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Cambridge, MA – July 17, 2025
The Cambridge City Council voted 6-3 Monday night to keep the Outer Huron Avenue separated bike lanes on schedule, rejecting a one-year pause option and sending staff back to work on parking solutions near Fresh Pond. The decision means construction will likely start in late spring or early summer of next year, leaving the city several months to refine overnight resident parking and daytime access rules.
Councilor Marc McGovern's substitute motion carried the evening after a competing proposal from Councilor Cathie Zusy — first a five-year freeze, then a one-year delay advanced through her charter right — failed 4-5. Zusy had argued that a single year would allow the city's new anti-car-storage policies to prove themselves this autumn before any spaces were lost. She was joined by councilors Tim Flaherty and E. Denise Simmons in opposing McGovern's motion; Vice Mayor Burhan Azeem had sided with Zusy's revised timeline.
McGovern's order directs staff to push nonresidents toward carpooling, walking, biking or transit; to study daytime meters with time limits suited to golf rounds and community programming; and to look at adding storage and drop-off capacity at the golf course so shared rides become practical.
"The removal of the parking is not going to take place until late spring or early summer of next year anyway, which allows them time," McGovern said.
He also dismissed the value of a year's wait, arguing it would likely reproduce the same conflicts and the same project later. "We'll probably end up very much in the same spot," he said.
The roughly 1,200-foot stretch, running along the Strawberry Hill neighborhood at the Belmont town line, is the missing piece of an east-west route identified in the city's 2015 Bicycle Plan. It also falls within the 2020 Cycling Safety Ordinance, which requires Cambridge to build about 25 miles of separated lanes within seven years.
The street now has painted bike lanes that offer little separation from traffic, a setup the project explicitly aims to replace with quick-build protected lanes. As currently designed, the work would convert 79 mostly unregulated on-street spaces into 35 spots that are resident-only overnight and open to everyone during the day. That is a net reduction of 37 to 44 spaces serving a dense cluster of public destinations: the Fresh Pond Golf Course, Glacken Field, the Russell Youth Center, VFW Post 8818 and the 251-apartment Parkside Place complex.
The prospect of losing spaces drew a 1,510-signature petition to suspend the work. But two rounds of public comment brought out supporters as well as opponents, and McGovern pointed to design changes made in response to that feedback. The number of spaces removed was cut from roughly 81, handicapped parking was added where none existed before, and a loading zone in front of the community center was restored.
"The city did listen to many people in the community and did make changes to this plan, and it may not be everything that everyone wants, but those are pretty significant," he said.
Resident Neheet Trivedi described a personal shift from repeated bike accidents to routine family rides, including trips to the Russell Youth Center. "When I first moved here, I biked everywhere for several years and I had multiple accidents," Trivedi said. "Over the last few years, the city is much safer. I bike everywhere now, as much as I can, with my children as well."
Zusy, who has worked with transportation staff since December, said the substitute motion offered no real mitigation. "It doesn't do anything — it doesn't mitigate the impacts of these lanes on so many people… it just says everything is wonderful," she said.
She detailed what is at stake: about 30 percent of Parkside Place's 500 residents are low-income, and many park on the street because spaces inside the complex are costly. She worried about the VFW hall losing events, the Russell Youth Center turning away seniors and disabled youth, and families driving in for West Cambridge baseball, tennis, basketball, the tot lot and the golf course. "There are just so many impacts, and there is not documented need for this lane at this time," she said.
Neighborhood context supports part of that concern: Outer Huron is one of the few places in Cambridge where a driver without a resident sticker can leave a car legally for long stretches, which makes it attractive to commuters and others looking for free storage as well as to local residents.
The week between council sessions brought a setback. Parkside Place management declined to rent unused parking to the city, Transportation Commissioner Brooke McKenna reported, even though a study suggests up to 40 percent of tenants do not own cars.
McKenna said the current direction is a split approach for the 35 remaining spaces: keep daytime parking unrestricted so golfers and recreation visitors can use it, and enforce resident-only rules overnight "to ensure that those spaces are available for residents when the demand is highest." At the golf course, the city would switch to a dashboard-placard system and ticket cars without permits, while continuing to look for off-street space and keeping the door open with Parkside.
The vote carried larger significance because of the 2027 completion target in the Cycling Safety Ordinance. A five-year freeze — Zusy's initial ask — would have blown past that deadline; even the one-year version would have crowded an already busy construction calendar for the city's remaining protected lanes.
The safety evidence for separated facilities has also strengthened since the ordinance passed. A meta-analysis in the Journal of Transport & Health found lower crash and injury rates where cyclists are physically separated from motor traffic, and a review by the National Association of City Transportation Officials of protected-lane installations in ten U.S. cities found serious injury rates stayed flat even as ridership grew. Cambridge's own experience with earlier protected corridors has followed that pattern, with bike volumes rising and crash complaints falling on streets where painted lanes were replaced with barriers.
City staff now have several months to refine the parking plan before any physical changes. The council's directions — daytime meters calibrated to recreation demand, carpool drop-off areas, continued talks with Parkside — leave room for the details to shift. The ordinance deadline and the upcoming construction window, however, appear settled unless a future council revisits the issue.
For residents and users of the Fresh Pond recreation complex, the practical question is narrower: how many spots remain, who can use them at night, and whether the city can find off-street capacity before barriers go up. On all three, the search continues.
Broadly, the dispute mirrors the tension playing out in older U.S. cities between a legally mandated safety agenda and an informal parking supply that has never been priced or managed. Cambridge has spent much of the past decade trying to thread that needle, and Monday's vote suggests the council majority sees the two goals as compatible — provided the details are handled in the months ahead.
