Boston releases new details for Blue Hill Avenue redesign

The rain didn’t stop dozens of community members from showing up at an open house for the latest draft proposal of Blue Hill Avenue redesign at the Grove Hall branch of the Boston Public Library, Nov. 21.

The new draft and the open house, the second of three, mark the latest step in a years-long process looking to restructure transportation along the busy roadway that cuts through Mattapan, Dorchester and Roxbury, increasing access and focus for bus riders, bikers, pedestrians and others who are moving down the corridor in modes other than a personal car.

A bus drives the 28 route down Blue Hill Avenue in Dorchester in March 2024. The city of Boston and MBTA released a new draft plan this month for its redesign of Blue Hill Avenue, which aims to restructure the roadway into a multimodal corridor with better support for bikers, pedestrians and others who don’t drive. PHOTO: AVERY BLEICHFELD/BAY STATE BANNER

At the heart of the project is a center-running bus lane — which, when it was announced in February, received mixed reviews from community members — but it also includes efforts to increase greenery along the route, improve crosswalks for pedestrian safety and better structure how people are travelling down the corridor. The draft proposal includes new specifics that, at the time of the February announcement, had not been developed.

Though the open house was filled with polished signs about proposed structures, and suggested layouts, much of the design is still up in the air.

One staff member on the project team described the current draft as a “concept design,” a step in the process where many of the elements could still change, even as the central goals — improved pedestrian and cyclist safety, separated bike lanes, ease of access especially for non-drivers, and a center running bus lane — are expected to carry through.

Andrew McFarland, a project manager with the MBTA, said this draft marks the project reaching about 15% in the design process, a stage in the process that is mostly focused on the layout that drivers, pedestrians and others using Blue Hill Avenue will interact with. Future portions of the design process will focus more on the engineering behind those concepts.

One prominent goal of the project is to make Blue Hill Avenue safer for people on foot, whether they’re walking to the bus stop or directly to their destination, even if the center-running bus lane draws a lot of the attention.

“You see the red paint [of the bus lane] on the street — that’s what your eye is drawn to — but a huge goal of this plan is pedestrian safety,” said Phillip Cherry, a senior project manager at the MBTA.

That effort looks like shortening crosswalks — staff at the open house said that, on average, crossings along the travel corridor will be 25% shorter — and reducing or eliminating places where they cross streets that intersect at odd, non-perpendicular angles (what the team called skewed crosswalks) by adding green spaces and plantings to shift the angle of the intersection closer to 90 degrees.

Along the roadway, traffic signals will be re-timed, something that hasn’t happened for decades. And the city is installing speed humps — speed bumps’ wider, often shorter cousins — on nearby side streets as part of a Safety Surge initiative that is looking to install the humps across the city.

To attempt to dissuade drivers who might look to avoid the changes along Blue Hill Avenue, side streets along the corridor are being prioritized, with all the nearby zones slated to be finished before construction for the redesign begins.

The project team also said that they expect separating the street and establishing separate lanes and spaces for each type of transit — center-running lanes for buses, driving lanes for cars, separated bike lanes and sidewalks — will also help make travel safer and calm some of the chaos of the roadway.

And adding new trees along the street (the most recent draft of the project aims to add at least 150 new trees) may also slow and calm traffic by making the street appear narrower. The efforts, together, might help reduce traffic on Blue Hill Avenue by encouraging drivers who currently use it as an alternative to taking Interstate 93 to get from south of the city to the north to go back to the highway.

“That’s really a trip that belongs on the highway network because it’s a regional trip,” said Maya Mudgal, a transit planner with the city of Boston.

Center-running bus lane

The project is also aiming to increase transit reliability and access. At the heart of the project is its center-running bus lane, which the team said they anticipate will sharply cut transit times through one of Boston’s busiest corridors. The city estimated that the new design will save travelers on the 28 bus 15 minutes in travel between Mattapan Square and Grove Hall (what will happen past Grove Hall, where Blue Hill Avenue narrows and many of the bus routes split off onto Warren Street, remains a point of concern for Louis Elisa, president of the Garrison Trotter Neighborhood Association).

And redesigning the roadway means that certain quirks of bus routes along Blue Hill Avenue could be ironed out. For those bus lines going to Mattapan Station, currently, drivers have to go past Mattapan Square and loop around through Milton. Instead, the updated Blue Hill Avenue would allow for those buses to make a left turn straight from Mattapan Square into the station, shaving a few minutes off of the ride.

But beyond that, the project is looking to optimize bus station locations — the current draft has three main areas along the road that the city and MBTA are looking for feedback on, all of which include questions around the placement of bus stops.

Those decision, in many cases, include factors about transfer to other routes or means of transit. For example, in the dueling designs for the stretch of Blue Hill Avenue between Regis Road to Almont Street in Mattapan, one includes a bus stop platform with a crosswalk that provides direct access to the Blue Hill Avenue Station on the Fairmount Line.

That connection would come as the MBTA works on electrifying the Fairmount Line, a switch that will bring cleaner, but also potentially faster and more frequent service along the commuter rail route.

And the work on Blue Hill Avenue is happening as the MBTA is planning shifts in how and where it runs its buses as part of a Better Bus Project. That project, will increase frequency on some bus lines, while rerouting others — including shifts like changing the end of the 28 bus from its current end in Ruggles to Kenmore Square.

But, as excited as the team from the city and the MBTA are about the project and what it could bring to the area, still, community members have concerns.

What about parking?

Shameka Nurse, a Grove Hall resident who attended the open house, said she was originally concerned about how the redesign will impact residents and businesses, especially when it comes to parking and traffic.

Parking along the route has been a question throughout the planning process. Along the roadway, where parking is already limited, certain spots see double parking regularly. What to do about some of those spots is still a question.

For example, at the intersection of Talbot Avenue and Blue Hill Avenue, outside the Happy Supermarket drivers will consistently double and sometimes triple park. The current draft proposes adding angled parking spots that would increase the amount of parking but could prove challenging for pulling out into the one remaining driving lane if the road is busy. Similar diagonal spots currently exist in Mattapan Square, where attendees at the open house said one lane of traffic generally goes unused to avoid cars pulling in and out.

At the event, Mudgal told one attendee that the team had heard concerns about the diagonal parking spaces and were considering other options, which would likely be centered around shifting how parking there is regulated and how frequently it is enforced.

Nurse, who, at the open house, walked the length of a map of the full project while asking questions of the staff working on it, said the chance to speak with the project team helped ease her concerns a little, but said she still has the same concerns about what the traffic and parking impacts will look like.

Elisa said he’s not convinced that the changes the city and MBTA are planning will actually impact how many drivers choose the roadway, making for concerns that it will just mean a more congested Blue Hill Avenue with fewer lanes for drivers.

“You’re not changing the volume of cars,” Elisa said. “They have not changed the equation to the extent that the independent variable — which if the number of cars coming through — is going to change.”

A better transit system might improve things, he said, acknowledging that transit options in the area “might be coming around,” but he doesn’t feel that there’s enough good transit options to convince people to leave their cars.

If cars are greatly slowed and don’t opt for other routes, he said he worries about the environmental and health impacts it could have on residents nearby.

“It should be that the state would be looking at how do you mitigate, how do you minimize the amount of pollution going into the community,” Elisa said. “Instead, they come up with a design that maximizes the amount of pollution that goes into the community.”

The feedback for the proposal, however, hasn’t been entirely negative. At the open house, a dot-sticker poll saw positive response to a number of project goals, like increased tree coverage and increased pedestrian safety. Sticky notes on a map showing the entirety of the proposed changes along the project corridor included messages thanking the project team for adding in things like simplified and protected intersections or commended considerations of how to reduce double-parking along the route (though some portions of the project — including places that also received positive notes — also saw jotted-down concerns).

But for some, who regularly take means of transit other than cars down Blue Hill Avenue, the plan to restructure the car-centric road into a multimodal corridor with more focus on buses, bikes and pedestrians is a welcome change.

“We have every mode of transportation in Mattapan,” said Vivian Ortiz, who was named as Boston’s “bike mayor” by Amsterdam-based BYCS in 2020. “You don’t have to make very trip in your car.”

Ortiz said she hopes changes like the one proposed in the draft will make that transition easier. Currently, she’s one of the only people she knows who can navigate Blue Hill Avenue on a bike “somewhat confidently”. Part of that is a level of discomfort about sharing the busy roadway, as its currently designed.

“If everybody has their designated space, then we should see the number of crashes and just the fear, hopefully, lessen, and we can get more people to be using biking as a more efficient way and a more planet-friendly way to travel,” she said.

Ortiz said she’s aware that feedback from some other community members is not very positive. Part of that might be a matter of who is being most vocal, said Ortiz, who has partnered with the city on outreach for the project. Many people who she’s spoken with, once they actually get a sense of what the redesign will entail like much of the project, she said.

And, in some cases, many of the people who have shown up at meetings have been those who navigate Blue Hill Avenue in a personal car. According to reporting by StreetsblogMASS most of about a dozen attendees at an open house in August 2023 favored the status quo along the roadway. Of those attendees, StreetsBlog found only one who was a regular bus rider, and she the only attendee they spoke with who fully supported the center-running bus lane.

Regardless of thoughts on how to solve the problem, one thing most residents and people using Blue Hill Avenue agree on is that something needs to change.

“Change is needed because the streets, the roadways, the sidewalk, the green, it’s all looks old, it looks tarnished,” said Nurse, pointing to a need for trash barrels, more trees and repairs to fix the places where sidewalks have been pushed up and the road has potholes. “It all needs repair in some type of way. That’s why I say it’s long overdue.”

Though he doesn’t agree with how the city is approaching it, Elisa too said he wants to see something different along the corridor.

“I want to see Blue Hill Avenue improved,” he said. “I want to see more safety.”

But Ortiz said she doesn’t see that kind of happening unless people give big changes — like what the city and MBTA are proposing — a chance.

“Everyone agrees Blue Hill Avenue is a mess, we need to do something about it, so the professionals come up with a way of how to do something and then the community doesn’t want it because ‘I don’t want to give up the way I’m travelling,’” Ortiz said.

The project team will continue collecting feedback on its draft proposal until about Dec. 13. The city will host a third open house at the Josh Kraft Mattapan Teen Center on Dec 4.