Part 4: Sustainable Transit
Part 4 of a series on my priorities as a first-time candidate for Cambridge City Council. Next: Part 5: Investing in our Youth
High quality transit is critical for a functional, sustainable, and accessible city. We must actively invest in our growing transit infrastructure to encourage use and ensure safety.
- Protected Bike Lanes
As a supporter of the Cycling Safety Ordinance, I support investing in a connected, balanced network of protected bike lanes. This ensures the safety of our many daily bikers whose numbers grow by roughly 8% per year, not to mention that of drivers and pedestrians.
As a non-car owner who relies on biking and walking as my primary means of commuting, shopping, and general transportation, I experience the dangers of our current infrastructure everyday firsthand. Creating strong and safe bike infrastructure will help our city reach its health, environment, and livability goals.
2. Encouraging Transit Use
Greater investment in busing, subway access, and walkability in addition to safe bikeways is critical. Additional city-provided busing in areas not well served as well as reducing barriers to using transit generally (for example, providing discounts and vouchers) can also contribute here.
3. Updating Blanket Parking Minimums
Cambridge’s scarce real estate means we must carefully balance competing community needs including housing, public resources, business requirements, and infrastructure. I support updating current blanket requirements for off-street parking for every new residential and commercial development. Unneeded parking provision results in waste of valuable real estate and building cost and results in yet more wasteful urban sprawl. However, we must take into account the needs of small businesses, who rely on accessible parking for visitors, as well as residents reliant on street parking.
I propose investing in reasonable third-party studies on appropriate parking needs by microdistrict based on current use of on-street parking, businesses, transit access, most likely demographics of new occupants, and other factors. This would help the city understand real parking needs at an appropriate scale, better serve our residents, and eliminate wasted space. Existing requirements do not do this, and I believe we can do better.
4. Municipal Sidewalk Shoveling Program
Snow removal is a matter of pedestrian safety and it’s everyone’s responsibility to share the load. Making snow removal a city service makes sense from the point of view of doing exactly that, from the taxpayer perspective. But it also has many logistical advantages: If one service takes responsibility for city-wide implementation, it can benefit from economies of scale and perform snow removal with much greater efficiency. Not to mention the nuisance for many residents who are out of down during blizzards who have to (1) realize there has been a blizzard in Cambridge and (2) independently arrange a service to perform snow removal for just their property. The amount of saved time, energy, and complication absolutely justifies such a program and would undoubtedly result in cheaper, more reliable execution and safer streets for everyone.
