Great news–the Hubway citywide bike-sharing program is considering expanding to Roslindale! See the full schedule and how BTD will be rolling this out. A community meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, September 20, 2017, at 6 PM at the Boston Center for Youth and Families Menino Center, at 125 Brookway Road (just off Washington Street near the South Street intersection).
Bring your ideas about where Hubway should be located in our neighborhood come next spring.
We’ve seen some of this in our own neighborhood, like the street mural at Conway and South. Where else in Roslindale should we consider this? Ideas welcome in the comments!
After you view this video at vox, featuring Don Shoup from UCLA, I hope you’ll be, like me, a Shoupista, when it comes to how we handle our parking here in Boston and really everywhere. And note that Boston hasn’t done what it should on point 1, but we are trying point 2. Enjoy!
We last discussed the NSS program under Vision Zero back at the end of March, when 47 applications, 4 of them from our beloved patch of soil, were submitted. At that time, we thought only 2 areas in the city would be selected. In the interim, the city found additional money for 3 more areas, so yesterday…drum roll…BTD announced 5 selected areas, one of which is the Mount Hope/Canterbury area in the eastern section of Roslindale. Congratulations to the champions of that effort, including WalkUP Roslindale’s own Lisa Beatman and Rick Yoder! You can find the city’s official announcement here, and a Boston Globe article from today here. We are excited by this opportunity to improve street safety and slow traffic in our neighborhood and look forward to working with Lisa, Rick, their neighbors in MH/C, and BTD staff to get this done as soon as humanly possible.
As we have said many times at this blog and elsewhere, everyone in this city deserves to live on a safe street. Everyone on every street in every neighborhood.
We know WalkUP Roslindale’s walk audit in December 2015 wasn’t the first time members of our neighborhood identified the crosswalk at the intersection of Washington and Basile streets as being in need of safety improvements. Indeed, we recognized at at the time that we were joining a long line of activists who had already called for changes at this important crossing at the northern entrance to Roslindale Square that is the main access point from the west for students going to and from the Sumner School. It was accordingly great to see city contractors out at this intersection in the last few weeks and days reinforcing the recently signed no-parking/standing areas adjacent to the crosswalk, installing curb-ramps, fixing the flashing yellow light, and installing the pedestrian crossing bollard and flexposts in almost all the required areas (the area right on the southbound side is, we believe, awaiting the completion of utility work before flexposts will go in).
We all recognize that there is more work to be done throughout the square and the entire neighborhood to improve walking and cycling and overall safety for all users of our streets. But we will pause for this moment to thank everyone who had a hand this, starting with walkBoston, who took us through the walk audit, and including the Mayor’s Office for Neighborhood Services, Councilors McCarthy and Wu, the Boston Transportation and Public Works Departments, and Roslindale Village Main Street.
Picked up this graphic at a Jeff Speck session at CNU25. Abundantly true of a city like Boston, where it makes no sense that our mayor still isn’t fully behind appropriate funding for active mobility and Vision Zero, or applying, right now, political will to breaking down the institutional barriers that are holding us back.
I had the opportunity to attend the 25th annual gathering of the Congress for the New Urbanism in Seattle from Wednesday through Friday this past week. CNU, as the organization is called, has been more effective than it admits to itself in moving thinking in this country in the direction of walkable, connected, and contextual development patterns. And I do believe the organization’s charter, which stands as a kind of manifesto, is worth reading in full. It has stood the test of time. Take a read of this recap over at Public Square and take a look at the charter itself here: Charter of the New Urbanism. I think the opening sentence gets it very much right about the underlying nature of the community-building work that still lies before us:
The Congress for the New Urbanism views disinvestment in central cities, the spread of placeless sprawl, increasing separation by race and income, environmental deterioration, loss of agricultural lands and wilderness, and the erosion of society’s built heritage as one interrelated community-building challenge.
Here’s a link to the prior announcement: LINK. We will have a WalkUP Roslindale banner set up in the corner of the Arboretum down the hill from the Mendum Street Gate in the Peters Hill section of Roslindale. Hope to see you there!!!
Yes. That’s Keytar Bear from the Roslindale Craft Beer Cellar opening earlier this year!!
Friends, it’s going to be a busy few weeks upcoming. So, as we close out April and start into May, here are 5 eminently worthwhile events to put on your calendar. We hope to see you at all or at least some of them:
ITEM 1 – Sunday – May 7 at 1 pm – Jane’s Walk – We’ll meet in the southeastern corner of the Arboretum, just down the short slope from the Mendum Street gate and then wind our way northward along the contemplated route of the Roslindale Gateway Path and the Blackwell Path extension, stop and consider ways to work with our neighbors on cleaning up the area around the Arboretum Road underpass, and get a tutorial on the upcoming end-state for walking and cycling connections in the Arborway-Casey area.
ITEM 2 – Monday – May 8 at 6:30 pm – Roslindale Gateway Path Conceptual Design Study Presentation – This will take place at the Arboretum’s Weld Hill building. More information at the link. Pushing the concept to the point of seeing how it might lay out on the ground is an important milestone, and those of us who have been steering this grassroots effort so far are eager to continue the community conversation we started last spring.
ITEM 3 – Tuesday – May 16 at 9:30 am – Mayor Walsh’s Neighborhood Coffee Hour and Fallon Field Playground Ribbon-Cutting – This will be a great opportunity to connect with the mayor and his staff (including our own Dan Murphy from ONS) to thank them for their work on the new playground and discuss other ways we can work together to make our neighborhood a better place.
ITEM 4 – Thursday – May 18 at 7:00 pm – Fun-Size Target Meeting – It’s now official: Staples is closing and Target is proposing to bring their smaller-size store model into our neighborhood. Lots of upside and downside to discuss. To be held at the RCC, this one promises to be interesting.
ITEM 5 – Friday – May 19 at 7:10 am – Bike to Work Day – With Councilor Tim McCarthy! – May 19 is bike to work day throughout the city and the country, and if you work downtown, you can have an extra special treat on this day because our own district city councilor has accepted Rozzie Bikes’ invitation to ride into town from Roslindale Square. The West Roxbury/Roslindale convoy starts at Adi’s Bike World on Centre Street at 7:00 am and then departs Roslindale Square at 7:10 am. The ride ends at an early-morning festival on City Hall Plaza. Be there with your 2-wheeler and join in the fun!
As part of the international movement of holding citizen-led walking tours promoting community-based city building during the month of May in honor of pioneer urbanist Jane Jacobs (that’s her in the graphic next to the Jane’s Walk logo) and in collaboration with our friends at WalkBoston, WalkUP Roslindale will be hosting its first-ever Jane’s Walk on Sunday, May 7, 2017 starting at 1 pm at the southeast corner of the Arboretum. We will wind our way along the proposed route of the Roslindale Gateway Path and the proposed Blackwell Path Extension, hopefully connect with a couple of key stakeholders at the Arboretum Road arch, and then hear from WalkUP Roslindale/Rozzie Bikes‘ own Mark Tedrow about walking and cycling connections to the Southwest Corridor and Franklin Park that will result from completion of the ongoing Casey Arborway project at Forest Hills. Hope to see you there!!!