Don't Drive Shitty Within This City
Pretty catchy 25 mph slogan, I think.
Hello, Worcester Sucksters!
Couple of quick things to know:
There’s a school committee meeting tonight and Aislinn has a great preview about it, as always. Some interesting stuff on there about the push from the crank contingent to get cops back in schools. Starts at ~5:30 p.m.
There’s also an event about a gas station development at the Hope Ave rotary (between all the cemeteries) that is displacing small businesses and presenting environmental concerns. Here’s the proposal document I got from the city. The meeting takes place at 7 p.m. at the Our Lady of the Angels Hall at 1222 Main Street. See you there.
Now to the past tense. But first, please subscribe!
We did it!—road to recover for Ayuen Leet—pushing for a doomed lawsuit—vacation all I ever wanted—(sticker) election update—odds and ends
We did it!
In a surprise turn of events, Traffic & Parking Chairwoman Donna Colorio started the meeting last night with a statement:
“I support adopting a statutory speed limit of 25 mph and establishing safety zones of 20 mph,” she said. Whoa! We love to see a change of heart. (Who got to her? And how? I need to know).
An hour and some change later, it passed 3-0. Next Tuesday, the full council is set to vote on it and it will almost certainly pass, with a maximum of three votes against by my count. Someone could hold it I suppose. But that would be very dumb, politically. So dumb it’s unlikely, even on this council.
So… we did it! We finally did one thing. It took almost an entire year and untold tragedies have unfolded in the interim but the city council is going to actually do something useful here about traffic violence. Stunning.
A bunch of people from the public came out to speak in support, and none in opposition, as has been the case just about every time this issue came up. (You can watch the whole thing here via our stream.)
Barring something unforeseen next Tuesday, the Department of Transportation & Mobility (DTM) and the police will start implementing the change as soon as the vote goes through.
What that will look like, per Commissioner of Transportation & Mobility Steve Rolle: New signs all around the city, a public education campaign, a grace period of enforcement, and a process for the public to report lingering 30 mph signs the city may have missed. Rolle said that Lowell’s public awareness strategy will be a model. Here’s the webpage, which suggests we’ll start seeing speed limit signs that look like this...
And a lot of placards and social media posts that look like this...
The new signage, Rolle said, is crucial for raising awareness among drivers that the city takes speeding seriously. While Lowell Drive 25 is cute and all my suggestion for Worcester’s campaign name is more to the point:
“DON’T DRIVE SHITTY WITHIN THIS CITY.”
On the police side, Interim Chief Paul Saucier1 said the police will increase traffic enforcement in part by moving the motorcycle cop division to traffic assignments. As of now, those cops patrol the common, he said. The sight of motorcycle cops pulling drivers over will signal the change, Sargent said.
Worcester’s no progressive leader on this. Some 70 communities in Massachusetts have already adopted this simple, effective change. As in most things, Worcester had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future.
Reduced speeds reduce accidents and reduce the deadliness of said accidents. It just works.
And before you have the chance to ask, think of it this way: any road with a route number is exempt. It’s changing the baseline speed limit from 30 mph to 25 mph. Certain highways will allow for faster speeds.
Oliver Chadwick, one of the key organizers in bullying the council into action on this, framed the lower speed limit in the appropriate way:
“As the DTM has said before, speed kills. A pedestrian hit at 20 miles an hour has a 90 percent chance of survival and if they’re hit at 40 miles an hour they have a 90 percent chance of being killed,” he said. “So for every five-mile-per-hour reduction, that’s about a 20 percent improvement to the chance of a pedestrian surviving.”
And, of course, higher speeds “not only make the impacts worse when they happen, they make crashes more likely to happen,” he said.
When it was committee member Khrystian King’s turn to speak, it was a bit of a nail biter. I was personally bracing myself for some sort of contrarian move to sabotage the proposal when he opened by saying he wasn’t initially in support of it. Things grew more tense when he started talking about how the city could opt to implement this on a street-by-street basis as opposed to citywide. It felt like it had the makings of an all-too-familiar story: the city council finding something that sounds like a compromise but in reality produces a policy disaster. Think inclusionary zoning, for one.
King asked Rolle about that option, and Rolle said that street-by-street implementation in a city the size of Worcester would “would be extremely time consuming, extremely cumbersome, and expensive.”
“It’s a little bit unusual, to be candid, because the whole idea behind a statutory speed limit is that’s a speed limit that exists in the absence of a posted speed limit,” Rolle said.
Only seven or eight small communities have done it that way, he said. It makes it a lot harder for a city to communicate that the speed limit is lower, which is the whole point.
I was sucking in breath waiting for King to make the motion for a street-by-street approach, but he didn’t!
“I do think we need to do this citywide,” King said, “and not anything less than that.” He made the motion for citywide. Phew.
Thu Nguyen, the third member, said they’ve supported it all along and they’re glad the committee is moving past its nine-month paralysis.
“I just want to take my time to really thank the folks who have been advocating for this,” Nguyen said. “I think y’all have been the ones to really push our council to take this action.”
It’s an important point to stress.
Colorio and King, by his own admission, were councilors that had to be dragged into supporting this. As recently as the last meeting, George Russell was railing against it, Donna Colorio was holding up symbolic shows of support, and Moe Bergman was being Moe Bergman. Even as pedestrian after pedestrian was rushed to the hospital, the council had been in a state of paralysis until last night.
The city council was truly pushed on this issue. By the community, by the city administration, by the undeniable truth of their negligence put in front of their face. The push was actually successful, where so often it ends in failure.
Credit is due to the relentless pressure from advocates, attending city hall meetings in person and cyberbullying officials online. The cranks were thoroughly drowned out.
But that wasn’t enough.
Credit is also due to the Department of Transportation and Mobility and the city manager, who could have buckled to the reactionary opposition many a time, but chose to stand by their people and the Vision Zero initiative.
We can’t forget it also took a fucking violent summer too. One little girl dead, one in a month-long coma, six others hospitalized with serious injuries. It has gotten to the point it was not an abstraction or exaggeration that the city has blood on its hands. That all of this social violence against pedestrians is, in fact, avoidable. And that Worcester has a real problem.
Despite the fact it was endlessly frustrating and took so much longer than it should have—I’ll say for the third or fourth time that a normal city council could have had this approved in January—the pressure campaign that got the city council out of the way of progress here now stands as a model. It can be repeated, and it needs to be repeated.
There’s so much work left to do, so much violence still being wrought by drivers in this city.
To illustrate the point: There was another bad crash Monday night on Grove Street. Someone on a scooter stopped to allow a family to cross a crosswalk. For doing that they were rewarded by a driver who hit them in the back, causing serious injuries, according to a police press release. It’s another unfortunate update to the traffic violence timeline.
There are so many streets in need of traffic-calming infrastructure improvements. There’s so much public education and awareness and social pressure needed to reform our needlessly aggressive driving culture. It will be a long time before pedestrians can feel safe in this city. It will take even longer to get the critical mass of people out walking, biking and taking the bus needed to smash the all-encompassing entitlement of car-drivers to our public roads.
But we have a plan. And it is a good one. And we have a city manager and transportation staff who want to implement it more than they want to placate their reactionary city council.
So, to close, we need people who were motivated by 25 mph to stay motivated, stay involved, and keep the pressure on. That means another big showing on Tuesday night of course.
But there are other opportunities outside the council chambers. A great one: The DTM is putting on several “walk audits” later this month in critical pedestrian areas. Led by traffic engineers, they’re on-the-ground assessments of a specific block—what’s working, what needs to change, and what it takes to get there. Feedback from attendees will be logged as data. It’s an opportunity to give real, concrete suggestions to the administration on what to do next.
Here’s the full schedule, as listed on the Vision Zero page of the city’s website:
The Department of Transportation and Mobility, with support from the City Manager's Office, invites members of the public to join these five events:
Walk Audits September 9
3 p.m., Belmont Street #1 - Belmont Street Community School to Converse Street/I-290 Ramp. Learn More & Register
5 p.m., Belmont Street #2 - Lake Avenue to Shrewsbury Street. Learn More & Register
7 p.m., Lincoln Street - Beverly Road to the Lincoln Street School crosswalk. Learn More & Register
Walk Audits September 12 - Featuring Jeff Speck, urban planner and author of Walkable City.
3 p.m., Cambridge Street - Price Chopper entrance to S. Crystal Street. Learn More & Register
6 p.m., Park Avenue - May Street to Chandler Street. Click here for more information and registration. Learn More & Register
Sign up for one of these and get involved!
The work never stops but ahhhhh if it isn’t nicer work to do with a little wind in your sails.
Have to relish in the good stuff when it happens.
Road to recovery for Ayuen Leet
Another rare bit of good news: Ayuen Leet is no longer in a coma!
The 13-year-old girl who was struck by a speeding driver on Shrewsbury Street last month has regained consciousness and rejoined her family. Per the Telegram:
“The doctors were surprised she made it. That’s how bad it was,” said her father Jok Mayak Leet in an earlier interview. “She had a fracture of her skull. She had a brain bleed and a lot of swelling. So they had to take off the right side of her skull.”
Her siblings now have reason for hope — her eldest brother lives and works in Boston; her brother, Jok Leet, is a medical assistant at the Reliant Clinic at St. Vincent Hospital; and her older sister is a certified nursing assistant at the Jewish Health Care Center.
“She asked for some candy, but she can’t eat yet so it will have to wait,” said Jok Leet.
Between a Paypal and GoFundMe page, the community has raised more than $20,000 for Ayuen. While the PayPal is closed, the GoFundMe is still active and accepting donations.
The Shrewsbury Neighborhood Support Team also ran a meal train for the family.
We are so happy to hear that Ayuen is conscious and communicating with her family! She is still in the ICU, but will be transferred to a rehabilitation center soon to continue her recovery process.
Leet was leaving a summer class at the African Community Education center off Shrewsbury Street when the driver, later cited for speeding, hit her.
At the Traffic & Parking meeting Wednesday night, Tim O’Neil, a resident who works at the center, brought up Leet to underscore that the traffic violence issue is, at the heart, a racial equity issue.
“We work with over 400 immigrant families in this city,” said O’Neil. “Our newest arrivals are the ones who are walking our streets. We have not done our jobs to keep them safe.”
Notice the difference in framing between this and Kate Toomey’s recent racist rant about immigrant pedestrians who don’t look both ways. (“We have a lot of folks that are new to our city who have not been informed of the rules of the road and safety.”)
It’s not about teaching them to be more fearful of cars, as Toomey suggested. They do not deserve to have to navigate public spaces that are so hostile to them. A society owes safe public spaces to its people. As O’Neil said, we have not done our jobs. That particular job falls squarely on the municipal government, not on new families.
Pushing for a doomed lawsuit
Councilor Candy Mero-Carlson put out a press release on Tuesday calling for the city manager to hold a meeting to discuss legal action against WPI. The letter is signed by eight other councilors. This has to do with the two hotels WPI purchased, as is their right in the free market system these councilors extoll in any other circumstance.
Two small quibbles: Mero-Carlson called for a private meeting, known as an “executive session” in government-speak. As Telegram reporter Marco Cartolano points out, that makes this release a public announcement about a private meeting. Also, Carlson asked for the manager to call the meeting. The city manager doesn’t call council meetings, the mayor does. Process finger wagging is annoying, I know. But I point it out in service of a broader observation: asking the manager to call the meeting is a tacit acknowledgement that the city manager steers the council—the opposite of how it’s supposed to work. The nine signatories are Mero-Carlson, Bergman, Colorio, Toomey, Russell, Pacillo, Ojeda, King, Haxhiaj. A curious pair, Mayor Joe Petty and Councilor Thu Nguyen, are absent.
At the end of the day, the press release is just a bit of bluster. Have the meeting, knock yourself out. But it would be very bad if the city acts on it, taking cues from Mero-Carlson and the cranks and actually entering into a legal action. I made that case on Sunday, in “A willing party to the hedge fund beneath the gown,” so I won’t remake it.
Point is: The much better course of action lies in a comprehensive review of the city’s PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) agreements with all the schools, as well as community benefit agreements for proposed developments, like WPI’s hotel-to-dorms project. There’s something productive to be won there, whereas suing a college-as-developer for, um… developing is just lighting public money on fire.
WPI has lawyers. Better ones, I am so very sure, than the city’s. They definitely checked to make sure they were on solid legal ground buying these hotels. The city on the other hand has a long track record of losing lawsuits after lengthy, protracted battles. The Telegram’s years-long lawsuit to get public records comes to mind.
We can’t let the city council pressure the administration to initiate a doomed and costly lawsuit out of spite. This is especially true in the case of WPI, our most generous PILOT contributor by a mile. We stand to lose almost $800,000 a year in those voluntary payments, on top of the $1.5 million we’re losing with the hotels, by souring the relationship further. (That’s also something I went over at length in “A willing party to the hedge fund beneath the gown.”)
And that’s not even factoring in the years of legal fees. If tax revenue were really an issue here for the political class (unclear to unlikely), we wouldn’t be going down this road. Completely petulant behavior.
In an upcoming post, I’m going to explore some different ideas for how to handle the current WPI situation. Which reminds me...
Vacation all I ever wanted!
It’s not often I take time off from this newsletter, but me and Katie are taking a monster trip for her birthday this year! We leave Sunday and we’re hitting Amsterdam, London, then a big multi-day road trip hitting four spots in the Republic of Ireland.
Super excited. We’ll be back on the 20th, with good stories to share, I’m sure.
I’ve worked out a publishing schedule that will allow me to completely check out of Worcester for the entirety of it while still getting regular posts up. I’m pre-writing a few shorter pieces to schedule over the course of the trip. I’ll announce the lineup in Sunday’s post.
For now, any good recommendations for what to do over there would be appreciated!
(Sticker) Election Update
Allegedly there was an election Tuesday. One of the sleepiest primaries of all time gotta hand it to incumbents. Here are the results. Write-in candidate Sheila Dibb outperformed MAGA Republican Peter Durant in the Worcester precincts, which is pretty neat.
A more important election, however, is ongoing. On the city’s Facebook page, you can vote for a new design of Worcester’s “I Voted” sticker, to be rolled out in the general election in November. Voting is simple. You just like or share the picture of the one you want to win, and the city will print the ones with the most likes or shares. Might I suggest Katya and (Worcester Sucks contributor) Greg Opperman’s:
It’s so sick! Here’s the link. Here’s a close up view:
Vote for it twice! (Even if only because Greg wrote two of the best pieces on here in recent memory: “This City Kills Children” and “It Happened Again.”)
There’s a bunch of other good ones. It’s worth a flip through the whole set.
Here’s one that absolutely sucks though…
…from one of the worst Worcester people: Walter Bird, Jr. “Our my their vote counts your 2024.” Lmao. Pronouns on the brain there, Walt?
Odds and ends
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Cool event alert: On Sept. 22, rising alt country star Jesse Daniels is at Ralph’s for a Hot Dog Safari event that features a mechanical bull and other fun stuff. Tickets here. I got mine already. Cya there! Mechanical bull signups are open until September 6 (tomorrow) also. Instructions on the Safari Instagram.
Worcester’s going to get $1.4 million from its former (terrible) bus contractor Durham in the settlement deal of an environmental pollution lawsuit filed against the company by the Conservation Law Foundation. Neat!
Finally getting around to listening to GBH’s The Big Dig podcast series. Only the first episode so far but it’s really good. Getting me juiced to start putting the heavy lifting in on my People’s History of I-290 project. Speaking of that look at this incredible spread I dug up the other day of the growth machine of the 1950s.
I’ll make a bigger pitch in a few days, but if you know anyone—anyone at all!—who was around Worcester for the construction of “The Worcester Expressway,” please send me a line billshaner@substack.com.
Ok that’s all for today! See ya Sunday.
Accidentally had this as “Steven Sargent” when I first posted. Brain fart!
Another merch opp? “DON’T DRIVE SHITTY WITHIN THIS CITY" signage stickers?
From my best friend in high school: “Try and reserve at Upstairs Pancakes. The smallest pancake place in Amsterdam and yummy. But you need a reservation!”