Discussion
First, context, Commonwealth Av is the backbone of Boston University and around the BU Cycle Kitchen is one of the best protected and heavily used bike lanes in all of Boston. It's protected by curbs and separate from the sidewalk and this is what it looked like yesterday. Unpassable
Credit to the BU Urbanists club who had been registering complaints for over a week, entering 311 tickets, contracting the mayor, Chief of Streets Nick Gove, and city councilors: no action whatsoever It was clear the city did not care and was going to do nothing. Enough folks were motivated to show
Everyone showed up with something, a shovel, something to hack through ice, drinks to keep people hydrated, a willingness to work together to take care of each other. Most of the work was done by hand, but someone brought a snowblower and started hacking a path through compressed and frozen snow!
Because the storm was so long ago, and snow from the street had been pushed into the bike lane, there were epic mounds of ice. You had to chop through them with metal shovels. And that's exactly what we did. All by hand. Here's a before, and during shot
You can see how massive this chunk of ice was that had to be chopped out and then removed! Had the city just cleared the bike lane when the snow was still soft, none of this would be necessary
While all this was going on, people who rely on this bike lane year round were forced to be either in the traffic lane or on the sidewalk. Folks biking, riding scooters, skateboards, runners, someone on a skateboard: Boston is a multimodal city and we all deserve safety and to be protected from cars
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