Council Updates, Garden Street Re-Reversal, and More

Ahern Field
The City of Cambridge is working to make improvements to the 158 Spring Street building and Ahern Field. Part of these improvements include a new synthetic turf field to accommodate more youth sports. The City Council and City staff have long been considered about the proliferation of PFAS materials in a range of uses citywide, as noted in CMA 2022 #181, which outlined policies and procedures on artificial turf, and CMA 2024 #137, which provided updated policies on PFAS in all relevant city areas (water, firefighting, turf, waste, etc.). On the Danehy Park field replacement project, which included replacement of turf fields and track, City staff considered a number of options for materials and opted not to use typical “crumb rubber,” and instead used a wood-fiber-sand mix, and took steps to independently test the turf grass blades for PFAS. I filed a policy order this week along with Mayor Siddiqui and Councillor McGovern requesting a report from City staff on how the decision to install artificial turf was made, the rationale for artificial turf, and what process was taken to ensure community concerns and public health considerations were addressed. Providing a playable field at Ahern is essential to improve access to recreation for East Cambridge residents, especially for youth and families who rely on nearby facilities and may not have easy access to fields elsewhere, but we need to better understand whether the only way to provide that is with a turf, not grass, field. And we must ensure public health and safety concerns are robust and addressed for all users of the facilities.

Garden Street
There is a policy order on the agenda sponsored by councillors Al-Zubi and Sobrinho-Wheeler asking City staff to stop their work on restoring Garden Street to a two-way car traffic street while utilizing bidirectional bike lanes on the south side of the street (like the Brattle Street bike lanes). The background on this policy order is that in 2025, the Council voted to approve a policy order requesting changes to the Garden Street street layout. More detail in this Cambridge Day piece from last April about why I thought those changes were important and necessary after many attempts at mitigating unintended circumstances. A key for me, as a supporter of a bike lane network, was that the plan includes safe two-way bike lanes.

After the last vote, concerns were raised from residents who were nervous about the lack of a delivery and loading zone access near Shepard Street. The staff had said that the need could not be accommodated. Since then, I worked with councillors Wilson and Toner along with City staff and Harvard University to see if there was a solution. And we found one! The plan is to rearrange a Bluebike station to make space for a loading zone on Garden Street. It is true that parking spots will be lost – the analysis provided by City staff is that there are sufficient spots within a block or two for the number of cars that park on Garden in that stretch.

Importantly, two way car travel with bidirectional bike lanes is safe. We have a bidirectional bike lane on Brattle, which works well. And by keeping bike lanes all on one side of the street, we reduce the number of intersection impacts. More cars traveling on Garden Street turn from and onto streets on the north side including Linnean, Shepard, and Chauncy than do on the south onto Bond and Madison, creating fewer opportunities for dangerous car and bike interactions. By moving the bike lanes to the south side of the street we reduce the number of intersection crossings for bikes from about 7 on the north side and about 5 on the south side to 5 intersections on the south side only.

Quick-build bike lanes have been a key strategy of the Cycling Safety Ordinance, not only because of the cost savings and the speed in which implementation can occur but also because it allows for additional changes if appropriate. We need to be willing to revisit projects and make adjustments at times. Garden Street, with two-way car traffic, will not be the same as it was five years ago, since bike lanes remain. It will have more cars than now, and should also have slower speeds due to narrow lanes. Two way traffic compared to one way generally sees slightly lower speeds, due to the two way, and narrower lanes. The road will be safe for cyclists and pedestrians and there will be two-way bicycle travel in dedicated, protected bike lanes.

If we want a full network of accessible and safe bike lanes, which I absolutely do, per Policy Order POR 2024 #152 from December 2024, we need to be amenable to a variety of solutions. We will absolutely not get there if we don’t consider the option of bidirectional bike lanes when appropriate. Many existing roadways are too narrow to accommodate all the necessary uses otherwise. And we will not get to a comprehensive network by ignoring the very real traffic concerns in the area or by walling ourselves off to alternative street designs. I am disappointed to be discussing this issue again, and after a year, I still believe the two-way traffic and bi-directional bike lane is still in the best interest for the entire area.