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_.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 13 episode of “Say More.”

Anna Kusmer: Welcome to “Say More” from Boston Globe Opinion. I’m Anna Kusmer. When Michelle Wu was elected mayor of Boston, one of her biggest issues was streets. She was Wu-train. She was going to free the T, pave bike lanes, and make the streets safe.

Now, five years later, the issue has become something of a third rail. After a strong start, street projects have slowed to a crawl, and many of Wu’s early supporters are angry. And now, on top of all that, real grief.

A City Hall worker, Luisa Gag, was killed on her bicycle last month. And Luisa wasn’t just a city worker. She worked on street safety; The exact issue that took her life.

Jascha Franklin-Hodge was Mayor Wu’s chief of streets for her first four years in office, and he resigned at the end of last year.

He’s here with me in the Globe studios. Thank you so much for being here, Jascha.

Jascha Franklin-Hodge: Thank you for having me.

Kusmer: So, Jascha, when you worked in City Hall, you were the face of Wu’s street team. You haven’t really talked to the press since you left. I have to wonder why you want to talk now? Does Luisa have something to do with it?

Franklin-Hodge: I will say, Luisa’s death is such a loss. She was a beloved colleague and a wonderful human being. She was smart. She was dedicated to the work. She was hardworking. But, more than anything, she was just a really kind person.

She did a lot of work on Blue Bikes and where a station should go. And that’s sometimes controversial, and I would get these angry emails occasionally from somebody who’s like, “There’s a station going right in front of my house. I don’t want it here. I want it there.” And I would always give the person to Luisa, and invariably within 24 hours, some reasonable resolution would be reached.

More often than not, I would get an email back from the person I had referred saying, “You have such a wonderful team.” Luisa had this way of helping people feel heard and seen and appreciated and it’s a loss for her family, for her friends, for her colleagues, and for Boston.

With that said, for me, now we’re in a moment where it feels like the Wu administration is trying to pick back up the work. And I’m encouraged by that, and I want to support that.

I think it’s important that there be good discussion about the context of how we were working and how we will work as a city in the future, and I can bring something to that conversation.

Kusmer: Absolutely. As I’ve been driving around Boston, when I’m on Tremont Street, I’m hyper-aware of trying to figure out what happened. My understanding at this moment is that she was riding in a painted bike lane [when] a recycling truck sort of veered a little to the side just to avoid another car and swiped her sideways.

She was hit, and it was a catastrophic hit. There’s two things that strike me: One, it didn’t seem like a very dramatic intersection or a place that you’d think of as dangerous. And two, there’s a bike lane there. If anything, that’s a signal to a biker that you can ride here.

Can you talk about this specific case study and what it says about bike safety in Boston? For me it’s two things: One, maybe we’re not safe anywhere, and two, that bike lanes, when they’re just painted on like that, they could be worse than nothing.

Franklin-Hodge: I’m not privy to the police report on this or the investigation that’s underway, so I don’t wanna kind of speak with authority about details that I don’t have. But your accounting of how this crash transpired matches what I understand to be the case.

We often design streets for perfect people. We design streets on the assumption that everyone will do the right thing all the time. And what that can mean is when somebody does the wrong thing, let’s say a truck driver moves into a bike lane because they’re trying to get around a stopped car. Because we’ve designed the street with no forgiveness in it, you get an absolute tragedy that results.

When we try to make streets safer, a big part of what we’re trying to do is to separate the different modes of transportation, to create those physical barriers. We’re trying to lower speeds. We’re trying to improve visibility. We’re trying to do things that make it so that if there’s a mistake made, it doesn’t turn into a tragedy. I think this speaks to what happens when we don’t have a street with that forgiveness built into it.

The challenge is space. Tremont Street has two lanes of traffic in each direction. It has buses running on it. It has painted bike lanes. It has street parking on both sides of the street, and it has sidewalks. Creating separated bike lanes there while preserving all the street parking and all of the traffic flow, there’s just not enough space to do that.

Whenever we’re looking at a street, there has to be a discussion of the different trade-offs that exist just with the space that’s available and how to allocate that space to maximize safety but also to make the street useful for all the different people that need to use it and all the different modes that need to be on there.

Kusmer: In the wake of Luisa’s death, 4,000 people signed a letter to Wu expressing outrage about the city’s lack of progress on bike safety. In the letter, we have removal of protective barriers in some bike lanes and a near stop to new speed bump installations.

The group, Transit Matters, tracked at least 16 major projects that have stalled over the last year. Can you talk a little bit about what happened to create the situation where there’s been such a slowdown in progress?

Franklin-Hodge: You know, 2025 was a tough year for the streets cabinet. It was an election year and I think that brings a whole set of complicated political considerations.

Mayor Wu’s opponent made opposition to bike lanes a centerpiece of his campaign, although it became very clear in polling and in the final result that that was not a deciding issue for very many voters in the city of Boston.

But, it elevated the issue to one of political controversy, and I think the decision was made last year to step back from the aggressive work that we had been doing, and that meant pausing a lot of the safety projects.

In some cases, in situations where we had made commitments to members of the public of streets that would get speed humps, where people had been advocating that [they] didn’t get them or where that got delayed substantially. I think that created, very understandably, a lot of frustration.

We seem to be moving in a good direction now. The mayor has appointed Chris Osgood as the new interim chief of streets. Chris is an incredible public servant. He’s dedicated, he’s committed, he is trusted by pretty much everybody in City Hall, which is a rare feat, if you’ve ever been around City Hall internal, inside politics.

There’s been some indication that some of the things that were put on hold will be moving again, and I’m cautiously optimistic.

I think there’s some trust that has to be rebuilt. But I do think that you have the ingredients with that leader and this team to get back to the business of making our streets better and I hope that they’ll be able to do so.

Kusmer: You mentioned the politics of it became part of the reason why things were slowed down. Do you think, though, the Wu leadership was kind of caught off guard at how much of a lightning rod this became or how upset people became by this?

Because it was such a galvanizing issue during her original campaign. And then it seemed to have almost the opposite effect in the next campaign. So what changed? Why did it being an election year cause such a different dynamic?

Franklin-Hodge: I think street projects are always going to be, maybe not controversial, but they will always be relevant in the political conversation.

It’s a sort of perfect issue to become politically relevant because it has so much immediacy and so much impact for folks. I think there were a handful of projects that were done over the past few years that activated particular elements within the community in opposition.

We had this dynamic emerge in the Back Bay especially. We had a bike lane that was built on or expanded on Dartmouth Street in the Back Bay, and originally that bike lane was supposed to be on Berkeley Street. Then through conversations with the neighborhood association and elected officials, we made the decision to move it to Dartmouth Street.

In the process, that meant that it went by the house of Jay Cashman, who is a millionaire who did not like this big, new bike lane in front of his mansion, and he literally spent millions of his own money launching this massive anti-bike lane campaign. He set up a podcast and a YouTube channel. He hired journalists to write critical articles. He’s paying for advertisements on social media.

It’s an important project. It links Copley Square to the Charles River. But it happened to go by someone who was rich enough to spend money really making the issue a bigger issue. I think all of this kind of speaks to the bigger question of how do you make sure, when you’re planning projects as a city, that you’re not just listening to the loudest voices, that you’re not just listening to the people who have the money and the megaphone, but how do you bring all the voices to the table and give them equal and appropriate weight?

Kusmer: The Globe wrote a report this past spring talking about essentially that. The streets team, a lot of their autonomy and power was taken away and that morale was really low in the streets team, and it just became a really frustrating place to work. I’m wondering if that’s part of why you left?

Franklin-Hodge: You opened by saying that I was the face of the mayor’s street work in the first term, and that’s true. I think she has been very public and clear that she is looking to change how the streets work.

I think, for herself and for myself, it makes sense to have a different face for this next version of the work that she’s doing. [Last year] was a challenging year, without a doubt. I care deeply about the team that is there at City Hall. There’s some really incredible, dedicated, talented people that wanna work, that wanna build good projects.

For many of them, the speed and abruptness of the change last year was really destabilizing and challenging to manage. But, I do think that, by and large, people are still there. They’re still ready to work. They’re working through a lot of grief right now.

There’s an opportunity to get back to doing what we were doing and I’m excited to see that happen under Chris Osgood’s leadership.

Kusmer: Michelle Wu released a letter outlining some new proposals to improve street safety. I know a lot of advocates are saying the response, it’s not quite what they wanted because it doesn’t have very specific timelines or specific commitments.

What’s your response to that letter? Do you think those advocates are right to keep pushing there?

Franklin-Hodge: I think it’s the job of advocates to make sure that people in power are held accountable to do the things that need to get done, and that if they make commitments, that they follow through on those commitments.

And so, it feels right that the advocates in the street-realm are pushing very hard on the administration to get specific and to follow through on the things that the administration says they’ll do.

I’m heartened by how many things are in that letter. There are projects that are moving forward that are incredibly important. The redesign of Congress and Sleeper Street in Fort Point Channel, where Gracie Gancheva was killed, is going to be transformational and includes features and design changes that were lessons learned from that awful, awful loss of a child.

Cummins Highway is finishing construction in Mattapan. This is a complete rebuild of a high-crash corridor that’s received no attention in decades and will now be a model for the gold standard of what a good street in a Boston neighborhood can look like.

[It] incorporates so much pedestrian infrastructure, traffic calming, green infrastructure, trees, art, bike facilities, places for seniors to sit if they wanna go for a walk, better bus stops, all of the things that you wanna see in a street. This is just like a transformational project for this corner of the city that has not seen much in the way of transformation. So I think there are things like that that I’m very excited about and optimistic about.

But, in particular, when it comes to some of the things that reversed last year, for example, the speed hump program —

Kusmer: That’s a big one.

Franklin-Hodge: There was no request more common than people writing to us about speeding in their neighborhood. That was why we built the program, and we built it with the capacity to build between 500 and 1,000 speed humps every year. We did that for a couple of years, and then we stopped. I can name streets out there where people have petitions.

They are waiting. They know what they want, and they are waiting to get it. So I hope that there will be more specifics and more planning work done to make sure that those streets are on a list, and that they are quickly getting the traffic calming that they want.

There are places around the city where flex posts were removed over the winter and where no alternative has yet been put back. There are alternatives like cast-in-place concrete or rubber bumpers or precast curbs that can be used as alternatives to flex posts.

Kusmer: These are different ways to essentially protect a bike lane.

Franklin-Hodge: But having protection in places where we had it and then it went away is incredibly important. And I think there needs to be urgency with that. And there needs to be clarity about the timeline for when that will happen.

I know the work has already started. I came here along Congress Street and there is a beautiful cast-in-place separator now, which is an upgrade from the flex posts that were there before.

The city has the tools and the capacity to do it, but getting clear and making clear commitments about when things will happen is essential to preserving safety.

Kusmer: Jascha, when researching this problem, I’ve learned that Boston is not alone in this and progress on street safety [is] so hard pretty much everywhere in America. What makes this issue so hard to move forward in all American cities? It’s not a Boston thing, right?

Franklin-Hodge: No, it’s definitely not unique to Boston.

I remember last year at one point looking for some outside support as we were going through this transition and pivot on some of the streets projects, and we spoke with Janette Sadik-Khan, who was the former commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation. [She] was really the person behind New York’s big shift towards multimodalism. You know, closing streets, building more pedestrian space, building more bike facilities.

We sat on a call with her and she said, “Everybody goes through this. It’s not unique. Every city has this. There’s always backlash. There’s always pushback. There’s always a period where it feels like the only thing anybody wants to do is beat you up for having done the changes that you have done.”

But her advice was, you just have to tough it out, right? You have to communicate. You have to engage with people. You have to, if there are things that weren’t done the best they could be, you have to go back and fix them.

But you also have to stay strong to the basic ideas. If you believe in streets that work better for transit, biking, and walking, you have to keep moving because over time what happens is people start to see the benefits.

I still to this day have people who come up to me on the street, who recognize me and say, “Thank you for putting speed humps on my street. I cannot tell you what a difference this has made for my family.” But it takes time.

When it comes to certain things like bike lanes, you have to have enough of a bike network that people feel safe to ride before you get to that point where people are saying, “Oh, I made a change to my commute and I like it and thank you for making that possible.”

If you just build a little bit here and a little bit there, it never connects into a network and you never get over that hump of people feeling like, “Okay, this is a thing I could do,” or, “This is a thing I could let my kids do.”

What we’ve heard from every city that’s done this is you have to keep going. You have to build things that can continue year over year, and over time you start to build a constituency for the work.

Kusmer: I’m interested, you were talking earlier about if we have lots of subtle changes that just slowly make streets safer, that’s a good thing.

I’m also thinking about the need for a new paradigm, too. The idea that cities are not primarily for cars. They’re for people. I think of the fact that in the middle of the 20th century, we had a big increase in the car-friendliness of our cities.

We had all these highways built through cities and just an incredible accommodation for cars in cities. It seems like now [that we’re] clawing back [the] space that has been given to cars, drivers feel oppressed by that.

Do you think we still need to be kind of pushing big picture thinking on this? Or do you think that’s kind of a losing strategy, because people love driving in this country?

Franklin-Hodge: I think it’s a great question and I would maybe answer it this way. I think, if we wanna be a growing city, we need a city that people can get around in.

If you look at the number of vehicles registered in the city of Boston in 2020 versus today — [that’s] about six years — [there’s] about 20,000 more vehicles registered in Boston now. So let’s project out, 15, 20, 60 years. If we see that same kind of growth, imagine what traffic is going to be like in this city, right?

It is bad today, and if you put tens or hundreds of thousands of more vehicles on the streets of Boston, nobody will be able to drive, right? That just won’t be an option for anybody because it will be so congested.

If we want to be a growing city, we have to sort of reckon with the geometric reality that cars take up a lot of space. Our streets cannot grow. Our streets cannot accommodate more cars. We can maybe do a little bit to manage the flow of traffic, improve signals, do some things at the edges that can improve the experience of people driving.

But we need to be giving people options beyond driving their own private car in order to be a growing city where people have a reasonable quality of life, where they don’t spend half their day stuck in traffic.

I don’t think it’s the job of [the] government to tell people how to get around. The city should not be here saying, “You should drive. You should take the T.” Or, “You should ride a bike,” right?

That isn’t an appropriate role for [the] government. What is an appropriate role for [the] government is to give people good choices, to let them make choices that work for their lives, for their jobs, for their needs as [an] individual.

To do that, we have to start to rethink some of the design of our streets because if you have a street that has a major bus corridor on it and is perpetually jammed with cars, that bus will always be an inferior experience for people. It will never be something that people would choose. They will only do it if they have to.

If you can create space on that street for a dedicated bus lane and make that street safe and reliable for people to travel on the bus, [or] if you can make sure that the people walking to the bus can do so safely, that they can cross the street without fearing for their lives, suddenly the bus becomes an option that is actually interesting and useful to more people. And it feels like a good choice to them, and some people will make that choice and choose not to drive.

So that’s, to me, how this shift has to happen. But as you say, in order to do that, that often means you have to make trade-offs with space for parking or vehicle travel lanes, and that can be very challenging.

When we put a bus lane on Boylston Street in the Back Bay, I had the head of the Back Bay Association in my conference room with my staff berating us for taking away that travel lane to make a bus lane. At one point she looked at me and she said, “Nobody shops at Dior and gets on the bus.”

Okay, so the Dior shoppers have the Back Bay Association to advocate for them and to fight for the space that they want to drive cars and park cars. But, I think, it’s the job of [the] government to also say, “Okay, we need to make sure that we’re considering the needs of the people who work at Dior.”

Kusmer: Yeah, who [are] cleaning the bathrooms at Dior.

Franklin-Hodge: [People] who clean the office buildings, who make the food, and the work-a-day commuters that don’t have the luxury of being able to drive into the Back Bay and have a private parking space waiting for them like the head of the [Back Bay] association and many of the executives do.

Kusmer: I think that’s exactly it, that example you gave about Dior. I think a lot of people who are really frustrated with leadership in Boston feel like the concerns of some projects that didn’t optimize parking for businesses or convenience of a loading zone, that these design details are being used to cancel or negate projects when a slightly inconvenienced business is being weighted more heavily than hundreds, maybe thousands, of people whose bus will be sitting in traffic or will be less safe on their bicycles.

And I think that’s part of the frustration of [these] politics, that it’s the people who will be sitting in traffic on the bus [that] don’t have an advocate.

Franklin-Hodge: Yeah. I think that’s sometimes right. I will say, business matters. Small business matters. Our neighborhood business districts matter. They are the heart and soul of a lot of our neighborhoods.

A lot of what the team did as part of projects is to go door-to-door, business-to-business, talk to them about, “When do you get deliveries? What size vehicles are used? How do you think your customers get to your business?”

We would try to design curb regulation plans that matched as best we could the needs of all of the local businesses, and I actually think it’s really important for the city to do that.

But I think this question of whose voice is being heard is incredibly important because we see this certainly in neighborhoods like the Back Bay, but even in the context of the city’s project planning [for] a bus lane on Blue Hill Ave., we made an intentional effort to listen to voices that traditionally weren’t part of the process.

We went out to senior centers where a lot of the residents didn’t drive, couldn’t drive, and rode the bus to get about their day, and we actually rode with them. We listened to them. We asked questions about what they liked, what they didn’t like, what they wished the amenities were.

We hired youth engagement specialists, young people who went out and talked to their peers, who require the bus to get to school, to get to after-school jobs, to get home. We asked them for their perspective, and we synthesized all of this into the reporting that we did to try to help with planning that project.

Now, what that meant is if you were in your local neighborhood association, you’re used to being the voice speaking for the community. Now the city is listening to your voice, but they’re also listening to other voices that have a different perspective.

I think sometimes that can feel like you’re not being heard, when really what that means is you just don’t have all of the power. You’re not the only one being heard.

Kusmer: I wonder about the kind of emphasis specifically on bikes and bike lanes. Often when I get deep into these conversations, it becomes extremely obvious that bikes are just one piece. But I feel like in terms of [these] politics, bike lanes seem to be the thing that everyone talks about.

Josh Kraft and his campaign was all about bike lanes. As you said, that was the lightning rod. I wonder if it would be politically easier to make it about kids not getting hit by cars. Do you think there’s too much emphasis on bicycles in this conversation?

Franklin-Hodge: We have bike lanes on maybe 5 percent of the streets in Boston, but it seems to be about 95 percent of the conversation about transportation. And, it is the perfect wedge issue.

I saw some polling last year that basically said a third of the city thinks we don’t have enough bike lanes, a third think we have the right amount, and a third think we have too many. So no matter what you do, you’re gonna make two-thirds of the city mad.

I mean, clearly bike lanes are a very polarized issue. And I do think there are places where bikes represent enough of the people on the street or where there’s enough of a history of crashes where there is a real obligation to take those considerations seriously.

If you look at Commonwealth Ave. in the Back Bay during the morning commute, bikes are about 20 percent of the vehicles on the street. You wouldn’t know it because they’re small and they move quickly. They’re not making traffic. But, that’s not a tiny group, right? That is a substantial user of the street, and I think it’s important for the city to take that into account.

Ultimately, what we’ve seen is that when we make streets that work well for people who bike, they get safer for everybody. We did an eight-year retrospective of streets where, mostly during the Walsh administration, bike lanes had been added. We looked at crash statistics before and after. And on average, we saw an almost 50 percent reduction in crashes across all modes, including pedestrian and motor vehicle crashes.

I think the emphasis in my mind should be on how we make streets that are safe and comfortable for people to use no matter how they’re traveling. That’s the work. And that takes many, many forms.

Kusmer: You’ve had a nice long break from working in city planning. What reflections do you have looking back on your time as streets chief? Do you have any regrets or just things that, if you were to do it again, you’d do differently or approach differently?

Franklin-Hodge: I might have waited until 2026 to put a bike lane in front of Jay Cashman’s house. That would be one. I think, broadly speaking, I’m proud that we moved with urgency. I’m proud that we took issues of street safety seriously, but I also know that some of that work created a lot of political pushback.

I always view [the] government as a relay race, right? The city of Boston has been around for almost 400 years, and it’s not about Jascha, it’s not about any one mayor. It’s about how we are building for the next 400 years of the city? How am I, as a leader, handing off an organization that can do more?

I think with the current leadership team that’s coming into place now with the streets cabinet, I’m confident that they’ll be able to do that.

Kusmer: You are a biker. You biked here to Downtown Boston to talk to me. And you often bike with your kids in the back of your bike.

I’m curious, knowing that Boston could be safer for bicyclists, how do you justify putting your own body, the body of your kids, on the line on a bicycle? Why is it still more important to you to ride a bicycle than it is to completely maximize safety in a big, you know, Hummer or something like that?

Franklin-Hodge: I care about safety, not just for me and my family, but for every family out there. And, driving a car that’s bigger than it needs to be puts other people at risk. But, you know, putting that aside, I think Boston is a safe city. And I think [it’s] for all this talk of street safety, right?

Nobody should be happy if there are deaths and injuries happening on our street. That should always be unacceptable, right? But when you compare Boston to almost any other major city in this country, what you see is a city that for pedestrians, for cyclists, for drivers, is safer, [in] many cases by an order of magnitude because of all of the good work that has been done.

Some of this is our street grid, right? The streets are small. You would be hard-pressed to find a street in Boston where you could reliably go 40 miles an hour, right? The street grid keeps speeds down. But there’s been so much work now for decades to really try to make the streets safer, to do the work that needs to get done.

You know, I love my kids to death. I would do anything for them, but I also know that there’s no place in the country I would rather them be walking, biking, or in the back of a car, than here. I wanna make sure [of] that, you know.

They don’t wanna be on the back of my bike half the time. They wanna be on their own bikes, and I wanna make sure that they, and every other kid in this city, grows up in a place where if they’re walking, if they’re taking the bus, if they’re riding their bike, that they feel like they can do it safely. And their parents don’t have to kind of worry [about] whether their kid is gonna come home in one piece.

I think that’s the work that we’ve made progress on, but there’s still more to do.

Kusmer: It sounds like you still feel very passionately about this issue, and you clearly are a major transportation nerd. What do you think will be your next chapter?

Franklin-Hodge: Well, as you said, I’ve had a wonderful and very fortunate opportunity to take a little bit of a break over the summer and just spend a lot of time with family.

I think in the fall I’ll be working to figure out what comes next. I care deeply about transportation issues. I’m a fourth-generation public servant. I believe in public service, and so I suspect that whatever I do next will be somewhere connected to one, or both, of those things.

Kusmer: Jascha Franklin-Hodge was Boston’s chief of streets under Mayor Michelle Wu. He stepped down last year.

Thank you so much for coming on “Say More,” Jascha.

Franklin-Hodge: Thank you so much for having me.

Victoria White of the Globe staff contributed to this report.

Listen to more Say More episodes here and wherever you get your podcasts. If you like the show, please follow us and leave us a review. You can email us at saymore@globe.com.

Anna Kusmer can be reached at anna.kusmer@globe.com.

Tragedies will continue if 18-wheelers continue to jockey for space alongside motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians in tight urban areas.

Last month, the death of transportation planner Louisa Gag, who was struck by a tractor trailer while cycling in Boston, was a tragic reminder about the danger large trucks pose on our streets. These big rigs kill cyclists, pedestrians, and yes, motorists and vehicle passengers, at a disproportionate rate.

Only 2.6 percent of registered vehicles in Massachusetts are trucks, but they account for 28 percent of cycling fatalities and 5 percent of pedestrian deaths on the road.

“If you are pedestrian or bike rider on the street, the number one danger to you at all times is trucks,” said Alexa Sledge, senior director of strategy with Transportation Alternatives, an organization that promotes better walking, biking, and public transit in New York City.

There are two paths forward — fixes to enhance safety with trucks operating in our cities, then longer-term changes to scale back the volume of large delivery trucks operating in our downtown cores.

In the aftermath of Gag’s death, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said that the city will install more concrete barriers on bike lanes, and fix sidewalks and curb ramps. The city could also prioritize the timing of bike signals to give cyclists a head start into an intersection to better ensure that vehicle drivers see them.

These changes would be welcome, but tragedies will continue if 18-wheelers continue to jockey for space alongside motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians in tight urban areas.

But let’s not villainize truck drivers — it’s stressful, dangerous work with high rates of on-the-job injuries and fatalities. In the past 14 years, 10 cyclists in the Boston area, prior to Gag, were killed by a truck turning right. None of the drivers were even issued a moving violation, suggesting prosecutors believed the driver was not at fault.

Nor can or should we ban trucks, which are the lifeblood of many industries.

The built urban environment and truck size and design are the problems.

In Massachusetts, semi-trailers up to 53 feet can navigate the roads (closer to 70 feet when the cab is factored in). There’s no practical reason for half-empty big rigs to be making urban deliveries,
double parking and blocking traffic or taking over bike lanes.

The city could also do more to prevent trucks from navigating through Boston during the day when streets are crowded, as it already does by restricting trucks hauling hazardous waste.

Then there are the trucks themselves. In 2014, Boston became the first city to pass an ordinance requiring city-owned and city-contracted trucks to have cross-over and convex mirrors, to reduce blind spots in front and along the side of a truck, along with side guards that prevent cyclists from being dragged under a truck’s wheels. Somerville and Cambridge have also passed similar ordinances.

The state expanded those requirements, including back-up cameras, to all trucks owned or leased by the state. That took effect on Dec. 31. The Legislature is now considering an amendment that would assign presumed liability if a cyclist is killed by a commercial truck that lacks proper safety devices. If that legislation passes and stands up to legal muster, it would force the insurance industry to pay better attention.

Every bit helps. Ultimately, however, truck designs must evolve.

In the United States, most big rigs have large noses, making it impossible for drivers to see their entire surroundings. Across Europe, trucks often have larger, flatter windows, increasing visibility.

“Visibility generally declines as vehicles get larger, and many newer versions of trucks are getting worse,” Kris Carter, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation’s chief innovation officer, told the editorial board. “Newer purpose-built and cab-forward vehicles provide better direct vision. We encourage drivers and companies to take this into consideration when selecting vehicles.”

Cities can’t mandate truck design shifts. They can, however, control where trucks can roll within their limits. London has set the standard for restricting where and when trucks can travel. In Hamilton, Ontario, one of Canada’s busiest ports, the city adopted an updated truck route network in 2022 to push trucks onto a ring road system while limiting the size of trucks within the city and restricting them to certain streets. Air emissions and noise decreased, some streets transformed into car-free spaces, and all the while, economic activity at the port grew.

Boston could petition the Massachusetts Department of Transportation to create something similar.

In order for this to work, rules must be enforced. In Hamilton, the public was given an easy way to report truck violations.

Boston does already restrict trucks from certain roads, but alternate routes need to be clearly communicated to truckers. There are navigation apps for trucks, but ideally, Boston, and other cities, could leverage their relationships with Google, or another tech company, to integrate optimal truck routes into their maps.

“We know how to do that. We can do that. It just needs to be a priority,” said Sledge.

In the longer term, our cities must transform into places with far fewer trucks.

“Our mobility patterns are changing and our physical infrastructure has to evolve in lockstep,” Caitlin Allen-Connelly, executive director of the public transportation advocacy group Transit Matters, told the editorial board. “Our streets today, they can’t remain static.”

In New York, small cargo e-bikes making Amazon deliveries are zipping around Manhattan. The 16-foot cargo bikes, increasingly common in Europe, have four wheels with an enclosed container on the back that can hold more than 100 packages. This can speed up delivery times and lower transportation costs. Imagine the benefits for drivers navigating Boston’s labyrinth.

For the rest of us, fewer trucks would improve safety, remove road congestion, and cut down on tailpipe emissions that contribute to climate change and negative respiratory health consequences.

These changes would take time, but none of this is rocket science. Cities constantly advance. The killing of Louisa Gag was a tragedy. Not taking decisive action to prevent future ones would compound that.

Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us u/GlobeOpinion.

Councilor Sharon Durkan is making moves to get cars off the road, by calling for the city to fine drivers who create a “dangerous environment” by blocking bike lanes, and ensure that pedestrians “are king” in Boston.

Durkan on Wednesday introduced an order for a hearing “on traffic enforcement of blocked bike lanes and crosswalks” that calls for the city to crack down on the motorists who use designated pedestrian and cycling spaces for additional parking.

“Under state law and in the city of Boston, crosswalks and bike lanes are protected spaces,” Durkan said at the City Council meeting. “Pedestrians have always had the right of way at a crosswalk, and it is against the law for a car to pull into a box without enough space on the other side.

“When vehicles unlawfully obstruct bike lanes and crosswalks, they force pedestrians and cyclists into active traffic and out of protected visible spaces, jeopardizing their safety.

“A lack of consistent enforcement and public education has perpetuated a culture that empowers drivers who don’t feel accountable enough for adhering to the rules of the road,” Durkan said, adding, “Our resident safety must be a top priority, and we need to stop drivers from stopping or parking in bike lanes and crosswalks.”

Durkan, a close ally of Mayor Michelle Wu whose Council district includes Beacon Hill and Back Bay, is calling for some of the same enforcement mechanisms outlined last month in Wu’s new street safety plan, which prioritizes cyclists while cracking down on drivers seen as putting them at risk.

The mayor’s new plan is responsive to pressure from bike activists following the traffic death of Louisa Gag, a 36-year-old city transportation planner who was fatally struck by an 18-wheeler truck while riding her bicycle last month on Tremont Street in Mission Hill.

Wu vowed at a City Hall vigil for Gag last month to recommit to the street safety projects she stalled amid criticism during last year’s mayoral race that bike lanes were worsening traffic, creating hazards, and hurting the bottom line for businesses.

Durkan’s order states that “various enforcement mechanisms, including automated camera enforcement and increased ticketing, can be used to enforce statutory protections that motorists consistently violate.”

She is also calling the city to evaluate its curbside management practices to ensure adequate loading space is available, and to look into whether it has enough staffing and funding to carry out traffic enforcement for blocked bike lanes and crosswalks.

Durkan suggested that the city consider improvements to resident reporting mechanisms so people can more easily report traffic violations they come across to 311 or the Boston Police Department.

The councilor said blocked bike lanes and crosswalks have become such a pervasive issue that she has found herself struggling to enter crosswalks along Cambridge Street, Tremont Street and Mission Hill.

Durkan said she has taken to investigating issues in her district through Reddit, where she has viewed photos of cars traveling in bike lanes and “completely” covering crosswalks in that part of the city.

She lashed out at the drivers she says have become “emboldened” to put pedestrians at risk because they aren’t penalized, and made it clear that pedestrians, rather than people who get around by driving, are her priority as a Boston city councilor.

“I’m really upset sometimes to see how emboldened drivers can be to hurting and really making a dangerous environment for pedestrians,” Durkan said. “Just yesterday, a car literally tried to back into me, and I had to slap the car to get it to stop backing up.

“We really need to make sure that pedestrians are king in District 8 and they’re king in our city, and we need to make sure that they have all the protections. Getting drivers from stopping in crosswalks is the bare minimum,” Durkan added.

The order was framed by Durkan as advancing the city’s Vision Zero goals of eliminating all fatal and severe crashes by 2030.

Thursday, August 6

6:30 p.m.

Morse School Auditorium, 40 Granite St., Cambridge

Come hear updated design concepts, learn how proposed changes could improve safety and bike/pedestrian connections, and share your feedback directly with the project team.

Accessibility accommodations and language assistance are available upon request.