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The future of getting around
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Even by Boston standards, Cleveland Circle and its vicinity stand out for their particularly bad roads. In the area of Brighton where Beacon Street and Chestnut Hill Avenue meet, the streets hit the Massachusetts trifecta: they’re bumpy
and dangerous and confusing.
In 2023, the city of Boston finally announced
a plan to improve the streets in the parts of the circle under its jurisdiction. But residents who emailed me when I asked for nominations for the worst street in the Boston area said little had changed. “Bad for all modes,” “barely drivable,”
“an embarrassment,” and “death lane” were some of the phrases used to describe roads in the area.
Indeed, the verdict from readers was quite overwhelming: the circle, and its immediate feeder streets, were your choice for the worst in the city — and therefore, the inaugural entry in our map of shame.
“Residents living and driving in that area should receive property tax relief,” wrote reader Brian Twomey of Brookline. “It is inexcusable that this road surface has seemingly been abandoned by the City of Boston.
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A pedestrian ignores a “Don’t Walk” sign in Cleveland Circle. Some of the circle’s traffic lights take two minutes or more to cycle, and neighborhood residents say many frustrated pedestrians jaywalk instead of waiting. (Alan Wirzbicki/Globe Staff)
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Saul Tannenbaum, who lives in the Waterstone, a senior housing development next to the circle, wondered why the city couldn’t lavish the same attention on the roads as it does on the baseball diamonds at
Cassidy
Field next door.
“The base paths are maintained better than the roads,” he said. “Can’t have someone hitting a pothole on the way to first base.”
“It’s past time for a complete redesign of Cleveland Circle,” said Boston City Councilor Liz Breadon, who represents the area and met with seniors in the neighborhood recently. “It’s denuded of trees, there’s very little shade, it’s not pleasant.”
In 2023, the city said it would be adding flex posts and other traffic-calming measures, but residents say nothing came of those promises (for what it’s worth, I didn’t see any evidence of them either when I toured the area with Tannenbaum and another Waterstone
resident, Paula Corman, a few weeks ago).
“They did do a study a few years ago, but I think it’s sort of sitting on the shelf at the moment,” Breadon said. “Everyone knows it needs to be improved but there’s no immediate plan.”
Two unique factors make the circle, which sits next to Chestnut Hill Reservoir, especially challenging. The first is that on top of normal car, bus, bike, pedestrian, and goose traffic, there are also trolley tracks in the streets used to connect the Green
Line’s B, C, and D lines to one another and to a train yard. So you’re driving or biking over and between tracks, and possibly behind a moving trolley, while traversing an area that’s already difficult.
Those tracks point to the second factor: three separate entities — the T, Brookline, and Boston — share responsibility for parts of Cleveland Circle, and can and do deflect blame to one another for its potholes, faded crosswalks, and bizarrely timed traffic
lights.
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The lines of this crosswalk, which is located on the Brookline side of the circle, are barely visible. (Alan Wirzbicki/Globe Staff)
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Asked for a status update on the area, a spokesperson for Mayor Michelle Wu said, “The city is in the early stages of concept design for the Cleveland Circle project, and has not yet reached a full design. Because there is so much pavement space at Cleveland
Circle, the City sees an opportunity to improve sidewalks, add greenery, and make the area much safer for people walking and biking. We will need to coordinate closely with the MBTA, especially around the track infrastructure throughout the area.”
A spokesperson for the T, meanwhile, said: “The MBTA is always open to support our city and municipal partners to improve transportation at large for commuters.”
Really fixing the area would probably require coordinated effort on the part of the T and both municipalities, but residents who contacted me said simply sorting out who to call when problems happen can lead to an exasperating exercise in buck-passing and finger-pointing
by different government entities.
“In Cambridge, I would have known who to nag,” said Tannenbaum, who lived across the river before retiring. “Here, it’s not clear who makes these decisions.”
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In 1968, the Globe published a question from a reader that still seems relevant today. (Globe Archives)
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The intersection, created when Brookline built Beacon Street in 1851 in what was then a rural area. When Frederick Law Olmsted
redesigned
Beacon Street in the 1880s, he turned the intersection into a circle, which was subsequently named for President Grover Cleveland after his death in 1908. The first car crash
reported
by the Globe was in 1917. In 1921, responding to “frequently occurring” accidents, the city realigned the streets. Chestnut Hill Avenue was widened, trolley tracks were moved to the center of Beacon Street, and a Globe article
predicted that
“if automobilists observe the simple road rule of keeping to the right, future accidents will be negligible.”
That prediction proved overoptimistic.
By 1951 — the year a woman named Ira Dunn was killed in a
freak
trolley accident as she waited for a bus, leading to calls to put the train tracks in the circle underground — the Globe
was
describing Cleveland Circle as “one of the city’s more troublesome bottlenecks.” The Globe’s archives say the circle was reconstructed in 1960, but by 1968, a
letter-writer
was asking, “Could anything be done about Cleveland Circle? The road is full of potholes.”
Sadly, that’s pretty much the same question residents are asking now.
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Cyclists venture into Cleveland Circle. (Alan Wirzbicki/Globe Staff)
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