Effect of quick-build bike lanes is questioned, with worries city is losing its unique character
Cambridge is known for being a special place to live and visit. It has unique shops you can’t find anywhere else, eclectic music venues, wonderful ethnic restaurants and proudly local cafes where you get your morning coffee.
Because of its uniqueness, Cambridge is largely a destination shopping city, and many businesses rely on out-of-town customers visiting by car to survive. Without community input from those affected, Cambridge officials unilaterally razed metered parking to install flexi-post bike lanes, making it difficult – or impossible – for many Cambridge residents and visitors to shop, dine or even go to the doctor. This ongoing removal of parking imperils our city’s diverse character and vital mix of residential and retail.
The city has the chance to right this wrong by stopping the implementation of quick-build bike lanes until officials can adequately study the potential impacts on the community – and most importantly, until they get input from stakeholders before making more changes to our roadways.
In previous years, Cambridge officials were mindful about providing the street parking that businesses rely on while also ensuring that commercial parking and traffic did not affect quiet, residential side streets. Those days, sadly, appear to be long gone. When rightfully indignant local shops sounded the alarm about how reduced parking was making business plummet – by 40 percent or more in some cases – the city’s response was to put some of the lost parking and loading areas on side streets. Now residential areas have lost valuable street parking and are seeing their neighborhoods filled with commercial traffic.
How did we get here? Before implementing the quick-build bike lanes, the city hired the Consensus Building Institute to assess the proposed projects. In January 2019, CBI made the following recommendation to the city: Conduct an analysis evaluating the impact of the quick-build projects on small businesses and form a stakeholders’ group to work and consult with city officials. Yet the city moved forward without taking this advice.
Later that year, the Community Development Department conducted a survey of businesses in Porter Square and Lower Massachusetts Avenue and found that 70 percent of those surveyed needed more parking to attract customers. Now, two and a half years later, as businesses try to recover from the Covid pandemic, the city is taking away the one thing businesses said they needed most. It is unclear why time and money were spent on conducting these assessments only to ignore the findings.
None of this makes any sense. You can’t have a vital mix of residential and business if you remove parking – because then existing businesses can’t survive. Driven by Covid, vacant storefronts in Cambridge are becoming more prevalent, and without customer parking, they will remain vacant or will be snatched up by corporate entities. This means small-business owners will be pushed out and Cambridge will soon be unrecognizable.
As a commercial property owner in Cambridge for more than 35 years, I have never seen a project of this magnitude be undertaken without the appropriate parking, traffic, safety, environmental and economic impact studies. Worse yet, affected residents, business owners, people with disabilities and seniors were not asked for input before officials started implementation.
Only under pressure in early 2022 did the City Council pass policy orders to form a Community Advisory Committee and conduct an economic impact analysis to inform its actions. Yet still, nothing has been done and the city pushes forward with implementation. All we get is a series of Zoom sessions in which each neighborhood gets a chance to “tweak” the plan that was mandated in the 2020 amendment to the Cycling Safety Ordinance passed during the early days of the pandemic. Citizens want real involvement in the overall plans, not a patronizing illusion of being consulted after the fact.
Nobody is against bicycle safety. But surely there must be a way to keep cyclists safe without wreaking havoc on the rest of the community. A vibrant blend of residences and commerce is being replaced with vacant storefronts and congested side streets. Businesses won’t be able to stay afloat without customer parking, and homeowners won’t have enough resident parking for themselves, let alone their visitors or service vehicles. Both commercial and residential properties will be devalued.
So let’s hit the brakes on implementation and save our city before it’s too late. Let’s do the studies and planning and include affected stakeholders in the process. Let’s get all citizens involved in the future of our city. We need a plan that works for all users of our streets and makes changes that the majority feel are for the better. Let’s build “smart,” not “quick.”
Sharon Cerny, Cambridge Streets for All
Sharon Cerny sits on the board of Cambridge Streets for All and has been a broker and property owner in Cambridge for more than 35 years. She is a strong champion for minority-owned small businesses in the Porter Square area.
The author is part of a lawsuit against the city, where they asked the city to rip out _every single protected bike lane in the city_ other than the one from the Charles River to Central Square. Every single one. That’s what their lawyer asked for in court.
We’ve just seen a Cambridge resident die biking in Boston, and a Somerville resident die biking just last week, because of bad infrastructure.
Ripping out the bike lanes would mean reverting to the dangerous conditions that will cause more deaths. The Somerville resident died due to dooring, which will once again be vastly more likely if the protected bike lanes are removed.
“No one is against bicycle safety” but you’re suing to make the roads vastly more dangerous?
The author’s tenant, Chalawan restaurant, converted some street parking into outdoor dining. Since Chalawan is only open in the evening, that means parking loss for all the author’s other tenants during the day.
Somehow this was fine and is not changing the city’s character or destroying those businesses, but adding bike lanes to save lives is a problem.
Also worth noting: the author’s building has a private, off-street parking lot. And it’s on a stretch of Mass Ave where the city will be spending a lot of money specifically to preserve more parking.
Here is the current situation: We have an efficient and practical means of transportation that emits no pollution, can save people thousands of dollars a year, enhances health, and also saves people time. But we have made our roads too dangerous to use it! This is a travesty, and every one should be upset about it.
Yes, cars are sometimes useful for some trips that might be hard to do by bicycle; that is a good reason to devote *some* space to them, but not to the near exclusion of bicycles.
And yes, if you are not willing to remove the minimum necessary amount of parking to achieve it, you *are* against bicycle safety. There isn’t some world where we preserve our excessive devotion to cars and car storage and also fix this problem.
I come away from this article committed to accelerating the change to safer streets. Cars as a primary mode of transit in a dense city like cambridge is unsafe and inefficient.
Some claims here don’t have any evidence backing them up:
“Cambridge is largely a destination shopping city”
“…reduced parking was making business plummet – by 40 percent or more in some cases…”
Provide some evidence (and on the second point, that it wasn’t the pandemic causing business to drop) and then maybe we can start this conversation. Without it, this is just reactionary nonsense.
It’s commendable that Cambridge Day makes room for the expression of opinions that almost nobody else shares.
So it would seem that as goes the country, so goes Cambridge. That we are living in times of unprecedented polarity is an understatement. The ironies of how this is playing out here are worth considering. Since the involvement of various community groups taking a stance against protected bike lanes has become more organized insisting that these policies side-stepped broader public participation and the unintended consequences of removing large swaths of on street parking along Mass Ave would disastrously impact local businesses the “bike lobby” has been extremely organized and vocal in there response, dominating social media and city council meetings. What I find objectionable though is the overriding self-righteousness and messianic zeal with which you attack those who have more legitimate beef with how things have rolled out. Do you not see how Trumpian you’ve become? Businesses having barely survived Covid now needing to deal with no parking for their customers? FAKE NEWS or “reactionary nonsense”. Businesses needing parking to be profitable?? Move elsewhere! (Want an abortion?? No bear the child and use drop boxes for safe havens…)You all have dissembled, spun and spoken with a hostility and loudness that would make Jim Jordan proud. Your underlying ‘biking is righteous, healthy, deals with climate change, will save your soul’ is evangelical in it’s hyperbole. Hey, it’s America and for the moment anyway free speech and thought still pre-dominate. But if it’s really a democracy where has the question of separated bike lanes been on the ballot. In fact I’d love to see a binding referendum on a City Ballot with two choices: a-continue implementation of separated bike lanes b- remove existing bike lanes until further study and discussion have been concluded. This would have the effect of discounting the many voices that come from non-Cambridge residents who frankly add nothing but rancor. I would also welcome a one on one debate with any of you on CCTV; this can follow a 30 mile ride, something I frequently do on the bike paths out to Lexington. Be happy to have you join.
There is *zero* evidence that the bike lanes hurt businesses. Perhaps it could be covid, inflation, increased cost of labor, or supply issues. Think before you write, dude. And back up your claims with evidence.
Most Cambridge shoppers do *not* arrive by car. Surveys show that Cambridge shoppers are more concerned about safe biking and improved mass transit than parking. The business owners who are clamoring for more parking don’t understand their own customer base.
The claim that people were not consulted by the city is also nonsense. There were multiple public meetings and delays as community feedback was addressed.
If you are not willing to make cycling safer and argue against it with lies and half-baked, unsupported, claims, you *are* against bicycle safety.
And it’s OK for you to remove parking for one of your tenants (Chalawan) but not OK to remove parking to save lives?
Arguing for “discounting the many [pro-bike] voices that come from non-Cambridge residents who frankly add nothing but rancor” is an interesting perspective.
Joe Lavins, a Lexington resident, died while biking in Cambridge on the way to work. The argument seems to be, though, that residents of other towns who bike through Cambridge to work or shop don’t count, shouldn’t be listened to, and don’t really deserve to be safe.
The op-ed, by Stu’s partner in the lawsuit, talks about “Cambridge is largely a destination shopping city, and many businesses rely on out-of-town customers visiting by car”.
So the message seems to be that if you drive from elsewhere, you matter, but if you bike from elsewhere, drop dead.
As someone who lives in Cambridge, I’d like to have a safe environment for everyone who comes here, not just drivers. But that’s just me.
I think when you’re comparing the city reallocating some public street space with a few hundred million people losing a constitutional right to abortion, you may have lost the plot.
I’m about 99% sure that “Stu” is an alias for a particular baker of gluten free goods in Porter square.
This is very misleading: “Later that year, the Community Development Department conducted a survey of businesses in Porter Square and Lower Massachusetts Avenue and found that 70 percent of those surveyed needed more parking to attract customers.”
This is only what the business owners *think*. Studies have shown that business owners vastly overestimate how much of their business depends on parking. Surveys of Cambridge *shoppers* show that they are more concerned about improving public transportation and bike safety. 2/3 of Cambridge shoppers do not use cars.
Business owners need to learn more about their customer base.
This piece is full of unsubstantiated claims and makes Cambridge sound like it’s the Burlington mall and not an old, dense city built before cars. We need a future that isn’t dependent on cars. Full stop. Prioritize people, the planet, and safety over your precious parking spots.
Bike lanes are good, I love riding in them. They also have trade offs for not bikers. Let’s not pretend they don’t. The city communication with stakeholders was objectively terrible. If so many residents and small businesses were blindsided by the lanes until construction began, the city did something wrong in their studies by not studying and interviewing those folks. Thats just a fact. While I’m in favor of new lanes, the city (and many individuals on all sides) could have chosen to truly build consensus and compromises that led to less community division.
Pro bike people are not serious about bike safety until several major problems are rectified.
#1 Bicycle helmets are required.
#2 All traffic laws pertaining to bicycles must be followed. No more going through red lights, stop signs, must yield to right of way cars.
#3 Bicycles must yield to pedestrians. Please don’t tell me that happens now.
Author clarification:
“The 40% number was arrived at thru an informal survey of business owners since we were still waiting for the city to hire a consultant (as promised) to do a formal economic impact assessment of the bike lanes”.
@myplanb Everyone needs to follow the rules.
But drivers should focus on their own misbehavior.
Drivers don’t follow the rules. They run red lights, roll through stop signs, speed, talk on the phone, and do not yield to pedestrians.
Take, for example, this poor elderly man who was nearly hit twice by cars over two days.
https://www.cambridgeday.com/2022/08/25/dangerous-crossing-look-out-for-pedestrians/
Cars do far more damage. >90% of pedestrian injuries and virtually 100% of pedestrian deaths are because of cars, not bikes. Look it up.
Traffic calming measures like bike lanes improve safety for pedestrians not just cyclists.
@q99 The city’s communication was not terrible.
There were multiple notifications, multiple public meetings, and delays to implement feedback from the community. If people choose to ignore all that, they can’t claim to be “blindsided” later.
@myplanb
Let’s follow your logic. Because *some* cyclists are reckless and don’t wear helmets etc, *all* of them should have to risk their lives?
There are reckless drivers too. Should we remove all safety features from all cars (seat belts, airbags etc] because some drivers seem unconcerned with safety?