The nonlinear path of biking in Boston

I moved to Cambridge in 2003 expecting to get around by bicycle. It’s how I lived: I’d sped to classes in college, risked irritating grizzly bears on Alaskan trails, even shipped my weather-beaten Univega to Indonesia the year I spent studying shadow puppetry.

The Boston area, and especially my family’s initial neighborhood of Inman Square, stopped me short. Many bikers braved it, but amid the chaos and driver attitude, I backed off. I was father to two young sons by then, one a newborn. My children needed a father. It was thin satisfaction to learn that my instincts were spot on: from 2002 to 2009, Inman Square recorded the highest number of bike crashes in the state. Between 1996 and 2006, Bicycling magazine repeatedly ranked Boston one of the worst cities for biking in the United States.

Jump ahead some 22 years and the picture could not be more different. Cambridge is ranked second in the nation for cycling, Boston in the top five. As bicycle infrastructure gets built out, everyone on the roads gets safer – drivers, pedestrians and cyclists alike. I’ve long since shifted happily to two wheels, as has my oldest son, now living in Brookline and biking to his first adult job downtown. Twice last week I pedaled near our old neighborhood of Inman Square, once via Beacon Street’s friendly green physically separated bike lanes and once via Somerville’s newly completed Community Path, out-hustling the T and rising at some points far above street level to take in the Boston skyline. 

A true joy.

All for the better, right? If only. 

Progress, meet backlash. Anger over bike lanes flashes white hot in Boston, with mayoral opponent Josh Kraft trying to ride the dissatisfaction into office. Mayor Michelle Wu, sensing risk in this fall’s election, has overseen a rollback. Business and resident rage over lost street parking in Cambridge has led to design and implementation delays. Few subjects generate more vitriol in city planning meetings and in local opinion pages, including this one.

You might assume that as a cyclist and writer on environmental issues, I’m here to condemn the backlash. Quite the contrary: Even when I find the tone counterproductive, I can validate some of the pain behind it. My family now lives in North Cambridge, and when I’m behind the wheel, I frequently gnash my teeth at the rush-hour parking lot Massachusetts Avenue has become, now that a single lane is available each way for cars. Lack of parking has caused me to give up on local errands more often than I care to admit. 

This is why you ride a mile in a fellow citizen’s vehicle: to learn empathy. On a bike, I’m grateful for every bit of paint, every pylon and especially every separated lane. In a car? I stew at what feels like narrowed horizons.

Conversations with key people helped me better understand Cambridge’s transformation, the growing pains we’re experiencing alongside it – and the long-term hope. 

First: Cambridge’s transformation truly has been extraordinary, and deliberate. In the 1970s and 1980s, Boston-area traffic congestion led to Environmental Protection Agency lawsuits on air quality. Cambridge responded with the 1992 Vehicle Trip Reduction Ordinance, a comprehensive approach to reducing the number of cars on the road by emphasizing mass transit and bikes. Even in the early stages, this helped decouple growth and cars. Areas such as Kendall Square gained 4 million square feet of residential and office development between 2000 and 2010 – and over that same decade, saw car traffic decrease 14 percent.

You can get only so many people to bike, though, if biking means risking life and limb. Witness: me. Studies consistently show the existence of a large reservoir of people who wish to be on two wheels, but don’t yet feel safe enough to do so. 

Enter Cara Seiderman, who served as Cambridge’s transportation program manager for nearly 35 years, just stepping down in 2025. She was newly on staff as an associate when the Vehicle Trip Reduction Ordinance passed in 1992, and by fortunate coincidence had the perfect resume – planning and landscape architecture at the University of California at Berkeley, Fulbright fellow in Copenhagen – to head up Cambridge’s just-forming bicycle program. Bicycle lanes began to roll out, just paint at first, here or there, but she’d learned the lessons that had transformed Copenhagen from a medium-sized, car-centered city into one of Europe’s most vibrant capitals: Create enticing public spaces that focus on people rather than vehicles. This includes installing networks of physically separated lanes that get pedestrians and bike-riders and scooter-scooterers safely where they need to go. The long-term goal was to shape Cambridge into a place where streets held more people, more happily. Studies (and Denmark, and Amsterdam, and more recently, Paris) showed what would result. Density accompanied by greater safety, health, and – in contradiction of the fears of store owners over loss of parking – richness of local shopping. 

Some long-term visions are just too long-term, though. Bicycle ridership went up – a graph published by the city shows a quadrupling of people bicycling on city streets since 2002, with upward of 9 percent of commuters on two wheels by 2023 – but the safety and connectedness of streets moved along more slowly. Cambridge’s original vision was to build separated cycling lanes as the opportunity naturally arose, when streets were due for rebuilds. “But major streets get reconstructed on average only once every 50 to 75 years,” Brooke McKenna, Cambridge’s transportation commissioner, told me. Cyclist deaths in 2016 spurred greater urgency, including one that especially chilled me: Amanda Phillips, just 27 years old, was doored and run over by a truck in my old neighborhood of Inman Square.

The city adopted a Cycling Safety Ordinance in 2019 that was the first of its kind in the U.S. It mandated timelines and “quick-build” infrastructure – plastic pylons, colored paint – along priority corridors such as Hampshire, Broadway and my stretch of Northern Massachusetts Avenue. 

A supporter’s letter to this paper in 2023 hailed the ordinance as a “game changer,” noting a doubled pace of construction of separated lanes. But along with the praise came sharper negative reactions. Quick-build, McKenna noted, meant residents’ streets could transform to new patterns literally overnight, instead of emerging after weeks or months of construction to give people time to get used to the changes. And while the ordinance involved plentiful opportunities for community feedback, the scope of adjustments was limited: Separated lanes were going to go in, and the only question was how to apportion the parking and travel impacts. 

All might still have gone more smoothly were it not for Covid. The pandemic’s shutdowns hit just after the cycling ordinance passed, the two disruptions unfolding simultaneously. Businesses were unable to tell when dramatic decreases in customers were coming from the societywide impacts of the virus, or local impacts to traffic and parking. Along Massachusetts Avenue’s freshly dedicated bus lanes, MBTA service, instead of speeding up as intended, grew more intermittent as the pandemic devastated revenues. Chris Cassa, an organizer with the advocacy group Cambridge Bicycle Safety, admitted that even as he admired the city going through with the Massachusetts Avenue plan, he dreaded the backlash he feared it would generate. 

About that backlash, and its sometimes panicky and bitter tone. All of us – agents of change, and leaders of resistance alike – are prone to what’s called the linear projection fallacy, the assumption that current trends will continue forever. In the grip of it, we react with panic or despair: activists, that society can never change; resistors, that change, once rolling, will crush them beneath its wheels. 

Take away the linear projection fallacy, and you take much of the sting out of change in a democratic society. What you see instead is dialogue. Transformations such as the shift toward bicycle commuting proceed in one direction only until competing interests organize and push back. Progress then does not cease; it becomes more complex, branching in multiple directions until policy and practice deliver, if not the perfect world we dream of, the good-enough version of what competing groups need. 

Take Fast Phil’s, the barbershop down the street from me. In 2021, in the wake of Northern Massachusetts Avenue’s quick-build makeover, it would be fair to describe owner Phil Soccorso and stylist Cindy Hughes as running around with their hair on fire, staring down what they feared would be the end of their business. Phil stood outside the shop flagging passersby to sign petitions, and I felt a bit of guilt cycling by in the new lane, knowing their grief. Not only have my children and I, as the official shop T-shirts put it, “gotten buzzed at Fast Phil’s,” I owe a debt of gratitude to Cindy for rescuing my aging dog when she wandered loose.

Yesterday I passed Phil as he basked in sunshine outside his shop, his distinctive Rod-Stewart-style blonde mane glowing in a more peaceful way. Still worried? I asked. “Nah, people find a way to get here,” he said. A city-installed handicap-accessible spot helped seniors come for the affordable haircuts; corner and bus lane parking helped others. He was so unworried, he hadn’t bothered to look at the latest plans for improving on the Covid era’s quick-build with a redesign of Northern Mass Avenue. 

Cambridge is still congested, but it’s ever more safely biked. Inman Square took multiple rounds of consultations and rebuilds, but now, Brooke McKenna noted, the intersection of Hampshire and Cambridge streets has been divided into two separate exchanges, substantially taming it for people bicycling, people walking and people driving alike. More than one person I interviewed for this article said they’d noticed seemingly impossible improvements take place. One business owner shook his head in wonder that at the other end of Massachusetts Avenue, the bridge into Boston, “they’ve narrowed it down to one lane each way, but you still get through faster than you used to.” 

Of course, it’s not one lane each way. When we think of traffic as only cars, we miss all the people newly on bicycles and on foot and in buses and trains, each taking up vastly less space (and emitting less carbon and particulate pollution) than single-occupancy, living-room-sized SUVs. “If people have a real choice to walk, cycle and transit comfortably and safely,” Seiderman points out, “there will actually be more room for those who do need to drive.” 

Cambridge, and the whole Boston area, got diagnosed nearly 50 years ago with arterial blockage. Keep gaining density if you’d like – but that car habit is going to kill you. We responded with transit, with bicycles, with a view toward world-class reinvention of our streets. We’ll get there together. That sound humming in the background? It’s the democratic process, and it’s powered by our own legs.

Greg Harris is the founding editor of the literary magazine Pangyrus and the founder and co-director of Harvard LITfest. His essays, reviews, and stories have appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard Review, Jewish Fiction, Earth Island Journal and elsewhere.

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