This Wednesday, February 27, 2019, elected officials will hold a public meeting to discuss ways to improve road safety for pedestrians, cyclists and drivers in West Roxbury. Sponsors of the meeting include City Councilor Matt O’Malley, the Boston Police Department, Senator Mike Rush, Representative Ed Coppinger, Chief of Streets Chris Osgood, the Mayor’s Office, and the Boston Transportation Department.
The meeting comes after two pedestrian fatalities in West Roxbury over the last four months, one on Washington Street in November, and one on Centre Street in February. We urge you to speak up this week for traffic calming measures that also make the roads safer for both cyclists and pedestrians. Details of the meeting below; please spread the word:
Wednesday, February 27, 2019 7-8:30pm
Boston Lodge of Elks #10
248 Spring St
West Roxbury
I attended, as did Alan Wright and David Wean among Roslindale residents. The meeting was led by City Councilor O’Malley, who invited initial comments from Senator Rush, Representative Coppinger, and Chief of Streets Osgood. The family of Marilyn Wentworth spoke powerfully at the outset and at a couple of points during the public comment section of their grief and their strong desire to see real, physical changes to the layout of Centre Street to prevent the kind of crash that killed their loved one. Northeastern University engineering professor Peter Furth decried the legacy of unsafe street design in the US and laid out the basic concept his students created a couple of years ago (single vehicle travel in each direction with a center median and turn lanes at certain intersections, eliminating the double-threat, with other details to be discussed) and insisted that it would handle the volume of traffic that Centre is expected to handle just as well as the current configuration. With this kind of context, I counted well over two-thirds of the public commenters in favor of a street diet or similar strong physical interventions to slow traffic and make the street safer. Perhaps most moving of the general public commenters was a gentlemen who indicated he had been hit in the same location (Centre and Hastings) 3 years ago and sustained a traumatic brain injury that took a year to heal. He called himself lucky to be alive and then demanded changes to be made as quickly as humanly possible before someone else is seriously injured or killed on Centre Street. Chief Osgood indicated that the city is budgeting money for both design and construction of a new configuration. An engineered proposal is expected to be publicly available come June. More to come certainly and we at WalkUP Roslindale will follow it and lend a hand where and when we can.