Tremont Street is a major road of about 3.4 miles that goes between Downtown Boston to Mission Hill while crossing the South End and the northern corner of Roxbury. This street is of interest because it is part of the City of Boston’s Connect Downtown project, which aims to redesign several iconic streets in the downtown area to improve safety for people walking and biking. Complementarily, the City is developing a design project to improve pedestrian safety on Tremont Street in the South End. 

 

This corridor is part of Boston’s High Crash Network and is particularly dangerous for pedestrians and people riding bicycles. As a part of Vision Zero priority corridors it has experienced some tactical interventions in the past.

​

As stated in the Roxbury Strategic Master Plan, cars traveling along Tremont Street tend to speed and the road traffic includes high volumes of automobiles during commuting hours; already in 2004 this plan was looking to create a more pedestrian friendly identity in Tremont Street around Roxbury Crossing. 

 

This street is characterized by its lack of homogeneity and changes in transportation conditions. Because it is a very long corridor, it contains a variety of infrastructure types and characteristics. However, a constant is the existence of blind spots generated by traffic and different travel modalities which result in crashes.

 

This corridor has been noticed over the past years. Boston Cyclist Union led a campaign for community outreach between 2018 and 2019 as a starting point to include bike and pedestrian improvements in the area. Since July 2020, the City of Boston Transportation Department has had a virtual open house accessible to the public, which you can also find in Spanish, and traditional Chinese at their Tremont Street Design Project website. 

 

With all of these processes coming up, we wanted to add one more intersectional layer to the existing scope of work and hear from you how your experience of Tremont Street is shaped based on your gender identity or presentation.