under budget cuts, and progress on bike plan goals has been slow. Many cyclists say Boston has the potential to be a great biking city, maybe one of the greatest in the country, due to its compact size, young population, and urban parklands. But more city leadership is needed to make it happen. The initiative, they say, has too often been left to others. Local officials respond that the city is still playing an important role and getting things done to make Boston more bike-friendly.
There seemed only one way to look into the state of biking in Boston: on two wheels.
Forging a pathIt's a bright, late summer morning when I meet Doug Mink, 53, of the bicycle advocacy group MassBike, at the Forest Hills T stop in Jamaica Plain. A headlamp sticks off the front of his helmet, a ponytail hangs out the back. By his side is a tandem bike, the rear seat awaiting me. A sticker on its frame reads, ''One Less Car."
We head down the Arborway and into Franklin Park, embarking on a version of the 30-mile ride Mink will lead today. Today's ride will be part of the AltWheels Festival in Brookline, which will feature workshops and demonstrations of alternatives to the internal combustion engine. The ride will include a new path being constructed along the Neponset River on Boston's southern edge. Two major bike routes (the Emerald Necklace paths and the Southwest Corridor path paralleling the Orange Line) converge at the Forest Hills T stop.
But biking to the Neponset takes a little creativity.
We wind our way through Franklin Park and exit onto the busy American Legion Highway. Mink steers us along the edge of the road's right lane, which is very wide and accommodating for bikes, although there are no designated bike lanes. Boston roads, unlike those in neighboring Cambridge, have almost no such lanes, the wisdom of which is debated in biking circles. Some say bike lanes make motorists more aware and accepting of bicyclists. Other cyclists argue that bike lanes are often too close to ''the door zone" of parked cars, cause cyclists to let their guard down, and foster the notion that there are car lanes and then there are bike lanes.
''I think bikes are safer if they act like cars, and the bike lanes make drivers think that's where bikes should always be," comments Jeff Miller, 32, who bikes about 14 miles round trip every day between his home in Watertown and job in Charlestown.
Unmet potentialAfter turning left onto Morton Street, Mink and I skirt through the parking lot of the Boston Nature Center, past the wildflowers, tall grasses, and old brick buildings of the state hospital that once operated here. We emerge onto Walk Hill Street, which leads to Mattapan and the Neponset.
''Bikes never really got built into the system," says Mink of his days on the Boston Bicycle Committee. He gives examples. ''We couldn't get the city to tell us when they were doing roadway redesigns so we could check to see whether they were accommodating bicycles. We couldn't get the city to put up any 'share the road' signs."
Referring to those signs, Vineet Gupta, director of policy and planning for the Boston Transportation Department, says, ''we're still pursuing the idea. We haven't abandoned it." Gupta maintains that the city has recently taken additional steps to build bikes into the system. For instance, in the past year, the city formalized a requirement that commercial developers install a bike parking rack for every 10 parking spaces and that residential developers install a rack for every three dwelling units.
Boston's potential to be a great biking town is enormous, many bike advocates say. For one thing, the city is relatively flat and compact. It also contains long stretches of waterfront and parkland, much of which was designed by the legendary urban planner Frederick Law Olmsted and envisioned as a continuous metropolitan greenspace network by Charles Eliot, the 19th-century landscape architect. And finally, it has a young and health-conscious population, who as the overstuffed bike racks at T stops indicate, eagerly utilize those biking facilities that do exist.
''The periphery is very good," says Mink of the bike paths and parks along the city's edges. ''Some of the views are so beautiful, and I actually think people don't know how much there is."
After a few more turns, Mink and I reach the Neponset, and the terminus of the MBTA's trolley that runs up to the Ashmont Red Line stop. A map in the Boston Bicycle Plan shows the trail eventually running by here, and miles beyond, to the Blue Hills Reservation in Milton. For now, though, we head along River Street to Central Avenue and over a bridge to find the trail alongside the trolley line.
As we near the river's mouth, we pass colorful murals on underpasses -- larger-than-life fireflies, marsh birds, bike riders. Every year a new mural is painted by teenagers in a summer works program sponsored by the Boston Natural Areas Network, the group spearheading the creation of the 6-mile Neponset River Greenway, a little less than half of which was completed in the fall of 2002.
On each mural is a long list of funding sources. ''You really get a sense of how government works in the nitty-gritty when you get involved in this stuff," says Mink.
The cost of bike paths vary. Besides land purchases, many paths follow old railroad right-of-ways that must be decontaminated before construction. The 2.5 miles of the Neponset trail completed so far have been on the high end largely due to the cost of cleaning contaminated soil, about $1 million per mile, according to Valerie Burns, president of the network group. Federal funding only flows after organizers have secured a 20 percent match of local and state funding. Mink says that while the city and state have helped negotiate land acquisition and funding applications, the sustained initiative and leadership needed to create and improve bike paths in Boston is almost always dependent on citizens groups.
We pass beside the river's marshland and watch a cormorant down a small fish. After riding through Pope John Paul II Park, we head under the Neponset River Bridge and another railroad bridge. And suddenly, the river widens and shows the harbor beyond. The Boston skyline hovers in the distance. Directly in front of us are the pilings of an old fishing pier and a dead barge with a gull perched on a large, rusty cleat. We have to detour through the quiet neighborhood of Port Norfolk to reach another path along Tenean Beach and then must detour again onto city streets to continue our journey north.
After we merge onto Morrissey Boulevard, a rush of cars and trucks streams by, and Mink points to an approaching ramp from I-93 North.
''It's sort of a blind intersection," says Mink as he glances over. ''Cars are zooming down the off-ramp, and if you're coming along on a bicycle, it's sort of tricky."
Along that same stretch of road, a car sits facing the wrong way, surrounded by shards from its shattered windshield. Its front end has been flattened. The traffic eases its way past the wreck.
Still, Mink and other bicycle advocates argue that bicycling in city traffic isn't nearly as dangerous as most Bostonians fear. ''Boston traffic generally doesn't move very fast," he says.
Although many bikers are nervous about cars and trucks speeding by, Mink says most collisions occur when people open doors of parked cars, or when motorists pull out of driveways or make turns at intersections without checking for approaching bikes.
Other bicyclists, however, think riding in Boston's traffic deserves its dangerous reputation.
Cyclists need to ''wear a helmet, observe the rules of the road, and be on a high state of alert to sudden and dangerous actions by motorists," advises Robert Rosofsky, 52, an avid biker from Milton.
Linda Epstein, 44, who bikes 14 miles from her home in Arlington Heights to work in Kendall Square, puts things more bluntly: ''You should ride like everyone is out to kill you."
Of course, cyclists who think the rules of the road don't apply to bikes also cause a lot of accidents.
''Cyclists in Boston are as much to blame as motorists," Epstein adds, by ''running red lights, riding the wrong way down one-way streets and on busy sidewalks."
Connecting the dotsWhen Mink and I reach the edge of the UMass Boston campus, we head out toward Columbia Point along the Harbor Path. The trail is marked by an occasional clam shell dropped by a gull, along with plaques telling of Boston's shipwrecks, ''flounder facts," and the fairytale, ''The Fisherman and His Wife."
But once around Columbia Point, the path ends, and we have to ride over 100 feet of grass until we reach a stretch of crushed stone that eventually rejoins a paved path at the Harbor Point Apartments. The little gap, like the trail gap before it along the waterfront, is indicative of what's lacking in Boston's bike path network: connectivity.
For instance, Mink would like to see the city follow up its one-time plan to build a boardwalk alongside the expressway near the
The Boston bike plan calls for the envisioned South Bay Harbor Trail to supply a good dose of path connectivity. Plans call for a fishhook-shaped path stretching more than 3 miles from the Southwest Corridor path across Roxbury and the South End and up alongside a redeveloped Fort Point Channel to the South Boston seaport.
According to the Transportation Department's Gupta, over the past few years the city has focused on negotiating the route of the South Bay Harbor Trail as it weaves its way across town through a maze of public and private land. Like most trails built these days, it will be a mixed-use path, meant to accommodate pedestrians and cyclists.
As Fort Point Channel is redeveloped, parcel by parcel, quips Bruce Berman of Save the Harbor Save the Bay, a harbor advocacy group working on the trail, ''there's probably not going to be one big ribbon-cutting on the South Bay Harbor Trail, there's probably going to be 25 ribbon cuttings."
Connectivity has also been the focus of Somerville's bike path planners and their efforts to extend the Somerville ''community path," a mixed-use bike and pedestrian path that runs a short distance from Davis Square along a defunct railroad right-of-way. The plan is to continue the path across town, using a series of railroad right-of-ways, all the way to the Lechmere T station.
''Bike and pedestrian paths will not only lead to improvements in the health of the people in our communities and to fewer cars on our roads, but they will also be great economic catalysts for the community," says Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone, who has also championed efforts to link bike trails along the Mystic River. ''People are excited to live near bike paths and to use the paths. It's an attraction for people and businesses to move here."
This may be especially true if forecasts by the Boston Metropolitan Planning Organization of the region's growing traffic snarls hold true. In a recent report, the organization predicted that within 20 years, there would be about 1 million more vehicle trips every day clogging up Massachusetts roadways, an increase of 10 percent from current levels.
Hub could be a contenderBack in Boston, Mink and I make our way to Melnea Cass Boulevard and the deteriorating bike path that runs alongside it, which will be reconstructed to form the western end of the South Bay Harbor Trail. Grass sprouts through cracks in this skinny, littered, and buckled path. One large bump feels like a paved-over
''This basically hasn't been touched since it was put in," says Mink as we bounce along. ''And bike paths don't last forever."
Fortunately, we soon reach the Southwest Corridor. After a short distance, though, we have to leave the path again for city streets to reach the Fenway and the paths of the Emerald Necklace. More path gaps appear as we head south along the algae-slick stillness of the Muddy River, including one on the Brookline side a few blocks before the Route 9 crossing, which also lacks either a traffic signal or a crosswalk.
To fix these problems, says, Mink, ''We need leadership from government. Because there's always opposition if anything extra has to be done to accommodate bikes, whether it's just spending money or taking roadway away from cars."
His sentiments are echoed by Paul Schimek, Boston's former bike and pedestrian coordinator who was laid off a year ago.
Schimek says he suggested several measures that were much cheaper than bike paths, such as wider lane standards for major streets, share-the-road signs, and a bicycle enforcement pilot program for police, but made very little headway.
His major accomplishment during his two years in city government was the installation of about 235 bike parking racks around town.
''The point is not that the city hasn't done this, this, and this," says Schimek. ''Boston doesn't need to do that much. But the little things they can do, they really should."
One of those little things, says Mink, is to reestablish the bicycle-pedestrian coordinator position.
''You need somebody with the city that looks after bikes and pedestrians -- a person that really does just that, that looks across the different parts of transportation and planning, construction, and public works, too."
As we enter the Arboretum, Mink leads us up a 150-foot incline to Bussey Hill. ''This is what my doctor calls my daily stress test," he jokes as my legs turn to jelly.
After we coast down the other side and return to the Forest Hills station, Mink leaves me with this thought: ''Boston's not a bad place to ride," he says, ''but it could be the best place in the world."
For more information on the AltWheels Festival in Brookline see www.altwheels.org.
