I live in Somerville, MA. It’s a dense city of 81,000 packed into just 4 square miles that borders Boston and Cambridge. Like a lot of urban areas across the country, we’re having big debates over bike lanes. There’s a huge push for them in the name of fighting climate change. I get that, but speaking as both a biker and a driver, I believe the movement has gone too far.
First, a bit of context. Our city is going through its own version of the “Big Dig”. Due mainly to a rapid transit project called the GLX (short for Green Line Extension), there are numerous long-term bridge and road closures all over our city. Even before these closures, we have in recent years been dealing with a spike in traffic due to the usual suspects:
- new housing developments
- Uber/Lyft ride-share services
- Amazon delivery vehicles
The bridge and road closures only made a bad situation worse. The Broadway bridge near my house closed last March for an entire year. That pushed hundreds of cars and city buses directly onto the streets that run through our immediate neighborhood. Every morning and evening, the traffic turns our streets into parking lots, to the point where exiting our block requires the kindness of other drivers to let you in. I mentioned I live in Boston, right?
Now let’s see, what could make our lives even more painful… give up? Cutting lanes of course! That’s exactly what happened on Broadway, the main thoroughfare through my wider neighborhood of Winter Hill. Broadway is one of those old-school Boston roads that’s wider than one lane but was never marked for two. We used to have more of them. Somerville Ave. used to be like that. They’re a dying breed. I call driving down Broadway “the waltz”. Traffic moves in a very organic way that’s akin to driving in foreign country. I always joke with out-of-towners that driving in Boston is the closest you’ll get to driving in India. It’s always a thrill and despite what people say about Masshole drivers, we know how to get where we’re going.
Winter Hill is a neighborhood that is changing fast as Somerville becomes more gentrified. It’s still a neighborhood of nail salons, sub shops, liquor stores, and Desi markets. But with proposals like a huge 200-unit development on the horizon, everyone realizes that the old Winter Hill has its days numbered. The writing on the wall is definitely this lane reduction being imposed on Broadway. The powers-that-be decided it would be a good idea to cut Broadway down to one lane, move parking into the street for a protected bike lane in some sections, while other sections now have a wide combo bus/bike lane that mostly sits empty.

Now I don’t want to talk about all the reasons why I think this project was logistically a bad idea. For that, read longtime resident Arthur Moore’s petition about it. On many days, he’s standing out on Broadway with his picket sign and can tell you all about the safety issues, confusing layouts, and massive congestion that have resulted from this project. No, what I’d like to talk about is a larger issue in my mind: How did bike lanes become such a wedge issue among anti-gentrifiers?
Take a look at this article from CityLab about the bike lane debacle in Baltimore. There was massive backlash against them due to the pain they inflicted on long-time city residents, to the point where many of the new lanes were quickly removed. Many people-of-color look at bike lanes with dread because they are a sure sign of turnover in neighborhoods. And it’s not as if bikes were completely alien to these neighborhoods; people just used them without requiring special lanes.
Similar sentiments are being felt in Winter Hill, where some long-time residents feel like these bike lanes are not intended for them. I talked to a number of small business owners along Broadway who are upset that the original plans called for little to no parking changes, but then the planners changed their minds and removed huge swaths of street parking. If you are a small business owner whose livelihood is under constant threat by tech disruption (Amazon and the like), and you rely on metered spots for your customers, the bike lane feels like a slap in the face. Many of these businesses are minority-owned and already feel like outsiders in political processes. We should be doing more to help these businesses survive.
The clearest sign that our new lanes are so bluntly a harbinger of gentrification is where they begin (or end, depending on your perspective). McGrath Highway is the de facto line between Central Somerville and East Somerville, the last bastion of truly ungentrified Somerville. Driving from East to Central, you’re confronted by a strange merge at the start of the new lane. There might as well be a sign reading, “Welcome to Gentri-ville”. Everyone is expecting the new lane to jump the highway someday soon, which means that East Somerville’s days are numbered too.

We have a municipal election coming up. The progressive incumbent for mayor checks all the boxes that progressives like. Sanctuary city, check. Black Lives Matter banner, check. The underdog challenger also checks a number of boxes for progressives: Advocacy for unions, check. Fighting against developers, check. But what is clear from this transit-oriented survey is that the challenger is lukewarm about bike lanes. That puts progressives in a pickle. It’s clear that the challenger is not anti-bike lane, but more in favor of a gradual transition with more community input.
That’s something we need to figure out as progressives. There’s a lot of debate right now about whether bike lanes are a sign of gentrification and privilege. On the other hand, I hear a lot bikers dismiss car ownership as a sign of privilege. That puzzles a lot of people living in Winter Hill. I can tell you that from the brand, age, and condition of cars parked in Winter Hill, these are not signs of privilege. “Tesla-ville” it is not.
I’d like to propose a truce between bike riders and long-time city residents. We need to figure out how to come together. There is a middle-ground between no biking infrastructure and using biking infrastructure as a sledgehammer against cars: incremental bike lane introduction… modest lanes with sharrows. If that’s not enough, the evidence will be clear when they are not sitting empty. Then we can take the next step. The same goes for bus lanes. Wait until there are more frequent buses that are actually being used at capacity (which they definitely are not currently) before dedicating a lane. With our limited resources, premature optimization helps no one. It just turns people against one another.
Finally, I’ll throw one more item on my wish list: if you truly care about public transit, how about mass transit for kids? We used to call them “school buses”. (Smirk) That’d be a win-win on reducing traffic and me not wanting to shoot myself every morning driving our kids to school.
We will find a way to do this the right way.
