Sometimes, the best way to gather ideas and feedback is to let people draw on some maps. Last night, at the Bike Network Open House, pedallovers unveiled a draft for their upcoming plans for a more connected biking network infrastructure for Boston, thanks to the help of the fabulous talent at Toole Design. More sharrows, bike lanes, and a laid out system for easy commuting from point A to point B anywhere in Boston is in the works. For the generations of Boston bicycling advocates before me, I can imagine hearing news like this is the beginning of a dream come true.
I just arrived after work to catch the last twenty minutes of Q&A, so I didn’t catch the presentation. But when John from Toole Design came up to me with a pen and encouraged me to provide my own feedback, I happily obliged. I went right to the map of the area that’d become my home for the past five years: Boston University to add one suggestion in fat red marker I’ve had in my mind for years: Put a two-way cycletrack on Bay State Road.
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Sitting in a room overlooking the Charles river and Kenmore Square with members of BU administration at a BU Bike Safety Committee meeting several years ago, one committee member became very vocal about the dangers of driving down Bay State rd and dodging the very frequent, daily occurrence of bike salmon (wrong way riders) on Bay State Rd. We struggled with ideas on how to improve bicycling, and came to the conclusion that the chance of the city ever installing a contraflow bike lane on that road were slim. Education was key.
Bay State Road is easily the most scenic stretch of BU’s campus, where traffic is light, and where brownstone apartments lined with trees and wide sidewalks mirror Back Bay’s brownstones. Not surprisingly, it’s where daily BU college tour guides seduce high-school freshman and their families. If you were a BU student on a bicycle and your options of biking from the College of Arts and Sciences to the School of Management or Kenmore Classroom Building were
- Wait for the light to cross Comm. Ave, ride 2 blocks, dodging the BU bus, cars, taxis, swarms of pedestrians, then wait for another light to cross back over to Kenmore Classroom buildling/School of Management.
down the quiet and scenic Bay State Rd or the traffic-heavy or down the pedestrian packed Commonwealth Ave. to class, it’s a pretty clear choice which one I’d go with.
I had the
Bay State Road runs parallel to Commonwealth Ave, a major commuting vein for