Mattapan meeting set for 4-7 at veterans’ post
A city council oversight hearing planned for Tuesday afternoon (June 10) in Mattapan Square will offer a fresh update on the long-anticipated infrastructure plan intended to improve safety and access to public transit along the Blue Hill Avenue corridor. The project, still in the design phase and facing a fresh layer of funding uncertainty posed by a hostile federal government, would include a center-running bus lane with new platforms at key spots along the avenue.
Fans of the project— including some of the city’s most powerful political leaders— point out that Blue Hill Avenue once featured streetcars that also ran up and down the middle of the thoroughfare. The streetcar tracks, long gone, were replaced in most sections by a large median strip which would be reclaimed for new, dedicated bus lanes and the promise of a faster commute for tens of thousands of MBTA-reliant passengers.
Tuesday’s oversight meeting— ordered up by a trio of Boston city councillors who have voiced mixed feelings about the plan in the past— will also offer a platform for critics, including some merchants who’ve expressed worries that the project will disrupt deliveries, worsen motorist congestion, or limit parking.
But, those in support of the plan— including Mayor Wu and state Rep. Russell Holmes— say that specific design details— still only at roughly 15 percent completion— are open for discussion. But they’re also adamant that it’s time for long-deferred upgrades to one of the city’s most heavily used roadways to move forward, even if much-needed federal dollars are unlikely to be forthcoming in the near future.
Wu said that Tuesday’s meeting is an opportunity for city leaders to emphasize the upsides of the project— and to counter an ongoing narrative that fixes to Blue Hill Avenue are set in stone. One example, she says, involves bike lanes, a controversial element to roadway changes across Boston in recent years.
“I have heard, for example, this [project] is a secret plan to add bike lanes everywhere. And, that’s why they’re doing this, right”? said Wu, who noted that “there’s no commitment to bike lanes. If the consensus from the community is that we don’t want bike lanes as part of this project, this is a public transit project. This is about giving access to local communities, neighbors who live along the route, people who are already relying on public transportation and who are stuck in traffic for hours of their lives every single week, every single month, who we know would benefit.”
She added: “Whether or not there’s a bike lane here, that is all to be decided. I think there’s going to be designs presented without the bike lane designs [and] with a bike lane design to reflect different conversation pieces that have happened. But we want to move people faster and more conveniently, and we want it to help out people in Boston as opposed to preferencing the people outside Boston who are trying to get by and through our communities as quickly as possible.”
State Rep. Russell Holmes, one of Wu’s closest political allies and an outspoken proponent of the project, says the point of the investment is to better serve the people who live along Blue Hill and nearby streets. Holmes says he’s “sick and tired” of his constituents getting bypassed.
“The priority is the bus for the people who live in this neighborhood,” Holmes said in an interview with The Reporter last week. “If we go right down to Mattapan Square, there are probably 20 people standing in front of the old McDonald’s waiting for a bus at this very moment with horrible conditions, with nothing really telling them when the bus is going to come, sitting there with all the folks, you know, who’ve been out drinking and hanging out.
“I would like them to get a priority. I would like the priority to be the people who live here and not the people who drive through here. And that was basically the whole point of all of this.”
Wu and Holmes point out that they’re not alone in pressing for the improvements. US Rep. Ayanna Pressley, who secured $15 million to spur the project forward three years ago, has said the “unjust status quo at Blue Hill has got to change.”
The MBTA’s general manager, Philip Eng, has urged Boston to move forward with center-running bus lanes, saying they will improve T performance and experiences for bus drivers and the estimated 37,000 people who use the buses on a typical weekday. Commute times for them would be cut by more than a half-hour, according to city and state officials.
City Councillor-at-Large Julia Mejia, one of three councillors who called for Tuesday’s hearing, said her office is “committed to ensuring that the redesign process is transparent, accessible, and accountable.”
Mejia added: “Residents have expressed feeling unheard in a process that shapes their daily lives. This hearing brings together the administration, City Council, and everyday users of Blue Hill Avenue—pedestrians, bus riders, cyclists, drivers, small businesses, and abutters—to unpack these concerns, evaluate the Blue Hill Avenue redesign engagement process, and explore pathways forward.”
Jascha Franklin-Hodge, who leads the Wu administrations’s Streets Cabinet that is overseeing the project, notes that the Blue Hill Avenue planning has already included more than 3,000 specific engagements, including curbside conversations with MBTA riders as opposed to traditional community meetings, which have also been held.
“There’ve been some really innovative approaches,” said Wu. There was a whole report published about the different kinds of outreach that were done, stationing people at the bus stops to get feedback, riding the buses along with people, going door-to-door in the small businesses, just really trying to not just make it so that you can only participate if you can make it to City Hall on whatever night, day of the week evening to testify for two minutes. All of those pieces are important, but we’ve really tried to go above and beyond in creating the spaces to hear from people and to hear from everyone who uses this corridor.”
Tuesday’s meeting is scheduled from 4 pm. to 7 p.m. at the American Legion Post, 1531 Blue Hill Ave. in Mattapan. Councillors Julia Mejia, Brian Worrell, and Tania Fernandes Anderson called for the hearing to be held.
A major subtext to the session will likely be how the project might be impacted by the Trump Administration’s hostile posture toward Massachusetts at large, and Boston in particular. In addition to the $15 million already pledged to the project in federal money, Boston has pledged $18 million and the state— via the MBTA— has assured another $11 million. But the project’s full budget will require more money, some of it hoped-for through a “rolling grant program” offered by the federal government for shovel-ready projects.
The city and MBTA filed jointly for approvals— and were admitted to be considered for more dollars in a March 2025 decision, according to Franklin-Hodge.
It’s not yet clear how long it might take for the Blue Hill Avenue project to be funded with more federal dollars — and of course, there’s no guarantee it will be selected, particularly under the Trump watch.
“We really don’t have any sense of the timeline that they’re operating on if they’re moving this at all,” said Franklin-Hodge, who noted that city and state planners are working to bring the project to 30 percent design phase this year.
“There’s a lot of elements that are still up for discussion and input, so while we’re waiting for clarity on that, we’ve continued to make a lot of short-term investments in the corridor. Upgrading streetlights, repaving, refreshing fit pavement markings, adding green infrastructure in parts of the corridor to just create a little bit more beautification, a little bit more greenery in Grove Hall, for example.
“But,” he added, “we’re in a little bit of a slow period because we are waiting for a little bit of clarity on the federal funding, which is ultimately going to determine the scope and scale of what we’re able to deliver for the community.”
