Chairs Brendan Crighton and William Straus
Vice Chairs Paul Mark and Brian Murray
Joint Committee on Transportation
24 Beacon Street, Rooms 109-C & 134
Boston, MA 02133

October 3, 2023

Dear Chairs Crighton and Straus, Vice Chairs Mark and Murray, and members of the Committee,

We are writing to ask you to report out favorably on bills S.2208 / H.3398 that are before the Joint Committee on Transportation, while incorporating modifications as recommended below. Somerville Alliance for Safe Streets (SASS) is an organization of over 900 residents working toward safe streets and equitable mobility in the City of Somerville. Like many communities across the Commonwealth, Somerville is facing persistent traffic violence against vulnerable road users, with seven fatalities across the city in just under four years. Somerville also supports the greenhouse gas reduction mandates of the Green Communities Act of 2008 and has a Somerville Climate Forward plan that identifies transportation electrification and mode shift as two key strategies to meeting these goals.

In Somerville, as elsewhere, the worst impacts of both traffic violence and climate change are falling on our environmental justice communities, which are also suffering from air and noise pollution from abutting highways and dangerous cut-through roads as well as from transit cut-backs and underinvestment.

Large, heavy, fossil-fuel powered vehicles are the primary culprits of these negative impacts. From well-documented deadly visibility shortcomings to human-killing strike zones from high hoods, to abysmal efficiencies, these vehicles are killing our neighbors and destroying our climate. In addition, large, heavy vehicles destroy pavement, stressing our municipal budget for road repair. Like many of the Commonwealth’s oldest cities, Somerville has many narrow residential streets, with limited space in the public way for all modes of mobility. These large vehicles reduce already limited street parking, and frustrate our city’s efforts to create safer infrastructure – like parking-protected bicycle lanes.

As analysis by the Green Energy Consumers’ Alliance demonstrates, vehicles that cost over $60,000 are mostly SUVs and large pickup trucks – exactly the large, heavy vehicles that are causing disproportionate damage in Somerville and elsewhere.

SASS is supportive of S.2208 / H.3398. We respectfully ask the Committee to consider a few opportunities to strengthen this bill:

• Given the proliferation of dangerously large electric vehicles such as Hummers and pickup trucks, we recommend that a weight-based registration fee formula apply to ALL motor vehicles, with a 1,000 pound or other reasonable exemption for battery weight on plug-in and hybrid models, as has been successfully implemented in Washington DC.
• In addition to weight, consider setting fees based on other factors of motor vehicle design that impact the safety of vulnerable road users:
  • The pedestrian safety rating pending rulemaking by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or in the absence of such rating, a combination of bumper height and leading edge hood height.
  • The direct vision or outward visibility of child pedestrians to a the vehicle operator.
  • The overall vehicle height and its footprint (both related to visual obstruction of people in crosswalks to other drivers and to safely navigating historic town/city streets)
• Allocate at least 50 percent of the revenue raised by the fees levied as a result of this bill towards public transportation, bike/walk paths, bike/micro-mobility lanes, sidewalks, and accessibility improvements to help shift trips to inherently safer, non-driving modes statewide, while supporting the mode shift that is critical to meeting the Commonwealth’s statutory greenhouse gas targets.

We urge you to report out favorably on S.2208 / H.3398, with the above modifications.

Thank you,

The SASS Steering Committee

Chris Dwan, Ivaloo Street
Stephanie Galaitsi, Morrison Ave
Joan Liu, Florence Street
Karen Molloy, Highland Avenue
Arah Schuur, Walker Street
Susann Wilkinson, Orchard Street
Larry Yu, Herbert Street
Alex Epstein, Windsor Road
Mark Neidergang, Conwell Street
Roman Zadov
Ellin Reisner, Mt Vernon Street
Alex Frieden, lake street
Cynthia Stillinger
Edward Faulkner
Adrienne Agarwal, Hall Street
Cole Springate

January 06, 2022

Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Division of Professional Licensure
Office of Public Safety and Inspections
Architectural Access Board
1000 Washington St, Suite 710, Boston MA

Dear Members of the Architectural Access Board,

We submit the following public comment on the variance request for “MassDOT Project Number 608605 regarding Sidewalk and Wheelchair Improvements and Related Work”:

We welcome MassDOT’s plan to bring the crossing at Poplar Street in Somerville into regulatory compliance. However, we ask the board to deny the application for a variance as currently written and instead ask the project to bring the adjacent sidewalks into compliance, especially the short connection from the project’s current northwest boundary to the nearby bus stop.

We also suggest that the large radii of the turn lanes at Popular Street are contrary to current safety best-practice. They encourage high-speed turns that will put users of this new crosswalk at risk. We urge the board and MassDOT to collaborate on an improved design that would shorten the crossing distance for pedestrians and slow turning vehicles, such as squaring off the intersection and raising crosswalks.

Sincerely,

Somerville Alliance for Safe Streets Steering Committee

somervillesafestreets@gmail.com 

Angie Byrne, Highland Ave
Ken Carlson, Beacon Street
Bonnie Denis, Maxwell’s Green
Chris Dwan, Ivaloo Street
Edward A. Faulkner, Bay Sate Ave
Stephanie Galaitsi, Morrison Ave
Joan Liu, Florence Street
Karen Molloy, Highland Avenue
Mark Niedergang, Conwell Street
Ellin Reisner, Mt. Vernon Street
George Schneeloch, School Street
Arah Schuur, Walker Street
Susann Wilkinson, Orchard Street
Emily Vides, Mystic Avenue
Larry Yu, Herbert Street
Alex Epstein, Windsor Road

Somerville Alliance for Safe Streets (SASS)
somervillesafestreets@gmail.com 
Somerville, MA

May 19, 2021

Johnathan Gulliver, Highway Administrator
Jamey Tesler, Acting Secretary
Massachusetts Department of Transportation
10 Park Plaza, Suite 4160, Boston, MA

Dear Administrator Gulliver and Secretary Tesler,

Somerville Alliance for Safe Streets (SASS) is a coalition of hundreds of Somerville residents who demand safe streets and equitable infrastructure. Our group reflects Somerville’s diversity. We are pedestrians, cyclists, motorists, and transit users. We are parents of young children, seniors, and people with disabilities. Our recent call to action garnered more than 600 signatures, and the Mayor and the City Council have already responded by adding staff and accelerating project timelines. We hope that MassDOT will respond with similar urgency.

We are writing today to demand that you address the critical safety and accessibility deficiencies along Mystic Ave and McGrath Highway. These MassDOT-controlled roadways are the most dangerous and inequitable infrastructure in our city. Three pedestrians have been killed here in hit and run crashes by motorists in the past two years, the most recent of which was last month. This violence falls disproportionately on Somerville’s lower-income, Black and brown communities. Some of our most vulnerable residents have no choice but to traverse these roadways to get between home, food, work, and school.

We are frustrated by the lack of progress on fixing this long-standing highway injustice, and we urge you to make the following immediate improvements before more lives are lost. These improvements are necessary for safety now and will become even more important as the Route 93 viaduct project begins to reroute even more traffic through this area in 2022:

• Install Blakeley Ave crosswalk, traffic signal, and pedestrian refuge island this year, instead of waiting for the larger McGrath improvement project.
• Install ADA-compliant curb cuts and ramps at all crosswalks this spring or summer, with temporary asphalt curb ramps if more permanent construction needs to wait.
• Increase the walk phase and include countdown signals for all crosswalks at Broadway & McGrath and at Shore Drive & Mystic Ave.
• Construct raised crosswalks and speed humps at both entrances to the Kensington underpass.
• Complete pedestrian improvements at Shore Drive & Mystic Ave.
• Enact traffic calming measures such as rumble strips and speed humps to reduce illegal speeding on the on/off ramps of Route 93 and on Route 28/38.
• Decrease cut-through traffic on Mystic Ave by preventing left turns from the Exit 29 ramp of Route 93.

We acknowledge that MassDOT is already planning several improvements to this area, and while we welcome those plans we ask that you accelerate and enhance them. Specifically:

• Accelerate the Route 38 / Route 28 road improvement project from summer of 2023 to what was originally promised, summer of 2022.
• Extend the planned road diet to narrow McGrath north beyond Broadway to Mystic Ave by extending bicycle facilities and by building a signalized crosswalk and pedestrian refuge island at Blakeley Ave.
• Add sidewalk on Mystic Ave along Foss Park that extends to the east side of McGrath Highway to provide safer pedestrian access to Stop and Shop and East Somerville.

In addition to the ever-present threat of  traffic violence, the whole Route 93 corridor through Somerville imposes major health impacts on residents living in abutting neighborhoods. (These potential adverse health impacts were known back in 1970 when construction of 93 began.) We urge MassDOT to finally mitigate the noise pollution and deadly ultrafine particulate pollution by protecting these neighborhoods with sound barriers and other types of mitigation along Route 93 on the same timeline as the viaduct project.

Finally, we ask that you increase communication with our city government and residents, the latter of whom are often not included in the decisions affecting their lives:

• Designate two individuals at MassDOT with direct access to decision makers to serve as dedicated points-of-contact for local residents and city leaders to address questions and concerns about these projects.
• Meet with SASS to discuss the timing and scope of the full set of proposed projects for McGrath Highway, Mystic Avenue, and Route 93.

At a time when our state and nation are struggling to address the dual crises of systemic racial inequality and climate change, it is unacceptable to invest in outdated designs that treat residents and pedestrians as second-class citizens while dumping traffic, noise, and air pollution onto neighborhoods that have been historically ignored.

We invite you to join us and Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, State Rep. Christine Barber, State Rep. Mike Connolly, State Rep. Erika Uyterhoeven, Mayor Joe Curtatone, City Councillors Matt McLaughlin and Jesse Clingan, and local residents for a highway justice rally on May 26 at 6pm at McGrath and Broadway.

Sincerely,

Somerville Alliance for Safe Streets Steering Committee

somervillesafestreets@gmail.com 

Ken Carlson, Beacon St, Ward 2
Bonnie Denis, Maxwell’s Green, Ward 5
Chris Dwan, Ivaloo St, Ward 2
Stephanie Galaitsi, Morrison Ave, Ward 5
Joan Liu, Florence St, Ward 1
Wilfred Mbah, Woods Ave, Councilor at Large
Karen Molloy, Highland Ave, Ward 5
Mark Niedergang, Conwell Street, Ward 5 City Councilor
Arah Schuur, Walker St, Ward 6
Emily Vides, Mystic Ave, Ward 4
Susann Wilkinson, Orchard St, Ward 6
Larry Yu, Herbert St., Ward 6

The original Google document version this letter is here.