Rebutting Boston’s Carhead Journalists
Boston is uniquely unsuitable for automobiles. Our narrow streets are not meant for car traffic, let alone the bigger autos of our time. Cycling infrastructure makes the road safer for all
or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the bike lanes
by Harmony Boyd
Boston is uniquely unsuitable for automobiles. Our narrow streets are not meant for car traffic, let alone the bigger autos of our time. Cycling infrastructure makes the road safer for all and benefits everyone in the community.
Yet there are still these hit pieces masquerading as journalism bashing bike lanes. It is disappointing or perhaps telling that the mere notion that cycling and bike lanes are beneficial for all seems ridiculous to Boston’s journalistic community.
A BlueBikes station being mostly full only shows that more people are docking than are departing. Must cyclists prove who they are by wearing the full spandex uniforms everywhere, helmet and all? Joking aside the truth is everyone and anyone can be a cyclist.
There is not one type of person renting Boston’s Blue Bikes, which can be rented to anyone with a bank account. They’re ridden by people of all ages, genders, and backgrounds. There also exist numerous specialized biking options for people with physical disabilities. Almost any physical condition can be accommodated with the right set of wheels, making cycling a powerful tool for equity in transportation and recreation alike.
Then there’s the anecdotal account of empty bike lanes. I see plenty of cyclists every day, the only reason they’re apparently not ubiquitous enough for the writer is because Boston and the surrounding cities have half-assed bike infrastructure with big gaps that compromise rider safety. Who wants to venture far out if they know their separate bike lane might suddenly turn into a paint strip?
If these cities built dependably safe and consistently separate bike lanes there will be no shortage of riders. The pandemic showed this to be the case. Freely accessible Blue Bikes and almost no cars on the road, it became impossible to find any bike at any docking stations because they were all actively in use. If you build it safely, they will come.
This writer makes the classic blunder of trying to speak for everyone, when they can only speak for themselves. Asserting that there’s “a growing chorus” is difficult to take seriously without any specifics to interrogate. The comment on the cold immediately proves the writer isn’t speaking from experience, it takes about as long to warm up riding a bike as it does shivering in a car while the seat heat and air conditioning kick in.
It’s not always super fun, but plenty of people cycle in Boston during the winter. Some don’t have any other choice. There’s also the option of taking public transportation if cycling in the cold is too much for your fragile constitution. But winter cycling still has one undeniable advantage over driving: No more scraping ice off the windshield! As for the snow, well, if the roads are clear enough for cars but not clear enough for cyclists the issue is with some snow shovelers slacking, not bike lanes.
Putting that aside, the argument itself is bunk; ‘We can't build bike lanes, a viable alternative to driving, until we have access to viable alternatives to driving’ is circular logic. It’s nonsense! Even if only 1% of Boston’s population is cycling because of bike lanes that represents thousands upon thousands of people not contributing to traffic.
The Globe article this particular excerpt is from leans heavily on conjecture and leading questions, but is light on actual reporting. This is typical of the coverage bike lanes receive in the Boston media, where cyclists are portrayed as stuck-up elites because they care enough about sustainability to make it a part of their lifestyle. It’s seen as a privileged choice to cycle while driving is viewed as the default.
Never mind that autos can only be relied on by those who can afford insurance and maintenance costs. Poorer drivers are just waiting for those particular rugs to be pulled from beneath them. It costs on average 10,000$ per year to have a car in the city of Boston. That’s nearly a thousand dollars per month. For a lot of working people, that’s the difference between paying rent and being on the street.
There is a large part of the population using bikes not because they’re tech bros taking the latest ebike for a joyride, but because they can afford nothing else. If you live in Chelsea, Revere, or Everett your non-car options to Boston are a long bus ride over the Tobin or a ridiculously winding bike ride through the rustiest part of Suffolk County. If you can’t get a job in Boston, well, good luck with the work you can scrounge up this side of the Mystic River.
Instead of interrogating the feeling that cyclists are “lording over them” the author assumes cyclists are just as bad as cars. If we’re doing whataboutism, why is it that when cars fly through red lights and turn people into strawberry jam it gets called an “accident” but when cyclists are killed by cars it’s suddenly their fault and a matter of personal responsibility? Why do drivers feel entitled to speed as fast as they can through residential streets but cyclists get scrutinized if they ask for a modicum of safety? The smug tone of this Globe writer hides a dearth of actual journalism. So to ask a real question, why are more bikes and not more cars the answer?
Let’s be frank. As the population of drivers increases, traffic gets worse. No matter how many lanes there are, if everyone is driving the gridlock will grind us all down to the nub. Every person choosing to cycle or use public transit instead of driving means that many fewer cars clogging the road. To oppose the development of bike lanes out of a belief that drivers will benefit is to be tilting at windmills. A self-own. Everyone benefits from bike lanes, even businesses.
Businesses accessible by bicycle or public transit are easier to patronize than places where the only access is by car. Unless you get lucky, the car option entails endlessly circling an ever-wider radius to find street parking within a reasonable walking distance of your destination. If you’re really lucky, then you might have the privilege of shelling out for a paid spot.
If it’s a delivery business, you can send out more deliverers for less if they’re on bikes. Not to mention a bike making a delivery takes up a hell of a lot less space than a car doing the same thing. How many times have you been stuck behind a delivery driver with their hazards blinking while they drop off food on a narrow road?
It’s not fun to spend so much of our lives looking for parking and stuck in traffic. We should be working together to make a difference that benefits everybody using the road, bike lanes are a sustainable solution that improves safety and puts people before cars. Pitting drivers and cyclists against one another is just another way for the powers that be to divide and conquer the people. Nobody benefits more than the automotive and gas megacorps when people have no viable options but driving everywhere.
The automobile is simply not a sustainable method of mass transportation. It represents a class barrier for the poorest rungs of society and is an indispensable ticking time bomb for the people just above them. Cars drive inequity as the wealthy and comfortable can zip along in their air conditioned isolation chambers totally oblivious to their privilege while the poor take the bus, bike, or pray that it isn’t the day their a-to-b car breaks down for the last time.
Car proliferation also makes us less safe. The destructive potential of even a small automobile crash is orders of magnitude larger than the damage any bicycle could ever do. Every day when I take the Haymarket bus in to work I see ample evidence of automotive mayhem. Facades and masonry smashed to dust, dented metal road barricades, painted bikes memorializing dead cyclists. These scenes of pain are everywhere if you’re paying attention. I refuse to accept cars regularly obliterating property and extinguishing human life as normal. We might be used to it but that doesn’t make it okay.
If everyone rode bikes everyone could get where they want to go but the same cannot be said for giving everyone cars. Space for bicycles benefits everyone, more space for cars doesn’t even benefit drivers because it creates traffic. If Boston tears out every bike lane then traffic will not improve, it will grind to a complete halt. Cycling isn’t a novelty or a niche hobby, it’s the solution to traffic and mobility in the city and ought to be a top transit priority.
What does a bike-free future look like? It looks like one big traffic jam. More dangerous streets, all the road rage, just so people can sit in their cars isolated from the world around them until it all comes to a crashing halt. Do we want future Bostonians to inherit a city with all the worst in smog, congestion, and impoverishment? Can’t we do better?
Car Free Boston thinks so, and so does Boston Better Streets. They created this list to contact the powers that be and tell them that bikes and not cars are our city’s future:
Superintendent of Streets Mike Brohel ([email protected])
Mayor Michelle Wu ([email protected])
Chief of Streets Jascha Franklin-Hodge ([email protected])
Director of Stakeholder Engagement Mohammed Missouri ([email protected])
These are the people who are responsible for transit in the city and they are the ones to contact if you feel moved to make a difference. Let them know slowing down progress will not solve our problems, it will only make things more difficult for the people coming after us. The age of the bicycle isn’t coming tomorrow, bikes are paving the way for a sustainable future today.
Thanks to Aleksandra and Lichen from Car Free Boston for their contributions to this article, I would like to express my gratitude to everyone in the group also.
I can be found on BlueSky and I have a website that I need to update.
screenshot sources:
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2025/03/09/bike-lanes-battle-boston/