In September, Boston City Councilor Ed Flynn proposed a bill that would completely ban delivery apps like UberEats and DoorDash from using e-bikes, bikes, and motorized scooters. This takes a step back from Michelle Wu’s expansion plan for bikes in Boston: e-bike rebates, adding more bike lanes, and discounting Blue Bike subscriptions. To me, these efforts feel like an avoidance of the true problem: the presence of bikers in infrastructure that was not meant to accommodate them. The problem isn’t delivery workers–it’s the fact that the roads are narrow and the only thing we’ve seen done to add bikes onto them are thin slivers of green paint.
I’ve spent my entire life in and around Boston–both as a driver and pedestrian–and I’ve seen firsthand how the city is not ready for bikes. I hate bikes here, not necessarily their existence, but the way they operate. No one seems to know the rules, and it just creates a more dangerous environment for everyone.
Drivers here are not the best. They use blinkers as if they were simply suggestions and honk at any minor inconvenience. Allstate’s Best Driver Report named Bostonian drivers the worst out of all the states for a tenth year in a row, and no one who has ever merged onto Storrow Drive is surprised. This, on top of the constant construction detours and streets that make no sense, results in drivers who become impatient and unpredictable. You would think that after the Big Dig the problem with traffic and accommodations would be mitigated, but rush hour still adds at least 30 minutes to your ETA.
Since bikes are so small, they seem to pick and choose when they themselves are sharing the road or become pedestrians. One second, they’ll be on the road alongside cars, the next, jumping onto sidewalks. They run red lights when it’s convenient and face no consequences; a scooter doing 25 miles an hour while lane splitting in blind spots and e-bikes cutting through intersections should be called what they are, safety hazards and a blatant disregard for traffic laws.
This proposal was partially mobilized because of a recent death in August. A pedestrian near Copley Mall was hit by a bike and hospitalized, later dying, as reported by NBC News. Instead of using this tragedy to spark a conversation about the root causes, lawmakers found a scapegoat, blaming riders instead of admitting the city has a safety problem to begin with.
It’s understandable, to an extent, how there is not truly a place for them to begin with. A city rich with history also means it was built on paths originally intended for cows and horses. The roads are narrow, uneven, and constantly being worked on. You can’t even distinguish the lanes on busy roads like the Tobin Bridge. Bike lanes, when they exist at all, disappear the second the road curves or a parking spot is more convenient. Cars, buses, bikes, and pedestrians alike are crammed into streets that cannot even have one lane of traffic without danger and confusion. You can’t expect bikes to fit into a system that was never designed with them in mind, and you also can’t expect drivers and pedestrians to adapt to infrastructure that doesn’t exist.
If Boston truly wants to do better, it needs to stop forcing bikes into a city that wasn’t designed for them without doing real work. You see some great examples from Somerville and Cambridge. While I don’t agree with road bumps every two feet, they’ve integrated bikes into commuting routes and neighborhood roads, require protected bike lanes on all major streets, and are better at protecting intersections with raised bike crossings.
So while I hate bikes, I don’t blame the people riding them; I blame the lawmakers pretending that paint counts as infrastructure. People are still going to order UberEats, and workers are still going to deliver. I hate the MBTA, but I hate Boston’s streets even more.
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