Somerville is intentionally making roads harder to drive on. It’s getting results.
SOMERVILLE — For years, cars driving onto Tufts Street had it easy. A gently curved entrance allowed for a smooth turn that gave way to a wide, linear road stretching about 1,000 feet parallel with McGrath Highway, with just some narrow sidewalks on either side.
It was the way you would build it if you wanted to make it as easy as possible to drive.
But that is no longer what the densest city in New England wants.
Today, this section of pavement in East Somerville hardly looks like a road at all. Renovations underway since summer 2025 and set to wrap up in the coming days include all-new signage and pavement markings, speed humps, windy curbs, and artificially narrow sections — capped off by a mammoth new mural that is several hundred feet wide — that give it the feel of something else entirely.
It’s a “neighborway,” one of several experiments in extreme street makeovers in Somerville as the city tries to prevent deadly crashes on its roads by intentionally making it harder to drive on them, turning side streets into comfortable routes for people who aren’t traveling by car, and cutting down on the risk posed by too many cars going too fast.
“Think about everything everybody knows about the interstate highway system. Curvilinear geometry and wide lanes are designed for cars and trucks to move fast,” said Brad Rawson, Somerville’s director of transportation and infrastructure.
Somerville, on this street, tried to do the opposite.
“Tight corners, narrow geometry, narrow lanes are designed to slow down traffic,” Rawson said. “That is the best practice around North America that cities like Somerville are implementing to save lives.”
This is not the city’s first “neighborway.” The term is used here and elsewhere to describe streets where cars pass by so slowly and carefully that people feel comfortable walking their dog or letting kids ride their bikes in the street.
It happens naturally on many quiet roads in Somerville that primarily serve the families who live near them. But sometimes it takes speed humps or “sharrows” — arrows reminding drivers and cyclists to share the road — or miniature rotaries to make it happen.
The process has not always gone smoothly. New speed humps a few years ago caught some by surprise. Drivers have sometimes found the tiny rotaries bewildering.
But the city has been getting results: It has not had a single traffic death in four years, despite having a large number of cyclists. Traffic deaths and injuries in Boston, Cambridge, and other cities across the state highlight perils on the road for cyclists and pedestrians. So the feat is drawing attention to the sometimes peculiar way Somerville does things on its roads, and maybe providing a roadmap for transportation planners elsewhere.
Tufts Street became a focus after neighbors complained the road had become a popular cut-through for people hoping to avoid traffic near the highway. A city-run study found that, before the renovation, as many as 3,000 cars used the street each day, often at high speeds. It posed risks to families living nearby, bikers heading to the Somerville Community Path and newly opened East Somerville MBTA stop, and kids at a nearby early childhood center.
“They were flying,” said Bernie, 59, who lives in a mixed-income housing complex on the street and asked for his last name not to be published to protect his privacy.
In public meetings, neighbors weighed options for calming things down, among them turning the road into a one-way street. But a neighborway, which allowed travel in both directions while narrowing the road and turning it into a quasi-obstacle course, was the result.
A highlight of the changes are new “pinch points,” where curbs jut out and create a gap that only one car can fit through at a time. Drivers traveling in opposite directions have to slow down, or even pull over and stop, to let one another pass.
“I call it Somerville chicken,” Mayor Jake Wilson said in an interview. “Typically, it works itself out. Someone pulls over, the other person goes, and then you proceed. People figure it out.”
Not all neighbors are convinced that the unusual road layout will do the trick.
“I don’t know if it helps because people still zoom through,” said Billy Kan, a 28-year-old real estate developer who lives in the neighborhood and was out walking his dog, an 11-year-old Havanese named Wally. “The people who are going to speed are going to speed.”
And not everyone who lives nearby and will be driving on it loves the added challenge behind the wheel.
“I hate driving on Tufts because of those narrow things,” said Michael Pauls, a 28-year-old software engineer, who moved to the street after relocating from Chicago earlier this year. “I can see the rationale behind it if the city wants to keep people from gunning it, but from a driver’s perspective, I don’t like it.”
Some of the changes are more subtle. Call them psychological traffic calming.
Like new pavement markings to warn drivers about sharing the road with cyclists, which include an image of what appears to be a child riding a bike, instead of the usual stick figure.
The idea is that a driver might be more careful if their first thought was it might be a little kid, instead of an ornery adult, behind the handlebars.
“We’re trying to illustrate that biking is for everybody, not just for older, male-identifying people, which is sometimes some of the stereotype and some of the narrative,” Rawson said. “Everybody bikes.”
Even the 300-foot mural is meant to be a deterrent for driving too fast. Painted on what had long been the large blank wall of an industrial building, it’s a pleasant pop of color. It’s also meant to make the area look less like a back alley, and more like a place where people actually live.
“Before, when I first moved to the area, the wall was a giant swath of dirty white concrete,” Nova Reilly, an artist who lives in the neighborhood and was hired to help paint the mural, said in a video about the project. “Now it’s a very beautiful community contribution.”
In the future, Somerville hopes to see the thinking behind this makeover applied not just to other side streets, but to major roadways that officials believe should move more slowly than they do currently. That includes McGrath Highway itself, which has long been called unsafe by residents and is set for a major renovation as soon as in 2028.
“We’re excited for the McGrath to be more like a city street than a freeway, because we want it to be for Somervillians,” Wilson said, “as opposed to serving as a commuter highway through the middle of our city.”
Spencer Buell can be reached at spencer.buell@globe.com. Follow him u/SpencerBuell.