I know im preaching to the choir here, but deserves to be said. Theres two places where I see a good amount of bikers in Boston: Columbus Ave by Northeastern (good bike infra and university nearby) and then Mass Ave right by the Harvard Bridge--and its all people going back to Cambridge from their jobs lmao. You can just tell from the cycle map from google maps the huge gap in bike infra in most of Boston, especially SEast vs. NWest (Southie, Dorchester, Roxbury, Hyde Park, Mattapan etc.).
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The biggest difference though is Cambridge/Somerville have continuous routes that take special attention to intersections. Boston has a lot of bike paths, but sooooo many little gaps everywhere. Those small gaps in between really make or break your bike network. So often there will be a mid to shite bike lane (but at least something) that just ends at an intersection so that cars have 4 different lanes to go straight or take a turn. Example at Columbia x MassAve:
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Ive said this before on here, but my biggest problem with Boston's traffic and bike planning is they very carelessly will take superfluous stretches of pavement in areas where those exist for bike lanes, with no regard for the major intersections where these stretches lead to. The areas where there simply are no easy ways to make a bike lane are exactly those areas where there tends to be congestion and dangerous driving. And I dont think it's always a good idea to simply slap down bike lane paint on some windswept stretch if a biker who doesnt know better will suddenly find themselves hurled out of a bike lane into some pseudo-shared lane precisely at the point where the whole road narrows and driving gets more dangerous.
A classic example of this is Centre St by Faulkner. There are bike lanes on either side of Allandale Rd, but right at the intersection, Centre gets an extra lane in each direction for the turns onto Allandale, and to accommodate these lanes, the through lanes of Centre get shifted over. So this is an intersection where approaching cars, already driving 40-50mph, suddenly get shunted abruptly over by one lane each, and right at that very point is also where the bike lane runs out. Literally, if you bike here you are thrust from a bike lane into a travel lane where the drivers in this lane are busy looking to their lefts (away from bikers) to make sure they dont crash into the suddenly-created left turning lane which is full of cars.
And this is replicated all over Boston. The key areas where the bike lane ends are also the most dangerous intersections for cyclists. Any area that doesnt have some convenient extra strip of pavement to accommodate a quick paint job to create a bike lane is always also going to be an area that traffic planners think that traffic is too dicey in said intersection to make a bike lane and worsen traffic. So it's this weird paradox where roads that are already not all that dangerous to bikes just because they're already super wide are those that are low hanging fruit for bike lanes, and the areas that are innately the most dangerous for bikes are also the very last spots to get anything for bikes only. That is first and foremost the most critical problem in Boston.
It would be smarter in many cases to not even have done anything with bike lanes and create a false sense of security without committing simultaneously to addressing the most dangerous intersections. But sadly, this backwards type of thinking seems prevalent across Boston traffic planners, and is not limited to bikes. Hence, we have the same brainless proposals and plans we occasionally see to throw on some bus lane only paint on some strip of road that already was so wide that traffic wasn't bad in that area and it didn't need a bus lane. So you get the bus speeding into the same congested intersection as before.
At any rate, the city should not have any instances where a biker suddenly has the bike lane run out, without any warning, in the middle of a busy intersection. This is extremely dangerous. At the very least, the bike lane should just be striped to go onto the sidewalk, or, alternatively, there should be a million painted signs on the lane warning the biker that they're entering a no bike lane area and dangerous intersection. I would have so much less hatred for our city officials if I didn't feel like they truly didnt give a shit about legitimate risks to my safety caused by such thoughtless planning and lack thereof.