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© 2021 The Somerville Times. All rights reserved.
By Alderman-At-Large Stephanie Hirsch and Ward 5 Alderman Mark Niedergang
Residents reach out to us constantly about their frustrations and fear regarding traffic. Different people are aggravated by different aspects of traffic. Here’s some of what we hear:
- I can’t get out of my driveway and have started making doctors’ appointments only for the middle of the day…. It took me 20 minutes to get through Union Square…. It took me a half-hour to drive from Porter to Sullivan.
- My kids can’t get to a class nearby because I think it’s too dangerous for them to walk through Union or Davis on their own.
- The traffic light signaling changes are supposed to make things better… but my impression is they make things worse.
- I’m afraid that people who drive are not paying attention… I’m afraid that people who bicycle are not paying attention… I’m afraid that pedestrians are not paying attention… When I’m driving, there are too many things to pay attention to on the streets.
- The commuter traffic on my block backs up so far that the air gets hazy from exhaust.
- I’d love to bicycle around, but I’m scared, it doesn’t feel safe.
Traffic tops the list of quality-of-life concerns in Somerville (except, perhaps, for frustration with rats in some neighborhoods). Traffic problems appear to be overwhelming. But changes are happening that make us optimistic that a lot more progress will be made in the next five years than in the past five.
What’s causing our traffic problems?
One cause is the sheer volume of cars on our streets. A majority of cars being driven on our streets come from and go to somewhere outside of Somerville. That includes about 20,000 cut-through vehicles that pass through Union Square, 130,000 on I-93, and approximately 80 percent of all drivers at busy times and locations. The volume has increased along with the increase in traffic in greater Boston. More drivers are trying to find a way through Somerville around the traffic jams on I-93. Somerville Police Traffic Officers report that, at least anecdotally, the non-local commuters are more distracted and more likely to speed or skirt laws.
Another issue that’s aggravating traffic is construction. This cause, we hope, will be temporary. Detours, road closures, dirt and gravel-covered streets… they are driving all types of travelers crazy. But at least they come with an eventual reward. (Note: If you have a construction-related issue or travel question you can email: construction@somervillema.gov)
How can we make a dent in the traffic problems?
We have been meeting monthly since January 2018 with a group of residents who care deeply about making streets and sidewalks safer for all, and about relieving the traffic congestion that hurts our quality of life. We are so grateful for these residents who spend significant time working on traffic issues, including members of a group called Staying Put, who are trying to make sure that seniors and others with mobility issues can safely navigate our sidewalks and streets.
In addition to this effort, Mark chairs the Board of Aldermen (BOA) Traffic and Parking Committee. (Mark also represents the BOA on the City’s Traffic Commission, a little-known five-member Board that makes many of the important decisions about specific traffic and parking details in Somerville.) Mark has tried to focus on not just the very long laundry list of traffic problems, but on the big picture challenges, like staffing and infrastructure investment, that affect how much progress we can make.
The Administration and the BOA made a significant investment in 2018, almost doubling the traffic planning staff, thanks in large part to the advocacy and support of members of the public. The Mayor has also given the Office of Strategic Planning and Community Development transportation planning team both more resources and more responsibilities to tackle traffic planning issues. These extra resources have brought a much more flexible, creative, contemporary, and problem-solving approach to solving traffic issues.
We and the Administration share a focus on reducing traffic-related deaths, and the City’s new Vision Zero initiative addresses this objective. In particular, the planning process looks to increase the safety of pedestrians and bicyclists, who are most likely to experience traffic-related injuries and deaths in Somerville. However, we know that the entire system of streets and traffic requires study to improve life for people who travel by foot, bicycle, car, or bus/subway… and in most cases a mix of these methods.
We are working with the Administration on the following approaches:
- A staffed Pedestrian and Transit Committee: Our top request, along with the residents we’ve been working with, is to have a resident advisory committee that focuses on traffic and transit issues. It should be modeled after the hugely effective Somerville Bicycle Committee that has helped the Administration make enormous progress on bike infrastructure.
- Real-time traffic engineering with experimentation: In response to input from residents, a fully-staffed Traffic and Infrastructure Division can collect data, test out different traffic-calming strategies, monitor how those experiments worked, and report back to the community. This will be, we hope, a virtuous cycle.
- More enforcement: In a recent East Somerville traffic enforcement effort, a Somerville Police Department traffic control officer said, “The officers reported that the area is literally ‘out of control’ with violations which occurred directly in front of them even though they were there with blue lights activated as a warning to motorists not to commit a violation.” This feedback shows how much more we could do in the enforcement of traffic laws. Key violations to enforce include speeding and distracted driving, which cause many fatal or serious accidents nationwide. The Administration should add more Police resources for enforcement, including enforcement of bicycle laws, in particular when they impact pedestrians.
- More investment: To make a big impact on this big problem will require more staff which will take more funding.
- Neighborhood advocacy: You understand your own neighborhood best. We want to empower neighbors to work with City traffic planners to implement effective solutions to calm traffic and/or reduce traffic flow through small residential side streets.
- Coordination with the MBTA: Our public transportation system could be much more effective, but it is controlled by the MBTA, a state agency. For example, there is virtually no North-South public transportation route in the City. With five new Green Line stations opening in 2021 in Somerville, there will need to be some changes in bus routes. The City needs both to advocate for more and better MBTA bus service and also to be a good partner for the MBTA, such as by piloting bus-only lanes.
- Last, but certainly not least – parking: With a growing population of residents, shrinking space on our streets, and outdated regulations, the Administration must begin a community discussion about major changes in our parking policies. Many parking regulations need to change to improve the parking experience for thousands of residents.
We look forward to working with the Administration and with all of you on these important public health and quality-of-life traffic challenges in 2019. With the tools that are available, the expertise of our growing City staff, additional investment, and your relentless advocacy, we can chip away at the mountain of issues and begin to see some relief.
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People seem to overlook one major fact: more and more people are enticed to come here to live every day. Developers are constantly flipping properties, and are also encouraged to do so by our local government.
You cannot be the cause AND the solution at the same time. Stop packing us in like sardines and then decide that we have a problem trying to move around the city.
We used to be able to breathe here. Now you walk out your front door and you’re lucky to make it down the street. I drive out of Somerville once a week, and no sooner am I off my own street than I am merging into a packed area full of other moving cars, parked cars, cyclists, and pedestrians, all in the same place and trying to go somewhere.
Just because we’re a popular place to live, that doesn’t mean we should keep letting more people flood into the city. There will be time enough for people to move here once someone moves out, and at this rate, there will be plenty of that, too.
There is also the myth that millennials don’t have cars. While some don’t. we’ve seen many apartments turn over from families or older residents who have ~ 1 car to 3 millennial roommates who all have a car. There is one house in West Somerville that went from 2 cars for 3 apartments to 8 cars when all the units turned over (after rents went up)
Simple math, more housing more cars.
Linda: What, you want to build a wall and make Cambridge pay for it? That’s not how America works.
The whole blatant attempt to legislate the use of private vehicles by tax paying residents is offensive to me. Perhaps congestion from traffic might be eased by decreasing the number of special parking permits provided to all municipal employees and school department staff who do not live in Somerville. Providing parking in Somerville to employees at the expense of residents is, in my humble opinion, unfair.
Ellen,
Your private vehicle would be exempt from municipal legislation if you didn’t store or drive it on city streets.
How can you say you want to improve parking in the city and then turn around and ban parking in school lots during snow emergencies? Say one tjing and then do another. Have you also considered that reducing lower Broadway to one lane has caused enormous traffic issues? Also whatever was done in Union Sq needs to be fixed. Making the streets 2 ways has been a disaster, I avoid the area at all costs. Also something needs to be done about the congestion on McGrath heading both directions, but that should be last on your list of things to “fix” because I’m positive that whatever this city does will only make things worse.
It seems every plan to make the city less congested has had the opposite effect. I have yet to see a traffic improvement plan that didn’t back fire.
Simple math, heavily subsidize cars through general funds instead of user fees, you’ll get alot of cars.
The article says a big problem is through traffic – traffic that comes from outside somerville and is going to outside somerville and merely finds somerville to be the shortest path. However, the article doesn’t say at all how this will be addressed or if the city is even thinking about it.
It says bicycle traffic laws must be enforced particularly when they impact pedestrians. I say they must be enforced at all times – bicycles are a severe hazard to cars – and while a car driver is unlikely to be killed by a bicycle, a badly behaved bicyclist could be killed by a car, and they’re a person to. Also, they could ruin the car driver’s life if they ride their bicycle inappropriately and this results in a collision with a car, as police and courts are likely to blame the car driver. My friends and I have been saying for actual decades that the city needs to step up enforcement against bicycles because they’re a hazard and can’t be bothered to obey traffic laws, and the city has always lied that it does enforce traffic laws against bicycles.
The article complains that car driving is becoming more slow in Somerville, while at the same time complains about pedestrian safety. The city’s approach to pedestrian safety has been to deliberately impede car driving (with things like speed bumps or the Cherry Street nonsense) to slow down car traffic – so fast driving and safe pedestrians have become mutually exclusive goals. While of course I want to be safe when I walk in the city (which is often), I recognize that when I drive anywhere, I have to allocate between 20 minutes and half an hour just to get out of Somerville (which can be more than half the trip, depending where I’m going). This is untenable and sooner or later I will feel forced to move out of the city because of it.
The article complains that bicycling “doesn’t feel safe”. The city is very dense and highly populous. We can either make empty streets that are safe for bicycles, or we can make streets that cars can drive on. The city’s current approach of encouraging bicyclists and making sure they know they’re entitled to take up the whole lane merely results in city wide traffic jams (I’ve seen Highland Ave jam up all the way from the high school to Davis Square because of one bicyclist taking up the whole lane going 5MPH and giving the finger to the cars behind them) and unsafe bicyclists (as noted it’s not necessarily safe to bicycle in Somerville, and the more bikes there are the more accidents with them there will be).
More Condos=More people=More cars=More traffic and pollution. Simple logistics. In 2009 a study was done on traffic pollution and Somerville topped the chart. I can only imagine what the study would show if repeated in 2019.
The study can be located here:
http://www.somervillestep.org/2009/04/steps_wig_zamor_2.html
Can you please where you got your statistics? I’d like to know specifically how you know the number of cars that don’t begin or end in Somerville. I’d also like to know about your statements about accidents and pedestrian safety. I can’t remember the last time I saw a car accident anywhere in Somerville, much less a fatal one. I also can’t remember the last time I heard of a pedestrian being hit, much less killed, by a car. Can you state statistics please? I would also like to know how much money will be added to the budget if your proposals are accepted. New committees, additional personnel to departments, etc. Maybe the BOA should do their job, for which they are more than generously compensated, rather than add more and more unnecessary positions to the city budget.
Hard to believe that people would cut through Somerville to escape a jammed up I-93 more than once. They’d quickly realize their mistake. Is there a way to track that? If so I’d like to see the study.
No question that more people living here brings more cars on the roads. Just wait til the Union Sq development…
If the city is unwilling to stop approving denser housing, perhaps along with not providing on site parking, which politicians have said will bring new residents without cars, these new units shouldn’t qualify for resident parking permits.
AaronWeber, are you serious? Trying to compare this to an immigration issue is ridiculous.
It doesn’t matter who comes here, we simply have too many people here in one single city. We are the most densely populated city in New England. Doesn’t that tell you something?
The more people, the more parking, the more police, the more work is needed to keep everyone safe. You can only juggle so many balls in the air. How do you accommodate everyone here?
We don’t need a wall, we need common sense government here. You can’t cram us all into one city, period. If you’re going to argue the issue, come up with something that’s relevant.
This could be as simple as charging market rates ($150+ per month in winter hill right now) for parking rather than our current parking fees and you’ll see the number of cars in the city drop.
Matt – that would be a very regressive tax on parking.
If we’re going to stop “subsidizing” cars and start charging market value for parking permits, perhaps it’s time to start considering ending MBTA subsidies as well.
Technically I’m already paying for that street parking spot via taxes. So what they should do instead is offer a tax credit to people who don’t park on the street, except they still need to collect some money from them every time they pull over to pick up / drop someone off, double park, or have anyone visit.
In any case I like this idea because after I pay for my fancy expensive street parking spot there will be lots more room to park, with all the poor people being unable to afford parking spots and leave or struggle through 90 minute commutes via “transit”. Another bonus: fewer ugly (ie cheap) cars parked on the streets. The ugly cars can go where they belong: newly paved-over yards.
Let’s say you started charging “market rates” for street parking – whatever that is. One, it’s a highly regressive tax. Some people have to have a car. People that live in Somerville and do not have a driveway have to park on the street. People like me will simply pay the annual fee and it will not make any difference to me. It could be $1200 a year – I will just pay it. But it will to some people.
As Yet Another Poster implies – it will make life much easier for more affluent people, as they will simply pay the fee and not give up their car and they will have more parking spaces. The simple fact of the matter is that there were two cities I lived in where I did not have a car – London and NYC – because the public transport was so regular and reliable (both bus and subway) that you did not need a car. The same cannot be said of Somerville or metro Boston.
On thing that has eased parking on my street is owners of two families selling their houses to families when they used to rent it to students. We had about 8 cars liked to the house two doors down from us. I went on an open house and the landlord had turned every room into a bedroom ad divided rooms to stuff as many students in as possible, With every student was a car. Now there is only 2 cars linked to that house. So it has made parking a lot easier. There needs to be better regulation of these rental houses.
As for subsidizing the MBTA, did you know that only about 30% of the MBTA’s annual budget come from people paying to ride transit. The MBTA is massively subsidized. How would you like to see the cost of your Charlie card go up 70%? I thought not. But in fact what we have – as the MBTA service declines and infrastructure crumbles – is the progressives of Somerville advocating that there should be more classes of free and 1/2 price riders – literally more free riders! It’s crazy.
People who own cars are not bad people. The city probably does not want fewer cars as they generate millions of dollars per year from parking tickets! More cars means more tickets.
I agree that the gas tax being frozen at 1993 levels is insane. The federal government should fix that.
Mr. Driveway, I’d be happy to apply the same level (%) of subsidy to parking as we see on the average transit ride in Somerville. I’d also be good with applying additional levels based on income.
I live in Union. I’ve got a car. Use it as little as possible. Will probably get rid of it when the T station opens up. Yet no complaints if they jack up the parking permit fee. Eventually they should ban on-street parking in and around the squares where we’ve got T stations. We aren’t a suburb.