This morning Mayor Wu released a 6 page letter outlining the steps her administration was taking on street safety and on managing the Streets Cabinet in the wake of Louisa Gag’s death back on July 9th. The TL;DR is that the letter appears contradictory, with a lot of positive statistics and claimed progress and a few worrying admissions that require significantly more explanation. BPI has 7 takeaway from the letter, so keep reading for more on each one.
Outside of the Mayor’s letter there are 5 stories that are part of important policy conversations that BPI was following this week:
The biggest news at the Council this week was about the health of its members, with Councilors-at-Large Henry Santana announcing he had been hospitalized - read the Instagram post - and Julia Mejia announced she was wearing a heart monitor on the floor - watch starting at 3:06:47 mark - and put out a statement about her health scare yesterday - read the Instagram post.
District 5 Councilor Enrique Pepen called the Boston Herald’s coverage of Councilors’ health issues “inhumane” for reporting on potential electoral ramifications of an extended vacancy or resignation among the Councilors-at-Large - watch the Instagram video. Pepen’s criticism ignores the enormous importance of individual Councilors to public policy. For example, Santana chairs the Public Safety Committee, which currently has no hearings scheduled despite important dockets on everything from the spate of violence this summer to the in-custody deaths at South Bay. What is the plan for this committee with Santana hospitalized? It isn’t “inhumane” to ask.
The Council held its first meeting since Louisa Gag was struck and killed while riding her bike on July 9, and her death was referenced repeatedly as Councilors offered a series of street-related dockets. Gag was a City Hall transportation planner and transit activist and her death has prompted an outpouring from both elected officials - all 13 Councilors acknowledged her death on social media - and activists - there have been a series of well-attended memorials and a petition with specific policy demands was signed by more than 2k Boston residents. What stood out in Wednesday’s Council meeting was how unresponsive the Council’s 3 street-related dockets - an ordinance mandating the City report on street work, a hearing order on the City’s Bike Network Plan, and a resolution on Vision Zero - appeared when compared against both the 5 demands in last week’s petition, and new revelations from StreetsBlogMass about how the Wu administration has managed street safety based on a trove of newly released internal emails. Now attention will turn to the Council hearings on these dockets and how Mayor Wu will implement the activity laid out in today’s letter.
Mayor Wu has struck another long-term PILOT agreement with a university, this one a 5 year, $104M deal with Boston University. While this deal does increase the cash contribution BU is making to Boston, ⅔ of the headline dollar figure is not actually cash: $66.8M of it is community benefits - read more in the City’s press release. This deal follows a similar one with Northeastern University struck back in November 2025 and appears to be part of the effort that Larry Edelman wrote about in his Boston Globe column 2 years ago back in July 2024. Exactly how that effort is going isn’t clear because these deals aren’t subject to Council approval and the Council hasn’t held a ‘review PILOT’ hearing in years despite dockets getting filed in 2024 (#0589), 2025 (#0472), and 2026 (#0288).
An inmate’s death at Suffolk House of Correction back in December has now been ruled a homicide, highlighting Council docket on the issue that still doesn’t have a hearing date. According to the Boston Globe’s reporting, the inmate was beaten by guards before being pronounced dead. Docket #0870 on the deaths at the Suffolk House of Correction - 20 people have died in custody since 2020 according to the Boston Globe - was proposed by Councilor Culpepper in April 2026 and was sent to the Public Safety Committee. That committee is chaired by Henry Santana, who is now hospitalized, and the committee has no hearings scheduled.
7 TAKEAWAYS FROM MAYOR WU’S STREET SAFETY LETTER
There are 7 important takeaway from the Mayor’s letter: keep reading for more.
1. IS THIS ENOUGH?
Mayor Wu’s letter should be viewed as a response to the petition delivered to her by transit activists, which featured 5 demands:
Looking at the list of new actions and pledges the Mayor made in this letter, it seems responsive to the activist demands, but doesn’t appear to actually meet any of them.
Here is BPI’s list of specific actions and pledges in Wu’s letter:
Installs 2 senior staff “full-time” Streets Cabinet, but doesn’t change existing leadership.
Announces new advisory group with a vague mandate that seems similar to the 30 Day Review.
Pledges to “identify important fixes” on the Tremont Street corridor where Louisa Gag was killed.
Pledges to replace flex posts with “cast-in-place” barriers and in place where that can’t happen this year, like the cycle tracks around the Boston Common and the Public Garden, and along Western Avenue, to install quick-build barriers.
Pledges more truck safety legislation.
Pledges to keep Vision Zero dashboard update.
Pledges an app to report traffic and parking violations to the City - this is something former Boston mayoral candidate Alex Alex has been calling for.
Pledges to have parking enforcement officers use bikes.
This conversation is going to continue in the weeks and months ahead, and the push and pull between activists and the administration will be a important element.
2. IS CHRIS OSGOOD WORKING AT STREETS CABINET OR RUNNING THE OFFICE OF CLIMATE RESILIENCE?
This is in the 3rd paragraph on p. 1:
I have asked Chris Osgood, Senior Advisor for Infrastructure and former Chief of Streets, and Tali Robbins, Deputy Chief of Policy, to support the Streets Cabinet full-time.
According to the letter, Osgood and Robbins started on July 13, 2026, and will not only provide “guidance and support” but also meet monthly with the leaders of advocacy organizations.
This is particularly surprising because Osgood was appointed Director of the Office of Climate Resilience back in August 2024 as part of a wider restructuring of the Environment, Energy and Open Space Cabinet. Since then Osgood has been a high profile leader on climate issues, including getting quoted in a City Hall press release sent out today about the new $10B plan for coastal defense from the US Army Corps of Engineers:
“If we do not act, many people in Boston and across the region could have their home, work, school, commute, or medical care affected by coastal storms and sea-level rise,” said Chris Osgood, Director of the Office of Climate Resilience. “Investing in resilience will not only save lives. It will protect our regional economy and critical services, as well as enhance recreational, and natural spaces along Boston Harbor.”
How is Osgood’s “full-time” role at the Streets Cabinet going to affect the Wu administration’s climate ambitions and plans? That question isn’t answered.
3. IS THE NEW ADVISORY GROUP DOING 30 DAY REVIEW 2.0?
Also in the 3rd paragraph on p. 1:
Over the coming weeks, I am also convening a group of advisors to assess the Streets Cabinet’s organizational structure, staff capacity, and resource needs. This group will advise on ways to improve and accelerate the delivery of safer streets and critical services.
BPI will look for more information about this new group and their mission with interest because at first blush, it appears Mayor Wu is giving them exactly the same mission she gave Mike Brohel last February, when she ordered the 30 Day Review for Street Infrastructure.
There have been unanswered questions about that review since it was published back in April 2025, and the number of questions recently grew, with StreetsBlogMass’ release of a trove of internal emails between City leaders, the press, and the public during the creation of the 30 Day Review.
4. CITY’S VISION ZERO DASHBOARD WAS OUT OF DATE
This is in the 3rd paragraph on p. 2:
The City’s Vision Zero dashboard is currently updated with data through June 2026. Going forward, we will update the dashboard monthly and expand our analysis to target locations and conditions for needed interventions. We will continue to use data to help guide our transportation policies and investments with the following goals.
Unmentioned in the Mayor’s letter is that this dashboard had not been updated until earlier this week on July 21. The public learned that from Councilor Sharon Durkan, the Chair of the Planning, Development, and Transportation Committee - which gets most Streets Cabinet-related dockets - who told her colleagues how she worked to fix the issue - she is Speaker starts at the 2:00:48 mark:
Here is the Vision Zero dashboard related lines of her speech:
And until yesterday, all of the data for the fatalities and injuries were not even updated on the website. I’m really happy we’ve advocated and I know a lot of advocates that we’re advocating. The data has now been updated where we can take a look, but there’s no way to approach the Vision Zero if we don’t actually have the data and we’re not working towards a plan.
5. HOW DO YOU KNOW IF A STATISTIC IS GOOD OR NOT?
This is the first bullet point on p. 3:
Our administration has filled in critical missing pieces in our bike network, building nearly 20 miles of bike lanes in the last five years.
4 miles of bike lanes a year is not a lot according to recent public testimony from Stacy Thompason, the former executive director of Liveable Streets Alliance and one of the most prominent transit activists in Massachusetts. Here is what she told the Council back on May 4 - she is Speaker 17 & starts at 1:40:41 mark:
Here is the miles of bikeway related lines of her testimony:
And the last thing that I’m gonna say is that if Marty Walsh had said he was gonna build 2.5 miles of bikeways, I would have destroyed him. We gotta get to 5. We’ve gotta get to 7.5. We are a major city in America.
This is not the only statistic in the letter that lacks important context, for example the Mayor cites how many curb ramps have been installed, but not that Boston is under a court-order to install those.
6. WU SAYS CITY DROPPED PROJECTS, BUT DOESN’T SAY WHICH ONES
This is the 3rd paragraph on p. 4:
But our staffing, maintenance, and operational capacity did not always keep pace to fully support all the newly installed infrastructure, and we developed a pipeline of more planned, designed projects than the City budget currently has the capacity to deliver or maintain. Especially in a constrained fiscal environment, it is essential that each street investment is carefully prioritized, designed to be well-integrated into the neighborhood, and built to last.
These lines seem like an admission that the administration purposefully stepped back from a number of transportation project. That raises questions about which projects were cut because of capacity issues, and what failed in the City’s capital planning process that allowed the Streets Cabinet to outrun the City’s financial capacity.
This is particularly true of projects that have state and federal funding. The City provided a list of these projects a few minutes before the Streets Cabinet’s FY27 budget hearing started on May 4, and Councilors failed to ask for a detailed accounting of every project on that list. Now with this admission in hand, Councilors should be able to learn more about what is going on inside the Streets Cabinet’s capital planning process.
7. WU SETS NEW STANDARD FOR COMMUNITY PROCESS
In the first paragraph of p. 5, Wu provides her view of the 30 Day Review, its output, and calls it “a point-in-time snapshot and was not meant to document the full range of residents’ perspectives.” Then she proposes a new standard for street infrastructure projects:
Going forward, our standard is that community members should fully understand the available choices and tradeoffs, help shape design details through an iterative process, understand how and why decisions are made, and continue giving feedback after infrastructure is installed so further adjustments can be considered.
This approach seems like the antithesis of the “build fast and fix later” policy called for by transit activists.
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