Public officials and members of the general public attended the Highway Justice for People” event on Wednesday, May 26.  — Photo by Joe Creason

By Joe Creason

Mystic Avenue and McGrath Highway cut through Somerville like river rapids made of steel and concrete. Walking alongside it, as many pedestrians and residents of Somerville do every day, is like paddling a canoe around edges of a hurricane comprised with raging noise, industrial particulates and speeding cars. This “Corridor of Death,” as many in the community are calling it, has already claimed the lives of three pedestrians in just two years.

Somerville Alliance for Safe Streets (SASS), a community organization formed with the intention of raising awareness and engaging leaders on the values of accessibility, equitable investment, safety and the mitigation of climate change, put forth a major effort in changing the status quo of perilous conditions for residents in the area with the “Highway Justice for People” rally on May 26.

In attendance at Highway Justice for People were City Councilors, Mayor Joe Curtatone, State Representatives Christine Barber and Mike Connolly as well as Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley.

The rally comes as a response to a pattern of neglect from the Massachusetts State Transportation Department (MassDOT) towards the Mystic Avenue Highway corridor and the surrounding neighborhoods. As accidents lead to pedestrian fatalities in the community, MassDOT has only prolonged their timeline for building safety improvements.

Instead, MassDOT has fast tracked a steel viaduct restoration project on the Mystic Ave expanse of the Highway despite the death of residents.

“The people who live in these communities are the people who have to cross these streets dangerously all the time, who are the ones with heart problems and asthma,” said Executive Director of The Welcome Project Ben Echevarria, “What MassDOT wants to say to us is, wait in line and next time we do something we’ll build something. It’s always the same story, next time. We’re tired, we’re dying. We don’t need next time, we need now.”

The Welcome Project, an organization dedicated to empowering the residents and immigrant communities of the Mystic Public Housing Development, had many members assembled at the rally in a show of support for the cause. The Mystic Public Housing Development borders the Corridor of Death and is faced with many negative environmental factors as a result.

“Why is it that every year I drive down and I have to hear about murders. If you drive through Medford, you see sound barriers, you see none here, instead you see Mystic housing and the beautiful little apartments, the second you see a sign for Charlestown-BOOM another sound wall,” Echevarria said.

According to Echevarria, the only neighborhood with sound barriers along the Somerville expanse of McGrath Highway is the affluent community of Ten Hills. Sound barriers not only protect those living around highways from the noise, but also from the fine particle air pollution produced by cars which is known to cause serious health consequences with long term exposure.

“Hundreds of families who live on Mystic Ave are breathing in the pollution every day from I-93 and it’s greatly affecting their health and we have the science to back this up,” said State Representative for the 34th Middlesex District Christine Barber.

The State Delegation has secured $2 million dollars of funding for pedestrian improvements and another $2 million for sound barriers through bond legislation. 

“We’ve secured the money, but MassDOT has to spend it, the Baker administration has to spend it and that hasn’t been happening,” Barber said.

Officials and community organizations at Highway Justice for People, called upon MassDOT to make a Blakeley Ave crosswalk immediately and to accelerate the delayed plans for safety improvements to the Mystic Ave and McGrath Highway corridor.

“We’ve been fighting for every inch of progress with MassDOT but we can’t do it alone. We need each and every one of you to show up on June 1 for the Boston area capital investment meeting and on June 8th for the I-93 preservation meeting,” said State Representative for the 26th Middlesex District Mike Connolly.

Connolly later made note that while driving up the Massachusetts Turnpike, he noticed 30-foot sound walls protecting the trees in more rural areas. Meanwhile, residents in Somerville live with their triple decker housing units abutting McGrath Highway.

“Why is it that MassDOT and the Baker Administration will protect the lives of trees and not the lives of our constituents,” Connolly said.

According to Connolly, in 2019 then Massachusetts Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack promised to accelerate a road safety audit on the Mystic Avenue corridor. The audit resulted in the approval of a $ 6 million intersection improvement project which was planned to begin in the Summer of 2022.

In an April 2021 meeting, MassDOT told the State Delegation that the intersection improvement project would be delayed until 2023 and that they had already completed designs for a green lighted improvement project to begin in 2022 to “preserve the life of the steel on the highway bridge.”

“If you’re going to preserve the life of the steel, you need to take action to preserve the life of our constituents,” Connolly said.

In addition to the construction of new pedestrian safety elements, elected officials and their constituents at the rally also called on MassDOT for the immediate enactment of traffic calming measures and to erect sound barriers along I-93 to reduce noise and fine air particulate pollution.

“As a black woman, I’m often told that I need to moderate my righteous indignation or rage lest people think I’m angry. Well, I am outraged because this is outrageous,” said U.S. Representative for Massachusetts’s 7th Congressional District Ayanna Pressley,

“Justice delayed is justice denied.”

According to Pressley, McGrath Highway is one of the deadliest roadways in the entire Commonwealth based on data. Pressley says the existing infrastructure has continuously created environmental hazards towards the community due to structural comorbidities caused by divestment and racism. A heat map showing the rates of asthma around McGrath Highway, correlates with a map of Covid-19 fatalities in Pressley’s 7th Congressional District, which was one of the hardest hit in the entire nation by the pandemic.

“Injustice and oppression of the minoritized and marginalized is usually intersectional, so we have to take a moment to speak to the intersectionality of our organizing and in our future not just for this corridor but for the thousands like it in this country,” Pressley said.

Pressley would go on to note that while she continues to fight for improvement funds at the Federal level, it was public outcry that defeated the Inner Belt initiative in the 1970’s which would have seen I-93 redirected through the heart of Boston and split Lower Roxbury in half.

“Organized power is realized power, and the power of the people has always been greater than the people in power,” Pressley said.

Concerned residents can make an impact by showing up on June 1 for the Boston area capital investment meeting and on June 8 for the I-93 perseveration meeting.