As reported by Streetsblog:

The funding for speed humps as part of the safety surge was decreased by 2 million.

>Besides the reduction in overall funding, the FY27 budget document reveals that Boston’s Streets Cabinet spent only $450,000 on speed humps in the past year – less than 10 percent of what the FY26 budget had proposed.

"While Boston installed around 600 speed humps in 2024, fewer than two dozen were laid down last year, according to estimates from five city employees familiar with the effort." https://archive.is/ASxy9#selection-1629.0-1629.176

This year the city plans only 100. That is despite speed bumps already being designed for streets across huge swaths of the city. https://mass.streetsblog.org/2023/05/22/wu-admin-announces-safety-surge-of-traffic-calming-for-neighborhood-streets

This project was overwhelmingly popular and the most common negative feedback was that it wasn't being rolled out fast enough.

As reported by Streetsblog:

The budget has been eliminated for this project

>that would have redesigned parts of Centre Street and South Street in Jamaica Plain “using a Complete Streets approach.” A city website for the project says that “in Spring 2026, we’ll start having conversations with the community about your experiences and ideas.”

This street predates automobiles. It once had a street car the state had a legal mandate to return. It is lined with community institutions and businesses. It deserves better.

Food delivery drivers struggling to make ends meet could see their jobs become even more difficult in Boston after new city rules went into effect last week.

The rules, chiefly adopted to address reports of dangerous driving, require major third-party delivery companies to secure a permit to operate in Boston and obtain liability insurance protecting their drivers, other motorists, and pedestrians in the event of an accident. The ordinance, approved last year, went into effect April 11.

But because the new rules focus heavily on financial protections, there could be unintended consequences for drivers, according to several urban traffic experts who study third-party delivery logistics. The ordinance doesn’t prevent companies from passing some of the insurance costs onto drivers, cutting into their earnings, researchers said.

“There are lots of different potential outcomes that could come from what might otherwise seem to be a pretty straightforward policy intervention,” said Jason Jackson, an urban planning professor at MIT whose work focuses on digital platform economies.

A spokesperson for Mayor Michelle Wu said large food delivery companies “have the resources to meet this requirement.”

Researchers said it’s also unclear if the insurance requirements will encourage drivers to navigate the streets more safely, or if the policies could lead them to take more risks, professors said.

“That would be a perverse outcome, given the objectives of the new ordinance,” Jackson said.

Last year, the City Council and Wu adopted the rules, saying they would provide much-needed oversight.

The ordinance says companies must obtain insurance policies for drivers that cover medical expenses or property damage beyond a certain threshold. In addition to cars and motorcycles, bicycles, e-bikes, and motorized scooters must be covered.

If a delivery driver lacks a personal vehicle insurance policy or is underinsured, the company’s liability insurance must also cover the courier in the event of an accident, according to the ordinance.

The coverage applies only when a driver is in “active status,” which the ordinance defines as the period beginning when they accept an order until it is completed.

City Councilor Sharon Durkan, who chairs the council’s committee on planning, development, and transportation, said companies such as Uber Eats, Grubhub, and DoorDash were previously operating in Boston without any conditions.

“Before this ordinance, we didn’t have leverage to say what requirements are necessary in order to serve the city of Boston,” Durkan said.

In recent years, many drivers have worked for the companies without licenses or insurance, Durkan said, pointing to police data. But no one was being held to account, often at the expense of drivers’ safety, she said.

“These drivers are being incentivized to drive faster, unsafely, and these are really dangerous jobs that aren’t sold as dangerous jobs,” Durkan said.

Drivers lack job protections and often complete deliveries as fast as they can to maximize their earnings, researchers said. If they don’t work fast enough, drivers can get bad reviews and risk getting terminated from the app, said Shauna Brail, an urban planning professor and director of the Institute for Management & Innovation at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

“Delivery drivers are trying to work against the clock to deliver a prepared meal in the time that the app suggests, or perhaps even faster, because then they might get more orders,” said Brail, who researches how cities interact with digital platform economies.

The Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Boston’s union for ride-share and third-party delivery drivers also did not respond to a request for comment.

DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub are three of the biggest tech platforms now required to secure permits to operate in Boston.

So far, only Grubhub has a permit, Durkan said.

Durkan said she is in conversations with Uber and DoorDash about the new requirements.

The new rules also apply to other third-party delivery companies that facilitate more than 1 million orders per year, according to the ordinance.

Uber and DoorDash are likely negotiating insurance details behind the scenes and possibly trying to find loopholes in the ordinance, Jackson said.

“What don’t they like about the new rules? Why are they pushing back? I interpret that as some degree of resistance,” Jackson said.

Uber, which is headquartered in San Francisco, said on Tuesday that it is working to sync its operations with the new regulations.

“By working hand-in-hand with city officials, we are refining our approach to keep Boston moving forward by blending innovation with a focus on safety so that every order arrives reliably and every street remains a community,” spokesperson Katie Franger said in a statement.

DoorDash, which is also headquartered in San Francisco, said it recently submitted its permit application.

Delivery companies that operate without a city permit could face fines of “$300 per day per restaurant” and/or “$300 per order,” the ordinance states.

Wu has described the ordinance, called “Road Safety and Accountability for Delivery Providers,” as a response to increasing reports about dangerous delivery driving, including people on mopeds and scooters running red lights or driving on sidewalks and the wrong way down streets.

Residents over the previous year have made more than 100 calls reporting instances of unsafe driving by couriers, the Globe reported in February.

Trilce Encarnación, a business professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who studies third-party delivery driver logistics, said that over time, the insurance policies could lead drivers to operate more safely.

“There might be some minimal recalibration,” Encarnación said. “Engaging in unsafe behaviors might have downstream effects if the companies connect that to bad performance on the job.”

But some couriers could drive more aggressively if they feel insulated from repair bills stemming from an accident, Jackson said.

“If they’re insured, maybe they’ll take more risks,” he said.

Brail said that more drivers could feel pressure to drive faster and disobey traffic regulations if the companies lower their pay to offset higher insurance costs.

“If their incomes go down, they’ll be further penalized for going more slowly,” Brail said.

Durkan, as well as Encarnación, said the insurance requirements represent the most rigorous safety regulations among big US cities in an era when government policies have lagged behind the expanding tech platforms and their workforce.

Whereas other cities, such as New York and Seattle, have focused on regulating third-party food delivery wage minimums, Boston’s new rules focus on insurance coverage, Encarnación said.

“The novelty of this is that Boston is framing this as a transportation safety issue,” said Encarnación, adding that she is “impressed” by the ordinance.

Still, it’s unclear how city officials will ensure compliance with the permit requirements, Brail said, pointing out that similar city ordinances regulating short-term rentals on platforms like Airbnb suffer from lax enforcement.

Immigrants who work as delivery drivers could also fear being caught up in enforcement, she said.

“One of the unintended impacts could be a reduced number of people willing to work in this sector, if they feel that their ability to remain in the US is at risk,” Brail said.

Learning how the companies operate is Durkan’s primary motivation, she said.

As part of the new requirements, the companies must share data on individual drivers, and their deliveries, with city officials. The transportation department plans to analyze what types of vehicles are used, and how far they travel, to determine how to make streets less congested, the ordinance states.

“I didn’t know how we could fully measure the impact without getting data,” she said. “That’s the first order of business.”

As reported by Streetsblog:

The Mayor has eliminated funding for protected bike lanes on Comm Ave between where they currently end by the BU bridge up to Kenmore Square. This project has been in the works for a while: “A city website for these projects has not been updated since at least 2019.” This street has high cycling rates already but is also a high crash location.

>Hello bike friends,

>The Council will be voting this Monday (April 27th) on whether to keep Garden Street’s current configuration in place, and we need your help (see Charter Right Item #1; the vote was delayed from the last meeting). We believe that the answer is not to move dangerous driving back and forth between Garden and nearby streets, but instead to make all of these streets safer. The policy order directs the city to keep the current design, and address safety concerns on neighboring streets through targeted traffic calming like speed humps, chicanes, and other measures to reduce dangerous cut-through driving. 
If the vote fails, Garden will change to having two-way car traffic, with a two-way bike facility on one side, which increases dangerous turning conflicts, and leaves very little room for deliveries, pickups, or short stops that will inevitably block the bike lane. City staff have said that this new design will also make traffic worse, and will cost $250,000, money that could be much better spent improving safety elsewhere.

>Sign up to speak at Monday's meeting

>It sounds like it might be a close vote, so we need your help speaking at the meeting; you can do it over Zoom. Public comment starts at 5:30PM, and public comment is in order of sign up. The earlier you sign up, the earlier you will speak. We can text you when it's your turn to speak so you don't have to be online the whole time! See below for details.
How to give public comment:

1. Starting Friday morning at 9AM or so, you can sign up with the City for public comment here and include "Support for one-way Garden St" in the “Agenda Item” field. The web form and email you get will send you a Zoom link, and importantly tell you where you are in line, e.g. that you're speaker number 63.
2. Tell us you signed up with our form. If you share your speaker number and your phone#, we can text you a few minutes before your time to speak; we encourage you to fill out the form regardless so we can tell how many people are speaking.
3. Monday evening, sign in to the Zoom link you got emailed.

>Can't make it? Email the Council now

>If you can't speak, please send a short, constructive email with "Support for Charter Right #1 (one-way Garden St)" in the subject line. Personal stories about how you or your family use and enjoy the current Garden Street design are especially compelling. Send the email to CityCouncil@cambridgema.gov, cc CityClerk@cambridgema.gov, and bcc info@cambridgebikesafety.org.
Regards,
Cambridge Bike Safety

I’ve seen this in other cities but never here. Would be great to start them here!

Coverage of the hearing from Universal Hub:

>"I've heard the word pause a couple of times whether it's projects or residential parking permit program, nothing is on pause," Missouri said. "We've spent a lot of time working over past year. ... to just make sure that our process is the way it needs to be the way we think about to achieve our goal for our streets, which is that they're all walkable, drivable, you know, cyclable, for all people, for all road users, and they're safe and nice, and that they're also helping our small businesses. ... The reason it may have taken longer than in the past is we have had staff turnover and other factors related to that I would say that led to what has been slower than the first three years."

>"I have never heard anything more inaccurate and disingenuous than that," Reggie Ramos, executive director of Transportation for Massachusetts, said of Missouri's no-pause statement. "Come on. Let's get real. 16 projects have been paused. And we need the city to get on the move on them. Today."