AVENUE OF BROKEN TRUST

Many Black res­id­ents in Mat­tapan greet plan for redesign of Blue Hill Avenue with skep­ti­cism.

Boston Sunday Globe

By Emma Pla­toff

In the middle of Blue Hill Avenue’s weeknight chaos — the triple-parked cars and the scoot­ers zip­ping around them; the par­ents grip­ping their chil­dren’s hands as they step off the side­walk to cross; the city bus lum­ber­ing along, belch­ing and hiss­ing — one seg­ment of the street is stag­nant: the wide, empty median.

On a street where every­one is bat­tling for space, and every inch is con­tested, this bar­ren strip sits right in the cen­ter of everything, in most places entirely use­less. The cracked con­crete is a reminder of the inac­tion and dis­in­vest­ment that’s made this cru­cial artery through Black Boston so frus­trat­ing and dan­ger­ous to nav­ig­ate.

“Cam­bridge has beau­ti­ful streets and bike lanes, beau­ti­ful bus stops, all that,” said Glorian Lee, 18, who lives near Frank­lin Park and takes the 28 bus down Blue Hill Avenue every day. “Why can we not have the same thing?”

Top: A view of Blue Hill Avenue and River Street near Mat­tapan Square.

City and state offi­cials say they finally have a plan to make things bet­ter. They see the neg­lected median as the key to trans­form­ing Blue Hill Avenue into something like the func­tional, even pleas­ant boulevard it was 80 years ago. The pitch is this: Take the belea­guered buses out of the side lane of traffic, where they get stuck behind the double­park­ers and right-turn­ers, and put them in the exclus­ive, unen­cumbered cen­ter, in new ded­ic­ated bus lanes. There, they can move more swiftly, fer­ry­ing the people of Mat­tapan, Roxbury, and Dorchester — who are some of the heav­iest users of pub­lic transit, but suf­fer through some of the least reli­able ser­vice — to and from their schools, jobs, and dent­ist appoint­ments. It’s the anchor of a lar­ger plan for the avenue that also includes trees, cross­walks, street­lights, and new side­walks.

After dec­ades of stops and starts, the money for improve­ments is finally there. The fed­eral gov­ern­ment has come through with grants total­ing $95 mil­lion, while the state and city are set to kick in $51 mil­lion and $18 mil­lion, respect­ively. But Mayor Michelle Wu has gone quiet on the cen­ter bus lane pro­posal, caught between com­pet­ing pres­sures to remake the city’s streets for the bet­ter and to avoid ali­en­at­ing the Black voters already frus­trated with her.

Right: Mac Hud­son, who lives on Blue Hill Avenue, spoke at a March com­munity meet­ing on the cen­ter bus lane pro­posal.

The trouble is, many people in the neigh­bor­hoods branch­ing out from Blue Hill Avenue are deeply opposed to this plan, a skep­ti­cism wrought by dec­ades of broken prom­ises and worse. They fear that adding a bus lane and remov­ing some ded­ic­ated travel lanes would slow car com­mutes that are impossible already, or that street improve­ments could limit park­ing and gut the local busi­nesses that are the spirit of the cor­ridor. Along­side prom­ises of bet­ter light­ing and safer cross­walks, the latest ver­sion of the plan also includes bike lanes — which to many rep­res­ent the first, gal­lop­ing horse­man of the gentri­fic­a­tion apo­ca­lypse. Some neigh­bors have gone so far as to ask the Trump admin­is­tra­tion to res­cind $80 mil­lion in fed­eral fund­ing, an effort to halt the project.

Sup­port­ers say they do not anti­cip­ate any harm­ful effects on busi­nesses, and offi­cials intend to pre­serve as much as 90 per­cent of park­ing. But those assur­ances do little for com­munit­ies that have every reason to doubt what the gov­ern­ment says. The MBTA in 2025 spent $300,000 on a traffic ana­lysis, but never released it to the pub­lic, adding to wor­ries about what offi­cials have planned.

When a cor­ridor is neg­lected for so long, prom­ises to improve it can feel like something nefar­i­ous. Many in Mat­tapan, Roxbury, and Dorchester say they feel like the plan for a cen­ter-run­ning bus lane — along with other gov­ern­ment efforts to increase hous­ing and boost busi­nesses along the avenue — is being forced on them des­pite protests.

Which is to say, the cur­rent debate is about much more than a bus lane. It’s about trust, and what hap­pens when the gov­ern­ment has done so little to help and so much to harm a neigh­bor­hood that it has little cred­ib­il­ity left. It’s about who gets a say in Blue Hill Avenue’s future.

“Why are we even here tonight? They already know that we don’t want this,” said West Ward, 25, at a March com­munity meet­ing on the bus lane. “Why aren’t they listen­ing to the people who live here?”

A story of dis­in­vest­ment

The story of Blue Hill Avenue is a story of dis­in­vest­ment. Once home to Jew­ish neigh­bor­hoods, the cor­ridor swiftly trans­formed in the mid-20th cen­tury when racist hous­ing policies funneled Black res­id­ents there, as banks refused to give them home loans else­where in the city. Now, its neigh­bor­hoods are home to some of Boston’s most diverse com­munit­ies, Black fam­il­ies who trace their roots here back gen­er­a­tions and newer arrivals from Haiti or Cape Verde.

A cen­tury ago, a street­car ran down Blue Hill Avenue all the way to Mat­tapan Square. Fam­il­ies queued up to ride it through a vibrant cul­tural cor­ridor with meat mar­kets, fur­niture stores, syn­agogues, and his­toric theat­ers. But in the 1950s, as cars became more pre­val­ent and white fam­il­ies left the city for the sub­urbs, author­it­ies ripped out the street­car and redesigned the avenue to add a traffic lane in each dir­ec­tion. The new setup made it easier for com­muters to travel in and out from the sub­urbs in their cars. But it also made Blue Hill Avenue less of a des­tin­a­tion for shop­ping and din­ing, and did little for the people who lived there.

They “pull the trol­leys out, and cre­ate this road, that is a huge road, that’s designed to get people through my neigh­bor­hood and not to my neigh­bor­hood,” said state Rep­res­ent­at­ive Rus­sell Holmes, a Mat­tapan Demo­crat.

As long ago as the 1970s, city and state transit offi­cials recog­nized that remov­ing the trol­ley had con­demned the neigh­bor­hoods to poor pub­lic transit — a “major [factor] con­trib­ut­ing to the deteri­or­a­tion of the Blue Hill Avenue com­munity,” accord­ing to a city report from that time. Archival doc­u­ments show offi­cials wanted to restore the trol­ley and even weighed extend­ing the Orange Line beneath the cor­ridor.

“Fixed-rail trol­ley ser­vice is the pre­ferred tech­no­logy,” a 1979 report con­cluded. “It has to be made easy for Cor­ridor res­id­ents and oth­ers to reach these import­ant des­tin­a­tions.”

Double-parked cars were seen through the wind­shield of the 28 bus on Blue Hill Avenue in Mat­tapan.

The plan for rail was ulti­mately rejec­ted as costly and infeas­ible.

As the dec­ades wore on, trains and trol­leys expan­ded else­where in the MBTA sys­tem, includ­ing an exten­sion of the Green Line into Somerville that took three dec­ades and cost $2.3 bil­lion. But rail never returned to Blue Hill Avenue.

It was not the only time such transit was taken from Boston’s Black com­munit­ies.

“When they took the Orange Line away from Nubian Square, we were sup­posed to have a replace­ment, and we never got that,” said City Coun­cilor Brian Wor­rell, who argues his con­stitu­ents deserve sub­way ser­vice, not just buses. “It’s like we’ve been red­lined out of the rapid rail infra­struc­ture — and you’re talk­ing about one of the highest transit rider cor­ridors. Why doesn’t Blue Hill Ave. get what Dorchester Ave. has?"

By 2009, when at last fed­eral fund­ing was avail­able for a project to refur­bish the street, the pro­posal was for “bus rapid transit” called the 28X, after the 28 bus route that ran up the cor­ridor.

Rail “was never feas­ible,” said Jim Aloisi, who shep­her­ded the effort as trans­port­a­tion sec­ret­ary under Gov­ernor Deval Patrick. “I heard those voices back then, and we had plenty of dis­cus­sions about it, but I just had to politely say, ‘I know that’s what you think you want, or what you want, but that’s not feas­ible.’”

Instead, Aloisi said, he wanted to prove to res­id­ents of the cor­ridor that the 28X bus could be “really, really, really good, and func­tion as well as light rail.”

Skep­tics in the neigh­bor­hood felt like they were being presen­ted with a fully formed plan — one with no room for their feed­back to shape it, said Vivien Mor­ris, a long­time com­munity leader in Mat­tapan who recalled the oppos­i­tion.

“That’s been our his­tory — being treated neg­at­ively and pushed around town,” she said. “That’s why if the ini­ti­at­ive came through the city, then people feel like, first we have to push back in order to make sure that our voices are heard.”

The 28X quickly fell apart. Facing wide­spread oppos­i­tion from neigh­bors, Mas­sachu­setts turned down the fed­eral money, leav­ing Blue Hill Avenue’s prob­lems to fester.

Fray­ing trust

Not every­one in the com­munity was happy to see the 28X project die. Its col­lapse inspired Holmes to run for state rep­res­ent­at­ive. Now, he keeps a ren­der­ing of the rejec­ted route in his office.

“I’m still just in dis­be­lief that we made that decision,” Holmes said. Elec­ted offi­cials had turned down tens of mil­lions of dol­lars, he said, when “what we should be doing is bring­ing resources back to our Black neigh­bor­hood that has been under-resourced and under­delivered to for dec­ades.”

An out­bound street­car passed inbound pas­sen­gers wait­ing on Blue Hill Avenue at Arbu­tus Street in 1929.

In 2019, Boston offi­cials decided to try again. Recog­niz­ing the fail­ures of the pre­vi­ous, state-run effort, the city under Mayor Marty Walsh took a more act­ive role in plan­ning the bus project, hop­ing to rebuild trust in the skep­tical com­munit­ies around Blue Hill Avenue.

“This is a part of the city that has been under­served over the last sev­eral dec­ades,” Vin­eet Gupta, the city Trans­port­a­tion Depart­ment’s plan­ning dir­ector, told GBH News at the time.

“We really want to start learn­ing from people who live in the cor­ridor.”

But after seven years, hun­dreds of sur­vey responses, and thou­sands of pub­lic com­ments, trust is still frayed, and res­id­ents remain dubi­ous that the plan will help them. Mean­while, the con­sequences of inac­tion on Blue Hill Avenue plague every­one who lives near it.

The cor­ridor is one of Boston’s most dan­ger­ous, with a col­li­sion requir­ing EMS trans­port every three days on aver­age, accord­ing to city data. For ped­es­tri­ans, cross­ing the wide street can be treach­er­ous. And driv­ing it is a sin­gu­larly mad­den­ing exper­i­ence.

“I do whatever I can to avoid Blue Hill Ave.,” said Ihioma Bren­eus, 42, who lives in Mat­tapan.

Res­id­ents and com­muters com­plain about the traffic, par­tic­u­larly dur­ing peak times; they gripe about double­ some­times triple-park­ing; they fear for their safety, and their kids’ safety, when they cross the street or, God for­bid, ride a bike.

“Blue Hill Avenue is as unsafe today as it was 50 years ago,” said Tiffany Cogell, who grew up in Roxbury and now heads the Boston Cyc­lists Union. As a kid, she recalled, she was never allowed to cross the wide street — mean­ing though she lived just a few minutes away, she couldn’t get to Frank­lin Park on foot. “There is no reason in the world that I’m about to be 57 years old, and Blue Hill Avenue doesn’t feel any dif­fer­ent or safer than it did when I was a little girl.”

If there is con­sensus on the prob­lems, though, there is still no con­sensus on the solu­tion. Neigh­bors are sharply divided on, if not over­whelm­ingly opposed to, the cen­ter-run­ning bus plan. An ana­lysis pre­pared for the MBTA found the plan would speed up the 28 bus by as much as 15 minutes at peak times, while slow­ing down cars by as much as six minutes dur­ing the morn­ing rush, in part because the latest ver­sion of the plan would get rid of some traffic lanes. Crit­ics fret over that increase, and argue offi­cials should make other improve­ments — more trees, safer cross­walks, bet­ter lights — without chan­ging the bus path.

“Nobody’s ask­ing for it,” Bren­eus said of the cen­ter lane. Many fear the revamp could bring gentri­fic­a­tion, and say the city isn’t doing enough to pre­vent that.

Two city coun­cilors who rep­res­ent Dorchester and Roxbury are still push­ing for rail, not bus ser­vice, along Blue Hill Avenue. Wor­rell and Coun­cilor Miniard Culpep­per on Tues­day unveiled a plan to extend the Orange Line beneath the cor­ridor. Offi­cials owe their neigh­bor­hoods faster, bet­ter transit, they said.

“We want them to live up to their prom­ise from 40 years ago,” Culpep­per said.

But even if polit­ical lead­ers were to embrace the idea — and Wu has already soun­ded skep­tical — any rail expan­sion would be costly and time-intens­ive. For some, the bus lane at least offers a quicker answer to Blue Hill Avenue’s prob­lems.

Lee, the 18-year-old, lives in Dorchester, just a few miles from his part­time job in Mat­tapan Square. The bus ride should take about half an hour, but one recent Thursday, Lee left home two hours early, know­ing he could be delayed. Once, he said, he was so late for work that he missed his two-hour shift entirely.

At his stop near Frank­lin Park, Lee tracked the bus on an app, know­ing that the sched­ule is merely a sug­ges­tion. “Another bus bunch­ing!” he lamen­ted, refer­ring to delays that made his bus arrive at the same time as the one sched­uled for 15 minutes later. That day, he made it to work before his shift star­ted. But he often thinks about all the things he could do with the lux­ury of a bit more time.

There is a clear gen­er­a­tional divide between younger transit users who take the bus and want a bet­ter one, and older com­muters who drive. At a pub­lic meet­ing this spring, former state sen­ator Dianne Wilk­er­son described the cen­ter bus lane as yet another unwanted change that offi­cials were inflict­ing on her com­munity.

“Nobody takes a bus to go pick up the pizza,” she said. “Nobody takes a bus to go pick up their kids. … That’s not how any­body lives. So we will not have this forced on us.”

It hasn’t helped that the Blue Hill Avenue plan is being debated along­side two other con­tro­ver­sial devel­op­ments nearby. Wu is push­ing to turn Frank­lin Park’s White Sta­dium into a pro­fes­sional soc­cer venue, and the mayor also caused uproar when she shelved a plan for a life sci­ences and afford­able hous­ing project in Roxbury in favor of build­ing a new high school on the site.

“You have three projects affect­ing a really mar­gin­al­ized com­munity, and at this point they feel really unheard,” said Che­vanese Van­Dyke, 46, who lives in Dorchester. “No bus is going to make up for that.”

A job of per­sua­sion

For transit offi­cials who want the project to go for­ward, the next few months will be about per­suad­ing people like Van­Dyke. The MBTA has prom­ised more pub­lic engage­ment, and plan­ners emphas­ize the design is far from final, mean­ing some of the more unpop­u­lar fea­tures in early sketches may change. The MBTA won’t go ahead with the project if Wu doesn’t want it, and for the mayor, there are land­mines every­where. Elec­ted with the sup­port of Boston’s Black com­munit­ies and its transit advoc­ates, she has now ali­en­ated swaths of both.

Any choice she makes on Blue Hill Avenue could fur­ther incense at least one group.

Aloisi blamed crit­ics for exag­ger­at­ing how much park­ing might be lost, and how much busi­nesses might suf­fer.

“Do you want to con­demn those bus riders, those transit-depend­ent res­id­ents of the city, to a life­time of sub­stand­ard transit access on the altar of false inform­a­tion?” he said. “This is really a moral respons­ib­il­ity to make something like this hap­pen and not to let it fail again.”

For Blue Hill Avenue to get bet­ter, Holmes said, it has to change. Beau­ti­fy­ing the streets and leav­ing the traffic setup as is will not solve the prob­lems, he said.

Along­side the bus lane, he’d like to see two traffic lanes in each dir­ec­tion, and as much park­ing retained as pos­sible. He can live with los­ing some trees from the plan.

“We’re not going to have any bike lanes,” Holmes added. “For­get that.”

Those tweaks could assuage some fears about con­ges­tion and gentri­fic­a­tion.

“So much of this is the Black com­munity say­ing, ‘We don’t trust that this is for our com­munity,’” Holmes said. “‘Is this for us?’ And I say the answer is, ‘Yes. Don’t move.’”

The dis­trust is hard to get around. But if the city and state don’t have a record of doing right by Black neigh­bor­hoods, Holmes said, “at least I do.”

He can see a future where the gov­ern­ment, with the sup­port of the neigh­bor­hood, fixes a prob­lem it helped cre­ate. “You’re going to see young folks going to and from school on the buses,” he said. “You’re going to see those who are in most need.”

That’s who the improve­ments are for, Holmes emphas­ized. “We’re look­ing to serve the people who live in our com­munity.”

Now, he just has to con­vince them, too.

Glorian Lee lives in Dorchester, just a few miles from his part­time job in Mat­tapan Square. The bus ride should take about half an hour, but one recent Thursday, Lee left home two hours early, know­ing he could be delayed. Once, he said, he was so late for work that he missed his two ­hour shift entirely.

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