Good lord 🤦 Boston is being governed like it’s a game of Sim City.
Install a bike lane outside senior housing, ignore residents’ concerns, create problems for emergency access, then rip it out two months later at taxpayers’ expense.
This is what happens when ideology takes priority over common sense.
Seniors and taxpayers deserve better.
Mayor Michelle Wu's administration put a two-way bike lane in front of a South Boston senior housing building in August. Two months later, the city is tearing it out.
The roughly 100-foot lane on O'Connor Way, which the Andrew Square Civic Association dubbed a "bike lane to nowhere," didn't connect to any bike network. It took the parking that caregivers, visiting nurses and families relied on.
Neighbors warned it would make it hard for first responders to reach the building, and video obtained by Mass Daily News shows it: a Boston EMS ambulance and a fire truck stuck out on the street, with the bike lane's railings between them and the front door. Flynn says it wasn't the first time. In August, an ambulance couldn't pull up out front, and days later neighbors couldn't drive onto the street for more than 45 minutes.
The city even held a meeting with residents without any South Boston elected officials there, Flynn says.
Flynn kept pushing, and Boston's Chief of Streets has now told him the lane "is now being removed." He wants a City Council hearing on how it got approved in the first place, and on what he calls "the waste of taxpayer money."