Everyone has their quirks, right? There are people who put ketchup on scrambled eggs, who, like Ted Cruz, vacation in Florida in the summer. I love Boylston Street. To the uninitiated, it’s just a busy city road in a landscape full of them.
But viewed in a different way, it’s the most regal commercial street in Boston, what Tom Menino used to refer to as “Boston’s grand boulevard.” Drive or walk down Boylston Street and you can look up, way up, at the tallest buildings in Boston, the Prudential and the Hancock. Boylston Street is where the duck boats inch through a swarm of humanity to celebrate our sports championships.
It’s where Trinity Church and Old South Church serve as but two expressions of a city’s faith. It is where people of all walks of life come together, where four- and five-star hotels like the Mandarin Oriental and the stately Fairmont Copley Plaza are just feet away from Raising Cain’s and Trader Joe’s, where the knowledge of the world is free to anyone who wants it inside the two stately buildings that make up the Boston Public Library. Advertisement Boylston Street is where this region felt tragedy in a way that it had never endured before with the Boston Marathon bombings.
It’s a place where the city shows its resilience every year when thousands of runners round Hereford Street toward the finish line just before Copley Square. Boylston Street is a place to spread out, to think big, to feel what brings us together and know what sets Boston apart. It is — or was — a place of wide lanes and broad sidewalks that flow from the grittiness of Mass.
Ave. to the cosmic beauty of the Boston Public Garden. But that has changed now, too much of it, since city leaders thought it was absolutely imperative that they crowbar bike lanes onto a street that was thriving without them.
The whole thing now feels like a crowded, unkempt, chaotic mess. Gone is the broad-shouldered appeal of a proud urban thoroughfare, replaced by something decidedly hunched. Let’s stop here and understand what this isn’t.
It’s not a screed against bicycles, because more and more, good, everyday people are cycling in Boston, which is a truly great development. It’s not even another complaint about bike lanes in a season full of them. We have bike lanes on nearby Commonwealth Ave.
, the most majestic residential street in town, that work magnificently. We have bike lanes on Stuart Street, just to the south, that apparently rarely get used. Advertisement And this is not a shot at our mayor or her aides.
They are trying to make Boston a more forward-looking city with better and cleaner transportation for all. But let’s know our limits. You can be pro-bike and advocate for bike lanes without feeling compelled to cram them onto every imaginable thoroughfare.
You can pursue a better future while still balancing the realities of the present tense. And right now, we are a city filled with Uber drivers and riders, with Amazon Prime vans, with DoorDash workers, and with regular old delivery trucks. On a place like Boylston, specifically on Boylston, they cause outsized havoc wherever they park — and they are not going away.
What used to be three through lanes on Boylston Street, through the whole of Back Bay, has been reduced to a maximum of two, and in some key places, with the addition of a bus lane, just one. What used to be this city’s grand boulevard can feel like a narrow path. Meg Mainzer-Cohen has run the Back Bay Association from her Boylston Street office for the past 24 years, and run it very well, but it’s only been this summer that the chaos — in the form of constantly beeping horns — has caused her to shut windows, mute calls, and even work more from home.
“It’s completely dysfunctional,” she said. Advertisement According to Mainzer-Cohen, the city no longer leaves enough time for pedestrians to cross Boylston at a pair of key intersections, at Dartmouth and Berkeley streets. The result: “Jaywalking abounds,” she said.
The city’s mantra is that everyone should live within a three-minute walk of a bike lane, which is a little odd, because couldn’t they ride their bike to get to the lane? And the city’s belief, one mayor to the next, is that more dedicated lanes will induce more people to ride bikes, which will transform Boston into Copenhagen, minus Tivoli Gardens and the pervasively good mood. We are who we are. All of this is noble, and may eventually work, even if most bike lanes transport a few hundred people a day.
One morning rush hour on Boylston Street in early July, I counted 17 cyclists over a 30-minute stretch, or a little more than one every two minutes. A recent Globe story reported modest increases in some key bike lanes. I was considering all of this when my phone rang with Jascha Franklin-Hodge on the other end of the line.
He is Boston’s chief of streets, and — why does this always happen to me? — sounded like a smart and reasonable guy. “It’s an iconic street, an important street to the city,” he said of Boylston. “And we have been thoughtful about what we’ve done with the five lanes, all devoted to cars.
Bike lanes are just ten feet of that.” He said Commonwealth Ave. is not, in his parlance, a “low stress” bike lane, because it’s not barricaded from traffic, and that Beacon Street runs west, while Boylston goes east.
Advertisement Franklin-Hodge noted that even the Champs-Élysées in Paris, widely considered the most beautiful boulevard in the world, has been transformed to include wider bike lanes. Which is true, but a quick Google search also shows that as they reduced through-traffic from six lanes to four, they added trees, what they call “terraces,” and most notably, a dedicated lane for delivery vehicles and taxis. On Boylston, we’ve simply smooshed everything together.
What if the city focused on creatively building better, safer two-way bike lanes with signage and signals on fewer streets, while avoiding the thoroughfares that are the most congested and dangerous for everyone involved? What if the city not only induced people to ride, but steered them toward these cycling highways? When there are bike lanes on Beacon Street, Commonwealth Avenue, and Stuart Street, is the Boylston Street lane necessary, or is someone just trying to prove a point? There’s little middle ground in the divisive debate over these lanes. If you’re not for them, you’re a climate-change-denying neanderthal who is looking to endanger everyone else with this throwback mode of transportation known as a car. And if you’re pro-bike, then you’re an effete elitist who is selfishly causing mayhem so a few of your friends can glide to pilates, and half of them still use the sidewalk anyway.
Even amid the cacophony of Boylston Street — especially amid the cacophony of Boylston Street — one thing still rings clear: There’s got to be a better, more thoughtful way. Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at brian.
[email protected] ..
