That directive, which hasn’t been previously reported, has brought the vast majority of the city’s streets projects involving design or infrastructure changes to a near standstill for the past year, according to 11 current or former cabinet employees. The slowdown has sent staff morale plummeting, those city workers said, and many of the cabinet’s top leaders have left City Hall in recent months.
“All these projects exist because someone asked for them,” said one Streets Cabinet employee, who, like 10 other former or current city workers, spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation from the administration. “These are going to be more promises that the city’s breaking. I think that’s what is breaking people’s hearts who are working for the city right now.”
The rollback of Wu’s street safety agenda has deeply frustrated transit advocates, who say City Hall is slow-walking, and potentially jeopardizing, projects that would deliver badly-needed safety improvements to key transit corridors.
Now, four months removed from Wu’s landslide reelection victory, some advocates are questioning Wu’s commitment to the transit priorities she championed in her first term, when she pushed for the city to install hundreds of speed humps and miles of bike lanes, and advocated for ambitious, if sometimes controversial, safety upgrades to dangerous roads.
In an interview with the Globe, Wu insisted that street safety continues to be a top priority, but that she also has to consider feedback from residents and other elected officials who felt the city had moved too quickly on earlier projects.
“Sometimes in the push for urgency and for speed of getting things done, things got lost in translation,” she said. “I intend to do better this term.”
Wu did not confirm she instituted the policy requiring her personal approval for advancing projects, but acknowledged she is “very involved” in the Streets Cabinet’s work.
Caitlin Allen-Connelly, executive director of the public transportation nonprofit TransitMatters, said the Wu administration did not respond for months to her organization’s repeated questions about the status of various infrastructure projects. TransitMatters is tracking at least 16 major projects that have not moved forward over the last year, Allen-Connelly said.
“There’s seemingly no explanation for why these projects are sort of on pause,” Allen-Connelly said. “When we’re not getting a response from the city, it begs the question: ‘Where’s the mayor?’”
A view of the center line island on Blue Hill Avenue in Mattapan Square with traffic.David L. Ryan/Globe Staff
Among the stalled projects are a $162 million plan to reimagine Blue Hill Avenue, another to overhaul Columbia Road, a yearslong plan to invest in Hyde Park Avenue where a pedestrian was killed in 2024, and a project to extend a center-running bus lane on Tremont Street and Columbus Avenue.
Her administration’s “Making Neighborhood Streets Safer” program, which aimed to install at least 500 speed humps a year on city streets, has itself slowed to a crawl. For example, Boston installed around 600 in 2024. But last year, the city installed fewer than two dozen, according to estimates by five employees of the Streets Cabinet with knowledge of the effort.
As of Friday, Wu’s office did not provide data on how many were installed last year.
Wu said several street safety and infrastructure projects are still ongoing, including reconstruction of Congress and Sleeper Streets in the Seaport where a 4-year-old was hit by a pickup truck and killed in 2024, and a mammoth effort to overhaul Sullivan Square and Rutherford Avenue in Charlestown. She said the city has also made significant progress on other maintenance duties, such as repaving roads, repainting crosswalks, and fixing sidewalks.
Her close monitoring of the cabinet’s work has included attending meetings where she’s reviewed projects ranging from major changes to more minor ones, such as proposed locations for new speed humps.
Wu said she did so, in part, to ensure enough outreach had been done and that projects have the “full consensus of the community.”
Wu pointed to an incident last year when the city installed speed humps in a Jamaica Plain neighborhood, only to remove them later after nearby residents complained.
“Wherever possible, we need to be getting things right the first time,” Wu said. “Our role as a city is not to decide within City Hall what’s right for the neighbors and fight to force people to accept that.”
But transit advocates and employees inside the department say some of the projects on pause have broad community support, and already went through years of design revisions and community engagement. That includes the Hyde Park Ave. project, they said, as well as the reconstruction of Harrison Avenue Ink Block, which is listed on a city website as in construction and set for completion this year, though the most recent update is dated January 2025.
“When the city engages the community, [and] asks them, ‘Hey, what do you need? How can we help you?’ And then it’s radio silence … that’s the fastest way you can rupture trust,” said Reggie Ramos, executive director of the advocacy group Transportation for Massachusetts. She later added: “It feels like transportation is no longer a priority of the city.”
Wu heavily championed progressive transit policies during her 2021 mayoral campaign, and has pushed through controversial projects, including bike lanes on Boylston Street. In 2023, the city also completed a redesign of Centre Street in West Roxbury with bike lanes and traffic calming measures, despite vocal opposition from some in the community.
Then, to many transit advocates, Wu changed her posture just as she began her reelection push, including walking back street design changes in response to criticism from prominent business leaders.
Early last year amid public backlash over bike lanes and a political challenger in Josh Kraft aiming to capitalize on it, Wu ordered a 30-day review of all recent street infrastructure changes, and had a controversial bus lane on Boylston Street removed.
Around the same time, administration officials began telling staff of the Streets operation to stop working on nearly all projects involving design or infrastructure changes, big or small, until Wu’s office gave them the go-ahead to continue. The edict left dozens of projects in limbo, 11 current and former Streets Cabinet employees told the Globe. Since then, they said they’ve received limited to no communication from Wu’s office on how to proceed.
Maha Aslam, transit and streets program manager of the nonprofit LivableStreets Alliance, said she had hoped Wu would allow work to resume on the stalled projects after she overwhelmingly won reelection in November.
“Unfortunately, that didn’t happen,” she said.
Meanwhile, Wu’s Streets Cabinet has lost much of its top leadership. Jascha Franklin-Hodge, the chief of streets and face of Wu’s transportation agenda, announced he was leaving the administration just days after the November election. The Streets Cabinet’s chief of staff and deputy chief of streets for infrastructure and design have also since departed, and the director of policy and planning has retired.
Now, advocates say they’re concerned the continued delays could mean some projects won’t happen at all. Two stalled projects, to redesign Maverick Square in East Boston and Roslindale Square, are backed by federal pandemic relief dollars that expire at the end of the 2026, Allen-Connelly of TransitMatters said.
Wu said the city is aware of the funding deadline and that the projects “will get done.” But the websites for the initiatives indicate both are still in the planning stage.
Meanwhile, the Blue Hill Avenue project recently secured more than $80 million from a federal grant program. But according to LivableStreets, those funds, plus nearly $50 million in state and MBTA funds allocated for the project, are contingent on the design including a center-running bus lane, which is opposed by a vocal group of residents and some elected officials.
Four city streets staff members told the Globe they still haven’t gotten the green light from the mayor to continue working on the Blue Hill Avenue project.
Niki Griswold can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @nikigriswold.
