Car crashes, bike lanes, and transportation policy

Speeding and safety

The intersection between Willis and Golden is about a hundred feet from my front door. My neighbors that live on the corner of that intersection have a wooden fence. They replaced just two walls of this fence several weeks back. Whenever I'd passed by, I idly wondered why they would replace just two walls of their fence and not the rest, never bothering to apply much critical thought to the issue. On June 17th, a rainy Saturday, when I was walking back from my twice-daily cup of coffee from Oasis, I heard a loud bang. One car going down Golden failed to notice a stop sign, which was partially hidden behind an untrimmed blackberry tree, and hit the back of a car going down Willis.

A view of the crash. The new fence panels can be seen in the background as well.

I jogged over and called 911. The operator said that someone else had already called. The next minute a few police cars and a firetruck were at the scene. Thankfully, nobody was hurt. From the small crowd of onlookers that formed, I was told that those two fence panels had needed to be replaced due to a drunk driver that had also sped down Golden Avenue several months prior. Within about twenty minutes, both cars were towed and nothing remained on the scene, except for some sand that the fireman had put down next to the car's engine to ensure nothing would catch fire.

I had been working on a transportation platform plank for Medford for several weeks. Shortly after going public with my campaign, a traffic engineer out of Wellington emailed me and pointed out that my platform was light on anything related to transportation. He was right; most of my activism and work had been in affordable housing. I invited him to breakfast and picked his brain for an hour. When I started canvassing, I learned quickly that about half of what people talked about were roads and pretty much anything related to them. Just weeks before, a neighbor had complained about cars constantly speeding along Willis Avenue and the need for speed bumps.

After the crash, I spent the rest of the day canvassing in the neighborhood around Medford Square. Purely by coincidence, I knocked on the door of a member of the Bicycle Advisory Commission, a woman who could talk for hours about roads, traffic engineering, and transportation policy. I'd met the week before with her and a member of Walk Medford, over a breakfast that I had spent furiously taking notes.

I learned a lot of details at that breakfast. Electric vehicles are heavier than normal vehicles, which means that they will likely damage roads more in the future (a minor concession, in my mind, to the need to transition away from fossil fuels, but something to note for the long term). Medford doesn't have enough bike racks. Those signs that display both the speed limit and the real-time speed of incoming cars are good at reducing speeds, most of the time; when canvassing, I learned that she had one of those signs, quite literally, on the road outside her front door.

It didn't show speeds above 35 MPH, she explained, because some people deliberately sped up to get a high score. She also told me about someone who regularly sped his motorcycle, handsfree, up and down her street. The police weren't allowed to pursue him.

She and the other individual from Walk Medford were also full of ideas about how to make roads safer. Enforcement had to be consistent. Don't let people turn right on red lights — on any intersection, for the sake of consistency. Because if rules are more consistent, they’re more likely to be followed. The police, stretched thin as they are, could set up speed traps to pull more speeding drivers aside to give a warning instead of a ticket. The parking near Main Street and Harvard could be repainted so that cars backed into spots, which would help with safety as they exited the spots. Et cetera, et cetera.

Who controls what?

A tricky part of transportation policy is finding out what is controlled by the state of Massachusetts and what we have control over at a municipal level. It's not as though city councilors have zero influence at the state level — a call to Senator Jehlen or one of Medford's three reps from a councilor has more weight than from most other residents — but if it doesn't directly affect land in the city of Medford, it's less likely that city councilors can pass laws affecting it.

This becomes relevant in, say, airplane routes. During COVID, when more people worked from home, many started to notice that airplanes were directed over Medford. I spoke about this for about half an hour with a resident in Lawrence Estates, an area particularly affected by the noise. Routes are controlled by Massport and the FAA, and Medford has very little they can do about it, though there is a page on the city website dedicated to the issue. The most Medford City Councilors can really do is call up Markey or Warren and point out that there's quite a few potential voters in the area who aren't pleased with the airplane noise. It's not nothing, but paper written in City Hall doesn't have a huge effect on vehicles going in and out of Logan.

It's also true of the MBTA. Medford City Council can do very little to affect bus routes, though, again, city councilors can do a lot to advocate for their cities at other levels. This doesn't mean we have zero say in the operation of buses. For instance, Medford City Council can choose to move bus stops to places along routes that are more convenient for residents, to ensure that they don't have to walk further. We can also advocate for the implementation of more complex solutions, like installing detectors in traffic lights that would affect their timing so that buses can pass through intersections faster (they had done this in Brookline and Boston).

Bikes or Cars?

Many Medford residents are undoubtedly divided between team bike and team car. The lines are drawn (or not, depending on which side you're on). As I outlined previously, I've spoken with both residents that strongly want more bike lanes and those that drive large vehicles and whose vision would be more obstructed by bike lanes (firefighters, construction workers). And I've been asked plenty of times "what's your opinion on bike lanes?"

My first thought is that cities need more bikers, but there will never be a world where cars aren't a necessity. This is obvious, but it's a point I want to make. Reasonably healthy individuals can bike around the city and use public transportation all they want. Disabled persons, first responders, and large families cannot. I need to drill outside the city once a month, and doing so without a car is logistically impossible. The reduction of cars, especially unnecessarily large vehicles, is a good goal; as that leader in Walk Medford pointed out, large vehicles do exponentially more damage to roads than smaller cars. Bike lanes are an essential part of this reduction. So is better public transportation generally, but city councilors have far more control over bike lanes, and we need to do our part.

So, for bike lanes, we need to sit down with bikers, drivers, traffic engineers, police officers, disability advocates, and a magnifying glass to figure out a nuanced plan that would make Medford a safer place to bike without substantially affecting larger vehicles. This would benefit everyone, since drivers would find fewer cars on the road with this plan. The drafts of plans to do this are out there and public, too, so I'm not being particularly original in this suggestion. A lot of this work for Medford specifically has already been done by the Bicycle Advisory Commission, which released a Master Plan and an infrastructure map. The Master plan contains recommendations for alterations to literally every applicable road in Medford. I would suggest flipping through it and finding out what it says about streets you commonly drive or bike on. I think that debates can healthily be had over particular roads — a firefighter may disagree with the long-term plans for Main Street, for instance, and that's a discussion worth having — but blanket statements about whether Medford should only be bike-friendly or car-friendly forego long-term thinking and aren't conducive to discussion.

My second thought is that pro- and anti-bike lane people can agree on about 80% of the changes either wants to make. For instance, Medford's system of repairing its roads — which usually means tearing up roads to fix individual gas leaks when they occur — isn't great, long-term, for anybody. Bike lanes on Main Street, if and when they're installed, wouldn't work on a street that's littered with pot holes, which drivers don't enjoy, either. And I doubt that drivers would care much about having more bike racks around Medford, which is a common complaint among bikers in the city. The other issue is enforcement. Ticketing bikers that run red lights and ticketing drivers that break speed limits is agreeable to both parties because it makes roads safer for everyone.

The issue with implementing the changes that everyone can agree on, as usual, boils down to money. Medford doesn't have a whole lot of money — at least, not enough to repair our roads, install more speed bumps, and invest in appropriate personnel and technology to make roads safer, all at once. The series of intersections around Main and High street, where they awkwardly mesh with 93, don't have operational traffic lights and leave drivers to fend for themselves as they pass through. Medford's traffic engineer, Todd Blake, told me that a traffic pattern study to figure out the appropriate timing on those lights would cost about a million dollars. The Bicycle Advisory Commission's master plan can only be implemented in fits and spurts as money becomes available. What gets implemented and when will depend on both cost and demand.

My own house sits between Main Street, which is in disrepair, and Mystic Avenue, which is being repaved at the moment. It's now as smooth as the surface of Saturn and a pleasure to drive down. Repairs to Mystic Avenue are funded by the state, so it's not relevant to Medford, but it serves as a reminder of what's possible.

All of this was the background of my transportation platform, which I am releasing with this blog post. It came from conversations with many residents and experts, as I try to come up with a balanced and feasible plan that takes advantage of technology and new ideas whenever they're available.