u/axlekb

>If you spend any time in Franklin County, you start to notice something that rarely gets mentioned when people talk about life in rural New England: a lot of people here don’t drive. You see it in Greenfield early in the morning, when the FRTA buses begin their loops and riders gather at the transit center. You see it in Northampton, where PVTA buses at the Academy of Music pile on students, workers, and older adults across the river or up Routes 5&10. And you see it in North Adams, where a surprising number of households don’t have a car at all. We imagine this part of the state as a place where everyone has a vehicle in the driveway. The truth is different. Because all of the people I know have cars, I have rarely given fair thought to those without. But let’s dig deeper, with a bit of empathy, because people suffer from not having cars; it makes life much harder.

While Main Street always had “good bones,” none of these additions would have occurred without the renovation, Sink argued. 

June 26, 2026: “Ever since the last redo, there’s more people, more young people, especially in the evening, eating outside,” said Taranow. “It used to be a place where people came to work and go home. Now, it’s not. If you sit outside at nine o’clock on a Friday night, there are people walking by constantly. That was never the way it was.”

Genuine question because there are some horrible 4 way stops in Northampton that could really benefit from a roundabout. Amherst seems to put in new roundabouts on a weekly basis so I’m just curious what it would cost, as I assume cost is the limiting factor?

Prime candidates are the intersection of 66 and West Farms / Glendale (not a 4 way but should be for safety), Burts Pit and Florence Rd, and of course Prospect and Jackson / Woodlawn. They did the one at Look Park so it can be done! Just genuinely curious why we don’t have more especially given the safety risk.

"Mike Roeger has spent long stretches of his life getting by without a car.

Growing up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Roeger and his nine siblings often had to bike, walk or catch rides with friends because the family shared one car. Roeger regularly trekked nearly two miles to high school. Even his dad would walk 45 minutes each way to work. It set an example for Roeger that he carried into adulthood.

“It’s important for people to be able to get around without driving,” he says.

SOMERVILLE — Chelsea Quenneville can still recall Union Square as it was a decade ago: a chaotic crossing with cars and bikes barreling along four lanes of Somerville Avenue — a virtual “free for all.”

But on Monday, she sat at a shaded outdoor table in a commercial hub transformed. Traffic was restricted to one lane in either direction, slowed by concrete refuge islands. Pedestrians walked along a raised crosswalk adorned with flashing lights. Down the block, there were new cutouts for drop-off zones, handicap parking, and an extended curb that bulged 10 feet into Walnut Street.

“It should be like this,” Quenneville said.

Union Square is but one of the busy places Somerville has sought to make safer for pedestrians, motorists, and cyclists alike. Its efforts yielded results almost unheard of in any urban area, much less the most densely populated city in New England: No one has died in a traffic collision on Somerville streets for four years.

“Somerville has done a great job taking advantage of every opportunity that arises,” said Brendan Kearney, executive director of the pedestrian advocacy group WalkMassachusetts. “It’s an exercise in not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

While other communities in Massachusetts have had to confront traffic deaths, from highway drivers to cyclists, serious crashes in Somerville dropped by 50 percent in 2025 from the year before.

Three other Massachusetts cities, including Boston, subscribe to a policy called Vision Zero that incorporates traffic controls and street designs to eliminate roadway fatalities completely. Only in Somerville has that become a reality.

City officials have installed 139 striped speed humps on busy corridors since 2019. Chaotic traffic circles are slathered with flex posts and stop signs. Flowerbeds and large landscape planters provide a shield for some bike paths from adjacent car traffic.

It took a “whole of government approach,” said Somerville director of mobility Brad Rawson.

Drivers are speeding less, city studies show, in part because road safety furniture and new laws have made it near impossible to drive fast. Moreover, Somerville has been able to achieve this without significantly stepping up enforcement against speeding and distracted driving.

Instead, Rawson and his colleagues assist with larger safety redesigns to major corridors operated by state officials, such as an impending makeover of McGrath Highway, and focus much of their time on smaller, discrete traffic measures on city-controlled streets. That spans everything from painting hundreds of yield triangles on roads to installing street signs in braille.

Preventative traffic measures do require more people and more money. Just the 21-mile expansion of separated bike lanes is projected to cost nearly $10 million in the next four years, according to a city report. Since 2018, Somerville has added more than a dozen people to its mobility, engineering, parking, and public works staffs, who together paper neighborhood sidewalks with fliers, field 311 calls, and host safety workshops as part of 120 community events held last year.

But the most effective traffic calming strategy in Somerville can also easily become a cultural firestorm: slowing down cars.

Citywide, the default speed limit is 25 miles per hour, and drivers are expected to slow to 20 mph in 500 high-pedestrian “safety zones” scattered around 4 square city miles. The city’s rollout of speed humps was, well, bumpy, and the deployment of small-scale rotaries in neighborhoods left some initially confused about how to navigate them.

Still, the likelihood of an injury “spikes dramatically” when a car travels above 35 miles per hour, said former Somerville mayor Joe Curtatone. But those incidents are now infrequent: Somerville has had just 46 crashes with serious injuries since 2021, a Globe analysis of state crash data.

“You’re always going to be faced with the question of, if there’s not enough parking or too many bikes,” said Curtatone, who led the city for 18 years until leaving office in 2022. “What about if there are too many cars?”

Boston and Cambridge, both larger cities than Somerville, recorded 560 and 112 serious crashes last year respectively. At least 48 people have died in Boston traffic incidents since Somerville last had a roadway fatality.

Improved public transit has also been a key factor in Somerville’s success. A long-overdue expansion of the Green Line — and the 2014 addition of the Assembly Square Orange Line stop — raised the proportion of residents living within a half-mile of T station from 15 to 85 percent.

Using legislation from Cambridge as a model, Somerville charted its own safe streets ordinance in 2024, following several high-profile pedestrian crashes that killed a teacher, a mother of two, and a cyclist — the last of which happened on Aug. 12, 2022, almost exactly four years ago. The law gave city planners license to speed up their work.

Somerville Mayor Jake Wilson has no plans to slow the momentum, calling street safety “personal” in a statement. He said his daughter was struck in a crosswalk by a car last fall, though she walked away with only a bruise.

“No city can promise to fully eliminate traffic deaths or crashes — but what we can do is keep driving down that risk by deploying the proven interventions that keep us all safer,” he said.

Alienating car users is still, at least politically, a nonstarter. People are driving more, state data show, and on-street parking remains a pain point with some voters. Yet Somerville officials have gradually normalized the trade-off of fewer parking spots for safer streets and encouraged the use of alternate modes of transit. The long-term goal, ultimately, is to have 75 percent of trips citywide happening without a car.

This works for Laura Brooks, a four-decade Somerville resident. She walks, bikes, and drives each week. And though she said speeding on her street is still a persistent problem, “I don’t really have an issue with parking,” Brooks said. “Anyway, there are so many ways to get around.”

In fact, Somerville’s proactive approach to mobility is a “big part of why I love living here,” said Stephanie Galaitsi, a resident and member of the Somerville Alliance for Safe Streets. “We have these calmer streets. It doesn’t feel like we’re OK with people dying on the roads anymore.”

Somerville often makes information on safe streets easily accessible. Each redesign project has a webpage that displays public comments and blog post updates on its progress. Residents can peruse maps of the calming measures installed and paving plans for most Somerville streets online.

The city also splits its street safety budget between routine maintenance and other improvements, while trying to use a variety of funding sources. “So not all your eggs are in one basket,” said Brian Postlewaite, Somerville’s director of engineering.

Next door, Boston has struggled to get the same results. Mayor Michelle Wu stalled most street safety projects for over a year amid criticism for her approach to bike lanes, the Globe has reported. Many plans were resurrected in July in response to the cycling death of city planner Louisa Gag.

Already, Boston is a leader in preventing road fatalities compared to other car-centric cities nationwide.

But Chris Osgood, Boston’s newly appointed interim chief of streets, said the city is redesigning its streets project process by “taking somewhat of a similar approach” to Somerville and plans to update its own Vision Zero plan by the year’s end.

The aim is to ”reduce the overall timeline to get streets projects into construction," he said.

But improvements are not happening fast enough for some Bostonians, including Roslindale resident Corie Scibelli. She was discouraged when Boston removed newer speed humps from her neighborhood, citing concerns about access for emergency vehicles .

It was another item Scibelli included on her list of “daily disappointments” with Boston street safety, she said. “It adds to my general sense of fury and rage.”

Pedestrians on Tufts Street passed an extended curb that affords room for a park bench.Lane Turner/Globe Staff

In Somerville, by contrast, officials see untouched opportunities everywhere. During an hourlong walk around Union Square, Rawson and Postlewaite pointed to dozens of spots they’re desperate to address. The westbound traffic on Bow Street, they said, is a danger zone for “double-threat” crashes, in which a driver in one lane might stop for a pedestrian but the motorist in the adjacent lane doesn’t. The intersection of Washington and Beacon streets needs protected bike lanes. There are dozens of outstanding candidates for bus-only lanes and commuter shelters.

No one project, Postlewaite said, is “ever really done.”

Diti Kohli can be reached at diti.kohli@globe.com. Follow her u/ditikohli_.