Jascha Franklin-Hodge on why Boston Needs Safer Streets

Welcome to Say More from Boston Globe Opinion. I'm Anna Kusmer. When Michelle Wu was elected mayor of Boston, one of her biggest issues was streets. She was Wu train. To make change at scale and at street level. We need, we deserve both. She was going to free the tea, pave bike lanes, and make the streets safe. Now, five years later, the issue has become something of a third rail. After a strong start, street projects have slowed to a crawl, and many of Lou's early supporters are angry. And now, on top of all that, real grief. I want to thank and give our condolences to all of Louisa's friends and colleagues. Her loved ones at City Hall. A city hall worker, Louisa Gag, was killed on her bicycle last month. And Louisa wasn't just a city worker. She worked on street safety, the exact issue that took her life. Yasha Franklin Hodge was Mayor Wu's chief of streets for her first four years in office. And he resigned at the end of last year. He's here with me in the Globe Studios. Thank you so much for being here, Yasha. Thank you for having me. So, Yoshi, when you worked in City Hall, you were the face of Wu's street team. You know, you haven't really talked to the press since you left. And I have to wonder why you want to talk now. Does Louisa have something to do with it? Well, I will say, I mean, I think, you know, Louisa's death is such a loss. She was just a beloved colleague and a wonderful human being. She was somebody who was smart. She was dedicated to the work. She was hardworking. But, like, more than anything, she was just like a really kind person. And... Yeah, she did a lot of work on blue bikes and where a station should go. And, you know, that's sometimes controversial. And I would get these angry emails occasionally from somebody who's like, there's this station going right in front of my house. I don't want it here. I want it there. And I would always give them the person to Louisa. invariably within 24 hours, some reasonable resolution would be reached. And more often than that, I would get an email back from the person I had referred saying, you have such a wonderful team. Louisa just had this way of helping people feel heard and seen and appreciated. And it's just a loss for her family, for her friends, for her colleagues, and for Boston. With that said, I think, you know, for me, Now, you know, we're in a moment where it feels like the Wu administration is trying to pick back up the work. And I'm encouraged by that, and I want to support that. And I think it's important that there be good discussion about the context of how we were working and how we will work as a city in the future. And it's, you know, I can bring something to that conversation. Absolutely.

As I've been driving around Boston, when I'm on Trenmont Street, I'm hyper aware of trying to figure out sort of what happened. My understanding at this moment is that she was riding in sort of a painted bike lane, a recycling truck sort of... veered a little to the side just to avoid another car and swiped her sideways and maybe she was, you know, she was basically hit and it was a catastrophic hit. There's two things that strike me. One is, it didn't seem like a very dramatic, it's not like a dramatic intersection or a place that you'd think of as dangerous. One, and two, there was, there's a bike lane there. I mean, if anything, there's signals to a biker that you can ride here. So can you talk about this, like, specific case study and when what it says about bike safety in Boston. I mean, for me, it's two things. One, maybe we're not safe anywhere. And two, the bike lanes, you know, when they're just painted on like that, they could be worse than nothing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so I'm not privy to the police report on this or the investigation that's underway, so I don't want to kind of speak with authority about details that I don't have. But your accounting of how this crash-transpired matches what I understand to be the case. We often design streets for perfect people. We design streets on the assumption that everyone will do the right thing all the time. And what that can mean is when somebody does the wrong thing, let's say a truck driver. moves into a bike lane because they're trying to get around a stopped car. Because we've designed the street with no forgiveness in it, you get an absolute tragedy that results. And so when we try to make streets safer, a big part of what we're trying to do is to separate the different modes of transportation to create those physical barriers. We're trying to lower speeds. We're trying to improve visibility. We're trying to do things that make it so that if there's a mistake made, it doesn't turn into a tragedy. And I think this speaks to what happens when we don't have a street with that forgiveness built into it. The challenge, of course, is space. Tremont Street has two lanes of traffic in each direction. It has buses running on it. It has painted bike lanes. It has street parking on both sides of the street, and it has sidewalks. And creating separated bike lanes there while preserving all the street parking and all of the traffic flow is there's just not enough space to do that. And so whenever we're looking out of street, there has to be a discussion of the different tradeoffs that exist just with the space that's available and how to allocate that space to maximize safety, but also to make the street useful for all the different people that need to use it and all the different modes that need to be on there. In the wake of Louisa's death, 4,000 people signed a letter to Wu expressing outrage about the city's lack of progress on bike safety. In the letter, we have...

removal of protective barriers in some bike lanes, a near stop to new speed bump installations. The group Transit Matters tracked at least 16 major projects that have stalled over the last year. Can you talk a little bit about what happened to create the situation where there's been such a slowdown on progress? Sure. You know, 2025 was a tough year for the streets cabinet. It was an election year. I think that brings with it a whole set of complicated political considerations. You know, the mayor's, the mayor Wu's opponent made opposition to bike lanes a centerpiece of his campaign, although it became very clear in polling and in the final result that that was not a deciding issue for very many voters in the city of Boston, but it elevated the issue to one of a lot of. you know, political controversy. And I think the decision was made last year to step back from the aggressive work that we had been doing. And that meant pausing on a lot of the safety projects. And in some cases, in situations where we had made commitments to members of the public of streets that would get speed humps, where people had been advocating that didn't get them or where that got delayed substantially. And so I think that created very understandably a lot of frustration. We seem to be moving in a good direction now. The mayor has appointed Chris Osgood as the new interim chief of streets. Chris is an incredible public servant. He's dedicated, he's committed, he is trusted by pretty much everybody in City Hall, which is a rare feat if you've ever been around City Hall internal inside politics. There's been some indication that some of the things that were put on hold will be moving again. I'm cautiously optimistic. I think there's some trust that has to be rebuilt. But I do think that, you know, you have the ingredients with that leader and this team to get back to the business of making our streets better. And I hope that they'll be able to do so. You mentioned the politics of it sort of became. Part of the reason where things were slowed down was, do you think the Wu leadership was kind of caught off guard at how much of a lightning rod this became or how upset people became by this? Because, you know, it was such a galvanizing issue during her original campaign. And then it seemed to have almost the opposite effect in the next campaign. So what changed? I mean... Why did it being an election year cause such a different dynamic? Sure. I mean, I think street projects are always going to be, maybe not always controversial, but they will always be relevant in the political conversation. It's a sort of perfect issue to become politically relevant because it has so much immediacy and so much impact for folks. I also think there were, you know, a handful of projects that were done over the past few years that activated particular elements within the community who were in opposition. You know, we had this dynamic emerge in the back bay, especially. We had, you know, a bike lane that was built on or expanded on Dartmouth Street in the back bay.

And originally that bike lane was supposed to be on Berkeley Street and then through conversations with the neighborhood association and elected officials, we made the decision to move it to Dartmouth Street. In the process, that meant that it went by the house of Jay Cashman, who is a millionaire who did not like this big new bike lane in front of his mansion. And he literally spent millions of his own money launching this massive anti-bike lane campaign. He set up a podcast and a YouTube. channel. He hired journalists to write critical articles. You know, and it was he's paying for advertisements on social media. And, you know, that was a, it's an important project. It links Copley Square to the Charles River. But it happened to go by someone who was rich enough to spend money really making the issue a bigger issue. And I think all of this kind of speaks to the... bigger question of how do you make sure when you're planning projects as a city that you're not just listening to the loudest voices, that you're not just listening to the people who have the money in the megaphone, but how do you bring all the voices to the table and give them equal and appropriate weight? The Globe wrote a report this past spring talking about essentially that the streets team, a lot of their autonomy and power was taken away. and that morale was really low in the streets team, and it just became a really frustrating place to work. I'm wondering if that's part of why you left. Yeah, I think, you know, you opened by saying, right, that I was the face of the mayor's streets work in the first term, and that's true. And I think, you know, she has been very public and clear that she is looking to change how the streets work. for herself and for myself, it makes sense to have a different face for this next version of the work that she's doing. It was a challenging year last year without a doubt. I care deeply about the team that is there at City Hall. There's some really incredible, dedicated, talented people that want to work, that want to build good projects. And I think for many of them, the speed and abruptness of the change last year was really destabilizing and challenging to to manage. But I do think that, you know, they're there, by and large, people are still there. They're still ready to work. You know, they're working through a lot of grief right now. But I think there's an opportunity to get back to doing what we were doing. And I'm excited to see that happen under Chris Asgud's leadership. Michelle Wu released a letter outlining some new proposals to improve street safety. I know a lot of advocates are saying the response. it's not quite what they wanted because it doesn't have very specific timelines or specific commitments. You know, what's your response to that letter? Do you think those advocates are right to kind of keep pushing there? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a job of advocates to make sure that people in power are held accountable to do the things that need to get done and that are, you know, that if they make commitments that they follow through on those commitments. And so, you know, it's, it feels right that the advocates in, you know, in the streets realm are pushing very hard on the administration to get specific and to follow through on the things that they, that the administration says they'll do.

I am heartened by how many things are in that letter. There are projects that are moving forward that are incredibly important. The redesign of Congress and Sleeper Street and Fort Point Channel, where Gracie Genceva was killed, is going to be transformational and includes features and design changes that were lessons learned from that awful, awful loss of a child. Cummins Highway is finishing construction in Matapan. complete rebuild of a high crash corridor that's received no attention in decades. And will now, I think, be a model for the gold standard of what a good street in a Boston neighborhood can look like. You know, incorporates so much pedestrian infrastructure, traffic calming, green infrastructure, trees, art, bike facilities, places for seniors to sit if they want to go for a walk. that are bus stops, all of the things that you want to see in a street. And this is just like a transformational project for this corner of the city that has not seen much in the way of transformation. And so I think there are things like that that I'm very excited about and optimistic about. But I think in particular when it comes to some of the things that reversed last year, thinking about, for example, the speed hunt program, right? That's a big one. There are we, you know, there was no request more common than. people writing to us about speeding in their neighborhood. And that was why we built the program. We built it with the capacity to build between 500 and 1,000 speed homes every year. And we did that for a couple of years. And then we stopped. And so I think there are, I can name streets out there where people have petitions. They are waiting. They know what they want and they are waiting to get it. And so I hope that there will be more specifics and more planning work done to make sure that those streets are on. a list and that they're quickly getting the traffic calming that they want um There are places around the city where flex posts were removed over the winter and where no alternative has yet been put back. There are alternatives like cast in place concrete or rubber bumpers or precast curbs that can be used as alternatives to flex posts. These are different ways to essentially protect a bike lane. Exactly, exactly. But having protection in places where we had it and then it went away is incredibly important. needs to be urgency with that and there needs to be clarity about the timeline for when that will happen. But I know the work has already started. I came here along Congress Street and there is a beautiful cast in place separator now, which is an upgrade from the flex posts that were there before. So the city has the tools and the capacity to do it, but getting clear and making clear commitments about when things will happen is essential to preserving safety. More of my conversation with Yasha Franklin Hodge after a short break. Yasha, when researching this problem, I've learned that Boston is so not alone in this and progress on street safety being so hard, pretty much everywhere in America.

What makes this issue so hard to move forward on in all American cities? Like, why is Boston? It's not a Boston thing, right? Yeah. No, it's definitely not unique to Boston. And I remember we were last year at one point looking for some outside support as we were going through this transition and pivot on some of the streets projects. And we spoke with Jeanette Sadi Khan, who was the former commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation and was really the... the person behind New York's big shift towards multimodalism and, you know, closing streets, building more pedestrian space, building more bike facilities. And, you know, we sat on a call with her and she said, everybody goes through this. It's not unique. Every city has this. There's always backlash. There's always pushback. There's always a period where it feels like. The only thing anybody wants to do is beat you up for having done the changes that you have done. But her advice was you just have to tough it out, right? You have to communicate. You have to engage with people. You have to, if there are things that weren't done the best they could be, you have to go back and fix them. But you also have to stay strong to the basic ideas. If you believe in safer streets, if you believe in streets that work better for transit and biking and walking, you have to keep moving because over time what happens is people say, start to see the benefits. You know, when you get, I still to this day have people who come up to me on the street who recognize me and come up and say, Thank you for putting speed humps on my street. I cannot tell you what a difference this is made for my family. But it takes time. And it takes a sort of, you know, when it comes to certain things like bike lanes, you have to have enough of a bike network that people feel safe to ride before you get to that point where people are saying, oh, I made a change to my commute and I like it. And thank you for making that possible. If you just build a little bit here and a little bit there, it never connects into a network and you never get over. that hump of people feeling like, okay, this is the thing I could do, or this is the thing I could let my kids do. What we've heard from every city that's done this is you just have to keep going. You have to build things that can continue year over year. And over time, you start to build a constituency for the work. I'm interested, you were talking earlier about if we have lots of subtle changes that just slowly make streets safer, that's a good thing. But I'm also thinking about like, the need for sort of a new paradigm, too. Like, the idea that cities are not for, not primarily for cars. They're for people. And I think of, you know, the fact that early, in the middle of, say, the 20th century, we had just a big increase in just the car-friendliness of our cities. We had all these, you know, highways built through cities and just an incredible accommodation for cars and cities. And it seems like now... clawing back like that space that has been given to cars, drivers feel pressed by that. Do you think we still need to be kind of pushing really big picture thinking on this? Or do you think that that's kind of a losing strategy? Because people are just, people love driving in this country. Yeah. I mean, I think it's a great question. And I would maybe answer it this way, right? I think there is a...

If we want to be a growing city, right, we need a city that people can get around in. And if you look at the number of vehicles registered in the city of Boston in 2020 versus today, it's about six years, it's about 20,000 more vehicles registered in Boston now. So let's project out, you know, 15, 20. 60 years, if we see that same kind of growth, imagine what traffic is going to be like in the city, right? It is bad today. And if you put tens or hundreds of thousands of more vehicles on the streets of Boston, nobody will be able to drive, right? That just won't be an option for anybody anymore because it will be so congested. So I think if we want to be a growing city, we have to sort of reckon with the geometric reality that cars take up a lot of space. Our streets cannot grow. Our streets cannot accommodate more cars. We can maybe do a little bit to manage the flow of traffic, improve signals, do some things at the edges that can improve the experience of people driving. But we need to be giving people options beyond. driving their own private car in order to be a growing city where people have a reasonable quality of life where they don't spend half their day stuck in traffic. I don't think it's the job of government to tell people how to get around, right? The city should not be here saying, you should drive, you should take the tea, you should ride a bike, right? That is not an appropriate role for government. What is an appropriate role for government is to give people good choices and to let them make choices that work for their lives, for their jobs, for their needs as an individual. And to do that, we have to start to rethink some of the design of our streets because if you have a street that has a major bus corridor on it and is perpetually jammed with cars, right, that bus will always be an inferior experience for people. It will never be something that people would choose. They will only do it if they have to. If you can create space on that street for a dedicated bus lane and make that street safe and reliable for people to. travel on the bus if you can make sure that the people walking to the bus can do so safely that they can cross the street without fearing for their lives suddenly the bus becomes an option that is actually interesting and useful to more people and it feels like a good choice to them and some people will make that choice and choose not to drive so that's to me how this shift has to happen But as you say, in order to do that, that often means you have to make trade-offs with space for parking or vehicle travel lanes. And that can be, you know, very challenging. You know, when we put a bus lane on Boylston Street in the Back Bay.

I had the head of the Back Bay Association in my conference room with my staff berating us for taking away that travel lane to make a bus lane. And at one point she looked at me and she said, nobody shops at Dior and gets on the bus. And... I, you know, okay, so the Dior shoppers have the Back Bay Association to advocate for them and to fight for the space that they want to drive cars and park cars. But I think it's the job of government to also say, okay, we need to make sure that we're considering the needs of the people who work at Dior, the people who clean. And who's cleaning the bathrooms at Dior. Yeah, who cleans the office buildings, who makes the food and the work-a-day commuters that don't have the luxury of being able to drive into the back bay and have a private parking space. waiting for them like the head of the association and many of the executives do. I think that's exactly it, though, that example you gave about Dior, because I think a lot of people who are really frustrated with leadership in Boston feel like the concerns of, okay, so, you know, some project that didn't necessarily totally optimize, you know, parking for businesses or, you know, convenience of a loading zone that these design details. are being used to cancel or, you know, negate projects when a slightly inconvenienced business is being weighted more heavily than hundreds, maybe thousands of people whose bus will be sitting in traffic or will be, you know, less safe on their bicycles. And I think that's part of the frustration of the politics that it's like the people who will be sitting in traffic on the bus are truly, like, don't have an advocate. Yeah, I think that's sometimes right. I mean, I will say, You know, business matters, right? Small business matters or neighborhood business districts matter. They are the heart and soul of a lot of our neighborhoods, especially. And a lot of what the team did as part of projects is to actually go door to door business to business, talk to them about when do you get deliveries, what size vehicles are used, how do your customers, how do you think your customers get to your business? And we would try to design curb regulation plans that matched as best we could the needs of all of the local business. for the city to do that. But I think this question of sort of whose voice is being heard is incredibly important because, you know, we see this certainly in neighborhoods like the Back Bay, but even in the context of the city's project planning a bus lane on Blue Hill Ave, we made an intentional effort to listen to voices that traditionally weren't part of the process. We went out to senior centers where a lot of the residents didn't drive, couldn't drive, and rode the bus to... get about their day. And we actually rode with them. We listened to them. We asked questions about what they liked, what they didn't like, what they wished the amenities were. We hired youth engagement specialists, young people who went out and talked to their peers, who required the bus to get to school, to get to after school jobs, to get home. And we asked them for their perspective. And we synthesized all of this into the reporting that we did to try to help with planning that project. Now, what that meant is if you were, you know, in your local neighborhood association, you're used to being the voice speaking for the community. And now the city is listening to your voice, but they're also listening to other voices that have a different perspective. And I think sometimes that can feel like you're not being heard when really what that means is you just don't have all of the power. You're not the only one being heard. I wonder if about the kind of emphasis specifically on bikes and bike lanes.

Often when I get deep into these conversations, it becomes extremely obvious that bikes are just one piece. But I feel like in terms of the politics, like bike lanes seem to be the thing that like everyone talks about. And, you know, Josh Kraft in his campaign, it was all about bike lanes. As you said, that was the lightning rod. I wonder if it would make, you know, it would be politically easier to make it about, you know, kids not getting hit by cars. So do you think there's too much emphasis on bicycles in this conversation? Yeah, I mean, I think we have bike lanes on maybe 5% of the streets in Boston, but it seems to be about 95% of the conversation about transportation. And it is the perfect wedge issue. I saw some polling last year that basically said a third of the city thinks we don't have enough bike lanes. A third think we have the right amount and a third think we have too many. So no matter what you do, you're going to make two thirds of the city mad. Right. So, I mean, clearly bike lanes are a very polarized issue. And I do think there are places where bikes represent enough of the people on the street or where there's enough of a history of crashes where there is a real obligation to take those considerations seriously. If you look at... Comav in the back bay during the morning commute. Bikes are about 20% of the vehicles on the street. It's true. Comab has a lot of bicycles. You wouldn't know it because they're small and they move quickly. They're not making traffic. But like that's not just, that's not a tiny group, right? That is a substantial user of the street and I think it's important for the city to take that into account. But ultimately, I mean, what we've seen is that when we make streets that work well for people who bike, they get safer for everybody. We did a. eight-year retrospective of streets where mostly during the Walsh administration bike lanes have been out and we looked at crash statistics before and after and on average we saw an almost 50% reduction in crashes across all modes including pedestrian and motor vehicle crashes so i think really the emphasis in my mind should be on how do we make these straight streets that are safe and comfortable for people to use no matter how they're traveling that's the work and that takes many many forms. You've had a nice long break from working in city planning. What reflections do you have looking back on your time as streets chief? Do you have any regrets or just things that you, if you were to do it again, what you do differently or approach differently? Yeah, it's a good question. I might have waited till 2026 to put a bike lane in front of Jay Cashman's house. That would be one. Post-election. But, you know, I think, broadly speaking, right, I'm proud that we moved with urgency. I'm proud that we took issues of street safety seriously. But I also know that, you know, some of that work. created a lot of political pushback. And, you know, I always view government as a relay race, right? The city of Boston has been around for almost 400 years. And it's not about Yasha. It's not about any one mayor. It's really about how are we building for the next 400 years of the city? How are we building? How am I as a leader handing off an organization that can do more? I think, you know, with the current leadership team that's

coming into place now with the streets cabinet. I'm confident that they'll be able to do that. You yourself are a biker. You biked here to downtown Boston to talk to me. And you often bike with your kids in the back of your bike. So I'm curious, like... Knowing that Boston could be safer for bicyclists, how do you sort of justify putting your own body, the body of your kids, you know, on the line and on a bicycle. Why is it still a... more important to you to ride a bicycle than it is to kind of maybe completely maximize safety in a big, you know, Hummer or something like that. Well, I care about safety not just for me and my family, but for every family out there and, you know, driving a, you know, a car that's bigger than it needs to be puts other people at risk. But, you know, putting that aside, I think, you know, I... Boston is a safe city. And I think for all this talk of street safety, right, nobody should be happy if there are deaths and injuries happening on our street. That should always be unacceptable, right? But when you compare Boston to almost any other major city in this country, what you see is a city that for pedestrians, for cyclists, for drivers, is safer, in many cases by like an order of magnitude because of all of the good work that has been done. this is our street grid, right? It's the streets are small that it's, you know, you would be hard pressed to find a street in Boston where you could reliably go 40 miles an hour, right? That's not, you know, the street grid keeps speeds down. But there's been so much work now for decades to really try to make the streets safer to do the work that needs to get done. And I, when I look at the statistics, you know, I love my kids to death and do anything for them. But I also know that, you know, There's no place in the country. I would rather them be walking, biking, or in the back of a car than here. I want to make sure that, you know, they're already, they don't want to be on the back of my bike half the time. They want to be on their own bikes. And I want to make sure that they and every other kid in this city grows up in a place where they're walking, if they're taking the bus, if they're riding their bike, that they feel like they can do it safely. And their parents don't have to kind of worry whether their kid is going to come home in one piece. And I think that's the work that we've made progress on, but there's still more to do. It sounds like you still feel very passionately about this issue and you clearly are a major transportation nerd. What do you think will be your next chapter? Well, as you said, I've had a wonderful and very fortunate opportunity to take a little bit of a break over this summer and just spend a lot of time with family and think in the fall I'll be working to figure out what comes next. You know, I'm a I care deeply about transportation issues. I'm also a, you know, I'm a, you know,

fourth generation public servant, and I believe in public service. And so I suspect that whatever I do next will be somewhere connected to one or both of those things. Yasha Franklin Hodge was Boston's chief of streets under Mayor Michelle Wu. He stepped down last year. Thank you so much for coming on, say more, Yasha. Thank you so much for having me. Say More is a production of the Boston Globe. Today's episode was produced by me. Our editor is Jim Dow. Our engineer is Uzair Ambin. If you'd like the show, please follow us and leave a review. You can email us at say more at globe.com. I'm Anna Kusmer. Thanks for listening.