BikeLoud Stands in solidarity with Boston transportation advocates 

The article below was written by BikeLoud PDX Vice-chair Kiel Johnson and was first published in that organization’s newsletter.

On July 9th, 36 year old Louisa Gag (above) was struck and killed by a truck driver. She was riding in a painted bike lane on a street in Boston that the city had long identified as dangerous. There was a funded plan to dramatically improve this street, which the mayor’s administration had halted and then defunded after backlash from businesses and community groups. Gag worked for the advocacy group LivableStreets and was a transportation planner for the city. She spent her career trying to prevent tragedies like the one that claimed her life. 

In 2021, the mayor of Boston was elected on a platform to improve street safety, but paused and backed away from making improvements after community and business complaints about loss of parking and car lanes. For people in Portland, this story is very familiar. 

We mourn the loss of Louisa Gag and stand in solidarity with Boston’s transportation advocates. Her death is a heartbreaking reminder that our decisions about street design have real human consequences. We have solutions to prevent tragedies like this one. In Boston they had the plan and even the money. What they lacked was the political will. 

Advertisement

Transportation safety is either a priority or it isn’t. Growing the number of people who bike is either a goal or it isn’t. When elected leaders pledge to build safer streets but retreat when car-centric opposition arises, those commitments become little more than words. Little by little, this erodes our faith in leadership. Every delayed project and every watered-down design leaves dangerous conditions in place. In Portland, the list of missed opportunities continues to grow. 

After Louisa’s death, Boston’s transportation advocates wrote a powerful letter calling on their city to match its values with its actions. We couldn’t help but think it could have been written about Portland and we wanted to share it with you.

Dear Mayor Wu,

Enough is enough.

We are parents, families, and neighbors from across Boston. Many of us have met you — at safety walks, at community meetings, on Hyde Park Avenue and on corridors like it across the city. For years, we have told you, in public and to your face, that continued delay on street safety would cost lives.

Last week it cost the life of Louisa Gag — a transportation planner in your own administration, a person who devoted her career to making our streets safe. Louisa was killed on her bicycle blocks from an intersection your administration has studied and stalled. She was not the first. We have been losing neighbors to these streets for years, and we have been warning you, specifically and repeatedly, that more deaths were coming.

You know as well as anyone how beloved Louisa was. She began her career in public service on your own staff, when you were a city councilor, and she spent it working tirelessly for the residents of Boston — beside the advocates she organized, her colleagues in City Hall, and neighbors across this city whose streets are safer because of her. She was killed on the streets she spent her career trying to fix. Years ago, one of her professional responsibilities was keeping the list of people killed by cars in Boston. Now her name has been added to it.

For at least eighteen months, your administration has stalled and re-studied safety projects that were designed and funded. You have told us these projects need more process, more consensus, more perfection. But consensus never arrives for the dead, and a study protects no one.

Budgets are moral documents. The budget you put forward placed safety projects on hold and cut transportation funding at the very moment the city needed the opposite.

We are not asking for better messaging or communication strategies. We are asking you to act:

1. Unpause every stalled street-safety project within 30 days, with a published, dated construction schedule for each.
2. Restore the street-safety and transportation funding cut in your budget.
3. Build fast and fix later. End the practice of holding projects hostage to perfect designs and unanimous approval. Use quick-build materials now; refine as you go.
4. Appoint a permanent, qualified Chief of Streets with a broad public mandate to eliminate traffic deaths.
5. Be accountable. Publish a public timeline for every high-crash corridor — including Tremont Street and Hyde Park Avenue — with a named official responsible for each.

None of us is willing to raise our families in a city whose leadership will not answer for preventable deaths on its own streets. We are asking you to do what is right. And if you cannot or will not, you will have forfeited the trust a mayor needs to govern — and no study or prolonged consensus project will win it back.

Signed,

The people of Boston who walk, bike, and cross your streets — and who are done waiting.