Right, Essaibi-George was legit from Boston, and while plenty of Wu's detractors complain that she is a carpet-bagger, the claims don't hold up well against somebody who has never lived here at all. Of course, that might not be the reason behind people using that label for Wu, in which case, they'll be happy enough with Kraft. There just aren't enough of them in the Boston electorate, though.
Wu’s lived here for years and actually served as a city councilor. Huge difference.
Beyond a certain level of financing he's already well got, how much does PAC-level money even matter in a Boston mayoral race? It's not like the office is going to be won or lost on TV advertising; local politics here just doesn't work like that. You've got to be able to pound the pavement and build coalitions of voters across multiple very different neighborhoods to win here. And these positions...just aren't going to do that. He'll collect a minority of grievance seekers and people who were dead-set against voting for Wu anyway, but he's so far been stunningly out of his depth at the kind of coalition-building that Essaibi-George was much better at 4 years ago in her loss.
The suburbs are building bike lanes too! You have to get out to some pretty regressive places for there to be a pervasive lack of normalization for things like bike lanes on major urban/near-urban thoroughfares. It's just not got much shock value anymore, especially the ignorant argument that the lanes outright cause congestion. If you're in the City of Boston and not a total (car or otherwise) shut-in, it's hard to not have observed various bike lanes not causing daily carpocalypses. It's a small and steadily shrinking niche who are nursing a vote-galvanizing grievance about them.
As is often the case, the bike stuff is often more about feelings than facts... but there are feelings that are out there now, and then there are untapped, potential feelings that can be drawn out/realigned/polarized depending on how things go.
No doubt! Plenty of regular working class Bostonions rely on cars for every day transportation and view the transportation system through a lenses much more similar to that of someone driving in from Weston than their neighbors walking/rolling/riding. What I think would separate the two is the level of priority they put on the issue, where the suburbanite would rate it above other issues of more pressing concern to the average working class Bostonion.
I don’t but I worry there are a lot more than people think. I check the NY Post and the Herald (the latter less often since it’s paywalled) and see a lot of conservative crap that I think is representative of more of a slice of the population — the local population — than we’d like to think.
www.bostonglobe.com
brookline.news
Select Board advances major Washington Street redesign despite local business opposition - Brookline.News
Brookline’s Select Board on Tuesday evening voted to advance plans for a major reconstruction of Washington Street on Tuesday night, signing off on a consultant’s latest design and sending it to the state for consideration. While the start of construction is several years away, the project would...
www.bostonglobe.com
I'm sure Kraft, John Henry, and the rest of the sports owners have at least a group chat... I'm kind of expecting more fluff pieces on topics Josh Kraft is focusing his candidacy on.Boston’s bike lane wars have entered the mayoral race. But who owns the road? - The Boston Globe
The crowd at Josh Kraft’s mayoral kickoff went wild when he promised to “pause” construction of new bike lanes. But are the lanes a cause of Boston’s traffic and parking woes? Or a way to solve them?
The article asks a lot of questions it seems like the point was to answer and then never does that. No stats, no data, just repeating the anecdotes heard from people who emailed the author. This is front and center on the Globe's webpage this morning.
I find the Globe's coverage of bike or pedestrian issues to be uniformly awful...and this is coming from a paying subscriber...Boston’s bike lane wars have entered the mayoral race. But who owns the road? - The Boston Globe
The crowd at Josh Kraft’s mayoral kickoff went wild when he promised to “pause” construction of new bike lanes. But are the lanes a cause of Boston’s traffic and parking woes? Or a way to solve them?
The article asks a lot of questions it seems like the point was to answer and then never does that. No stats, no data, just repeating the anecdotes heard from people who emailed the author. This is front and center on the Globe's webpage this morning.