It was the speed-hump nightmare on Allandale Street that really tore it.
In early February of last year, barely a month after gung-ho bureaucrats from Boston’s Streets Cabinet jammed 13 speed humps into a quiet stretch of Allandale near Faulkner Hospital (reducing traffic to a crawl and assuring patients in ambulances of a spine-jarringly bumpy ride), the backlash against the city’s street-traffic makeover reached critical mass. The humps were dumped. Mayor Michelle Wu ordered a 30-day review of the bus and bike lane expansions that had infuriated many residents and business owners, conducted by a team that notably did not include hyper-aggressive Chief of Streets Jascha Franklin-Hodge.
The review’s findings were scathing: “We heard consistent feedback that project communications and community engagement were inadequate, that decisions seemed predetermined, and that processes too often did not achieve consensus, contributing to a loss of community trust. Many felt that their feedback was given insufficient attention and that temporary measures were allowed to remain for too long without further analysis of impacts and outcomes. We heard feedback that the tone of some engagements was very heavy-handed and relevant information was not shared, questioning the veracity of the process. Many believed neighborhood feedback was not weighed as heavily as others when decisions were made.”
Thanks to a March 15 Globe report, we know that period triggered a dramatic slowdown of the city’s efforts, which now require the mayor’s “personal approval on most transit and road safety projects.” Franklin-Hodge is gone, along with many others from the Streets Cabinet. Disappointment with Wu is rampant among the current and former cabinet employees who vented to the Globe, not to mention the car-deploring activists over at StreetsBlog Mass, who headlined their coverage: “Globe Report Implicates Mayor Michelle Wu In Street Safety, Transit Project Cancellations.”
“Implicates.” Can a grand jury probe be far behind?
Wu’s bike-lane-loving critics aren’t wrong about the city’s safety and congestion problems, crazy drivers, and the benefits of alternative transit. Their dismay is understandable. They thought their wish lists would all be fulfilled in short order, and were thrilled with the damn-the-torpedoes approach of the Franklin-Hodge regime.
But their anger is misplaced. Wu should be praised, not vilified, for doing what elected leaders should (but often do not) do - recognizing a mistake, and taking responsibility for fixing it. “I feel lucky and blessed every day to represent a community that is among the most opinionated and involved in the entire world,” said Wu in a brief interview with MASSterList. “We get the best outcomes when we can hear people’s feedback and incorporate that into what we try to do.”
At times, the mayor’s openness to legitimate criticism has been questioned - just ask the commercial property owners, or skeptics of the costly White Stadium project. But if she’s a tad reactionary on occasion, that’s hardly something new; recall Marty Walsh’s fury over the “ten people on Twitter” who helped sink the Boston Olympics fantasy, and the late Tom Menino’s penchant for angrily rejecting policy disagreement, only to adopt worthwhile elements of it after he’d cooled down. The line between constructive dissent and NIMBYism isn’t always easy to define.
But her actions here are a welcome counter to the narrative that it’s always Wu’s way or the highway. Fresh off a re-election landslide that made Menino’s cakewalks seem like nail biters, the mayor could have ignored the street work backlash last year, or simply throttled it all back up after Election Day. But she didn’t, and hasn’t, although she vows to continue pursuing sensible, properly vetted safety measures.
“Listening for listening’s sake is not enough,” she says. “It’s not enough to say we have held a meeting or 300 meetings, that’s not always better if you don’t see the change in response. Not just saying we care about community feedback but actually changing our processes to fine-tune individualized responses. We can’t just always have a one-sized approach.”
Words to live by for any powerful politician.
We rightly slam them when they don’t live up that credo.
We should praise them when they do.
