Battle Over Boston Bike Lanes Intensifies and Hits Mayor’s Race

Construction mogul Jay Cashman says Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s bike lane overhaul is such a disaster that he’s willing to spend as much as $1 million to force the city to redo them.

Wu, who is seeking reelection this year, has added about 15 miles of bike lanes in a push to make it easier for cyclists to get around the notoriously labyrinthine city and inspire more Bostonians to commute to work this way. But Cashman, along with other residents, business owners and neighborhood groups, says the revamp was too hasty and ignored critics’ concerns, which range from safety risks, loss of parking spaces, more congested street traffic and slower response times for emergency vehicles.

“This problem is unfolding in front of us and unless somebody does something, it’s going to get worse,” said Cashman, who launched Pedal Safe Boston, an advocacy group pushing for an overhaul of the new system. He spent $100,000 to draw up a petition for a state ballot question that, if it moves forward, would impose new bike lane planning rules. He’s also backing a proposal from Boston City Councilor Ed Flynn to establish a commission to consider removing or altering Wu’s bike lanes and set new rules for them going forward.

Boston isn’t the first city to face pushback over bike lanes. Just across the Charles River, a cycling expansion in Cambridge — home to Harvard University — has sparked a similarly bitter back and forth. Toronto, Houston and New York’s Queens borough are among the other places mired in bike lane controversy. But in Boston, the battle has become a proxy for a broader debate in this election year over influence, access and whose voices matter most when determining the future of the city.

Josh Kraft, the son of billionaire and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, is challenging Wu in the Nov. 4 mayoral election, seeking to become the first person in 76 years to unseat an incumbent in Boston. He’s seized on the bike lane rollout as an example of how Wu doesn’t listen to criticism and is out of touch with the business community. Advertisements and text messages from the super political action committee supporting his campaign have called the bike lanes a “disaster” and proof that Wu’s ideas “only make things worse” for the city.

“Bike lanes have really impacted not just small business, all business,” Kraft said in an interview. He’s called for a pause in construction of bike lanes and the potential removal of the ones that he says create the most headaches, including those on Boylston Street in Boston’s commercial core and on Centre Street in the more residential West Roxbury neighborhood.

“We really need to take the time to study how they impact business and figure out where to put them,” he said.

Flynn says he wants to schedule a hearing on his proposal for a bike lane review commission sometime this summer but has gotten pushback from Boston city council colleagues who don’t want to consider an overhaul until after the mayoral and council races this fall.

Boston is also grappling with the mounting pressures of federal funding cuts on its vaunted research and higher education ecosystem, a deepening spiral in office building valuations and increased immigration enforcement. But when it comes to local elections, it’s often the day-to-day concerns — from affordability to commutes and housing — that carry the most weight for voters.

Nearly half of registered Boston voters think the city has too many bike lanes, while 35% say there are enough and 17% say there are too few, according to a February survey by Emerson College. Kraft supporters are far more likely to oppose Boston’s bike lane expansion than those backing Wu, the survey found.

“I’m not against bike lanes, but they’ve got to be put in in an efficient way where they don’t take away from the streets,” said Omar South, a barber-shop owner who joined Kraft at a recent event on the issue. “When you start taking away from businesses and creating more traffic, then it’s a problem.”

Safety Improvement

Earlier this year, Wu announced small tweaks to bike lane designs in some parts of the city in response to criticism. Her administration has also signaled recently that the reconfiguration of the Blue Hill Avenue thoroughfare in the Mattapan neighborhood may not include bike lanes after all.

Still, Wu has defended and continued to advocate for the expansion. Additional bike lanes have made roadways safer, even as they have spurred more residents to ride their bikes, Wu said last month at a business forum in Boston. Crashes have declined by 51% on streets where bikers and drivers are now separated by posts or other barriers, according to a city analysis.

Wu compared the city’s new bike lanes to a family rearranging living-room furniture to meet its changing needs.

“Once you move it around, it’s always going to feel very weird, because you are so used to how it was before,” she said at the event. “Sometimes you just need to live in it a little bit to see if that actually works.”

Advocates say bike lanes can actually boost store traffic as cyclists take breaks and that criticism over a lack of public engagement is misleading. City officials say they held more than 50 public meetings on roadway projects last year.

“Insisting on absolutely complete, rigorous data is just a way of stalling it,” said David Wean, a member of the Boston Cyclists Union, a group advocating for better bike infrastructure in the city.

Parking Problems

Wean acknowledged imperfections in Boston’s bike lane network, including points where a lane will end abruptly and throw bikers into the middle of car traffic. But much of the infrastructure built to date has made streets safer, he says. He pointed to the addition of bike lanes and other road changes on Centre Street in West Roxbury after a pedestrian was killed crossing the street in 2019. There have been no fatalities since then, he said.

Critics say they also want fewer accidents but that the haphazard design of Boston’s bike lanes has increased safety risks and come at the expense of local businesses. Wu’s effort to modify some of the bike lanes comes too late and doesn’t go far enough, says Meg Mainzer-Cohen, president and executive director of the Back Bay Association. What was once a business-friendly area has become a hazard for storefronts and delivery trucks, she said. Bike lanes “basically drove a stake into the functionality of the whole neighborhood.”

Over in Brighton, revenue has declined 40% year-over-year at Big Daddy’s Pizza and Sub Shop after bike lanes went up along Western Avenue in late 2024, according to owner Richie Singh. Some of his best customers were slapped with $100 parking violations for blocking the bike lane, Singh said. They haven’t been back since. He’s upset by what he sees as the city’s lack of response to his entreaties for help, though officials said this spring that they would seek to open up more curbside parking in the neighborhood.

The hit to his business is all the more frustrating, Singh said, because of the dearth of bikers he sees whizzing by his windows.

Each week, “I work six days, sometimes I work seven days,” Singh said. While he’s at the restaurant, “I see two, three bikes at the most, no more than that.”