Bike lane defenders, assemble!
We need you to hound the City Council tonight re Mill Street
Regularly scheduled full post later in the week. This one is just a quick Mill Street primer for a critical meeting tonight, and a call to arms. Please help spread the word!
On an agenda with many many many items of significance which deserve attention, we’re about to spend another Tuesday night re-litigating Mill Street — doing the whole thing again for the fifth (?) time. The cranks are still trying to upend it and we still need to swat them back down. Like every other time since the last municipal election when this bad faith political push started as a bad faith campaign issue employed by Jose Rivera against Etel Haxhiaj.
It is just a bike lane, people. It’s on the other side of the parked cars because it’s safer to have it there. Normal cities across the country do these things without incident. Can we please be just a little normal?
In order to swat effectively, we need people to show up at council tonight and call/Zoom in and email, call, text city councilors and overall just drown out these townie cranks. We should all be sick of this by now!
The meeting starts at 6:30 p.m., on the third floor of City Hall. Here’s the agenda. The call-in number is 929-205-6099. Here’s the Zoom link and the access code is 917 2757 4825. People in the council chamber is ideal though!!
The item is number 11o, filed by Moe Bergman.
Broken down, that means Bergman wants to 1. spend city money to redo a good design, 2. Provide “best practices” which he will continue to ignore (Mill Street is designed according to best practices) 3. Spend even more city money to have the traffic engineers which designed this street to review their own design and 4. Send all protected bike lane designs to the city council so they can block them.
It’s on the fourth point where we should be saying absolutely fuckin’ not. Councilors have absolutely zero business involving themselves in traffic engineering. Any more involvement than they have now is regressive.
And there’s also one from Bergman’s unlikely partner in the crusade against bike lanes, Khrystian King.
The $2 million figure is federal money already allocated to furthering the Mill Street redesign effort. While King’s order appears more innocuous than Bergman’s, he’s been a vocal critic of the design, and behind the nice words about elevating protected bike lanes likely lies an intent, same as Bergman, to reverse the changes. But Bergman’s order should be the focus tonight, because it behooves none of us to allow the council to set a precedent of authority over traffic engineering. It’s just not their job. At all.
Bergman’s order is his way of following up on comments made at a budget hearing a few weeks ago…
…which were psychotic frankly.
Bergman simply wants it to be a failure.
The data is clear: Since Dec. 1, 2023, when the redesign was finished, there have been 13 crashes. From Dec., 2022 to March 2023, there were 16 crashes. More crashes before the bike lane, fewer crashes after. The five-year average is 13 crashes, according to the chief.
And the chief of police wrote this: “While the early crash rates are consistent with prior years, we anticipate that they will decline as the community becomes acclimated to the changes in the road.”
But the data hasn’t stopped the bad faith townie outcry, of course.
Nor has it stopped the cranks from lighting up the townie Facebook groups with fake outrage.
Yes, this Donna Colorio...
The Donna Colorio who, last time this came up, revealed she didn’t understand anything about the road redesign, but still hated it for some reason. From my post on the matter in early April:
(Colorio) said she thought the entire street had been redesigned. “Because the entire Mill Street there’s a bike lane in the middle of the road,” she said. (The bike lane is not in the middle of the road.) She was apparently unaware of the southernmost portion, from Coes Pond to Webster Square, that wasn’t changed at all. It’s a rare and beautiful thing to see a city councilor be so dead wrong about such a simple fact, and in such clear terms.
Read up. Or just watch this clip.
This is the person working “behind the scenes” to “fix this mess.” She very clearly wanted worse looking numbers to help her bad faith argument. She doesn’t care at all about actual safety. We should be embarrassed!
And it should be stressed that Eric Batista’s administration has been actually good on road safety issues. Most readers will know I’m quick to criticize but here praise is deserved.
In his State of the City speech last week, Batista made clear his commitment to road safety and smart redesigns. From my dispatch on the speech:
Townies and cranks be damned, he was firm on the need for road redesigns, using the term “traffic violence prevention.”
“Even that term, ‘traffic violence,’ reflects a new way of thinking,” Batista said. To his administration’s credit, they have been pretty good on this front, and the recent refusal to capitulate to the cranks over Mill Street has been refreshing to witness.
And that rhetoric is backed up with an initiative: Vision Zero, one the the city’s more progressive and successful programs.
We’re in a rare position here where Batista and his administration need to be defended against a hostile council. We need to encourage him to ignore them—because he can ignore them, he often does, and in this instance he really needs to. There are many more roads in need of redesigning and the council needs to get out of the way of that.
They need to feel the heat, folks. Calling councilors, emailing them, Tweeting at them, showing up to city council tonight, getting in line on Zoom—it all matters.
Oliver Chadwick posted a great script on Twitter to work off of for testimony/emails/calls. Here it is:
Dear Councilor [XYZ], I am a [Worcester resident / Worcester resident of D5 / Worcester resident and live on/near Mill st].
I am writing to ask you to oppose reverting Mill street as suggested in item 11o of Tuesday’s council agenda.
The initial data shared by Police Chief Saucier indicated that crash rates were about the same, but he expected them to go down as people got used to the new layout. Reverting Mill street to “The Speedway” is a terrible path for the city to take. The previous layout had 270 crashes in the 5 years before the change and the average speed was 12mph over the limit with vehicles routinely going over 50mph.
Thousands of people have expressed their interest in safer streets and more transportation options in Worcester. [personal experience wanting to bike and walk safely in the city]
The city has hired expert transportation professionals in the DTM and they should be allowed to do their jobs. The council should not force a reversion based on a few recent anecdotes and opinions.
The DTM should look at a reasonable sample size of crash data and make adjustments as necessary. They are doing this. They are going to install additional signage and flex posts to further demarcate the lanes over the next weeks.
Please oppose item 11o and 10 d. Thank you for your attention to this important issue, - [Name]
Lastly, just for fun…
Just a quick one today to get this on your radar. If you saw any typos no you didn’t.
As always the WCT3k crew will be streaming the meeting over on Twitch. Come hang. We’ll start at 6:15.
And also as always throw me some bones if you can 🙂
The real issue with Mill Street has always been the drivers. We (I include myself) drive insanely fast on that road, and drivers refuse to slow down even with the changes. They just assume they can continue to drive the same way regardless, and if crashes happen it’s not the drivers’ fault, it’s the road! (Derp)
Take the 2million$ and pave some of the impassable roads